Author: Ace Fury

What beliefs do you have that you would die for? Would kill for? Not that you say you would, but that you actually would?

For most of us, the honest answer is probably “nothing.” This is our fundamental belief in tolerance.

At its core, liberal democracy is an ideology of tolerance. The fundamental concept is that diverse populations of people can democratically establish a “baseline” set of universal rules by which they can all abide, regardless of their specific personal beliefs.

Regardless of its many, many, many historical and contemporary shortcomings in practice, the theory of liberal democracy seems superficially sound. Assuming a true democracy and a respect for matters of subjectivity– namely, religion– liberal democracy entitles a society to self-determine the rules by which they live, as well as the right to practice their own beliefs as long as they are not affecting others.

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari presents a compelling narrative of how commerce served as the great uniter across cultural boundaries. Once an empire established a standard currency, it allowed reliable trade between groups with disparate beliefs; suspicions of “the other” were allayed by the threat of imperial force, and differences in cultural beliefs were tolerated to promote commerce. This commerce, in turn, fueled the dissemination of ideas and knowledge, and soon the great global collective was advancing human civilization at breakneck speed.

Well, except for during the Dark Ages. And except for parts of the planet where enslavement and genocide were more lucrative than commerce. But that’s not the point right now.

Traditional imperialism– invading armies and whatnot– demanded assimilation of the indigenous population into the conquering culture and religion. The native culture was plundered and then destroyed, and those who refused to abandon their beliefs were slaughtered. Where this was not the case, the conquerors’ reign did not last very long, because an oppressed culture will eventually reach a boiling point and coalesce into rebellion.

But the rise of commerce also saw the rise of modern imperialism– economic exploitation and cultural aspiration. This model did not demand explicit fealty to a faraway ruler or a new god; subjects could continue to worship and practice as they pleased, as their “benevolent” new rulers simply wanted to exchange goods and resources in a “mutually-beneficial” system with these “developing” nations. The subjects could either continue their traditional way of life or, preferably, be enticed into voluntary assimilation through the allure of consumerism and liberal ideals. Either way, the imperialist extracts their desired resources and retains superiority through systematic imposition of economic imbalance. But that’s not the point, either.

The point is that ethnicities and cultures have remained geographically segregated for most of history. Even in the largest metropolitan hubs and with very rare exceptionnotably Sarajevo and pre-Israel Jerusalem, ethnic groups typically remained homogenous in their own neighborhoods and interacted mostly for commerce, if at all.

Historically, multiculturalism has been a product of tolerance rather than of celebration. Cosmopolitanism is a recent enlightenment, driven by liberal beliefs in the validity of diverse cultures and universal human equality. And for the record, the Savior Self maintains that these are good things.

But of course, it is not without problems. Multicultural unity demands several things:

1. That all participants subscribe to a consistent standard of tolerance, i.e. a complete embrace of liberalism
2. That all participants accept a certain “dilution” of their personal culture and beliefs as it absorbs (and is absorbed by) other cultures
3. That all participants concede that their specific faith is not the absolute truth

All three of these criteria present challenges, but it is the third one that may be insurmountable. Every major religion asserts that it is the single truth and the only path to eternal salvation; it is literally impossible to reconcile this assertion with a tolerance for other religions, particularly when your religion demands the slaughter of infidels or a literal interpretation of a fairytale book.

Thus, the two options for religious belief are fundamentalism and moderation. Fundamental religious belief will prohibit coexistence with other religions because even if the religion does not preach violence against non-believers, it does, by definition, create inequality between the saved and the heathens; such inequality will inevitably lead to conflict.

Conversely, moderate religious beliefs selectively choose which aspects of a religion are “true” and therefore do not really constiture religious belief so much as they are simply cultural norms… In other words, if your holy book as written by the one true lord God demands that you do not wear mixed fabrics and you decide that, “meh, blended cotton is really comfortable though”, you are not very invested in the divinity of that book, and your faith is either in yourself or in whatever human cherry-picked the beliefs of your particular church.

We moderates see the power of true belief when it inspires inconceivable acts, whether acts of religious terrorism. of patriotic torture, or of righteous self-immolation. Those who claim belief but lack the conviction to defend it or are unwilling to adhere to its demands are empty… or, as a more generous interpretration, have been taught a fundamentally incomplete definition of what belief really is.

The truth is that the vast majority of the population lacks any such true belief, and it is a consequence of liberalism. Even in most nations that ostensibly reject western liberalism– such as traditionally “moderate Muslim” countries in Central and Southeast Asia– we can observe a tolerance that is clearly a product of liberal ideology, in that tolerance will be tolerated in quantites that are too small to threaten the status quo.

We are conditioned to be docile and tolerant and centrist even in our most extreme positions, to regard “radicals” with disdain or reverence (depending on the threat of their ideology to the ruling class) but never to think that we should follow their lead. Liberal democracy and consumer capitalism bestow upon us a great many comforts, and all they ask in return is adherence to an ideology that robs any meaning from whatever beliefs we claim to have.

Previous ruling empires knew that heterogeneity is unstable, but they did not yet grasp the concept of illusory freedom and so they attained it through force. The triumph of liberalism is that homogeneity is achieved not by forcing everyone to hold a particular belief, but rather by eroding the very concept of beliefs until we feel like we’re free to believe what we want when, in fact, we don’t meaningfully believe in anything. The price of the belief in tolerance is that all other beliefs become superficial.

Capitalism complements this framework by fostering our sense of “culture”whether it’s nerd culture, black culture, or even anti-capitalist culture by selling us distinct identities so that we can drape ourselves in the dressings of our “beliefs”, because capitalism doesn’t care what you consume as long as you are consuming.

