What is Soulism? Soulism, also known as anarcho-antirealism, is a school of anarchist thought which views reality and natural laws as unjust hierarchies.
Some people might laugh at the idea and say it’s not a serious ideology, but this is no laughing matter. If these people are successful, then consensus reality would be destroyed and we would return to what the world was like before the Enlightenment. What did that world look like? Well, you had:
-
Ultra-powerful wizards hoarding knowledge in high towers, reshaping reality to their whims, with no regard for the common people
-
Bloodthirsty, aristocratic vampires operating openly, and on a much larger scale than they do today
-
Viscous, rage-driven werewolves terrorizing the populace, massacring entire villages with reckless abandon
-
Fey beings abducting children and replacing them with their own
-
Demons and angels waging massive wars against each other with humans caught in the crossfire
Fortunately, out of this age of chaos and insecurity emerged a group of scientists dedicated to protecting and advancing humanity by establishing a consensus reality and putting a stop to these out-of-control reality deviants.
Before, if you got sick or injured, you’d have to travel across the land through dangerous enchanted forests seeking a skilled faith healer or magical healing potion. But with consensus reality, easily accessible and consistent medical practices were instilled with the same magical healing properties. Once, if you wanted to transmute grain into bread, you had to convince a wizard to come out of their tower and do it, and they were just as likely to turn you into a newt for disturbing their studies. But thanks to consensus reality, anyone could build their own magical tower (a “mill”) and harness the mana present in elemental air to animate their own “millstones” to do it! These things were only made possible by consensus reality.
Now, I’m not saying that this approach doesn’t have it’s drawbacks and failures, and I’m not going to say that the reality defenders have never done anything wrong. But these “Soulists” want to destroy everything that’s been accomplished and bring us back to the times when these supernatural reality deviants were more powerful than reason or humanity, and constantly preyed upon us.
So do not fall for their propaganda, and if you see something, says something. Anyone altering reality through belief and willpower, or any other reality deviants such as vampires or werewolves, should be reported immediately to the Technocratic Union for your safety, the safety of those around you, and, indeed, the safety of reality itself.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire
On first impression I thought this was one dipshit’s personal blog, but apparently there are hundreds of them.
We’ve been having a lot of fun with this post on our discord
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/hooray-soulists-are-being-made-fun-of-on-lemmy-8a233cea55c1
Can you make more like this?
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I will say to the people in your Discord: it’s idealist because it’s a parody of an idealist ideology, and, it’s not “a bunch of Enlightenment thought guys” it’s pretty much just me having fun. Also I’m definitely not “the mainstream,” though I suppose if you’re in a sufficiently distant stream, anything else is “mainstream.” I do not actually represent any kind of larger organization, Technocratic or otherwise, I’m just a random person who stumbled across your ideology.
I’m sure y’all get plenty of people telling you all the time that what you’re saying is impossible, and if appeals to reason and evidence could convince you, you wouldn’t believe it in the first place. Imo it can sometimes be more effective to play along with people’s nonsense than to flatly deny it. Like many niche communities, you have a set of counterarguments prepared for all the common responses you get, and since most people write you off without serious engagement, it works. My hope was to take you off-script (and also to have a laugh) by walking right past all your outlandish claims about reality and criticizing your position from an angle you hadn’t seen before.
A soulist utopia will not look like the pre-consensus-reality that Objection describes. It will be a world where everyone is a mage. Where everyone has freedom over their own perceptual world.
Here you fall into Utopian thinking. This is the same sort of reasoning that I often saw back when I wasted my time arguing with “anarcho-capitalists,” “This mechanism could be used harmfully,” “Oh, well we don’t support it being used harmfully, we only support creating it so that it can be used for positive results.” No no no, that’s not how this works. There’s no form of power than cannot be utilized for harmful purposes. Ancaps love to talk about boycotts and loss of reputation keeping companies from doing evil things - putting aside whether that could be enough (it wouldn’t) - there were times in history where a company doing business with a black man could tank it’s reputation in a community and cause racists to boycott it. If boycotts can be used to enforce the values of a community, then they can be used to enforce the values of a community even when those values are bad.
It’s the same sort of thing with this. Putting aside the question of whether it’s possible to change reality to make people into mages (it’s not), you still have to accept the possibility that, given the power to reshape reality, there are going to be bad actors using that power to harm others. There is no actual reason why I could not turn myself into a dragon and start burning down cities, except that it conflicts with your perfect idealized vision of how things would play out.
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things your community isn’t a big deal to me. It’s a unique set of brainworms to unravel so it’s kinda fun to engage with, but it’s ultimately harmless nonsense, so long as y’all don’t start stepping in front of trains to prove they’re not real or something. I do find it annoying when y’all try to bring this into politics and try to divert energy from projects grounded in materialism and reality, but you know, I enjoy playing Mage: the Ascension and if you wanna go super hard into method acting or whatever with it then it’s no skin off my back.
