Mission Statement
SECRET / CLASSIFIED
October 22, 1973
TO: CONTROL
FROM: Dr. S. Marshall Redgrave
RE: Continuation of Classified Program “URIEL”
== MEMORANDUM ==
The purpose of this memorandum is to establish parameters for continued operational support of the covert technical program designated URIEL in light of the determination by CONTROL to dissolve and defund the informally named “Continuity Working Group,” URIEL’s parent committee. Before doing so, however, an inquest is necessary.
Accordingly, this memorandum is divided into four parts. In the first, I will address the methods and goals of the Continuity Working Group (“CWG”) to the extent they are presently known. In the second, I will explain why, I believe, the CWG failed in its mission. Third, I will offer a proposal as to how URIEL’s mission may be reframed and expanded upon in order to advance the PROJECT’s interests while avoiding future CWG-style pitfalls. Lastly, I provide budgetary analysis, forecasting, and proposed resource allocation (including personnel who I believe would be well-suited to URIEL's modified portfolio) for the remainder of the next two fiscal years.
I. THE CWG: AN OVERVIEW.
The CWG was an informal network of accelerationist hardliners and career opportunists who believed — based on computer-aided esmology and applied predictive anthropology, though this is not yet fully confirmed[1] — that the “war” for HISTORY-A was “lost.” They foresaw a near future in which overwhelming material degradation caused by profligate resource extraction and unregulated population growth led first to ecological collapse and then to political chaos, ultimately prompting another ONTOCLYSM and the return of the RED KINGS.
Contrary to the PROJECT’s mission, the CWG’s stated purpose was not to avert this outcome. Instead, the focus of the CWG was on “ontological survivalism,” primarily for the benefit of its members and their interests. Preliminary investigation has revealed that they explored this concept from different avenues, among them by commissioning the URIEL program. The experimental “war game” scenario codenamed ALLOCHTHON — during which the CWG monopolized extensive PROJECT resources to ignite subduction zones throughout the eastern U.S. — was merely the latest of these efforts, calculated, as it was, to assess the viability of creating ontological bulwarks (or “bunkers”) that could endure beyond the existential failure of consensus reality.
Of course, the nature of the conflict in which the PROJECT finds itself requires CONTROL to plan for multiple eventualities and fund a wide variety of projects, programs, and operations, some with potentially radical objectives. Nothing in this memorandum should be read as an implication that the PROJECT should not explore all potential hypotheticals for the, quite literal, sake of humanity. That the CWG sought to research means by which some portion of "free" humanity could survive despite victory by the RED KINGS is not, by itself, improper. What was improper was the CWG's unsupervised, often covert, use of PROJECT resources to further a "fifth column" agenda without first subjecting their finding to truly independent peer review.
But how did it come to that? Why did the CWG, comprised of some of the brightest minds the PROJECT has to offer, diverge from its legitimate mandate — indeed, to borderline treason? My theory, in short, is this: the CWG failed to think differently. Presented with a choice — total defeat or neartotal defeat — it chose what it perceived to be the "better" option while neglecting to question whether a choice needed to be made. As CONTROL is well aware, such binary thinking runs counter to the PROJECT's aims.
II. THE CWG AND THE CRISIS OF CONTRADICTION.
In their recent work L'anti-Oedipe, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Félix Guattari[2] observed that “[n]o one has ever died from contradictions.” (“Jamais personne n'est mort de contradictions”). They make this point in connection with a broader — and, for the purpose of this memorandum, irrelevant — critique of capitalism, arguing that humans are “social machines” whose desires "create" reality, but who have been conditioned by outside forces to desire repression of their desires. This thesis strikes close to the heart of the matter: as the work of the PROJECT (and URIEL in particular) has demonstrated, the human impulse to believe, to want, is a crucial ingredient to "successful" irruptions and subduction events.
The human mind is not well equipped to manage contradictions. We "make a habit of feeding on the contradictions [we] give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate." (Deleuze, et al., L'anti-Oedipe 151). Still, it is not the contradictions themselves which are dangerous: it is our reaction to the contradictions that matters. No man has ever died from a contradiction, true, but many men have died through attempts to eliminate or repress perceived or subconscious contradictions.
The CWG provides a perfect example of this notion at work. As members of the PROJECT, the CWG lived in a world of irreconcilable contradictions: between the real and the unreal, between ideals and methods, between power and the spectacle. But unlike the rest of the PROJECT, the CWG faced an additional contradiction — one that broke whatever compartments they had built within their psyches. They knew that the work they were doing was pointless; we were fated to fail. So what do you do?
The psychic tension of this dilemma engendered a kind of panicked fatalism in the CWG; it "ceased doubting itself [and] abandoned belief in the possibility" of any other outcome. (Id.). Naturally, then, it sought to ease that tension — to resolve the contradiction about what to do when you know what you do doesn't matter — by exploring methods by which it could "modify the terms of surrender," as it were. Ultimately, had the CWG succeeded, the RED KINGS would have won, but not because they are the superior force or because of some failing on the PROJECT's part. Rather, victory by the RED KINGS would occur because the CWG could not reconcile how to win a game they believed they were destined to lose. Instead of living with or analyzing that contradiction, they attempted to "lose" in the best way possible.