This homogeneity is, of course, beneficial to the continued technological advancement of our species… if heterogeneity is instability, then the inverse is also true. A population with no deep-seated ideology has less reason for conflict and is less willing to fight injustice, or at least less willing to sacrifice anything in the pursuit of justice.

And so the ideology of liberal democracy spread far and wide for several centuries, failing to penetrate only a handful of countries that it conveniently labels an “axis of evil”to be fair, those countries DO suck in terms of human rights. But so do a fair number of countries that are decidedly anti-liberal and anti-democratic but are nonetheless willing to cooperate in capitalism.. Society became globalized, tolerance became standardized, and the world’s cultures were largely homogenized thanks to consumer capitalism and the false portrait of happiness-cum-liberalism presented by pervasive pop culture entertainment.

So sure, the commodification of multiculturalism means a Muslim and a Jew can share a bowl of soba noodles anywhere in the Western world, but it also means the Buddha’s wearing blue jeans.

This erosion of belief has left us spiritually empty, alienated and dehumanized; Marx blamed this explicitly on capitalism, but the Savior Self contends that it is more directly a product of liberalism, with modern consumer capitalism attempting to mend the spiritual void with material salve.

However, the global population appears to be reaching its boiling point. Right-wing ideologies are increasingly taking hold across the world, fueled by ethno-nationalism and a pseudo-nostalgia for traditional values. Immigration, tolerance, and liberalism are blamed for the ills of the world, for crime and economic despair. This is largely opportunistic scapegoating by the ruling class, to keep the masses fighting amongst themselves rather than turning their gazes upward at the rich and powerful that are actually to blame.

But maybe there is something more behind it, something within the long-tempered human spirit that demands something to believe in– truly believe in— that has remained unsatisfied by the comforts of capitalism and the compromise of tolerance. Perhaps there remains a savage soul that rages against the dying of the light, a light that is primal and violent and willing to lay down its life in the defense of its illogical beliefs.

Civilization is effectively synonymous with humanity. Beyond our physiological traits, it is our defining feature: the ability to organize, cooperate, and adhere to rules and norms and behave in a (mostly) predictable manner. It is this cooperation that enables our technological progress and continues to make our lives safer and more stable. The more predictable and uniform we are, the smoother this cooperation will be, and therefore the faster our progress.

Civilization (or society, if you prefer; we will use them interchangeably for our purposes here) prefers this predictable homogeneity. As a super-organism consisting of individual human beings, the system certainly benefits from this, just as we benefit from cells and organs that behave as they should, or as a machine benefits from equally-spaced cogs that allow uniform motion to maximize efficiency.

Unlike a cell or a cog, however, we humans have developed consciousness and self-awareness. Regardless of any greater meaning or purposeWhich, our Church maintains, there is none, humans have the unique (as far as we know) ability to identify ourselves as individuals, and all of our structures of value and purpose demand that there be a reason for this. We have free will and personalities, desires and ambitions, legacies and eternal souls that must answer for our brief time in existence.

This places humans in a precarious position: we are fundamentally reluctant to sacrifice our individuality for the benefit of society, because to do so usurps our position at the top of the existential pyramid. If humans must interact with one another for the benefit of society, then society is the ultimate power and our free will must be compromised in its service.

This is the core philosophical divide between conservatism and progressivism, and it defines every other conflict that arises between them. Conservatism values religion because religion supports the divinity of individual man (we are made in God’s image, each of us is an individual with free will and is judged accordingly, etc.). Progressivism values the notion of the greater good (at least in theory), that individuals must sacrifice for the advancement of our society or species as a whole.

Conservatism maintains that participation in society should be voluntary and, essentially, minimal (small government, libertarianism, etc.). Progressivism promotes unity and inclusion, regulation, and homogenization (via political correctness or so-called “wokeness”).

Conservatism upholds the mythos of the “rugged individual”, the self-sufficient pioneer whose bootstraps defy physics and who survives the brutality of existence only by sheer strength of will. Progressivism believes that humans are inherently flawed and weak and can (or should) survive only by caring for everyone.

This duality is not a new paradigm. Although one could argue that it has been taken to its most radical conclusions in modern America, the contrasting value structures of Dionysus and Apollo have been used as a framework to describe man’s conflicted nature for centuries.

So as we continue this march of civilization, of technological advancement, of what we ultimately call progress, we must inevitably sand down the gnarls and the splinters of the crude human spirit to achieve uniformity. We must overcome the primitive human instincts that compel us to demand recognition as individuals, to disregard the feelings and well-being of others in our own selfish quests for survival and fulfillment. We must succumb to the singularity, whether the hive-mind is technological or merely a social construct; we must learn to put its needs above our own.

The question then becomes: should we? Once we strip away the artificial values prescribed to society by the social constructs themselves (kings and popes and the ruling classes throughout history), we are left naked of our indoctrinated morality to decide for ourselves what it means to be human… what it means to be free. Is freedom the elimination (or ultimate reduction) of suffering and conflict, by pledging loyalty to the blind whims of the Hobbesian Leviathan and transcending our messy, primitive ancestry through this inexorable march of progress? Or is freedom the ability to do as one wills, to selectively choose loyalty, to determine for oneself what is right and wrong, with all the conflict and suffering that such choices may bring?

Now that we have established that existence is objectively meaningless, we must determine whether life must be so as well. To clarify this distinction, let us consider existence as the experiential condition of all other living organisms, and life as our own, subjective condition… in solipsistic terms, existence is what happens to everyone and life is what happens to me.

