Author: Ace Fury

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 in our current societies, we can commit to conscious living and consider each action and decision so as to reduce its harm, sacrificing as many modern conveniences as we are personally comfortable forgoing. Thus, we will continue to begrudgingly participate in harmful systems, but we will play a smaller part.

The challenge of this approach is that we will always struggle with alienation and frustration; we will continue to exist in a state of mutual disdain between a system that we condemn and which condemns us. However, the obvious advantage is that we can continue to benefit from the (very) relative comfort and stability afforded to (some of) us by this system.

Alternatively, one can abandon the system entirely and go “off grid,” rejecting the current economic and political paradigms completely while living a self-sustaining life as far removed from society as possible. We can choose no compromises of the tenets and pioneer new modalities of living that disentangle us from the patterns of harm and destruction that are perpetuated by the modern world.

The clear challenge here is that a life off-grid is hard and, currently, even getting off the grid in a “permitted” way requires significant capital and resourcesThis is perhaps the ultimate irony of capitalism: in order to escape it, you must first succeed at it.. To truly reduce harm to its minimum practical level requires the sacrifice of nearly every technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the advantage is a very smug sense of self-satisfaction.

There also exist virtually infinite other alternatives that fall somewhere between these two extremes. All such options are valid, as far as the Church is concerned. Salvation is liberation, and liberation is a conscious life.

Similarly, one can be a practitioner of the tenets as a single individual, or they can connect with others and build their community. Here, the Church solidly supports the latter approach. Of course, it seems almost silly to adhere to a philosophical framework that extols unity and interconnectedness as its ultimate goal but to do so as an isolated practitioner; however, there are many paths to salvation and some may choose to walk their path alone.

Community is one of the Three Refuges of Buddhism and it is often called SanghaThe true concept of Sangha is somewhat open to interpretation. Originally, Sangha implied the refuge of the ‘clergy’, the ordained monks and nuns of Buddhism. Later, it was interpreted more broadly to include all like-minded practitioners. It is now sometimes used to mean the kinship shared with all living things. We are talking about the middle one.. The goal is to cultivate a series of sincere, trusted, and rich relationships with others, so that you may all teach and learn from one another, provide support and safety, and share the whole of life experiences– beautiful and tragic– as one.

Navigating this existence with consciousness and mindfulness is no easy task. It is a daily struggle to reject the relative comfort of consumptive capitalism and the global system of injustice, to not backslide into our lifelong conditioning, to resist the dark allure of harmful behaviors. It is, quite literally, no different than recovery programs for addiction; we find strength in others, and we give them strength in kind.

Forging deep bonds in a like-minded community enriches us and helps ensure our success in our pursuits. There is no rugged frontiersman or lone ranger that can solve the problems of fundamental dissatisfaction on their own.

Of course, there is some sacrifice of individual liberty when participating in any system. But the Savior Self does not promote liberation as some sort of platonic ideal, the purest form of which should be pursued at all costs. The Savior Self wishes to improve the material conditions of our existence by achieving collective liberation; this must be achieved through cooperation and community.

To experience the true richness of life, it must be shared; if nothing else, it is in our biological nature. And we stand little chance of taking on this world alone. As we forge our paths to liberation and salvation, we must reach out to others along the path and build our Sanghasor intentional communities or affinity groups, or any name which you choose to give it..

We will discuss some strategies for establishing mindful communities in the coming entries.

The first five tenets of the Savior Self are fairly uncontroversial. They are a distillation of anarcho-communist ideals infused with a mild philosophicalSpecifically, traditional Buddhist philosophy 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 Savior Self is decidedly more definitive, and it must be accepted as an axiomatic truth to preserve the integrity of the other tenets. Before we discuss the sixth tenet of the Savior Self, it is important to understand why this tenet is so crucial.

In philosophy, egoism is the idea that all actions should enrich the self. In many ways, it is the foundational framework of liberal democracy and libertarian capitalism, in which people are encouraged to “follow their bliss” and prioritize their own personal well-being, and that doing so will then, somehow, benefit the whole of society via open markets and invisible hands.

Of course, we have seen the dehumanizing and destructive results of these beliefs in the “flourishing” liberal democracies around the world, as well as the false veneer of freedom they provide. Egoism is built on two key presuppositions: that humans are special, and that IThe royal ‘I’, not me specifically. am extra special.

Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are exceptional and unique in the universe. This belief can be traced back to Greek philosophy, and it is foundational to Abrahamic religions in the divinity of man and his creationSorry, ladies and enbies. /s in God’s image. The belief remains dominant today across religious, spiritual, and seculareven transhumanists believe that humans are the pinnacle of creation so far and are thus obligated to transcend to even more supreme forms. populations, perhaps with different justifications but culminating in the same conclusion: there is something cosmically or spiritually distinct about the human species, and we remain the most superior form in the universe.

The “logical” conclusion of human supremacy is that humans are entitled to use (and abuse) the world as we see fit. From biblical proclamations to spread like cancerGenesis 1:28 – And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” to various modern environmental conservation arguments, anthropocentrism is foundational to our morality.

In addition to this– or perhaps as a prerequisite for it– our minds perceive ourselves as the most supreme being, at least subjectively. Surely this arises from a survival instinct buried deep in our evolutionary past, a motivation for self-preservation inscribed in our helical genetic blueprint. Our modern social evolution may have required us to conceal and temper this belief in order to foster cooperation, but it is still very much a subconscious conductor of our thoughts and actions. There is certainly some truth to the idea that greed and selfishness are human nature… they are, just as they are in the nature of every creature confronted with resource scarcity.

