Word Salad Philosophy

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. $U(x){psi(x,t)} = i{h-bar}d{psi(x,t)}/dt ({h-bar}^2)/2m{del}^2 {psi (x,t)}$. To be or not to be, that is the question. Unless ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Moby Dick. Now he's a super star, slamming on his guitar, does your pretty face see what he's worth, he was a skater boy she said see you later boy, he wasn't good enough for her. ... E=mc^2. S=Klogt. Temporal and spatial dimensions are moving relative to one another. Everything should be made simple as possible, but not moreso and Eminem!

—Elliot McGucken

A philosophy that is so bizarre, rambling, and batshit insane that no one in their right mind can understand it. For some reason, Conspiracy Theorists hate segues and coherent trains of thought, so none of those here. In their place will be plenty of Meaningless Meaningful Words, Delusions of Eloquence, and Cromulence. May resemble an Ice Cream Koan. Compare Insane Troll Logic.

Maybe the "philosopher" doesn't have the writing skills to express their ideas. Maybe the point is so complicated that it would take several college courses to grasp its meaning. Or, maybe the philosopher is just a Talkative Loon.

Straw conspiracy theorists and granola girls the world over base their lives and beliefs around these.

Examples of Word Salad Philosophy include:

Fan Works

  • Arguably the whole premise of Chaos Is Very Good, as it focuses on Ahuizotl learning a frankly insane philosophy. How insane is it? Apparently one of the major truths is that the mouth should be used exclusively as a sexual organ.

Film

  • Don't Be a Menace had Farraconvict, a parody of the "ex-con turned religious intellectual" trope, whose ramblings go from cliché to odd to just plain gibberish all in a single chain.
  • Dennis Hopper's unnamed character in Apocalypse Now'.

Literature

  • In Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Pantagruel offers to judge the lawsuit between Lord Kiss___ and Lord Suckfist, which has been going on for years because no one but the litigants has any idea what it is about. After each party gives his "case" in a prolonged stream of non-sequiturs and gibberish, Pantagruel gives "judgement" in another such --- and both litigants announced that they are completely satisfied, an outcome without precedent.
  • Vardaman (from the novel As I Lay Dying), who is too young to comprehend his mother's passing, repeatedly lapses into this. Because flour and sugar and coffee. Jefferson is farther away than crazy.
  • Dr. Hamid Parsani, protagonist of Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, a text described on the back cover as "At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire," is perhaps one of our greatest postmodern wordsaladists. For example: "The nemat-space of the ()hole complex reduces the monopolistic holiness of the Creation, the functionality of the ground's economy (which also forms a taxis-trellis pincer to support the Whole), and the hegemony of the Whole. Nemat-space introduces wholeness to Zero without wiping it out. This is the polytics first practiced and exquisitely elaborated by the Persian cult of Kaxuzi..." etc. etc. for 250 pages.
  • The Weaver, of Perdido Street Station has an... unusual outlook on life, vaguely connected to an aesthetic opinion. It spouts a steady stream of not-quite-nonsense to anyone in earshot, but no one is any closer to understanding its motives at the end of the book than they are at the beginning. It's basically a non-hostile Eldritch Abomination, so that shouldn't be too surprising.
  • Judith Butler: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power". (From Confused Matthew.)

Live Action TV

  • The Hybrids of the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica speak entirely like this, with complicated philosophy mixed with prophecy and ship maintenance.
    • And so does Anders.
  • Reuben on iCarly talks completely like this, in muddled rhymes and colloquial sayings. Gibby seems to understand fine, but no-one else does. Until Sam makes up something at the end that makes no sense either, and sends Reuben off crying.

Music

New Media

  • Elliot McGucken's patent for creating "exalted" video games. This may be the longest, most jaw-dropping rant on the Internet.
    • But if you do attempt to skim through it, you soon notice that perhaps 0.1% of the text was written by McGucken, and the rest is a text-only dump of threads he started on various forums. The schizophrenic nature of it all is thus simply because it was actually written by dozens of "authors".
  • Our entry on True Art plays this for laughs.
    • Though considerably less so ever since it became an index.
  • The Conspiracy Theorist Troper Tales page:

My dear friend! Thank you for your courage and your energy. As well as just for being you. Speaking of YELLOW (in regards to the pulses of yellow light)I just heard on the radio last night that the new Pantone "color of the year" is Yellow. Last years (or coming to an end) was the color "Blue Iris." Illumi-Nazi Mind Kontrol is everywhere.

It will give you a new mental map upon which to fix your own position so that you can better deal stiffly with pugnacious Huns who bombard us with an endless array of hate literature. Although my approach may appear a bit pedantic, by setting some generative point of view against a structural-taxonomical point of view or vice versa, I intend to argue that it may not be easy to take steps against the whole unforgiving brotherhood of the worst classes of prolix gauleiters I've ever seen, but it can be done.

Newspaper Comics

  • Sally from Peanuts was known for declaring random sentences to be "my new philosophy in life". For example "Wolves are making a comeback."