How, then, can we ascribe any meaning to life when it is built upon the foundation of a meaningless existenceTo recap: all living organisms exist to propagate genetic code (a la Richard Dawkins), and human consciousness and self-consciousness are accidental byproducts of other evolutionary traits. Therefore, life has no greater purpose than simple procreation.?

We cling to life because we are afraid of death. It is our inherent survival instinct amplified by our intellectual knowledge of mortality and fear of the unknown. Despite the ever-rising numbers of secularists and non-theists, the vast majority of our species remains indoctrinated by religion to shroud this innate fear with the belief that life is sacred, procreation is godly, and suicide is punishable by eternal damnationAll major religions teach this. Despite what you may have heard, suicide is forbidden (haram) in Islam. It’s only modern extremist sects that have claimed it is an acceptable martyrdom.; they have reason enough to live, even if some may suffer the occasional crisis of faith. For many others, procreation itself is purpose enough and fulfills the higher stages of Mazlow’s hierarchy.

For the rest of us, we must ultimately find something to give us purpose before or else we succumb to despair and end our lives. Without this purpose, the value proposition of life– particularly life in any post-agrarian society– is quite unappealing; we toil in endless labor, expereince varying degrees of physical and emotional stress and trauma, and inevitably perish no matter what we do… why, then, should we not decrease our suffering by decreasing our lifespan? We must find a reason.

The human condition is conflict. Without conflict, we are unfulfilled. This is not some profound philosophy of spiritual purpose, it is a statement of physiological truth. Our developed– or over-developed, one might argue– brains simply require frequent stimulation, stimulation that was once provided by evading predators, finding food and shelter, and shepherding our comically-fragile children through a cruel and merciless existence.

However, once we achieved mastery over nature and secured a stable food supply, we were left with brains that had evolved to function under a much higher level of stress and challenges than we encountered on a day-to-day basis. So we turned inward for this stimulation and developed arts and lore and culture and tradition and a myriad other leisurely pursuits.

But as life grew increasingly comfortable and our population grew, we developed increasingly complex and ultimately mundane constructs to introduce conflict and struggle: religion and its strict dogmatism, tribalism and its flimsy premises for violent conflict, romantic love and the sorrows and ecstasy associated therewith, fanatical sports rivalries, Twitter feuds, homeowners’ associations… capitalism and its endless supply of misery in a million different forms. Stitch by stitch we’ve woven the tapestry of society out of artificial constructs that create discomfort, suffering, and intra- and interpersonal struggle, but which also imbue our lives with some sense of meaning. This culminates in what we call white people problems; even though our fortunate first-world lives are capable of being free of almost any struggle, we seek sources of stress and conflict.

Fundamentally, that meaning is inextricable from the struggle. This is near-universal across cultures; we condemn the lazy and the faithless, those who reject the trappingstrappings in both the literal and figurative sense… the mechanisms that trap us as well as their so-called rewards that we are conditioned to desire. of modern society out of either enlightenment or defect and seek out simple lives with as little drama as possible.

It is particularly true in America, where our puritanical inception and our “rugged cowboy” mythos continue to indoctrinate us to celebrate the savagery of capitalism and of a culture where death by random mass shooting is a daily possibility (and seemingly more possible every week). These struggles are inescapable, we think; there is no other way. Moreover, they are noble struggles, because cooperation and happiness are weakness. It is a cynical nihilism that overshadows any other belief that we proclaim to hold.

But as a response to this constant stress, we must find ways to release the pressure: we indulge in unhealthy foods that short-circuit our physiological stress markers; we binge streams of mindless content to turn off our higher brains as much as possible; we celebrate hedonism and promiscuity as bastions of liberation, when really they are often coping mechanisms for our subjugation. Or, some of us lean into the stress and fuel it with hate and fear until we become a vile husk around a blackened heart which, of course, only leads to greater stress.

And so these are our lives. Grinding away our weeks and years and decades in meaningless labor, unhappy and struggling from unnecessary conflict and hardship, unfulfilled with our ever-increasing consumption, but still desperate to maximize our lifespans (or somehow achieve immortality) because we are afraid of death or because we believe that the rare moments of happiness somehow outweigh the endless misery. The details may differ but the truth is the same for almost all of us.

What reason is there to continue this way? For all the widespread discontent, we all feel powerless to affect meaningful change within our own lives. We either follow power-hungry charlatans that extol some form of fascism as the solution to our ills (conservatism) or we resign ourselves to the struggle and hope that the gradual, historic “improvement” of the current system will somehow yield better results for our future generations (progressive liberalism).

The Savior Self rejects both fascism and liberalism. The Church believes that modern life is simply not worth living in its current form, and institutional changes are impossible or insufficient. We do not support revolution; we encourage abandonment. We hope to liberate all people, but we do not intend to directly affect the lives of millions (or billions); rather, we wish to develop a framework that provides evidence that a better way of living is possible. We will explore these ideas in great detail in the coming months… and years.

Life is meaningless and death is terrifying.

These are the simple truths that we humans have spent all of recorded history trying to come to terms with. On a purely experiential level, it is not difficult to connect the dots between biological death, the fundamental absence of the deceased from our realm of experience, and the idea that once a person dies they no longer are. When this idea is coupled with the empathic notion that we are the same as other people, the conclusion is that one day we, too, will die and therefore not be.

Being refers to the seemingly-unbrokenReally, it just feels unbroken. We all have “gaps” in our real-time experience (sleeping, blackouts and loss of consciousness, comas) and also our brains typically only store a very tiny fraction of that experience as “episodic” memories, or memories about specific events. stream of consciousness that we maintain throughout our lives across our long-term memories, our ephemeral short-term memory, our moment-to-moment subjective experience, and our plans and fantasies about our own future-state experiences.