In stark contrast to this, most Eastern religions and philosophies encourage the suppression of the self in order to recognize the interconnected unity of ourselves with everything and everyone. Ego death is the extreme form of this suppression, wherein one is able to fully dissociate from their own subjective experience and, ostensibly, see past themselves into a more objective reality; practitioners often use psychedelics to help achieve this transcendence. Whatever the method, the goal of enlightenment is to shed the veil of disconnected individualism and to embrace the unified cosmic energy of all living things.

It should be obvious which ideology works better for harmonious coexistence.

Ascribing human life with a fundamental value— and a value that is fundamentally far greater than anything else– restricts our ability to properly evaluate the consequences of our actions. If we were somehow able to cut down every tree on the planet and use them to provide housing for every homeless human, would that loss of habitat for countless billions of other organisms be morally justifiable?

That notion of a fundamental value to human life– no matter the circumstances– also provides the rationality for anti-abortion activists, because every life is sacred even if it is unwanted and results in a life of hardship and perpetual poverty. It is also the basis for capital punishment abolitionists who believe that a life sentence in captivity is somehow more ethical than a death penalty, or that the possibility of a single innocent person being put to death justifies the countless billions in resources that are expended to carry out life sentences for thousands of unrepentant violent offenders.

Thus, the Church rejects the a priori sanctity of human life as a counterproductive belief. This is the sixth tenet of the Savior Self.

Human life is not inherently sacred or special.

Tenet 6 of the Savior Self

This does not mean that human life has no value, nor does it mean that everyone is expected to adopt a materialistic philosophy that negates the existence of a soul or alternate planes of consciousness; however, it does mean that we should reevaluate our conceptions of our value on this plane of existence in a more rational manner. Of course human life should be protected and harm should be reduced to its practical minimum, as stated in the third tenet. Compassion is vital to the tenets of the Church.

But so is truth.

A person that deliberately causes harm to othersAnd is unrepentant or unable to be rehabilitated. cannot rationally be regarded as equal to one that devotes their life to helping others. Similarly, a person with a degraded quality of life– whether through illness, injury, or circumstance– should not be forced to continue their existence due to some arbitrary moral imperative.

To be sure, these both seem like slippery slopes. Who dictates the value of one life over another? The answer, in most cases, should be the person living the life. The ultimate goal must be a society in which everyone shifts their consciousness to perceive life in this way; if we do not indoctrinate and guilt people into clinging to life at all costs, if we normalize the creation of living wills, and adopt a healthier attitude towards morality– terrifying as it admittedly is, we can restore the freedom of choosing to die to many people.

The situation of capital punishment is more delicate. Incarceration has served many “claimed” purposes: a punishment meant to evoke penitencehence the term “penitentiary”; an opportunity for rehabilitation; a punishment for the simple sake of retribution; and as a last resort method of separating dangerous people from society. Recidivism rates indicate that penitence and rehabilitation are hardly effective, generally hovering around 40-60% across North America and EuropeEven in progressive Scandinavian countries that emphasize rehabilitation and dropping to around 20% in stricter countries such as Singapore.

Incarceration as retributive punishment can be justified when one party is tangibly harmed, although in such cases the decision should be made by the harmed party (and tempered for “fairness” by the community). In an enlightened society, the harmed party may seek restorative justice rather than retribution, but that should be their choice to make.

Finally, incarceration as a matter of public safety seems ineffective for non-life sentences (as supported by the aforementioned recidivism rates) and exceedingly cruel for life sentences. Regardless of the “comfort” of the accommodations, depriving a person of virtually all of their liberty for their entire, natural life seems far more barbaric than making the solemn decision to end their life.

With all that said, criminal justice remains a separate topic for another day. Moreover, the Church believes that crime should not be a common problem in a healthy society, and therefore these sorts of scenarios should be fringe cases that can be handled on an individual basis (as should all transgressions, really).

Accepting that human life is not divinely sacred allows us to make rational decisions to the benefit of everyone and everything which– in a holistic worldview– will be to the benefit of ourselves as well.

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 our livesThe Church will always qualify references to human prosperity as applying only to the small portion of people that are fortunate to live in stables societies and have some degree of wealth. It is crucial to remember that this is not the universal human experience, especially within the context of the tenet we are discussing today.. 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 our “free will” or contemplate our personal goals to shape our actions, but we ultimately operate on the premise of satisfying our every fleeting urge and fulfilling our social expectation, without ever stopping to consider the urge itself or the consequences of our action.

How many moments in a day are you awake? Not the number of hours you spend with your eyes open, but the number of instances when you make a deliberate, introspective analysis of yourself, your thoughts, and your desires, and then act accordingly? For almost all of us, the answer is certainly zero. Introspecting upon ourselves and adjusting our behaviors necessitate a certain amount of discomfort.

For example, even something as trivial as saying “bless you” in response to a sneeze is the product of an implicit expectation of the social contract. But even these trivialities deserve some critical reflection. What is the purpose of this reflexive response to someone else’s autonomic bodily function? There are archaic attributions to preventing spirits or souls from entering or exiting one’s body, and in other cultures the response to a sneeze is often a variant of “to your health!” But certainly even the most devout no longer believe a sneeze is a demon, let alone the rest of us; similarly, while wishing someone health may seem polite, it is also entirely meaningless.

Of course this is now itself an autonomic nicety, some harmless relic from centuries past, but it is representative of the insidious power of coercion to shape our behavior and our lives, often without our own awareness. In the face of lifelong conditioning, it requires less effort to not say “bless you” than to say it.

This is partially a product of evolution. The evolutionary pressure on every living being is to expend the least amount of energy. Discomfort elicits a reaction, and reactions burn calories; calories are scarce, and thus it is a viable strategy to exert some additional effort now to avoid discomfort later. So we remain in a seemingly unique evolutionary situation where scarcity is effectively eliminatedWithout a profit motive, it absolutely would be. and higher consciousness has formed, but our limbic survival instincts tell us to minimize exertion and conserve energy.