Professional Wrestling / Comics

  • Pro wrestler The Ultimate Warrior was famous for being a Talkative Loon with No Indoor Voice who went off at length about his convoluted "philosophy" almost every time he was put in front of a working microphone. The short-lived comic book series he wrote, Warrior, was basically a collection of multiple page, near-unintelligible essays on his point of view - spouted from the narrator and the main characters. Besides that, the plot was nonexistent.

Tabletop Games

  • HYBRID, which can't really be called a Tabletop RPG, is pretty infamous on RPG.Net, which describes the "game" as "unmitigated nonsense." It basically consists of of more than 500 numbered rules presented in a non-sequential order. The rules consist of mathematical equations with undefined variables, allusions to social and political issues, pop culture references, cross references to other rules, to non-existent rules, and to rules in other roleplaying games; misogynistic statements, and much more. It first appeared on the USENET newsgroup rec.games.frp.super-heroes as a series of disjointed posts by the author, who is known only as "C" and is currently maintained by Phillipe Tromeur. The version numbers are also non-sequential—its current version, 0.21, is a later version than version 0.34. RPG.Net ranks this "game" as the second worst game of all time (the worst being reserved for the Game That Shall Not Be Named).

Theatre

Web Comics

Anakin: So why do you act so... {beat} you know...
R2-D2: Stupid?
Qui-Gon: The way I see it... a character sheet is like a box of chocolates...
R2-D2: Oh god, here we go again.
Qui-Gon: I mean, it's... You never know what you're gonna kill... So why stress over it? The Tao's principle is spontaneity. You know... um... We play dice with the universe.
Anakin: Huh?
R2-D2: Roleplaying is his downtime. He likes to turn his brain off.
Qui-Gon: Chocolate dice!

Web Original

My wisdom so antiquates known knowledge, that
a psychiatrist examining my behavior, eccentric
by his academic single corner knowledge, knows
no course other than to judge me schizophrenic.

Implosion due to Charge Fractality is the ONLY Cause of Life, of Gravity,and ONLY Cause of ANY System to Emerge from Chaos!
- Here is Proof ! goldenmean.info/goldenproof < The CLIMAX of our Research.
What is the possibility that Planck Length x Golden Ratio= The Hydrogen Radii (Winter's new equation) happens by accident? Answer: ZERO!! Einstein's (&modern physics) failure to figure out why an object falls to the ground, directly resulted in the incredible stupidity not to learn what (FRACTAL) field effect CAUSES LIFE -

  • Nearly every time Sir Ron Lionheart goes all vampyric, he speaks only in nonsensical prose and even crazier philosophical ramblings. Rule of Funny applies big time, or else viewers would quickly get bored and leave.

But be careful not to let the attack become forever disfalled upon.
Please now witness, on a verge of remembrance, {unintelligble} has just been passed.
And the order of which thy book will reveal its Power Star is on a final stroke.

Run forward, pixel-man! We must find the world and all it is worth! Whether it be flies or mouths or army ants, we shall gather them all into a giant ball and roll it all over the world, until it gets high enough to encompass even the continents themselves! Run with me, my friend! Simply run, and forget the loss, and all the world it entails! Jumping over the spheres, and squares of oppression, littering the lands in front of us, beside of us, but forget all that is behind us, for there is only the future, and extremely little else! Run with me, my friend! Keep going and run! Run until the antelopes gaze behind our dust trails; 'til the larks, and the ducks in the pond all confuse us for the blur that we are! Run forward, my friend! Run, and forget the shrimps and the shackles and all the pain that bureaucracy and its friends want us to endure, for we will not endure; for we baked the past into the most delicious cake the world has ever encountered! It will not bring us our end, but our future will bring us more future! Run, my friend, run! My friend, the pixel-man.

Real Life

  • The use of odd meanings of words (either ironically or due to drift in language) has rendered a lot philosophies mutually incomprehensible. Adam Smith's idea of "enlightened self interest", for example, is partially a justification for not being a jackass. Internet people seem to have missed this aspect from all angles and instead latch on the immediate meaning of "self interest".
    • Similarly, Thomas Hobbes' materialism has nothing to do with Marx's dialectical materialism, and neither of them have anything to do with materialism as we know it today (defining yourself by possessions).
    • The phrase "Correlation does not imply Causation" is sadly dependent on people understanding that "imply" is being used in a obsolete sense meaning "signify" or "allow a conclusion to be drawn about". Correlation certainly does imply causation in the sense that it suggests there might be causation, the phrase only means that it isn't the same thing as proof.
  • Advanced physics has reached the point that differentiating it from the ramblings of schizophrenics is virtually impossible for lay people. While it is, supposedly, coherent if you know what the pieces mean, the rest of us have no choice but to accept the word of scientists.
    • This has caused something of a fad in faux-philosophers who can't or don't understand the physics concepts, instead using badly-mangled versions to justify whatever pet theory they're touting. Even easier-grasped concepts are not immune; Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is a popular target to mangle in this fashion.
      • And everything but everything is quantum physics.
    • Test yourself: does "Quantum Flavor Dynamics" make sense? Indeed it does Does Psychothermodynamics provide an explanation for why your mother gets cold when she sees you not wearing a shirt? I thought I made that word up, but... Was there ever a paper published in a journal about the effects of Mayonnaise on the rotation of the earth? Only in The Annals of Improbable Research, so no, not really.
  • G. I. Gurdjieff's magnum opus: the three-volume All and Everything.
  • This comment left on a political blog. (As far as anyone can tell, it's a pseudo-scientific Social Darwinist screed against the idea that white people should support, or mix with, people of other races.) You need to see the entire Wall of Text to get the flavor, but here are a few choice bits:

Ignorance of genomics? Thank G_d there have been no mindless regurgitations of Lewontin's Fallacy here as the sight of a grown man reduced the an extended phenotype of the ethnic interests of the Fallacy's inventor would be unbearable for me. Funny thing, when more than one loci is tested, the Fallacy is exposed as just that. Lack of faithism? We cannot be so lucky.
And should that surprised? The genetic continuity of one's group is a real life interest, however humble, however unsexy, and the sense of moral superiority and temporary bit of status one is rewarded with for paying lip service to the faithism de jure is not.
neo-liberalism + cultural Marxism = elite power

THIS IS A HOLYSPIRIT MANUSCRIPT BOOK: WHEN YOU BUY THIS BOOK YOU WILL BE READING A HOLYSPIRIT DIRECTED BOOK FROM God; & * CHRIST JESUS. THIS BOOK IS GODS HOLYSPIRIT VOICE: THE CALL FOR ALL CHRISTIANS & CHURCHES TO REPENT FROM ALL THEIR SINS: EVEN FROM FALSE CHRIST TEACHINGS. BIRTH CONTROL SINS HAVE CURSE THE CHURCH WITH SPIRITUAL WHOREDOM & FALSE WORSHIP. RESULTING IN THE PERSECUTIONS: AGAINST THE HOLY PEOPLE. THIS BOOK MAY BE REVISED: BECAUSE OF COMPUTER DICTATORS: MANY WORDS IN THIS BOOK: MADE HAVE BEEN CHANGED: TO>>DISCREDIT: THE AUTHOR. BUT IN TRUTH: I AM A HOLYSPIRIT CHOSEN ANOINTED DISCIPLE FOR GOD & CHRIST JESUS. EVEN FOR JEWS, MUSLIMS & GENTILE SINNERS. MANY PEOPLE WILL LEARN HOW TO> BECOME REAL BORN AGAIN CHRISTIAN: THROUGH THIS HOLYSPIRIT BOOK & THROUGH THE PROTECTION & SUPPORT OF MY HOLYSPIRIT LIFE!! JOHN 3 & 15. ALL NATIONS WILL OVER COME THE SINS OF BIRTH CONTROL.
(Yes, the entire book is written in ALL CAPS. And it's over six hundred pages long.)

  • "The Illusions of Alacrity" by one Y. Serm Clacoxia, quoted here in an essay by Douglas Hofstadter:

Thus we act: and perhaps action itself is the Anatole's Curlicue of our era. It is high time to recognize that action, and action alone, will be the agent that transmutes the flowery barrier of unutterability into an arbitrary but sacred iota of purposefulness, which cannot help but penetrate into an otherwise nameless and universally spaghettified lack of meaning, which smears and beclouds the crab-lit hopes of half-beings begging for deliverance from their own private, yet strangely tuberculine mealstroms that begat, and begotten were from, a howling sea of ribosomal plagiarism.

  • Søren Kierkegaard's wonderful sentence: "The self is a relation which relates itself to itself, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to itself; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to itself." Possibly a Stealth Parody.
    • Especially when one considers Kierkegaard's disdain for Hegel's philosophy as being obscure.
  • The writings of Francis E. Dec:

For your only hope for a future, do you know one word of pray for me. Francis E. Dec. Computer God computerized brain thinking SEALED ROBOT OPERATING ARMS SURGERY CABINET machine removal of most of the frontal COMMAND LOBE of the brain, gradually during lifetime and OVERNITE IN ALL INSANE ASSYLUMS, after C. God kosher bosher one month probation period, creating helpless hopelsss Computer God Frankenstein Earphone Radio parroting puppet BRAINLESS SLAVES, resulting in millions of hopeless, helpless, homeless derelicts in all JerUSAlem cities and Soviet slave work camps.

    • So . . . we're all getting lobotomies?
    • No, our brains aren't actually in our bodies; they are housed in glass cities on the far side of the moon. Also, we are naturally ageless, but the various world conspiracies, under the guidance of the Mad Deadly Gangster Frankenstein Computer God, have installed robots in our walls that do plastic surgery on us while we sleep so that we appear to age.
  • Emanuel Bronner started a soap company in order to spread his ideas. To this day, the labels on Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap carry an upbeat but decidedly nutty mixture of quotations (from Kipling and Thomas Paine, among others), religious ravings, and straightforward advertising. "It is the mildest, most pleasant soap you ever used or money back! Enjoy body rub to stimulate body-mind-soul-spirit and teach the Essene Moral ABC uniting all free in the Shepherd-Israel's Great All-One-God-Faith!" (Scans of the labels are available here. Each quart bottle carries about 4,000 words.)

Dilute! Dilute! OK!

  • A lot of continental philosophy is accused of this.
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