Trying to understand what not being actually means is impossible. Our entire frame of reference— every single thing that every single person knows and has experienced— is all built on the foundation of the sensory input and the brain computations that we call being. People tend to imagine ”non-existence” or ”nothingness” as something like a still, black, empty void… which sounds like something being experienced by a subject that has concepts of stillness, blackness, and emptiness. Nothingness means there are no concepts, and there is no observer. We have no way to imagine experiencing nothingness, because it is itself just a concept that by definition cannot be experienced.

The contemporary scientific consensus is that the qualia (or personal, subjective experience) of self-existence— what we refer to as consciousness— is an emergent phenomena that “spontaneously” formed as various functions of the brain became more complex and interconnected. An emergent phenomena or system is really just our symbol-driven brains connecting dots and defining a pattern; like infinity (or mathematics in general), it doesn’t meaningfully exist outside of the context of human consciousness.

So basically, the sensation of consciousness is an evolutionary byproduct of all the other things the brain does to keep us alive to allow us to replicate our genes, and our concept of consciousness is a self-referential loopFor more on these ideas, read Douglas Hofstadter and Danial Dennett..

This is, of course, just a theory. No one knows what consciousness is, which is why we have spent millenia creating religions and philosophies to try to explain it. But from a purely observational, scientific standpoint, it’s a pretty good theory and it has the most supporting evidence thus far.

One can argue that even if this is the case, this mechanism could have been ”intelligently designed” and human consciousness has some greater meaning or purpose in the universe. However, one cannot deny that, if this is the case, it means that once our biological brains stop functioning, our consciousness— our being, our self— ceases to exist, at least upon the plane of reality that living humans exist. Regardless of whether we ascend to heaven, achieve oneness with the universe, get uploaded into the singularity, or very literally become nothing, we can no longer experience that existence the way we did with our human bodies and brains.

As we developed self-awareness and came to understand the impermanence of our existence, we crafted intricate belief systems to explain how we actually survive death and continue to exist in some form, usually in a form that somehow retains our sense of self, our memories and personalities and emotional connections and all the other things that are very clearly dependent on our physical brains… Even though we die, we somehow continue being.

If we don’t retain these things, what’s the point in our beliefes in the afterlife, or reincarnation, or any other coping mechanism for our mortality? No explanation allows our self to persist, nor does any explanation reconcile the inevitable end of our current consciousness, the moment when we stop being. Nor do they answer the question of what or where we were before we started being.

If one were really desperate to reconcile this contradiction, perhaps they could argue that our “immortal soul” imbues us with our innate sense of self, and all our memories are “transferred” to it as we live or when we die… but at that point one could argue that we’re unicorns before we’re born and platypuses when we die and support it using the same amount of mental gymnastics. The simple fact is that our conscious time on this plane of existence– from the moment our brains look inward to the moment they cease to be able to– is isolated from any other plane, if any other plane even exists.

This is the ultimate threshold, a pale past which we cannot see, and once we cross we can never return. Evolution has molded us to be fearful of the unknown, and non-existence represents the most fundamentally unknowable of things. Of course we fear death, and of course we are terrified of the idea that there is nothing afterwards.

Most living creatures exhibit a “survival instinct,” reflecting at least an implicit, biological aversion to death, though that behavior is almost certainly an evolutionary hardwiring for the purpose of genetic propagation and devoid of any complex concepts about nonexistence. There is evidence that other animals understand mortality to some degree; our higher ape siblings, elephants, and even crows have all been observed holding mourning rituals, which implies some distinction between life and death. But thus far, humans stand alone in exhibiting self-consciousness and awareness of our own personal death, not just death in general.

Perhaps our impending self-destruction is simply an inevitable part of evolution. Whether it’s nuclear war or ecological destruction, maybe we will only serve proof that this meaningless universe could not sustain a species with brains so advanced that they grasp the meaningless, because they will inevitably try to create meaning through nation-states and capitalism and all the other tools of their own demise.

Our species is nothing without technology. From the first pointed sticks to Voyager I now transmitting from interstellar space, humans stand (mostly) alone in using abstract ideas to overcome our biological limitations and to craft the world around us to satisfy our needs and desires.

We have come to regard future technological advancement as an inevitability, some inherent chronological fate for which we must wait impatiently, tapping our toes and sighing heavily as we fumble through this uncomfortable adolescence, narrowly avoiding self-extinction and holding on juuust long enough to sort it all out. Surely the next technological advancement will save the planet, and the next one will eradicate hunger, and the next one will usher in our well-deserved Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

There is no question that “technology”, in the broadest use of the word, is beneficial. Fire, clay, medicine, electricity, quantum computing… every rung on the ladder of human history has propelled us skyward from the animal plane ever-further into the realm of gods… the very gods we invented in order to ascribe our brief existences with purpose and meaning beyond the simple role of genetic replicators.

And so with every rung that we ascend, every limit we erase, we redefine what it is to be human. Already from these great heights, we have long lost sign of and can hardly remember our original forms, so far below.

Is this inherently bad? Are we not overthrowing the tyrannical fascism of nature? Whatever setbacks we may endure on this uncharted path, are we not inching towards an egalitarian democracy? Although our biological evolution may have stalled long ago, we have continued evolving as a super-organism and transcending to a higher plane of existence, gaining ever deeper knowledge of the universe and perhaps creating entirely new forms of consciousness, as we are slowly subsumed by an omnipotent, omniscient singularity that ultimately promises us immortality.