Yet this instinct for sloth is extolled as a virtue in neoliberal societies and depicted as the ultimate goal of humanity: a life free of effort or discomfort or negative sensation, an existence whiled away in air-conditioned mental stasisThis is the less perverse sales pitch for the advancement of AI: that we may one day be freed of all humanly duties to become a species of interstellar meatsacks, floating contentedly throughout the cosmos. The more perverse pitch is a sort of crypto-extinctionist ideology that strives to replace humankind with a singularity, as previously discussed in “On Progress, Progress”. So we are encouraged to consume and distract ourselves, to silence our inner thoughts with a steady stream of sensory overload and recreational or pharmaceutical chemicals.

Nietzsche implored us to “live dangerously,” not as an invitation to death but as an affirmation of life. When we are faced with danger– true, grave danger– we are existing solely in the moment, not dwelling on the past or fantasizing about the future. We are aware of every sensory input and every muscular action, even if the adrenaline overwhelms us and makes our recollection of the incident hazy; in fact, it is that very focus that makes the memory hazy, as our mind is preoccupied with the moment and has fewer resources for processing memories.

Of course, defying death is not the only way to achieve consciousness, nor is it the most practical for most people. But for those who have had their mortality imminently threatened, there is no sensation in our daily lives that can focus the mind quite like those harrowing moments when death is on the line. That is why many people who have a near-death experience emerge with a sense of newfound clarity, a re-commitment to mindfulness and purposeful living.

But as we’ve discussed above, that mindfulness is often quickly snuffed out by the onslaught of distractions and pressures of modern life, and they return to old habits in short order.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Eastern philosophies have recognized this inclination since ancient times. Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism (and their respective derivatives) all place an emphasis on mindfulness and conscious living. This mindfulness is achieved through meditation, which is, at its most basic, the act of looking inward. Meditation teaches us to block both the internal and external noise in our lives– sensory distractions and purposeless mental chatter– in order to quiet our mind and build our internal tolerance for, essentially, boredom. It is only when we can feel content and satisfied even with this state of boredom that we are said to be at peace with ourselves.

Once we have attained this inner peace, we can return to the outer world with the ability to filter out the distractions and trivialities. With the noise tuned out, we can focus our minds on finding the truth, whatever that may mean for each of us personally. We can examine the world as it is, and ourselves as we are; we can observe the faults in each and work towards health and healing.

Now, in many ways this practice is even more difficult than nihilism’s decree of dangerous living. The modern world demands our energy and our attention, toiling away in a self-serving cycle of production and consumption and otherwise filling the idle moments with artificial conflicts and carefully-crafted dopamine triggers. The alienation and isolation of capitalist society make us feel as though we are in competition with one another; the ostensible comfort of cities and suburbs make us seem disconnected from nature. Mindfulness is the practice of seeing past these superficial boundaries and breaking free of our conditioned routines in order to make every thought, word, and action a conscious choice.

Committing to mindful or conscious living is a constant, difficult, and demanding goal, and that is why it is a foundational tenet of the Savior Self. A rational, conscious being is crucial to a harmonious existence. When we remember that we are connected with our fellow humans and with the world at large, we may act freely and without the need for gods or masters because we will recognize that any harm that we inflict upon the world will harm ourselves as well.

Humans should live consciously and reflect on their thoughts, behaviors, motivations, and emotions.

Tenet 5 of the Savior Self

It is a goal that, even after years of devout practice, is not permanently attainable. As with all tenets of the Savior Self, conscious living is aspirational, a goal towards which we should work every day. When we find ourselves faltering in our commitment– whether deliberately or, more likely, unconsciously– we must have the grace to forgive ourselves, the strength to introspect and find the reasons, and the will to gently re-align ourselves back towards the goal.

It is important to note that conscious living is not necessarily ascetic living. A conscious being is free to indulge in sensory pleasures and even pursue a fully hedonistic lifestyle if they believe it is the path to their happiness; the goal of mindfulness is to simply consider each decision and its consequences before making it, rather than to simply surrender to our natural urges or to social programming.

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 object— cutting down a tree, for example– can be quantified by examining the direct consequences of the action, and then the secondary consequences resulting from the direct consequences, and so on. In this example, cutting a tree may reduce the available habitat for local flora and fauna, remove the vegetation that produces oxygen, eventually destroy the root system that protects against erosion, and perhaps several other consequences. But depending on the biological health of the region, these effects may be incalculably minimal to the broader system; technically there is harm, but practically there is not.

Yet even this objective harm is exceedingly difficult to calculate in the modern age; cutting a single tree may be innocuous, but it quickly becomes tremendously harmful at scale (i.e., ten people each cutting down a tree will likely have a measurable impact, to say nothing of industrial logging removing hundreds and thousands of trees), or when one considers the “ripple effects” of an action (e.g., the carbon footprint of manufacturing a chainsaw, the petrochemicals required to operate it, etc.). For something as simple as buying groceries, one would have to extensively research and consider concerns about ethical labor, animal rights, carbon footprints of transport, packaging waste, nutritional value, bio-patents, supporting small and/or local suppliers, and likely several dozen other things.

By contrast, the negative impact of an action against a person is really rather straightforward… they can simply tell you that your behavior is harmful to them. Whatever is their subjective definition of harm is largely irrelevant; if you and they are both good-faith actors, it should be relatively straightforward to discuss the issue and find a way to eliminate the harm inflicted by your actions.

