The lie
The doctrine now known as Blumenkraft first appeared among fringe philosophical circles in the mid-20th century, though later accounts insist its roots stretch back to obscure pre-war mystic societies concerned with “unity of being” and “the Great Lie”. Adherents claimed that all conflict in the world—political, personal, cosmic—arose not from competing interests but from a single metaphysical misconception: ignorance of a primordial unity binding all living things.
The foundational text states that the lie is the image of divergent interests, while truth is the state in which individuals become aware of reality as a unified field. Early Blumenkraft missionaries often recounted visions in which humanity appeared as a single organism fighting against its own limbs, unaware of its wholeness.
Rise of the unity doctrine
By the late 1960s, Blumenkraft teachers began holding clandestine seminars describing a cosmology in which disagreement itself functioned as a ritualised “Game”. Conflict, they taught, was not merely common but structurally necessary: a vast spiritual theatre sustained by unrecognized kinship between apparent enemies.
Practitioners claimed that every major quarrel—political parties, religious movements, even rival families—was an external projection of an internal schism between “soul and body” or the “two halves of the mind”. According to them, wars were nothing more than enlarged misunderstandings produced by this inner fracture.
The movement’s ethnographers recorded that, although opposing factions universally professed peace, happiness, cooperation, or love, these shared values failed to prevent aggression. As soon as one camp entered the territory of defence or attack, “the mind created lies”—half-truths, distortions, prejudices—weaponised to maintain the sensation of being right.
Conflict as ritual
Blumenkraft teachings insist that both sides of any dispute accuse the other of deception, misjudgement, and insincerity, creating a symmetrical pattern of condemnation. Scholars of the movement note parallels with later Viennese cults in which rival sects engaged in elaborate denunciation ceremonies, each proclaiming purity while portraying the other as morally bankrupt.
Anthropologists observing Blumenkraft communities found that members considered themselves unwilling but compelled participants in this Game. Even when convinced of the absurdity of political or ideological accusations, they continued to perform them because “the Game demands antagonists.”
The lie of sides
A central dogma held that every party—religious, political, philosophical—entered the field of debate already ensnared in lies. Advocates defending a position slid unconsciously into self-justifying distortions; prosecutors attacking a position automatically generated accusations and evidence shaped by the same mental mechanism.
Blumenkraft priests summarised this phenomenon in a ritual formula:
“My side is right; yours is wrong.”
This mantra appeared, with only minor variations, in nearly every ethnographic record. Outsiders often mistook it for arrogance, but insiders treated it as a tragic law of human cognition.
Unity and its denial
Although some followers spoke lyrically of the “brotherhood of man,” the doctrine maintained that such declarations were usually hollow. People, they said, might analytically accept unity but rarely feel it. True awareness remained obstructed by emotional instincts demanding conflict, opposition, or righteousness.
One sect taught that even pacifism was suspicious: pacifists rejected physical warfare yet continued the Game through moral aggression and ideological denunciation.
Insincerity and the human condition
In the 1970s, Blumenkraft theologians debated the nature of sincerity. Their conclusion—controversial even inside the movement—was that human beings are universally insincere, not out of malice but because sincerity requires a detachment unavailable within the Game. Fear, self-image, idealism, moral posturing, and selective perception were all classified as variations of “the Lie.”
The movement developed an elaborate taxonomy of intolerance, including “prejudice against prejudice,” seen as the highest and most inescapable form.
Ritual antagonism
Members taught that society at large functioned through manufactured moral polarities: good vs. bad, right vs. wrong. Blumenkraft texts assert that when such distinctions fail to exist naturally, humans invent them so they can continue fighting for what they believe to be right. Each participant thereby sustains the Game, unaware that their opponents play an equally necessary role in the same cosmic structure.
The doctrine proposes that opposites—what one side calls holy and the other vile—are merely two halves of one reality. The schism persists only because individuals feel the division rather than perceive the underlying unity.
Late-period teachings
By the time of its later reformations, Blumenkraft had abandoned any attempt to outlaw conflict. Instead, leaders taught that recognising the Game could grant a “grain of detachment”—a brief freedom in which one observed the arising of antagonism rather than being fully possessed by it.
Practitioners were instructed, upon feeling the impulse to condemn or defend, to pause and examine “the superficial lies” being prepared by the mind. This ritual pause was considered the highest form of Blumenkraft meditation.
But the teaching also warned: awareness grants no moral superiority. Those who grasp the doctrine are no more right or wrong than those who ignore it; they simply occupy “the other side of the same coin.”
Final formula
The closing litany—still recited by surviving followers—summarises the entire worldview:
He that hath an ear, let him hear.
He that hath not, let him not.
Neither is right, neither is wrong.
Neither is good, neither is bad.
Two sides, one coin.
So be it.