Certainly, we are aiming for the throne of those gods we invented.

But there is a cost to this progress, a cost accumulated so gradually that it escapes recognition… to borrow a useful (but ultimately untrue) apalogue, we are the frogs to civilization’s slowly boiling water. The Agricultural Revolution gave us a relatively stable food supply, but rendered us stationary and dulled our senses. The Industrial Revolution unleashed unthinkable productivity and churned out superficial quality-of-life improvements for the masses, but it stripped us of individuality, community, and artisanry, to say nothing of the incalculable damage and destruction done to our planet.

Now, in the span of just sixty-odd years, the Digital Revolution has rendered the world unrecognizable and incomprehensible to our ancestors from just a mere century before. We have enthusiastically embraced its conveniences, even as it has reshaped our cognition and mental wiring. We have unquestioningly believed that it is a tool for connectivity, though it continually diminishes human interaction and replaces it with a problematic facsimile that leaves us all more isolated and alienated.

Is this progress inevitable? Was our species ontologically ordained to create infinity and to postulate the very birth of the universe on our journey of transcendence to a singularity? Is all organic biology merely a pupal form of existence until we reach our intended maturity as beings of pure energy? Or is all life a cosmic fluke and our particular evolutionary path gave us hyper-developed brains as a survival mechanism, the byproducts of which were self-awareness and a fear of mortality, which in turn produced science and religion and everything in between as a way of “defeating” mortality?

Given these brains that were forged in the evolutionary furnace over countless millennia, would it be possible as humans to be satisfied with the unknown? To rely on lore and mythos to explain the world’s mysteries, to accept our limitations and reflect soberly on the propositions of technological progress and reject them? The small, traditional communities that continue to exist around the world suggest that perhaps we can, although their dwindling numbers suggest not. And while a small group can choose to do so, the super-organism of the larger population becomes its own emergent system, unable to consider the branching consequences of each small step it takes.

The more relevant question is: Does any of it matter materially? We have created countless tools to alleviate our suffering and even mostly our mere discomfort (at least for some percentage of our global population), but in spite of everything we have builtOr, arguably, because of it, we continue to find new ways to suffer, to inflict harm, wasting away most of our waking hours fulfilling obligations that bring us no fulfillment until we expire. Surely our trials and hardships are different now than they were a thousand years ago, but are they really any fewer?

This is a neo-Luddism argument, clearly. The romanticizing of some noble essence de l’humanité that has gradually eroded as we clothed ourselves, mastered nature, and eventually became sanitized, hermetically-sealed, gadget-obsessed, anxiety-ridden, nihilisticin the worst sense of the word shells, regurgitating pop-culture references and manufacturing conflict in a desperate attempt to feel some semblance of connection to our lost selves and the communities of our ancestral ghosts.

Perhaps the exaggerated caricature described above is simply a “growing pain” as we build towards the next definition of humanity, one that is finally liberated from the messiness of our obsolete biological forms and all their shortcomings.

On a more existential level, is the end goal to escape biology completely and achieve immortality in a digital singularity? Will that be our ultimate rejection of memetic replication, or our ultimate embrace of it? For a self-actualized creature, death is a threshold to an infinite unknown which cannot be meaningfully comprehended, and is therefore understandably terror-inducing. But, is the concept of “infinite” existence– whether in a traditional religious afterlife or a modern virtual metaverse– any less terrifying?

Buddhist teaching is built on the concept of samsara, the perpetual cycle of birth, suffering, and death that we must struggle to overcome by attaining nirvana, or freedom from desire and ignorance.

Buddhist or not, we all are trapped in samsara. Our lives are a figurative cycle of death and rebirth, with endless suffering in between. We suffer and inflict suffering on others, though society has found ways to obscure both of these. We are blinded by veils of ignorance and desire, obscuring our only path to freedom.

We who partake in modern society– whether enthusiastically or reluctantly– have resigned to this cycle; we masses toil away our entire lives in various forms of soulless labor, to produce an ever-increasing array of worthless consumables, which are then sold back to us through manufactured desires, while the damage to our planet increases exponentially and guarantees increased future suffering.

Reflect for a moment on all the “creature comforts” that we aspire to attain, and whether any of them truly enriches our lives, and whether they are worth the countless hours of freedom that we trade for them, the lifetimes of stress that we endure attempting to remain financially secure.

Think about the luxuries that we vow we cannot live without, the standards of living that were unimaginable just a few generations ago, and how resistant we are to the very notion of changing our habits for the betterment of our own lives and our communities, to say nothing of the hope of saving our very planet.

Drive down a street in any population center– be it a metropolitan downtown or a suburban strip-mall hellscape– and evaluate what you see around you. Hundreds of restaurants to satisfy each of our novel cravings, thousands of stores selling every variation of clothing or home furnishing or other inherently-worthless trinket.

Consider how many advertisements you encounter every day, in some form or another. Each one reinforcing a lifetime of indoctrination that consumption and material possessions are meaningful goals. Each thing promising you some fleeting glimmer of happiness or fulfillment, or asserting that the consumption of this particular thing is sustainable and good for the planet, or commiserating with your dissatisfaction as some form of subversive, “woke” marketing. Whether it’s a commercial or a billboard or even just some hip logo and brand marketing, our senses are bombarded every minute with things begging for our consumption.

Walk through a mall and marvel at the opulence on display… marble walls, granite columns, ornate fountains. What was once reserved for temples of spiritual worship or communal spaces is now a grotesque facade to obscure the ugliness of consumption, sweatshops, and planetary destruction.

How many libraries do you see amongst the commerce? Or museums? Community centers, open spaces, or even religious temples? One for every thousand bastions of consumerism? How can we pretend that our lives are built on anything other than consumption?