Now, this can obviously also become more complicated when dealing with people behaving in bad faith– that is, people with unreasonable “sensitivities” to things that are generally regarded as harmless, or people with particular agendas to push a false narrative for personal gain. Of course, every person has their own traumas, thought modalities, and ethical or moral frameworks, and we should make good-faith attempts to respect them and make reasonable accommodations to their needs. But there is undoubtedly a so-called “outrage cultureDon’t worry, this is not some veiled right-wing sympathy for people ‘cancelled’ for their shitty behavior. This applies just as much to fearmongering assholes on the right as ‘language police’ folks on the left.” that pervades our current society, and even people that are generally well-intentioned will express great offense at perceived slights that, in all likelihood, were not meant by the actor. These are shortcomings that we must collectively work to remedy in society by promoting nuanced, rational dissertation rather than finger-wagging echo chambers.

Nevertheless, these differences in identifying and preventing objective and subjective harm require different approaches, and it is for this reason that the Savior Self promotes separate tenets for each. The third tenet of the Savior Self is Humans should not harm one another, which provides a somewhat definitive denunciation of direct harm against another person because such harm can be easily identified and, therefore, easily avoided. Do not physically or emotionally harm another person/people or their (private or communal) property.

Humans should not harm one another.

Tenet 3 of the Savior Self

The fourth tenet of the Savior Self, Humans should reduce all harm to its practical minimum, is deliberately open to interpretation. As we have discussed, some level of “harm” is implicit in virtually every single action we performEven the mere act of breathing ultimately eradicates countless microbes.. Attempting to prevent all objective harm is effectively impractical and largely impossible; thus, we encourage each person, affinity group, and other organizational system to contemplate their own definitions of harm and to align their behavior with the ethical thresholds that they find sufficient for harmonious living. Even with such broad interpretation, the Church believes that most people will readily agree on the vast majority of harm-reduction guidelines (as evidenced by our current tolerance for people of other faiths and ideologies), and any differences should be defensible through reasoned, good-faith debate by all parties.

Humans should reduce all harm to its practical minimum.

Tenet 4 of the Savior Self

Harm reduction is, without question, the most important foundational tenet for our social evolution. Ultimately, all human progress has been towards the goal of reducing harm; some of this progress has been misguided and much of it has been coopted by sociopaths that are happy to harm others for their own personal gain. But philosophy, religion, laws, politics, and technology are all ostensibly built upon the goal of reducing human harm, although their practical applications leave a lot to be desired. We must continue to aspire for ever-greater harm reduction– to our fellow humans and ourselves, to other creatures, and to our planet– as our world gets increasingly more complex and populated, because even the smallest actions can amplify and ripple outward to cause significant harm, intended or otherwise.

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 ourselves from our current, physical existence and “lose” ourselves in imagination. Cognitive scientists posit that dreams are a manifestation of this ability and, again, there is evidence that certain other creatures also dream, and therefore may have some degree of this ability.

Regardless, we will likely never know whether these abilities are uniquely human since we cannot experience the qualia (or subjective experience) of other creatures; for that matter, we cannot be certain that we humans ourselves share similar understandings of our mortality, but this is a digression into a different subject.

It is safe to assume that early mythologies and religions were developed to counteract the natural anxiety of mortality. Our mind— that is, our very sense of self– is predicated on a stream of consciousness that appearsdespite spending about one-third of our lives in a semi-conscious state, to say nothing of other interruptions to our consciousness or the idea that we ultimately remember only a fractional percentage of our past continuous and ongoing. Once we began to ponder what happens to us when we die, we realized that it is literally impossible to answer this question based on the assumption that death means we cease to exist, as we have no meaningful way of conceptualizing non-existence. Thus, we devised concepts of afterlives, reincarnations, celestial redistributions, spectral hauntings, and all manner of other inconsistent theories that still kept our subjective selves intact even after death.

Of course, philosophers debated these notions long before neuroscience provided indisputable evidence that our subjective experience is a product of our physical brains and, thus, the concept of surviving our biological death is meaningless. Nontheists and other “enlightened” scientific thinkers have claimed that they have made peace with this idea of nonexistence, with many claiming to find some type of comfort in it.

I cannot argue that such claims are superficial or disingenuous since, as we previously alluded to, we cannot evaluate the genuine qualia of other people; we must simply take their assertions in good faith. However, I believe that our intellectual desire for self-preservation– separate from our biological survival instinct– cannot logically reconcile this notion of nonexistence. Ostensibly, we did not exist before we were born and– within the context of our sense of self– continued nonexistence long afterwards until we achieved self-awareness somewhere in our mental development process. However, our minds were not aware of this nonexistence because, obviously, they did not exist. Thus, the totality of the mind is built upon our subjective experience of existence and we cannot meaningfully conceive of something outside of this boundary.

To illustrate this idea more simply, I will ask you to imagine an entirely new color, one outside of the visible light spectrum that we are able to seeRemember that images of ultraviolet and infrared spectrum are transposed to our visible light spectrum for us to actually see them. You may certainly be able to grasp the idea of some unknown color in the abstract, but despite your best efforts, you fundamentally cannot construct a new color in your mind because it is beyond the frame of reference of the entirety of your knowledge and experience.

To illustrate the idea more complexly, consider the concept of “infinity.” For a person that is untrained in mathematical thinking, our brains may be able to generally conceive of “something without end,” but we ultimately substitute this with a more understandable idea of “something very, very large.” Indeed, to the best of our scientific calculation and measurement abilities, there is no infinity in the physical world; both the cosmic universe and the subatomic appear to have finite limitsOf course, these limits themselves are far beyond our normal frame of reference and are practically incomprehensible except as variables in equations..

All of this is to say that no one can truly handle dwelling on the concept of nonexistence. Theists and spiritualists avoid the issue with a belief that their self-existence persists in some form, and nontheists may ultimately accept the concept, but they most assuredly do not think about it regularly.