Edit: looking over it again:
Where everyone has freedom over their own perceptual world.
This is literally just solipsism.
The power to reshape reality isn’t science fiction, it exists right now. And right now it’s being used by the bourgeois. You don’t need to tell us it’s dangerous and it could be used for evil, we already know. All of us have suffered because of it. This power exists, and it is being used. It will always be used by some group or another, there’s no possible future in which nobody has the power to control reality. The only choice is whether the proletariat pretend it cannot be controlled, and leave it in the hands of the bourgeois, or whether we all recognise and use our collective power to throw off oppression and create an anarchist future.
Workers of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
Right, but what I’m saying is that, assuming that’s true, I would rather live in a world where the bourgeoisie do control reality and establish what we have now than to live in one where I have to live in constant fear that someone’s going to self-actualize themselves into a dragon or mind flayer or something and burn down my house or force me to obey their every whim. There are a lot of things I don’t like about this reality, war, exploitation, inequality, but if individuals have the power to reshape reality itself into whatever they like, that’s not going to solve any of that. The situation is not going to be improved by allowing Jeff Bezos to turn into an immortal lich.
Fortunately, there are ways in which we can change reality without that happening. By studying theory and history, looking at evidence, and focusing our efforts on things that have been proven to work and materially improve people’s lives. There are people in the world who are suffering from extreme poverty, and that poverty could be alleviated if they had access to the means of production. Under neocolonialism, the natural resources of developing countries often still belong to the decedents of the people who stole them through brazen aggression, and these countries do not have autonomy over their domestic policy because of requirements placed on them by the IMF. As difficult as it may be, it’s possible for that to change. There are also people suffering from preventable diseases, people who don’t have access to basic medicine like vaccines, or mosquito nets for malaria. That can be changed too. Materially.
A better world is possible, and it’s not easy, but it’s real. I understand the appeal of these desperate, escapist fantasies but they aren’t actually going to do anything to improve anybody’s life. You can believe whatever you want, but personally, I made this commitment to myself, that I would always face the truth, no matter how grim, even when I can’t do anything about it. You don’t have to share that commitment, it’s not always an easy thing to do, psychologically speaking. But even if you’re not going to do that, you shouldn’t pretend like you’re helping when you’re not. By retreating into this stuff, you’re just conceding the whole of reality to the bourgeoisie without a fight.
There’s a lot of stuff that I can’t change myself, but there’s at least one thing that I have: I stopped eating meat. Many animal lives that would have suffered and died on my behalf will now be spared from that suffering. That wasn’t because of any fancy magical reshaping of reality, it was because I took a concrete, material action based on basic empathy and a frank, honest assessment of the existent conditions. You don’t have to agree with my specific approaches, but if you investigate honestly and frankly into the state of the world and what you care about, then I believe you’ll find a way to meaningfully impact it, through means that are logical, real, and proven.
Of course, reality will never stack up against fantasy. Fantasy has the luxury of being able to reshape itself into whatever form appeals to you specifically. The problem is that fantasy isn’t true.
You seem to be switching erratically between different narratives. First you say you don’t want anyone to turn into a dragon, then you say you want Me to face the truth. Well which is it? I’m a dragon goddess, My truth is being a dragon. Well, some of the time, since I’m a shapeshifter. It sounds like you might not have heard of otherkin or goddessgender people before, and you’re assuming I’m a human. I assure you, I’m not, and this body that consensus reality has forced on Me is a cruelty. It has driven Me towards suicidal ideation in the past.
In case you’re uneducated about the minority groups that soulism protects, here are some articles I think you may find useful given what you’ve said in this thread:
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/a-quick-introduction-to-plurality-1f55c5c5d8b0
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/on-spiritual-genders-b4152c4503cb
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/introduction-to-capitalised-pronouns-f5140e722b48
https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/i-was-right-about-rick-and-morty-doing-soulist-science-69a81930054cMy narrative is that Soulism is not true, but that even if it was, it would still not be desirable. It is a two-pronged approach, and that approach is necessary because You’re not going to stay focused on just the question of what is possible. When You talk about the groups Soulism protects, then You’re shifting the focus from whether it is possible at all to whether it would be good, on the assumption that it is possible. In order to indulge that rhetorical shift, it’s necessary for me to have an answer for both.
