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:
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Ultra-powerful wizards hoarding knowledge in high towers, reshaping reality to their whims, with no regard for the common people
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Bloodthirsty, aristocratic vampires operating openly, and on a much larger scale than they do today
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Viscous, rage-driven werewolves terrorizing the populace, massacring entire villages with reckless abandon
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Fey beings abducting children and replacing them with their own
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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.
My 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The key is to destroy consensus reality so that nobody’s left behind here.