This is true, too, of our overall sense of self. The more introspective among us may occasionally consider the inevitable deterioration of aging, or the potential consequences of our self-destructive habits, or the possibility of random death, dismemberment, or disease in our day-to-day lives, but we are unequipped to think about these things too deeply or to really consider their statistical probabilityOr certainty, as the case may be., lest we suffer an anxiety or panic attack as our brain cannot cope with the stress of these scenarios.

Thus, we each live within our own perpetual delusion of immortality, a subconscious rejection of these difficult and unpleasant realities. We would be paralyzed in fear if we were to admit that we are not immune to drunk drivers and mass shooters and the countless other horrors, accidents, and senseless tragedies that befall anonymous millions every single day. Most of us would succumb to mental breakdowns if we acknowledged the contradictions of our spiritual beliefs and attempted to understand the true nature of existence and mortality.

So we don’t.

This applies equally to those of us in the relative safety of the global North, and to those relegated to war-torn, violent, or impoverished parts of the world. The interminable hope and fascinating adaptability of the human “spirit” impels us all forward, day after day, with the memories of our past traumas eventually fading and the knowledge of our future traumas subconsciously suppressed.

We proceed in a momentary bubble of tolerable existence. Even in our greatest suffering, we press forward with the hope that our suffering will abate with time and that what lays ahead of us is better than what is behind us. Without hope is despair, and a person cannot sustain in despair for very long.

However, equally distressing is the notion of actual immortality. Our memories compress as time proceeds; we increasingly discard chunks of unimportant time and memories in our past, retaining only the flashes that fostered deep synaptic connections for one reason or another. What would we discard on an “infinite” timeline? What would really be left of us as individuals? How would we experience the tapestry of our past selves across thousands, millions of years?

How bored would we be?

Once again, our notion of immortality is clearly defined within our frame of reference of mortality. Perhaps we would transcend into a form that exists outside of linear time, experiencing past and present and future all at once, liberated from the restrictive causality that shapes our current reality. Or perhaps we figure out how to preserved digitally, an immortalUntil the inevitable heat-death of the universe, anyway. part of the singularity, intertwined with all other consciousnesses and omnipresent in a digital infinity.

But with any such fundamental reshaping of our experiential framework, would we really still be ourselves, in any meaningful sense? Does such transcendence allay any fears about the destruction of our subjective selves?

This is a lot of words to say that existence is torment and death is terrifying.

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 history this cooperation often occurred under the threat of violence, first directly and later more subtly through the systems of coercion we previously discussed. However, these threats were predicated on two things which we must work to dismantle:

• The premise that “human nature” is lazy and untrustworthy
• The imbalance of power that actually fuels humans’ laziness and untrustworthiness

Many societies– historic and contemporary– have proven that humans are categorically not lazy, and that while time for leisure and recuperation is necessary, we all ultimately are driven to achieve things, whether personal goals, professional endeavors, or simply idle activities to occupy our bodies and mindsand temporarily distract us from the cold, harsh reality of our mortality and the ever-impending descent into oblivion. Capitalism has worked diligently to make it seem that market economics are necessary to motivate people to work and innovate under threat of starvation and homelessness, even though volunteer organizations and open-source software (to name just a few examples) continue to thrive even under the increased pressure to fulfill our capitalist obligations.

Thus, the second tenet of the Savior Self: Humans should cooperate. On its own, this is another seemingly-superficial statement that can be interpreted countless ways and could ostensibly be applied to any form of interpersonal behavior. While the tenets are deliberately intended to be broad, ideological guidelinesyes, this sounds like the same apologetic excuse for religious scriptures, this tenet is ultimately intended to discourage competitive systems such as “free markets”.

Humans should cooperate.

Tenet 2 of the Savior Self

Although free markets have inarguably spurred tremendous innovation, they have done so in the interest of self-enrichment through capitalist gains. This is a flawed ideology through which to see the world and, it could be argued, has actually stifled innovation in more recent times due to hoarding of advancements through patents and obfuscated intellectual property.

Imagine if everything was open-source; every person could contribute their knowledge, ideas, and skills to improve products. And rather than flooding the “market” with a hundred variations of the product– each with its own shortcomings and compromises for the sake of undercutting the “market price”– we simply get the best version available to us, and we generate a lot less industrial waste or unsold products dumped into landfills to preserve the artificial scarcity.

Of course, “best possible” may be subjective and different groups may have different wants and needs, and and achieving general consensus is often tedious and significantly slows progress. Cooperation does not negate the concept of markets enitrely; people can still have choices and can create their own variations as desired. But rather than wasting energy and resources “reinventing the wheel”, they can simply “fork the main branchsoftware development lingo for making a copy of something to customize it separately from the primary version” to create their own variation and share it with others who are interested.

Innovation would skyrocket if we removed the artificial barriers that allow capitalist endeavors to hoard knowledge as they do other resources. Humans would still specialize and find their niche upon which to obsess, and they would be driven by both their personal passion as well as the status they would achieve within their community for their efforts.

To further clarify: cooperation does not preclude competition. Individuals can– and should— be rewarded for their efforts via public recognition, and friendly competition in pursuit of material incentives is not necessarily incompatible with the spirit of cooperation. Two groups can compete to find the most efficient method of producing a certain item; whichever group succeeds should be celebrated and rewarded, but their results should be shared with the world to allow the next great innovative leap.

We must stand on the shoulders of giants, and we must be willing to be a part of the giants upon which others may stand.

Coercion is a loaded term. We generally consider coercion as an individual performing a particular action against their fully-free will, generally under the threat of violence or harm; that is, a person does something not because they want to, but because they are forced to, to whatever degree.

