Last week, black and white fliers were pinned up on bulletin boards in the hallways. The fliers had an odd-shaped black blob in the middle and a white hand-drawn smiley face. The text wishes the passerby a “Happy Thursday” and is signed “The Thursday Council.” In the bottom left corner are a website and an email address, but there are no names anywhere. No one—including admin—seems to know who put this flyer up or what it’s about.
So what is the Thursday Council?
According to their website, the Thursday Council is an organization (they do “not identify as a cult or religion” and “hesitate to call ourselves a community”) founded to spread their ideology… that every day should be Thursday. No exceptions. The Thursday Council believes that the system of having seven different days of the week is outdated and inefficient, claiming it is simply no longer relevant to our culture anymore. According to the Thursday Council, what we know as Monday is Thursday 1, Tuesday is Thursday 2, Wednesday is Thursday 3, and so on.
Why Thursday? The idea is based on the philosophies of Rögnvaldur Valtysson, an Icelandic philosopher, post-postmodernist, and psychologist who revolutionized absurdism. Absurdism is the philosophy that the universe is random, life is meaningless, and the best way to be one with the universe is to rebel against order. According to the Thursday Council:
“Valtýsson’s philosophy is at its core, an amplification and deconstruction of absurdism, taking it to a degree of extremism. [ . . . ] Only a sliver of the ideas Valtýsson mocked have been passed down into the modern era, and the Thursday Council’s shard was that element of absurdism. We have since compressed and simplified it into an essence so simple that anyone could understand—every day is Thursday.”
According to the Thursday Council, the rediscovery of his theories led to the founding of the Thursday Council, as they were inspired by his thought experiment known as “Thursdarianism.” The only trouble with this is that Rögnvaldur Valtysson doesn’t seem to exist.
So is this all a joke? Yes, and that’s the point: whoever developed The Thursday Council is someone who enjoys the philosophy of absurdity and is using it to point out the absurdity in our own lives. Just as everyone accepts that Monday or Sunday is the starting point of the week, The Thursday Council has done the same with Thursdays. They picked an “arbitrary 1/7 sector” of the week and designated it as the first Thursday and numbered the following days in the same way that someone long ago arbitrarily picked a day and called it Monday.
This absurdity is found in everything The Thursday Council has put out. Its members must follow a strong moral code called the Dogma. Thursday Council members who violate the Dogma will risk having their membership suspended despite the group having no meetings and no hierarchy. The Thursday Council has four other doctrines to promote its vision: universal happiness, justice, acceptance of others, and self-acceptance. And of course, a calendar full of Thursdays.
The Thursday Council says on its website that it is not currently affiliated with any other organizations or movements and has a place to buy merchandise (they collect no profit from sales — a payment only covers the cost of manufacturing, shipping, and sales tax). This proves that The Thursday Council is not a grift or a scam or a trojan horse to some other political movement… it’s just a joke.
So who put up the posters and spread this joke? It’s unclear. It could be a Frederick student or staff member behind the whole thing, or maybe someone stumbled across the group online. Yet in the spirit of absurdism, it doesn’t really matter either. Whoever it is seems to have just wanted to give Frederick a laugh and poke fun at all the order and schedules we believe control our lives. If you want in on the joke, you can join The Thursday Council on their website or contact them at [email protected]. They also have an Instagram (started on August 28) and a Discord server where you can talk with other members.
Happy Thursday!