The ruthlessness of modern society lies not only in the grinding of the bones of the poor, those that must struggle simply to survive; neoliberalism’s more insidious evil is its broader dehumanization of us all. We have rejected the old gods and their silly myths and replaced them instead with lazy nihilism and hedonism, an absence of belief in anything that leaves us alienated and desperate for anything to give us meaning. Our civilization is built on the exploitation of our vanity and myopia, our timeless, universal psychological weaknesses.

Liberalism masquerades this as individualism. Conspicuous consumption is our reward– our counterweight– for the empty, unfulfilling hours of servitude that we sacrifice every day. We are compelled to purchase things that express our unique style and sensibilities, or to or enrich ourselves with leisure travelWhich is always carbon-heavy and exploitative of the underclass, but let’s put a pin in that. or, occasionally, donate to a worthy cause that is nevertheless fundamentally incapable of solving any systemic issue.

This is the Eden of neoliberal capitalism. An interdependent populace whose shared belief in money and things far outweigh their differences, resulting in a stable and docile society that wants everything and values nothing. Endless delights for insatiable appetites.

Perhaps, at best, we could justify that that consumptive capitalism also serves as the foundation for all the complexities that are necessary for advancements in medicine or science. This is a common argument by people that have been indoctrinated their whole lives to believe that such advancements are impossible under any other system (“look at all the failed communist states!”). But why? Why do we presuppose that these things cannot be decoupled? Why are we so willing to believe that greed and selfishness are the only motivating factors for our species?

How can we be satisfied with this life? Whether you believe that humans are endowed with some transcendental spirit that makes us unique and special or you believe that we, like every other living organism, exist solely to replicate our genetic data and then die… how can you find any meaning or purpose in the world we live in?

What, then, is our nirvana? How can we break this cycle and escape the suffering? That, brothers and sisters, is what the Church of the Savior Self intends to discover.

It is easy– almost obvious– to dismiss far-left ideology as unrealistic and unattainable. Whether you have only a perfunctory understanding of the modern world or you’re a serious historical scholar, you are likely to reach the same honest conclusions about human nature and social constructs: humans are selfish, submissive, hierarchical, and generally stupid, and society is most successfulfor whichever of a thousand definitions of ‘success’ that you may choose when structured accordingly.

Certainly, there is an element of “confirmation bias” to this assertion: the predominant society that has thus far prevailed through most of civilizedfor whichever of a thousand definitions of ‘civilized’ that you may choose history is built on these suppositions, and so of course it indoctrinates us from birth to perceive the world through this lens and propagate the same beliefs and values. As with any concept that challenges our accepted worldviews, we will instinctively reject the concept because it violates so many foundational aspects of our psyche.

Of course there’s a God and an eternal soul, how preposterous to think that everything is random and we become dust when we die.

Of course there’s no God or eternal soul, how infantile to think there is some figure judging our every action to reward or punish us for infinite time.

Of course collectivist anarchism will fail, people are greedy and selfish and require motivation and coercion to contribute to society.

Our brains are evolutionarily sculpted upon a foundation of pattern recognition and deductive reasoning; the many subsequent layers of self-identity and high-level reasoning demand a certain permanence from these patterns. If the sun didn’t rise tomorrow, most of us would lose our psychological shit as our fundamental understanding of existence would be disrupted.

So then, it is fair to say that our indoctrinated belief system is presented with observation of the modern world and historical evidence and concludes that selfishness and laziness are human nature, unfortunate problems built right into our firmware due to evolutionary pressure, original sin, a careless creator, or the devil or something. Any attempt to restructure society to be more egalitarian, cooperative, or self-determinant is doomed to fail because it goes against human nature.

The most common socioeconomic counter-argument is the age-old “nature vs. nurture” debate, suggesting that what we define as human nature is really just social conditioning, brought about by the same cycle of indoctrination and confirmation described above. There is, however, a different approach: human nature is selfish and lazy, but we should aspire to overcome it.

This is not a novel thesis; in fact, it’s pretty much the summary of every religion, like, ever. Whether it’s Dharmic transcendence or eternal salvation, this premise is at the root of religious teachings concerning individual behavior. Even atheistic morality is built upon the same concept of suppressing our instinctual urges to harm others. Why, then, are we so averse to the idea in the context of societal behavior?

To put it more plainly, of course modern society could not immediately transition to an anarchist utopia, free of police and hierarchy and debt and coercion. And in fact, we will probably never be able to do so, particularly if we wish to retain individuality and cultural heterogeneity; we may find that there are limits to how much we can “reform human nature.” Interpersonal conflict will still arise, power imbalances will occur, tribalism and moral righteousness will stifle progress, and almost certainly a host of other challenges that we can’t even foresee.

But why wouldn’t we try?

When most of us are struggling to achieve a spiritual or personal transcendence of our human shortcomings, why are we so afraid to strive for social transcendence? Why do we feel beholden to the current structure? We are the structure. The structure weakens with every person that refuses to participate, and once a critical mass of non-participants is achieved, it ceases to exist altogether.

It’s not a fantasy. It’s more real than most of us imagine.

We just have to try.

We see it every day. More and more reports of climate catastrophes and broken records, political unrest and riots, random acts of violence as people become more unhinged. We see these things politicized to promote agendas, or dismissed as noise in an increasingly-connected world. The world has always been burning. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

The simple truth is that human beings, like all animals, are not designed to think on the scale of decades or centuries. Our myopia is by design. The disciplined few among us may have long-term career aspirations or life goalsAlthough that seems increasingly rare as the nebulous sense of impending dread permeates the zeitgeist, but we remain fundamentally incapable of assessing the harm of a cigarette or a calving glacier. Our risk/reward neurons simply don’t function on that kind of timeline.