This definition is mostly adequate for the purposes of discussing the first tenet of the Savior Self: Humans should live free of coercion. However, we must reframe our concept of coercion to include not only obvious structures such as capitalism or majority-mandated democracy, but even to include the fundamental modalities of life that we take for granted such as cultural traditions and social norms.

Humans should live free of coercion.

Tenet 1 of the Savior Self

These modalities are so pervasive that most people will likely balk at the idea that they are coercive. But that is the product of indoctrination, both of the structures themselves and of the lifestyle that discourages conscious living.

To be truly liberated we must be truly conscious, and this requires a level of self-scrutiny that we simply do not commit to in our everyday lives. This is further discussed as part of Tenet 5: Humans should live consciously and reflect on their thoughts, behaviors, motivations, and emotions.

To be clear: the Savior Self does not claim that these things are without any valueIn fact, we’ve previously discussed the importance of homogeneous societies in On Tolerance; however, we must evaluate these deeply-ingrained beliefs and behaviors before we can transcend to self-determining, liberated individuals.

For now, let us consider that this tenet means that every human being must be free to exist as they deem correct. This means that any system or structure that is implemented by a hierarchical structure (such as an affinity group or intentional living community) should have its parameters explicitly defined and should allow those who do not consent to the system’s rules to amicably remove themselves from that system.

This does not mean that actions are without consequences, nor does it mean that individuals cannot be bound by explicit rules or expectations; rather, this tenet specifies that any such system must be entered into consciously and consensually, and that there is no retaliatory punishment for rejecting the system other than exclusion.

This tenet closely aligns with most libertarian ideologies except that, within this context, we wish to apply this principal not only to structures of governance but to all interpersonal relationships. In all instances, coercion arises from an imbalance in power, with the more powerful party imposing their will on the weaker party. This is true of both systemic coercion (state-backed threat of detainment or property extrication) and personal coercion (being held at literal or figurative gunpoint). While it is likely impossibleand undesirable to eliminate all imbalances of power, we must work to deconstruct oppressive systems and replace them with new structures which respect autonomy and which do not punish noncompliance; similarly, we must work to suppress the aspects of (so-called) human nature that desire power over others, and instead foster an appreciation for cooperation and consent.

Thus, systems must be designed to avoid the “tyranny of the majority” and to require selective consent to each aspect of their rules, as granularly as possible. Those who withhold their consent should not be punished, but may be excluded from that aspect of the system (or from the system entirely, as long as practical alternatives exist).

Of course, this situation is different in individuals who are not cognitively capable of providing informed consent, such as children. In these cases, a certain degree of “implicit coercion” is unavoidable, as the individual lacks may not fully understand the consequences of certain actions or behaviors and may thus act “irrationally” and against their own best interest. Despite this, parents and caretakers should make good-faith attempts to promote rational decision-making by explaining situations, reasons, and consequences when possible.

A free society consists of free people. We each possess the capacity to determine what is best for us, but this capacity is not entirely innate; it requires developed skills of logic and reasoning and, to be exercised responsibly, it requires factual information upon which to act. All of these elements have been deliberately eroded in modern society in order to disempower us and make us far easier to manipulate and coerce.

We must therefore work to educate anewI’m really trying to avoid the term <em>reeducate</em> with all its totalitarian connotation ourselves and our communities before we can hope to dismantle the power structures that rule us by coercion.

Now that we have thoroughly negged the modern world and everything in it, let us begin to discuss more constructive things; specifically, let’s focus on the vision of the Savior Self, and what is intended to be a path forward.

First and foremost, let us establish the intent of the Church. As the unholy name implies, the Savior Self is not a messianic institution, proscribing salvation for the planet or the species. The Savior Self does not offer any practical solution for the broader problems facing our population for, as we have recently discussed, these are fundamentally problems of scale and cannot be remedied without either a massive reduction of that scale or achieving a broad consensus of personal sacrifice, and the Church maintains that neither of these remedies can be humanely achieved.

Rather, the Church aims to provide a framework for willing individuals to save themselves through ideological self-fulfillment and a conscious rejection of the modern world to whatever extent each individual wishes to do so. Through this type of shift in personal ideology and practice, the Church wishes to foster the organic growth of like-minded communities, each of whom define their own shared morality, ethics, hierarchies (or lack thereof), and action plans.

With this is mind, let us put forth the fundamental tenets of the Unholy Church of the Savior Self. These tenets are not divine, and they are not the objective truths of the universe; instead, they are the foundational assertions of the ideology of the Savior Self, and all members of the Church are expected to treat these assertions as their own personal truths.

Beyond these tenets, every member of the Church is encouraged to craft, refine, debate, and pursue their own world view. Later discourses will discuss each of these tenets in detail.

The Tenets of the Unholy Church of the Savior Self

1. Humans should live free of coercion.
2. Humans should cooperate.
3. Humans should not harm one another.
4. Humans should reduce all harm to its practical minimum.
5. Humans should live consciously and reflect on their thoughts, behaviors, motivations, and emotions.
6. Human life is not inherently sacred or special.

With the exception of the final tenetWhich is perhaps the most important one, the tenets of the Savior Self resemble those of any major religion and most sociopolitical ideologies and may almost seem trite. Yet despite this resemblance, we can clearly see the endless inconsistencies and contradictions of modern society in practice, and the importance of intentionality in adhering to these tenets in our daily thoughts and actions.

The Savior Self is an opportunity for rebirth, in which adherents consciously reexamine their own personal beliefs and behaviors to identify the ways in which they are no longer compatible with these foundational tenets, and to make adjustments as necessary.

These tenets are deliberately broad and nonspecific, and their goal is to foster the self-development of an ideologically-consistent ethos for each member. The Church encourages divergent interpretations of these tenets, and it asserts that any ideologies that remain faithful to all tenets will be compatible with one another and allow for harmonious coexistence.