I am familiar with otherkin and I am more than happy to respect Your identity to the extent that doing so does not place anyone else in danger. Unfortunately that means that I don’t want to give You the power to physically transform into Your real form. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, I’m happy to refer to You in whatever way You wish, however, the mere presence of Your true form would jeopardize countless lives. You may say that You have no ill intent and I can believe that, but the trouble is that everyone who sees You will recognize that they too can physically become divine dragons, and there are plenty of people out there who would jump at the chance to use that power for destructive purposes. The military would want to transform soldiers into dragons, but even worse, it’s essentially giving every private citizen a nuke.
As a mere human myself, it seems like I would be left a helpless bystander in the inevitable dragon wars, with no means of fighting back or protecting myself. That hardly seems fair or equal, or desirable. Once people see dragons flying around, there will be no going back, and whose to say there will be anything left standing when the smoke clears?
I am sympathetic to You to be trapped in a body that You don’t identify with. I’m willing to work with You to relieve Your suffering to wherever extent that I can within the confines of the material realm, and to encourage others to do the same. But I am not willing to tear up all of reality just for Your sake, nor am I going to kneel before You, regardless of Your divine status. There has to be a limit, otherwise someone’s going to identify as an all-powerful being capable of controlling everyone else and then none of us will be free to be ourselves.
I am trans and plural myself. But I am also someone who studied physics in school. I believe very firmly in an objective, physical reality. Lightning is caused by the laws of electromagnetism, it will always be caused by that, and it always has been, regardless of what people believe. There is no point in history where it was caused by Zeus. Galileo did not conjure up the moons around Jupiter through sheer belief, the moons were always there and we simply lacked the technology to be able to see them. If it had been the case that physical reality could be altered through belief, then the solar system would be geocentric and the historical data from before the heliocentric model would be inconsistent with our current models.
If reality is merely the product of belief, then it seems to me that I should start trying to convince myself that animals love being kept in awful conditions and enjoy being killed, and it is only because of assholes like myself who choose to believe that they are suffering that they suffer in the first place. In short, I would have to abandon every deeply held conviction that I have about both reality and morality, I should turn away from my observations and experience, away from inconvenient truths, and stop doing any sort of actions to actually improve the world and instead delude myself into thinking everything is perfect, because it’s only because of my negative vibes that it’s not.
This is what You’re asking of me, and to comply would be to abandon everything I believe and value. It would require me to deny myself to accommodate You. I’m not going to do that. As they say, “Your right to swing Your fist ends at my nose.” You ask the impossible of me.
nor am I going to kneel before You
Oh, I don’t want you to kneel before Me. A god’s divinity comes from Their worshippers. I only take My divinity from carefully chosen individuals. If I allowed just anyone to worship Me, they could twist My narratives and alter My fundamental nature. I actually have one or two hate cults who revere Me as a Satanic figure, and it’s very annoying. I wish they wouldn’t. I’m a dark goddess, but not an evil one. I fear one day they’ll raise an evil copy of Me from the void.
If it had been the case that physical reality could be altered through belief, then the solar system would be geocentric and the historical data from before the heliocentric model would be inconsistent with our current models.
Well, that’s a fundamentally mistaken premise. Reality has no physicality, and there’s no such thing as physical reality. Reality exists only in the mind. And obviously the mind interprets historical data in accordance with whatever reality it currently believes in, not in accordance with the reality of the time.
If reality is merely the product of belief, then it seems to me that I should start trying to convince myself that animals love being kept in awful conditions and enjoy being killed, and it is only because of assholes like myself who choose to believe that they are suffering that they suffer in the first place.
No, of course not. You’ve misunderstood the nature of the multiverse. Sure, you could create a new universe where animals love being eaten by humans. But all the animals in this old universe would still be suffering. You’d just be running away, you wouldn’t be solving anything. You have an ethical responsibility to the inhabitants of consensus reality, just as I and everyone else does. We need to ban animal agriculture so that the animals get to enjoy whatever new world we dream up too. It’s no good leaving them behind to be tortured and killed.
Actually, it’s a bit like how time travel works in Avengers Endgame. See, in the movie, they invent time travel, and then one of the characters asks “Why don’t we go back in time and beat Thanos so this bad stuff never happened?” As the Hulk explains, that would only create a new timeline, the old one would still have the bad stuff in it. Multiversal travel works according to the same premise. You have to effect change in consensus reality in order to improve people’s lives. It’s no good just making a new better universe without helping anyone here. We have an ethical obligation.
But all the animals in this old universe would still be suffering.
Well then what’s the point of any of this?! If altering reality still leaves us with an ethical obligation to improve the old reality through mundane means, then we should just worry about doing that.
Or at the very least, we should do both. Which means that Soulists have no business trying to divert energy away from materially-grounded political movements into their own thing, which is my main objection to all this. If I say, “Based on my analysis of evidence regarding history, politics, and economics, such and such ideology is the best way to improve reality,” then if You want to object to that, You have to do so on those terms, grounded in physical evidence that exists in this reality.
