The Shriners started the same way the Proud Boys did— a comedian made a parody cult without really understanding that there is no such thing as a “parody cult”

Time & again this happens— the church of the subgenius, the discordians, etc. No matter how front loaded the “this is a parody joke cult” message is— it ultimately stops being a parody joke as soon as “being in on the joke” is concentric with “having authority”

Kek — it’s just a joke, but what if it’s not just a joke— that’s the real joke— that there is now a third degree of initiation
1: Naive (this isn’t a joke)
2: Initiate (it’s a joke)
3: Master (the joke is that it’s not a joke)

This happened with the “altright” generally—

Normies: “they’re racist”
Initiates: “it’s just jokes”
Master: “the joke is that we’re serious”

The initiates look to the masters & say “it’s just a joke, right?” & the masters know that they have not ascended yet “yeah, it’s a joke (for you)”— but if the initiate says “it’s starting to seem like it’s not a joke at all” then they are ready for the revelation of the mystery.

This is “redpilling”— the creation of an intermediary context for the transformation from naivety to irony to post-irony— & “initiates” do not believe this happens because they think they’ve “ascended” to the highest degree, which is “laughing at normies who don’t get the joke”

“They think hitler did nothing wrong”
“Lol it’s obviously a joke to trigger the libs”
“But what did hitler do wrong? In fact, you’ll see that the more you look into it...”

Kojeve described this to Bataille as when “the magician starts to believe in his own sleight of hand”— most of the time, the “master” is himself an “initiate” until the process of initiating others proves to him, in his own mind, that he “is no longer joking”

At a certain point, putting a lot of effort into a joke means it’s no longer a joke— say you start a parody music career, & then it starts raking in tons of money— at what point is this no longer a “parody music career”? Precisely when it becomes a real career.

A lot of the time, an “old joke” becomes a “new serious dogma”— this happened with Masonry— the Masonic rites were initially high court masques put on to make fun of “normies” — the rosicrucians were making fun of alchemists— then, a century later, their joke is taken as history

This sort of contextual layering is a key element of courtier life— participation with “internal disinterest”— the courtier knows that the queen was put into power by the court— but has to perform the public theater of “the queen as divinely ordained”