The New Mont Order Dissidents – Wisdom emerges through endurance and diversity.
Originally Published by Dissident Voice.
In my past articles on the Mont Order club, I talked about what the group used to be and how I think it represents an ideal of wisdom through diversity of religious, political and philosophical thought that I see a great role for in the world.
Since I last wrote on this subject, the Internet has proved to be firm and reliable ground upon which to rebuild the Mont Order as a real community and a real organization. This means that a new iteration of the Mont Order exists and the group is no longer defunct. At this time, a promising number of bloggers have come forward to build the voice of the new Mont Order in 2015, and we predict that our group will come to include hundreds of voices in different countries.
I want this article to serve as something of a guide to make their journey easier, as well as to illuminate our nature for all people who may take an interest in the newest variant of the group we have come to call “the Mont Order”. Some of our earlier members have had a rough journey, largely due to regretfully misunderstanding what the Mont Order is and whether or not we have any uniform ideology or agenda at all. It is apparently very easy for people to fall into the trap of fantasizing that this group is more than it really is, even when I go to great lengths to represent its current status accurately.
Much of the fault for this difficulty in the formative period of the new organization has been mine, for failing to publish helpful information on Mont earlier and reduce any possibility of misunderstanding. I now have an apparently clear responsibility to explain what the Mont Order really is as an organization, and portray its current status accurately.
There is scarcely any alternative than to explain things exactly as they are, rather than veiling ourselves behind already prevalent misconceptions about the Mont Order on the blogosphere. If the following explanation is still too hard to grasp, I encourage you to get in touch with our members directly to talk about your concerns. There is no substitute for speaking to our advisers directly, as simply researching this subject in the dark seas of the Internet will not likely suffice.
At the time of writing, the Mont Order refers to two different actors. The second is something of which I know a great deal and am quite actively involved in, and of the first I know very little other than that it is probably a body of rumor and fiction. Were one to confuse the two, one may doubt our very existence as a group or use our existence to see evidence supporting absurd conspiracy theories that already misled millions in the culture of the Internet.
The first Mont Order as an ideal
The first “Mont Order”, the ideal Mont Order, is not an existent organization. Several groups throughout history, including the Montagnards who brought about the French Revolution and a small 2010-2012 Religious Studies group I once helped appear to have used similar names and allegories to the Mont Order’s own. Whether they are really connected is not known to me. That Mont Order can be seen more accurately as a tradition that has worked inexorably towards building bridges of understanding among diverse people and groups, rather than isolating itself to form its own homogeneous culture in the way religions and cults do.
There is a body of rumor, mythology and apparently even a book called The Work of the Mont Order, all containing image and metaphor that I used to base the new organization of the second Mont Order upon. When I first came up with the idea of the new Mont Order as a fully-fledged dissident circle in 2014, I used these images and metaphors to design a motto and a seal for our use as an organization, but most of the similarities to the myth of the Mont Order ended there. The myth itself appears to have held that the first Mont Order is the oldest organization in the world, and has actively shaped the course of human history since before the dawn of civilization. That claim may even be true, but I am not aware of such answers and the current organization has no means to confirm them.
The second Mont Order as a reality
It is the second Mont Order that I know to be real, and it is currently reaching out to many bloggers to form a real community of diverse thinkers. Based on what we have talked about both publicly and on our internal threads, it is clear that we currently consider ourselves to be a new kind of pressure group that relies primarily on blogging and other forms of online publishing to promote a variety of progressive causes and other, more scientific developments such as transhumanism. Although we maintain as much coherence as possible in our message and we select members in the first place for their dissident credentials or their sociological foresight, the choice of causes supported by the Order is ultimately governed by the priorities of our incumbent members. Therefore, we have no set agenda and the Order answers to no-one but itself.
The Mont Order as a continuum
Where possible, we may make reference to the first Mont Order, the fictive group that may have traced its origins to the dawn of humanity itself, only to enhance the mystique and cultural appeal of the second Order. This is no deception, nor is it any other crime, but a means of solidarity that has been practiced by all people since the inception of writing. We constantly describe community by making reference to other communities, and even ultimately to concepts and ideals that have no substance of their own. Indeed, if you dig deep enough, all communication is made of allusion to some half-truths, fictions and ideals. One cannot describe the real Mont Order organization by reference to any other group or thing than the first Mont Order, the myth.
To sum up what I have tried to explain so far, I will say again that the first Mont Order, the group addressed by people who are likely conspiracy theorists, forgers and authors of fiction, appears quite non-existent. However, concurrently, I know that the second Mont Order is real and I intentionally used some images and phrases associated with the first to help inspire and model the second.
While it almost sounds like an act of dishonesty on my part to have equated a real organization with a possibly fictional one, the emergent success of the Mont Order as a formula for a new type of Internet-borne dissident group has convinced me that I took the right action. Our formula still requires that the name of the Mont Order should be carried by myth and meme, the most contagious and the most effective political phenomena that have yet allowed ideas to be circulated rapidly through new communication media.
What is most important for our prospective members and other Mont supporters and activists throughout the Internet to now consider is that we are not hiding anything from the public. What we have shown you is all that there is, and our members, in fact, support absolute transparency, except when it comes to subject matters where there is nothing certain to reveal.
We do not seek aggrandizement but the recognition that the Order exists and that the ideal of power and wisdom through endurance and diversity, as alluded to in the Order’s names and symbols, is also real. Our current three-way watchword, “Inheritance, Equilibrium, Order”, like our emblem, had no particular meanings in mind when it was first used by me but was a reapplication of the same recurrent words and symbols in the Mont myth preceding the Order.