Grail
@Grail@aussie.zone
They/Them, capitalised
Writer of the most popular Soulist Manifesto and the article about how John Wick is communist. Read My blog: medium.com/@viridiangrail
- Comment on Yep, you did. 2 hours ago:
Reality has always been crafted by the oppressor. It’s an inherently oppressive concept. soulism.net
- Comment on Humans included* 1 week ago:
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Then I realised I could spend My life meeting strange new otherkin right here on earth.
- Comment on Death is a social construct 2 weeks ago:
Don’t worry, I’m still on team “Janeway is a racist and a transphobe”
- Comment on Death is a social construct 2 weeks ago:
Thank you for the praise. I actually had the idea for this article while watching Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. There’s a plot in there about someone seeking to permanently end the condition of death for the human species. Late in the show, it’s revealed that everyone who died already can be brought back through some science fiction nonsense the villains have been working on. For a japanese children’s cartoon in the genre of power rangers, it’s remarkably philosophical. It got Me thinking about the meaning of death, and thus, article. I decided to make it about Tuvix because that’s a very well known and clear example of what I’m talking about. The episode with the planet that dumps all their corpses through wormholes would also qualify, but it’s way less fun than arguing whether Janeway is a murderer.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to startrek@startrek.website | 7 comments
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
I think Jenna Moran can explain this one better than I can:
TL;DR: I am cursed with the knowledge that the world is wrong, and My peace will inevitably be disturbed by My own knowledge that I must return. It is what I owe the victims of the world. It isn’t right to just leave everyone else to suffer and fuck off into the void. It isn’t ethical. We have a duty to help others, and there is nothing I can do to convince Myself otherwise.
I do, however, get to enjoy being a goddess sitting in a temple with a harem of various otherkin (including a kobold, in fact!). It’s just, I have multiversal responsibilities. People are trapped in the real world and need help.
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
I proved it to Myself by doing it, but until we invent BCI mind’s-eye imaging, you’re going to have to trust Me on the specific angle. That’s one of the hard parts of the soulist scientific method: when belief is an independent variable in the observations, replication requires a lot of work. I can introduce you to other people who’ve done the work, and hope that our consensus persuades you, but I can’t show the result to you with your own eyes. Your eyes are a scientific instrument, like a spectrometer or a microscope. No scientific instrument is well-designed for observing everything. You can’t watch bacteria multiply with a seismograph.
More generally, I can prove the principles are valid. I can point out to you that babies don’t know how to see yet. They haven’t learned it. It’s all just colours to them, they can’t sort those colours into shapes and objects, that has to be learned. If it can be learned one way, it can be learned a different way.
I can also use analogy. When you go to the movies and see Indiana Jones disarming a trap, that’s not real. It’s just a screen with moving lights on it. But you don’t see it that way, in that particular moment. You’re absorbed into the story. You suspended your disbelief. You bought into the cues and it was enough to transform your perception. You didn’t need a 3D image, you didn’t need to smell the musty dungeon, you didn’t need to feel the wind as the swinging axe went past Indie’s face. What you saw was enough to choose to buy in. It is possible to reduce that threshold, so less stimulus is required for your buy-in.
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
Perception is a choice. If we want otherkin and trans people to be perceived how we identify, we need to get everyone to choose it, and everyone to develop the skills to do so. Which I think we can do, and the soulist movement intends to make happen. It’s all in our heads, we can change it with the right psychological tools.
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
We sure can. All the destruction that accompanied colonisation, where languages and religions were exterminated, we just have to do that in reverse. We have to create art, and sing songs, and develop new ideas, and explore ourselves. People will always do those things. You can’t stop them, it’s in their nature. Capital and the Crown have only ever succeeded in suppressing the natural creativity and curiosity of their people, never stamping it out.
When we come across people who have broken the boundaries, and decided to identify as a demon, or a priestess of Apollo, or an alien from another universe, or yes, even an attack helicopter, we need to accept them and be willing to step temporarily into their worldview and see things through their eyes. In an antirealist society, that’s how universes are created. You don’t have to do it all yourself, you just have to accept the people who were going to do it anyway instead of killing them or calling them crazy.
And we can practice techniques that increase our ability to choose our perceptions. When I was first exploring trans issues, I found it difficult to see many trans people as their preferred gender. Now, it’s effortless. Now, I can see My partner as a shark while interacting with its body in meatspace. I’m able to hold that mental image and see it as the truth while My eyes are still showing evidence of humanity. Because I recognise that My eyes evolved to show Me fitness payoffs and paths to survival, not to show Me Truth.