III. URIEL: THE ONE WHO WATCHES.
Preliminary investigation into the CWG's rationale for funding the URIEL program indicate that the CWG intended URIEL to act both as a controlled psychosocial "experiment" and as bloodhounds who could "sniff out" potentially useful assets and ontological phenomena in the "Aquarian garden" of Northern California. URIEL seems to have been largely the brainchild of the Lt. Col. Anthony Barnes Reinhardt, one of the CWG's more extremist members. The Book of Enoch describes the Archangel Uriel as one of the "holy angels who watch, who is over the world and over Tartarus." (Enoch 20:2). In Paradise Lost, he is described as "His eyes," with an "unspeakable desire to see, and know[.]" (Paradise Lost 2:654-62).
The URIEL program was created to be the CWG's eyes, and it satisfied those metrics well — perhaps too well in the estimation of the individuals responsible for its formation. But the CWG was looking for the wrong thing: a resolution to a contradiction around which our work coheres. What it should have been looking for was a way to synthesize the contradictions that plague our present understanding of the metaphysical conflict between the HISTORIES.
The crisis precipitated by the CWG presents several additional and corollary problems. But more than that, the CWG itself presents a problem, namely, how can we do it differently? Unless it can be determined that the CWG was relying on tainted data, or memetic infection, or something similar, the question remains of whether we can avert the disaster predicted by the CWG's esmology. Putting aside the CWG's ethical and institutional betrayals, its recklessness and its secretiveness, the contradiction it was formed to resolve remains. The origin, nature, and motives of the RED KINGS and the circumstances that gave rise to the ONTOCLYSM are two mysteries at the center of everything we do. Until those mysteries are solved — truly solved, that is, understood and synthesized despite their seeming incoherence and inconsistency — the PROJECT will never achieve its stated mission of ensuring humanity's safety against the restoration of the RED KINGS.
Thus, the PROJECT must be willing to search for an answer to the essential questions of who they are, what happened, and why things are the way they are. Mere containment, mere management of this situation, is plainly not a long-term solution, as the CWG determined. But neither is annihilation or servitude. If those are the only options we see, it is not because they are the only options — it is because we have failed to think differently about the problem.
The URIEL program is the solution to that problem. Its members come from a wide range of backgrounds (racial, economic, social, etc.) and adhere to different motivational models and systems of transcendental apperception. Certain of them possess unique, seemingly paranormal abilities which cannot be explained by our present materialist scientific understanding. Still, they have demonstrated a keen ability to thrive in the ambiguity that such differences create, and to use that ambiguity to the PROJECT’s benefit against HISTORY-B. Moreover, and uniquely, the current members of the URIEL program have established a commitment of purpose and degree of trust rarely encountered in the field.
IV. RESOURCE ALLOCATION.
[This section consists of several pages of budget proposals, tables, graphs, projections, and acquisition requests. I figure we can use this as a sort of "catchall" for stuff that we or the PCs might think of as we unfold what happens over the next several months in-game].
V. CONCLUSION.
The most famous parable from the Bhagavad Gita concerns the great battle between Arjuna and his extended family – uncles, cousins, half-siblings, the whole array of demi-gods descended from the Hindu pantheon. Arjuna does not wish to kill his relatives, understandably, so he turns to Lord Krishna, and asks what he should do. Lord Krishna tells him to do his duty and be not concerned with the fruits of his actions.[3]
After the battle, Arjuna reflects on this teaching. It aided him at the time, but in hindsight, it strikes him as contradictory. To do his duty required him kill his family, to commit what many cultures and value systems regard as one of the great crimes. How could the endlessly benevolent and merciful Lord Krishna counsel such action? Arjuna returns, then, to Krishna, and asks him to teach him the lesson again, for he plainly did fully understand it. Krishna seems irritated at first: “You do not remember what I taught you?” Arjuna quakes. But then Krishna says, in effect, “Me neither,”[4] and proceeds to impart upon Arjuna an entirely different lesson: the Anugita, or “After Gita.”
What this parable tells us is that there is not one answer. To resolve the problem of the HISTORIES, we must be open to different, at times inconsistent, ontologies. URIEL is the PROJECT’s best hope for advancing that purpose.
Sincerely,
Dr. S. M. Redgrave
1 The origin of the CWG's conclusion that HISTORY-A faced inevitable defeat remains suspect. No doubt their esmology yielded results consistent with that conclusion. However, the intensity with which the CWG's members believed in the eventual failure of consensus reality suggests that they were working with compromised intelligence, perhaps even memetics, supplied specifically for the purpose of subverting the PROJECT. As will be discussed, URIEL is well-equipped to investigate this possibility more fully.
2 Deleuze and Guattari, both French, are a philosopher and psychoanalyst, respectively. Together they represent an emerging school of "post-left" thinking; L'anti-Oedipe has brought them some notoriety. A summary profile of each is included with this memorandum.
3 This contradiction of "agency vs. fate" is among the oldest known to humanity, dating back at least as far as the Iliad and the Odyssey — tales both laden with themes of great princes raging, tragically, against their destinies. Query whether these ancient myth-cycles represent some kind of "racial memory" of certain pre-ONTOCLYSM events or figures.
4 “From me, O son of Prithâ!, you heard a mystery, and learnt about the eternal principle, about piety in its true form, and about all the everlasting worlds. It is disagreeable to me that you should not have grasped it through want of intelligence. And the recollection of it now again is not possible to me. Really, O son of Pându!, you are devoid of faith and of a bad intellect. And, O Dhanañgaya! it is not possible for me to repeat in full what I said before. For that doctrine was perfectly adequate for understanding the seat of the Brahman. It is not possible for me to state it again in full in that way. For then accompanied by my mystic power, I declared to you the Supreme Brahman. But I shall relate an ancient story upon that subject, so that adhering to this knowledge, you may attain the highest goal.” (Anugita 230-231).