My educated, liberal friends will readily concede that climate change is real, but virtually all of them think that the worst effects won’t happen in our lifetime. Even those that may not explicitly say this certainly behave like that is the case. They continue their mindless consumption, because the earth they are scorching is someone else’s problem and, anyway, humans are smart and resilient and science will fix it before it’s too late.

Even among the more socially-aware leftists circles, I constantly hear repeated the trope that individual actions don’t make a difference and only five corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions and blah blah blah. Any excuse not to be accountable. Any excuse not to sacrifice the slightest convenience in the face of certain doom.

We expect that our elected stewards will take action when necessary… if they’re not panicking, things must be fine and it must all be sensationalism and hype. The media reports juuust enough to keep the masses in fear, but not enough to convey the truth of the dire situation we face. Everything is fine, go about your lives.

Beyond the realm of climate and ecology, the amount of worker exploitation that is required to satisfy ever-increasing consumption is reaching a breaking point. As I write this in the midst of the so-called “Great Resignation,” we still see the effects of lifelong capitalist indoctrination in the lack of empathy, the crossing of picket lines, the regurgitation of the lie that a Big Mac will cost $20 because workers have the audacity to demand a living wage.

Wealth is created and immediately consolidated through artificial scarcity and propaganda. Cryptocurrency was proselytized as the slayer of giants, the great equalizer; we are only now beginning to see that it was a long con, another commodity to be manipulated to pluck the ducats from the plebes.

Mass shootings, interpersonal violence, suicide, chronic depression and anxiety… all of these are trending up, even before they were all exacerbated by an ongoing global pandemic. The modern world is increasingly incompatible with mental health. From macro causes (like the aforementioned incipient collapse of the planetary ecosystem) to the micro scale of TikTok-induced brain-death, our global population is rapidly coming undone at the seams.

Eight billion people on this planet are either struggling to survive or are so enslaved by the comforts of capitalism that no one is compelled to make the necessary changes. Like boiling frogsA disproven myth, I know., we have proven that we won’t act before it’s too late; actually, we simply won’t act at all. Although there’s plenty of profit in fear, there’s no real profit in panic. The most cynicalread: realistic interpretation of this is that the ruling class knows exactly what is coming, but they’re simply content to let it play out. Because, really, what is the solution?

Do we immediately grind to a halt the wheels of global consumerism? Stop the manufacture of all the unnecessary, disposable garbage that immediately finds its ways into landfills and the ocean, while simultaneously reinventing the global economy such that it won’t be affected by millions of newly-idle hands? Convince or coerce the world to stop eating meat? Guillotine Elon Musk?

Okay okay, that last suggestion would have a limited scope of benefit.

But I vote we do it anyway.

Do we start with the most entitled swaths of the global north, the ones who took up arms at the suggestion of wearing a piece of cloth on their face to stop millions of needless deaths? Those guys? Or do we further degrade the quality of life for those in the global south, who lack the luxury of eco-consciousness but whose sheer numbers and lack of infrastructure amplify their harmful impact?

Or do we quietly concede that it’s too late and delude ourselves into pretending that switching from burning fossil fuels to strip-mining rare-earth metals for batteries is somehow a net positive? So what if Nestle owns all our water and the world’s two richest assholes are busy building escape pods? Everything will probably be fine.

In recent years, “late-stage capitalism” has become the go-to term for describing the conditions and contradictions of modern society. As a phrase, it has been in use for well over a hundred years but has gained popularity in American academia as a shorthand for the second half of the 20th century, starting with the postwar economic boom and continuing on through modern day. Think “multinational oligopolies” rather than “robber barrons.”

In its casual usage, it has grown to be the preferred shorthand for anti-capitalist critique from the left. This idea of “late” capitalism has been used for almost a century to indicate that the current form of capitalism will be its last, and that an alternative socioeconomic modelNamely, socialism. is imminent. Which seems very presumptuous.

The phrase is attributed to Werner Sombart in Der moderne KapitalismusNever translated to English and seemingly unavailable in digital format, so I am just providing meta-analysis.. In Sombart’s chronology, capitalism is divided into four eras:

• Proto-capitalism (1300s to early 1500s) – The transition from feudalism to mercantilism
• Early capitalism (1500s to early 1800s) – Consolidation of capital
• Mature capitalism (1800s to early 1900s) – The rise of the bourgeoisie and increased class stratification
• Late capitalism (1900s to present day) – The hellscape nightmare which we all presently endure

The successor to this late capitalism (and its expected arrival date) is open to the speculation of every socialist philosopher of the last 200 years. But the very term itself implies that we are in the endgame, that capitalism is against the ropes and on its last legs and that whatever comes next will be categorically different from the progression of capitalism over the last, oh, seven centuries.

I can appreciate this usage for the purpose of propaganda to indicate that the people’s revolution and liberation is just around the corner. And certainly it sometimes feels the capitalist model must be reaching the theoretical maximum of soul-crushiness allowed by the known laws of physics. But the reality is that it is simply naive terminology.

Sombart– and the successive economists and academics who popularized this term through the 1970’s– simply could not foresee the new perversions of capitalism that would run rampant at the end of the 20th century, nor did they have the imagination for the iterations yet to come.

Fukuyama’s “end of history” focused on liberal democracy as the final form of humanity’s societal progression, and although he argues that this end-state model includes a market-based economy, there is not as much discussion about the economic model that accompanies this pinnacle of social organization.