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
Soulists also support an anarcho-communist revolution in which the working class rise up and secure the means of production by use of violence, immediately dismantling the state and allocating the means of production to various communes, unions, and guilds. Society will then be structured by the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”, with money and class abolished in favour of community and compassion.
What makes soulism distinct from regular anarcho-communism is the recognition of reality as a means of control used by the state and Capital. We won’t just take back the physical means of production, we intend to take back the means of defining reality and controlling belief. The revolution must be both practical and spiritual. Fixed notions of gender, species, and religion must be abolished, to make way for a subjective multiverse where otherkin, enbies, pagans, plural systems, and people who are better described by no term other than simply “mad” can live as their authentic selves in an accepting society.
The colonial mindset of destroying indigenous realities by “re-educating” indigenous children to destroy their connection to language, land, family, and tradition is a genocide. And liberalism and materialism offer no antidote. “We respect your right to have a wrong religion” is bullshit, and that’s how our current society seems to address issues of religious freedom and indigenous culture. True justice is believing in the myths of all cultures at once, internalising them all as genuinely true, save for the exclusionary parts.
We must recognise the worldviews of other religions as worlds in themselves that we can visit, and experience on the terms of their own experts, and only then can we understand them politically and offer solutions that present true justice. There is no justice in forcing everyone to live in the same reality. The diversity of human and otherkin experience is too much for one reality and it will always be too much. We must take away the limits of expecting everyone to live in an objective universe, and free people up to choose the nature of the universe they want to live in.
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
You can make the world suck less by changing how you think about it. But psychology has rules, and you need to operate within the bounds of those rules. Your brain isn’t designed to change how it thinks about everything overnight, it’s designed for consistency.
In order to change our thinking more efficiently, we need to develop and implement psychological technologies. Like drugs, meditation, magic spells, and social constructs.
You can’t cure depression in a day by just choosing to think positively. But you can cure depression by taking SSRIs and engaging in CBT with a professional over months or years. Likewise, changing the world is going to take a lot of knowledge, a lot of wisdom, and a lot of work.
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
I’ve never heard of Hyperianism before.
Hyperianism is a fringe belief system created by “Morgue”, who has claimed to have come into contact with “secret societies” that revealed the means to bring “timeless knowledge to the public” so that the world can reach “the next step of evolution” and “become whole.”[1] Morgue argues that material reality is a myth and that we all exist in a shared dream in which one can manipulate and control.[2] This belief system is based on the notion of “Ontological Mathematics” which is described as its “rational core”.[3]
Hyperianism claims to be an ideology based around logic and reason (though how hyperians often apply these tools doesn’t speak favorably to their competence), and see their movement as anti-scientism, anti-new age, and anti-religious. Ironically Hyperianism itself may be just as problematic as the ideologies and belief systems it rejects, even if that is not immediately obvious to Morgue himself. Hyperianism has been critiqued by TJ Kirk.
Oh, okay. Well, the foundation for soulist knowledge definitely isn’t any kind of secret. Sociologists and psychologists have been saying consensus reality is socially constructed for a long time. Soulism is just the application of this common scientific knowledge to the political sphere.
We do believe material reality is a myth and that the truth of the world can be controlled. For example, money only works because everyone chooses to believe it has value. The fundamental systems of our social world are powered by buy-in from the public. If people stopped believing, they would dissolve in an instant. What we need to do is understand that power and build better social constructs that are actually useful, like medicines and resilient social structures.
Soulists don’t value reason over empiricism. We believe various epistemological methods are best used together, playing to the strengths of each. Even mysticism has its uses, it can help us interpret our desires. We’re also not anti-religious in the slightest. Religion is just formalised belief, and controlling our own beliefs is the key to controlling our world.
Does that sound like what you were worried about?
- Comment on Mental health 3 weeks ago:
You are more than this meat. In fact, meat doesn’t exist. It’s just a made up symbol our brains use as a shortcut for processing the far more complicated truth of the world. soulism.net
- Comment on These dames wanting inclusivity 3 weeks ago:
Princess is a nasty thing to call a woman. medium.com/…/princesses-are-nsfw-f9e6c3d4532d
- