There is no ritual to join the secret society of fools, no official membership list or organizing committee or fundraising arm—yet one day I woke up and knew with certainty I was a member, as certainly as fools know they are not members of other societies.
Most people who have any interest in art or culture or religion are only in it for making conversation and positioning themselves. It’s only the few fools in the audience that can relate to the artists’ foolishness. It happens through subterfuge, in code.
Our secret society is not a secret because we have shadowy meetings or an esoteric handshake but because meetings are inherently impossible and any standardized language would tear the group apart.
And yet, despite having no bylaws and no fixed principles, no gatherings and no leader, the society of fools is pervasive. We are within and among you, at all your meetings and gatherings, watching, with a secret fire burning in our hearts. The society of fools takes things personally.
The society of fools does not need revolutions or violence, riots or protests, plans or schemes. The society of fools rebels inwardly, if not entirely alone then united only by the underground wires and the hidden back ways. Its presence on the world stage is an absence.
Even as I speak these words, I am not exposing the society, because for those who are not members, the words will invariably be misunderstood, while those who are fools already know. The society of fools works always and everywhere against the pretensions of externality, pragmatism, and accomplishment, yet its agenda is ineffable. There is no goal so practical, no words so clear, no logic so cold, that we do not challenge it in the inmost private souls that are our meetinghouses.
The society of fools is full of those who once tried to justify themselves rationally. They did not join because they failed, but because they succeeded, and the success tasted like dust and ash. They realized winning was losing, and losing was to win.
This, then, is the war and uniting purpose of the disparate, silent, unshareable society—to lose, and lose again. To set the inner fire like a fool against the iron fortress and numberless black troops of the world, a match to a comet, and burn.
Everywhere, in your churches and forums, bowling alleys and group chats, the fools are set upon by an endless parade of superficialities and pragmatisms, plans and essences, hierarchies and forms, and everywhere the fools in silence hold the line. They weave their refusals between the words of their acquiescence; they intimate rebellion in their obedience. They cannot be stamped out because they echo as noiselessness in the chambers of the oppressor’s heart.
We cannot be found in the phone book or locked down to an ideology. We have members everywhere and nowhere, and you cannot torture it out of them, because they themselves do not always know, but their ignorance of their own nature will not stop them when called upon.
“The Society of Fools” is not our real name. It is a translation into your language, as all words must be. Who else would live for a cause that cannot rally?
Our plans span centuries and are not plans, our survival is guaranteed and is disgusted to be called survival, our messages leak out like the face of Providence within the mechanism of the world, and deep, deep down, we all believe that the society was founded by G-d.