As an ideology, capitalism has worked tirelessly for the last seven hundred years to sculpt the foundations of modern society around its ideals; it has consolidated wealth, resources, and power into the hands of its controlling few, and has spun the delicate thread of modern civilization intricately around itself. This inextricability has only accelerated in the past fifty years with the advent of technological dependence, intangible financial markets, and the abandonment of pretense regarding a separation between our government officials and the ultra-rich that control them… or simply are them.

Why, then, do we feel that a collectivist revolution is imminent? Why do we assume that those with all the power and all the resources are anywhere near defeat? Why do we ignore that they are, in fact, at the peak of their power and continuing their upward progression? Is it because of the disgruntled grumblings in our online, leftist echo chambers? Is it the fiery rhetoric of a handful of congresspeople whom, well-intentioned as they may be, have thus far failed to grow their movement or exert any meaningful power?

The bleak truth is that leftists have failed to meaningfully move the needle in this direction in over two centuries. Yes, labor reforms and worker protections are important and wonderful achievements and yes, Scandinavian Europe has robust social welfare policies. But these have done nothing to erode the power of the capitalist class or to challenge the ideals of free-market capitalism. The biggest swings we took all ended up as failed states and cautionary tales, try as we might to justify their failures¹And boy howdy, do we ever try..

Perhaps the end of capitalism really is nigh; maybe the next sick meme on Left Twitter will convince billions of subjugated people to shake loose their chains and reclaim their liberty. Maybe proletariat solidarity or permanent revolution is right around the corner. Or maybe the capitalists continue to masterfully consolidate their power and find new, innovative ways to exploit the masses. Either way, this idea of capitalism is in its “late stage” is disingenuous at best and harmfully naive at worst; the term paints a false portrait of an oppressive and destructive force whose downfall is imminent and assured, when nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is merely in its latest stage.

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, we have seen the full spectrum of human response: obedience, indifference, and resistance. The reasons for each response are varied, of course; nothing is a monolith. However, the dominant theme in resistance has been a rejection of tyranny, some patriotic duty to uphold the neoliberal ideal of doing literally whatever we want. Elected officials attempting to enforce the bare minimum of public safety have been deemed tyrants attempting to snuff the flame of American individualismI recognize that such arguments have been made in other Western countries as well, but I’d argue that the underlying, ‘personal-freedom-at-all-costs’ mentality is rooted in the distinctly American flavor of right-wing libertarianism.. This is, of course, a confusing and incoherent stance for a number of reasons.

Let us ignore, for the moment, the profoundly anti-social mentality of refusing to sacrifice anything for public health on principle. Actually, let’s not ignore it. Let’s start there. It is perfectly rational (and actually encouraged by the teachings of this church) to evaluate the cost of the requested sacrifice against the proposed benefit. In this case, the sacrifice is the mild inconvenience of wearing a piece of cloth on your face and avoiding large gatherings for a while, and the benefit is saving hundreds of thousands of lives. If someone refuses to even consider the cost/benefit ratio and consider any attempt at protecting public health an imposition of tyranny, they are fundamentally irrational. If they consider this tradeoff honestly and decides that the sacrifice is too great for the benefit, they are fundamentally irrational or dangerously anti-social.

That said, let us skip over the other undercurrents of the “anti-mask” protest movement, including the anti-science and anti-intellectual sentiments and the frankly deranged conspiracy theories that the virus doesn’t exist or it’s a scheme by Bill Gates to embed us with microchips and make us all 5G hotspots or something. Both of these are impediments to self-salvation, but we can revisit these topics later.

The main point of consideration for this discussion is the perverted concept of “tyranny” itself. The American mythos is founded on a notion of rugged individualism, of pioneers and cowboys who set out all alone and sculpted this great land with their bare hands. Immigrants pursuing the American dream must be self-made, just like all the great titans of industry in America’s history. Similarly, in the face of a deadly and highly-contagious virus, it is your own responsibility not to die from it, now get out of my way.

Conservative ideologies, and the American right in general, want America to be a savage and ruthless nation. It is the foundation on which their entire philosophies are constructed. It’s still the Wild West, and guns are the only thing preventing us all from raping and murdering each other. The reductionist argument is that capitalists want to condition the masses to perceive society as cruel and uncaring so that it will seem natural and proper that companies are cruel and uncaring. I think that is one element of it, but the roots of this ideology go deeper into fascism than simple corporate capitalism.

Fascism can be defined many ways, but a core tenet is hierarchy. Hierarchies, by definition, demand inequality in power. It goes without saying that the conservative masses are just as powerless as their progressive counterparts in the bigger picture, but this idea that they are all lone wolves enduring the hardships of this life solely on their own strength makes them feel powerful, and therefore higher in the hierarchy than the feeble masses who want to cooperate and take care each of each other.

And so, this train of thought somehow merges neoliberal individualism with paleo-fascist hierarchical constructs. The inconsistencies in these ideologies are glaringly obvious, but we’ll leave that for another day.

The broader point is that anti-maskers represent such a radicalized form of individualism that they are willing, nay, are eager to sacrifice the good of society, under the belief that their accomplishments are solely the result of their own hard work and that they owe society nothing.

Most of the protestors are who you’d expect: white suburbanites in the lower echelons of middle class. The lives of relative comfort and stability afforded by neoliberal democracy have entitled them to never be inconvenienced. I don’t wanna wear a mask, and I want a goddamned Trenta Frappe right now. Any new rule that encroaches on these daily routines and whims for instant gratification? Tyranny. The tens of thousands of rules they otherwise adhere to everyday? Well, those are obviously fine.