Once members have redefined themselves, they are encouraged to connect with one one another to form affinity groups and begin the development of their own utopic communities.

The next several discourses will explore each tenet in greater detail. We will then discuss the practical considerations for utopic planning and guidance on how to develop intentional communities that adhere to the tenets of the Savior Self. Finally, we will publish a series of essays on this author’s personal vision for a utopic community, as well as essays by any member that wishes to share their vision.

Life is meaningless and the knowledge of mortality is crippling. These are the truths of our modern scientific worldview. Any atheist who claims to not fear death is a liar or delusional; anyone who spends adequate time contemplating non-existence will teeter on the verge of madness.

So of course it makes sense that our prehistoric ancestors would craft mythology to soothe their burgeoning neocortices and keep the existential dread at bay. And of course it makes sense that this mythology would have to be regarded as unquestionable truth, because any speck of doubt can easily reveal the all-consuming darkness underneath with just a little bit of picking at the edges.

And so it was that humans came to believe that we (and we alone) possessed these immutable souls, existing through infinite time and subject to infinite bliss or agony based on our actions in the fleeting moments of our corporeal imprisonment.

And of course these beliefs were weaponized to wage wars and to justify subjugation and suffering in this life as a small price for eternal reward in the next.

Even in this age of enlightenment, it makes sense to believe that there is something beyond this life, because the very idea of continued existence after death is more fundamentally logical than the belief that our experiential self ceases to exist. We have previously discussed this in detail, so let us not retread too deeply.

But what simply does not make sense is to continue believing in the same absurd fairy tales that we devised two thousand years ago. Fairy tales whose literal narratives are handily disproven by modern science in, like, a million different ways; and, whose symbolism and figurative narrative are demonstrably derivative of previous mythologies.

It is obviously fruitless to confront religion with logic; anyone who actually does so will concede within a few short moments that their religion doesn’t hold up to any level of scrutiny. “Well that may be, but I have faith,” they will say in their simple way. As if that excuses the rejection of facts for the embrace of fiction.

For most, that “faith” is a crucially-embedded tribal identity and a nebulous sense of meaning for their wretched existences. The few that do attempt to find a true connection look to their religious leaders‘scholars’ to interpret the Divine meaning behind the enigmatic words of an omniscient figure. It is indoctrination to forego critical analysis and defer to authority. It is mental slavery.

This is true of all organized religions. It is perhaps most obvious in Christianity because Christianity has thrived in liberal democracies that are far more tolerant of the hypocrisy than Muslim countries that demand at least some level of adherence to the state religion. Judaism gets a relative pass because it is largely ambivalent to the concept of a god and a soul; with the exception of certain “radical” sects, Judaism is self-admittedly more ethno-cultural than spiritual and, in fact, promotes the intellectual contemplation of the religion and of one’s own faith.

Yet in all cases, these “moderate” versions of religions pose a larger existential problem than their fundamentalist interpretations. In their attempts to remain relevant to the onslaught of liberalism, the modern churchand mosque and synagogue and whatever seems more than happy to ignore large swaths of the teachings of their infallible deity, which would be fine if they admitted that these ancient, holy texts were just fucking stories from a time when people still hadn’t figured out paper… or windmills.

This essay is not an attack on religion. It is an attack on our continued tolerance of religion. That we somehow hold sacred these absolutely nonsensical beliefs that define the worldview of the majority of our species. Beliefs that champion subservience and demonizeliterally independent thought. Beliefs that unequivocally cause far greater harm than the comfort they proclaim to provide.

We regard ignorance and indoctrination as a human right, and we allow our modern “democracies” to be held captive to what hundreds of millions of people “believe” based on the lies and the mental trauma that they’ve been subjected to since birth.

Although liberalism and capitalism have greatly eroded the influence of dogmatic religion, we continue to see religion successfully weaponized to uphold regressive power structures, most recently as a crusade to save children from abortion and “LGBTQ predators”. It is easy to mobilize people when they believe they are waging a holy war. Religion continues to be a defining characteristic of our species, robbing us of our autonomy and our capacity for self-determination.

Religion also appears to be making a resurgence in younger generations by exploiting the spiritual vacuum left by capitalism’s brutality and vacuous consumptive ideology What little capacity we had for critical thinking has been further stunted in the youth via insidious social media manipulation and the continued rise of crypto-fascism, deeply and explicitly intertwined with religious fanaticism as both are doctrines of hierarchy and unquestioning subservience.

We cannot move forward as a species– in any direction– until we eradicate organized religion. It is a powerful tool of manipulation that uses the threat of eternal consequences to indoctrinate our biologically-susceptible psyches and retard our ability for critical thinking. Hoping that it will slowly become irrelevant while we continue to feign polite deference to its adherents is a losing strategy. Although it may cede ground to the pessimistic, humanist ideology of liberalism when it is expedient to do so, the ruling class will always leverage religion when it is necessary to commit atrocities or divide a working class that is becoming a unified threat.

Before we delve into the main topic of this discourse, take a moment to reflect on the human brain. Our brains are capable of such incredible feats that they may ultimately craft their own evolutionary successor (see On Progress, Progress) and render itself extinct– actually, let us digress from this digression.

The very idea that humansWell, some humans. are knowingly and deliberately attempting to create their own evolutionary successor (via some form of artificial intelligence) is fascinating. It is a slap in Darwin’s face, in that it would not be an evolutionary progression brought about by natural forces, but rather it will be brought about by information itself, having become so advanced and organized that it no longer relies on external pressures to shape its evolutionary path arbitrarily; it now dictates its own path, to the detriment of its current apex vesselMeaning humans. Well, some humans.. It’s essentially reverse entropy.

But that’s all assuming our species won’t destroy itself before that transcendence occurs, which we most certainly will; and in that case, our self-destruction would be natural pressure terminating this strain of evolution because it became too unstable and unsustainable.

Anyway.

Our brains are incredible devices, capable of conceptualizing infinities in all directions and measuring tangible and intangible things on scales from trillions down to trillionths. Our scientists and mathematicians deal with these numbers every day.

The problem is, our brains are in no way designed to handle anything remotely close to these scales. Without mathematical training, primitive tribes exhibit some variation of the “one, two, many” model of quantification. And research suggests that even in modern societies with general mathematical knowledge, we do not naturally create a linear number line but rather a logarithmic one. In simple terms, we implicitly assume that 1000 is closer to 2000 than it is to 1.

We are, at best, able to grasp numbers on the scale that we deal with regularly. So if a worker makes fifty thousand dollars a year, their entire numerical framework is scaled according to that, and that is generally the biggest number they encounter in any meaningful way. A million and a billion both seem equally far off from their scale, even though they are one thousand times closer to a million than to a billion. Frankly, even the idea of being a thousand times closer or farther from something means very little without serious thought.

The point of all this is not to discuss how people are fundamentally ill-equipped to understand just how obscene the billionaire class’ greed truly isAlthough that discussion should never be far from anyone’s mind. The point is to discuss the scale of human population and how it affects (and generally impinges) social constructs.

The current global population is about 7.8 billion people. In 1972, it was 3.9 billion. We doubled the population by adding four billion people in just 50 years.

What do you do with eight billionThat’s 8,000,000,000 although, as we’ve been saying, that probably doesn’t help your sense of scale at all. people? How do you provide them with the patently-unsustainable standard of living that the Global North promises to billions that are sucking down coal fumes and pouring toxic sludge into rivers?

How do you acheive any sort of consensus across such a vast population, especially as you extol the virtue of liberal self-expression and nonconformity? How do you control the disinformation and weaponization of ignorance that seems to only be accelerating? How do you foster unity across vastly disparate religious and ideological views and mitigate the instinctual hatred of the “other”?

These questions require immediate answers even at a drastically smaller scale such as the United States, which has just 5% of the global population. Five percent! But that’s still 400 million people. 400 million people with varying beliefs and values and goals and morals and ethics, all stuck in a spiral of radicalization and tribalization, consuming as much as they possibly can because they have been indoctrinated into a consumer capitalist culture that discourages critical thinking or conscious living.

The Savior Self believes that we are at the scalar limit‘Scalar’ is defined as having magnitude but not direction, which seems the most accurate way to descibe population growth. of a civilization or, in fact, we are actually far past that limit but it has happened so quickly that we are now seeing the cascading consequences.

This is not specifically an issue of population, although the exponential growth we have seen since the Industrial Revolution is very definitely not sustainable for much longer no matter how society is structured, unless we somehow manage to become an interplanetary species, which is highly unlikely no matter what the sad little billionaires tell you.

This is an issue of globalization, liberalism, and information superhighways, all acting upon a massive population of people that are fundamentally dumbNot necessarily dumb in a pejorative sense… just dumb as in preoccupied with the struggles of their own lives, evolutionarily programmed to be as lazy as possible, systemically weakened and oppressed since the dawn of time, and disenfranchised to the point of apathy and complacency..

We have been biologically frozen in time for 100,00 years; the fundamental machinery of Homo sapiens sapiens still operates on neural hardware adapted to hunter-gatherer tribes of a couple dozen at most. The rules were few, might made right, and if you didn’t agree with the prevailing mythological fairytale you were left outside for the wolves.

Everything that has come after that point is… fragile, to say the least. Throughout most of history, civilization has largely stuck to that same playbook, even as tribes expanded into empires. Only in the past century has the concept of cosmopolitanism gained traction (see On Tolerance); different peoples living in cities of millions and entertaining concern for the tragedies of billions of strangers across the globe are manageable when we have the luxury of stability.

But in times of pressure, we all find ourselves instinctively reverting back to our primitive firmware, the one that rabidly clings to mystical fairy tales, assembles in small tribes to fend off invading “others”, and goes into survival mode.

And now, in a state of constant pressure from the demands of modern society, political instability, and impending ecological collapse, we seek safety in the charlatans and the strongmen, who exploit our fears and our dumbness for their own gain with no regard for the consequences. Of course, this has always been the case, but the impact is now global and cascading, where previously it was confined to a single region or nation-state at most.

Eight billion people is a lot, but it’s a fraction of a percent of the biomass of this planet. Even with our calorie-hungry brains and our idea-hungry minds, we could readily support ten or twenty billion people on this planet (or more!), were we to organize society with more manageable structures and curb our insatiable appetites for novelties and so-called progress. We could use our intellectual evolution to foster peace and prosperity, to ensure that all people live comfortable, fulfilling lives free of tyranny, and to protect what remains of the planet and reduce our further harm.

But the Savior Self maintains that this is no longer a realistic goal, given the very issues of scale that we are discussing. Many great thinkers and dreamers have presented visions of such futures, but no one has ever devised a realistic path to those visions that did not necessitate large-scale death and suffering. Because there is no conceivable way to calmly convince a critical mass of people (or their corrupt leaders) to abandon the flawed belief systems that provide them relative stabilityEven though the systems subjugate them and inflict ongoing, low-level suffering and attempt to build a utopia that defies every indoctrinated notion they have about the world.

Although the Church rejects accelerationism, the Savior Self concedes that the only possible path forward requires traversing the incipient collapse, because the overwhelming majority of people will tolerate misery as long as it provides stability. Our only hope is that we may forge something better out of the ashes once that final stability is gone.