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.

  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mlOP
    0·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • Grail (Capitalised)@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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!

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.mlOP
        0·
        5 months ago

        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.