I was gonna do “Manifester” but wasn’t sure the joke would land.

We are maggots wriggling in God’s carcass, vying to shit out a better world. The name of culture is that creature who manages to poke out and declare, “They haven’t got me yet!” before sinking into the pre-lingual sludge. Strive to make Doompunk mankind’s last word.

Inspired by the likes of Rudy Rucker’s Transrealist Manifesto, I plant my flag in the barren earth and dub it doomed. It began as a kind of “Acid Buddhism,” angrier than Discordianism and less alarming than Thomas Ligotti’s ultra-pessimism (basically, I don’t judge you if you have kids).

“Doompunk” refers to an aesthetic and a philosophy––usually in keeping with certain subsets of goth, punk, and hesher ideologies––reflecting the righteous fury of having been raised in a society of monsters. You don’t have to be a fan of doom metal or punk rock in particular, but it helps.

Formed from ignorant mud and weaned on the hot milk of cruelty, you refuse to comply with the programming of the virus, Power. They say the way of the animal is brutality? Escape & Radiate. Excise the umbilical cancer and shamble across the wasteland, embarking on a seemingly hopeless search for a proper model to replace the mutant code that shaped your pupal stage. You imagine a freedom you’ll likely never reach. But you shamble in good company. Eat your heart out, Siddhartha.

“The bodhisattva is one who has turned down his chance to attain Nirvana in order to turn back to helps others… For the bodhisattva compassion is as important a goal as wisdom. That is the essential realization of the bodhisattva.”

— The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick (1982)

The ideal Doompunk strives to be the bodhisattva of the 21st century. Admire the psychedelic satori ensconced in the fancy philosopher’s stones upchucked by Western pharmacysts, then refuse a second serving. Reject Enlightenment in favor of remaining in this mundane material world and aim to awaken your fellow man, who in turn also rejects Enlightenment, and so on and so forth, until we’re all a bunch of jackasses shaking hands in grayscale nirvana.

Respect the implicit imponderability woven into human life. The cosmos cannot be fully measured, so stop worshipping humanity’s philosophical instruments. Trust that it’s unknowable and instead choose the most numskull path imaginable: flexible compassion. A hodgepodge of love and hate swirls inside the Doompunk. The disgust one has for the world we’ve built is a direct result of one’s love for an implacable peace lost in the process. Resolve the paradox. Embrace the hot and cold and fling yourself into the darkening universe like an unrepentant wavicle. Everyone else is making excuses for being an asshole.

The Doompunk emerges from the pool of profound unbelonging cultivated by our civilization. The risk of such a spiritually fallow ecosystem has given rise to the scummy spectrum of fucknuts that seem to teem everywhere you look. So where can we, the furiously righteous, go? Into the mosh pit of course.

Important words in our cosmology: Proteus, Pataphor, Pharmakon. You can throw in Psychonaut, but it’s getting overused these days. Pontificate the essential esoteric traditions of Gnosticism and Discordianism, but never sit still philosophically. Never let them catch you. As Burroughs wrote: Exterminate all rational thought. It’s the only possible way to cut the Control lines and dodge the slavering jaws of the Word-Virus. Pull R.A.W.’s cosmic trigger and ride the Eschatonic wave all the way to the New Flesh. Where the psychotic drowns, the mystic swims. Meanwhile the Doompunk doggie-paddles.

The universe is not God’s Logos : it is his Pathos :: There is nothing to know : there is everything to feel. In non-dualism, all living things are parallel pathways of a single sensation experiencing itself in variegated forms. Employ that in your interpersonal frustrations. Brass tacks: make others feel loved. Stand in solidarity with the immiserated masses.

Black Lives Matter.

Trans Lives Matter.

Keep indigenous cultures strong.

Protect the innocent from the ideological rot of cannibal crapitalism. Point a bloody finger at the pigs responsible. Sharpen your blades, hungry for dark lords’ backsides. Storm the reality studio and smash the soundboard. Balk their faschy cyberpunk fucktopia.

Feast on God’s flesh.

Under the encroaching shadow of prolonged Armageddon, we denizens of decline delineate the borders of oblivion. Anthropologists of the anthropocene, Doompunks stare the world in the eyes, daring it to die first. Prepare for apocalypse to not arrive. The Greek translates to “revelation” and we both know no one’s gonna learn the right lessons. Prepare to shoulder the fever dream of protracted cosmic brain-death while others somnambulate in self-delusion. Stay awake. Stab culture in the face and let its fetid blood languish on the dust. Build a sanguine sand castle and watch it get swallowed by the cytoplasmic sea. Grin into the glittering infinite eyes of the abyss.

Cry out in victory: “They haven’t got me yet!” and listen for another Doompunk to respond, like fireflies flickering across the void. If they do catch you, make sure the grinder chokes on your petulant meat.

And when the body you’re renting inevitably succumbs to the great endemic enemy of entropy, remember to maintain course in your next life. Emerge from the withered leaves and flex your verdant, vascular flesh. Sprout shoots anew and breathe deep the sun. Doom has come, and it is you.

And for goodness’ sake, try to enjoy yourself.

~DK