Ace Fury

This essay sheds the pretense of the Church and speaks directly to the people of the United States, and anywhere else that far-right populism is rising. But mostly the United States. Watching in bemused disbelief is not enough. Name-calling is not enough. Waiting for the system for magically fix itself is not enough. Late-night talk show barbs are not enough. Calm, centrist pontificating is not enough. The time to act is now. It doesn’t matter if he’s trolling. It doesn’t […]Read more »

The Savior Self was born of a time when the tide of fascism appeared to be ebbing and liberal democracy was once again the order of the day. Thus, the Church adopted a stance of passive exclusion against the current order; that is, rejecting or ignoring the current system as much as possible and focusing energy on building parallel structures of governance. But the ebb did not last long, and once again the global threat of fascism is fast on […]Read more »

We here in the United States find ourselves once more in the throes of overt fascism. Right-wing extremists, led by a textbook strongman persona, have won a decisive victory in our federal elections. Their explicit agenda is to dismantle the federal government, place plutocratic lackeys in the highest position of power, deregulate private industry, suppress our bodily autonomy, abolish freedom of the press, further destroy our education system, isolate the country from the global community, institute a police state with […]Read more »

So you’ve decided to seek the path to liberation and enlightenment with the collective strength of a community rather than all alone against the forces of the entire world. Great choice! But building an intentional community is, in itself, nearly as difficult as escaping the subjugation of a sleepwalking society. As with the tenets themselves, the Church of the Savior Self condones all prescriptive teachings; we must each walk our own path, replete with pathfinding and obstacle avoidance. More plainly, […]Read more »

Now that the Church has defined its core tenets (See the On Utopia series), let’s consider what these ideas would mean in practice. The tenets are intentionally simple and designed to allow interpretation and adaptation as each person sees fit; thus, there is no prescriptive (or proscriptive) “Right Way” to adhere to the tenets. One can attempt to adhere to the tenets while continuing to live in the modern world. Although strict adherence to principals of non-harm are virtually impossible […]Read more »

The first five tenets of the Savior Self are fairly uncontroversial. They are a distillation of anarcho-communist ideals infused with a mild underpinning… effectively, “Humans should be free to do as they please, but they should reduce harm in order to promote harmonious living.” The first five tenets are non-proscriptive and are intended to serve as a set of guiding principles upon which each person can develop their own beliefs and ethos. However, the sixth and final tenet of the […]Read more »

We have previously discussed the inexorable march of human progress and its effects on society, but let us now consider its effect on us as individuals. As we have tamed the world around us, we have eliminated the dangers and discomforts of . We operate on autopilot, performing routine tasks and duties with minor variations, ingesting and reciting pop culture and, increasingly, filling every idle moment with a stream of content from some digital device. We may, on occasion, exercise […]Read more »

Harm is a nebulous concept. At its most basic, to harm someone or something can simply mean to “negatively impact” it, which still leaves the concept open to broad interpretation. When dealing with people, we must rely on the subjective evaluation of the transgressed to determine whether they “feel” harmed, at least in less-egregious situations that don’t involve a court of law and a jury of peers. Of course, this makes sense. The negative impact of an action against an […]Read more »

As humans, we possess the seemingly-unique awareness of our own mortality. Although some other animals exhibit behavior that suggests at least some cognition of death– such as elephants’ mourning rituals– there is little evidence to suggest that they aware innately aware of their own eventual and inevitable demise. Relatedly, we alone seem to have a highly-developed sense of self, one that allows us to fully immerse ourselves in imagined situations and circumstances to the extent that we can temporarily displace […]Read more »

Liberty without cooperation is savagery. The foundational pillar of our continued survival as a species (for however much longer we can continue to survive) is that we developed complex societies that were ultimately built on cooperation. All our advancements were predicated on the notion of specialization, where separate groups would each perform a specific task necessary for our survival, and they would trust that other groups would perform their tasks and would share their results in kind. Of course, throughout […]Read more »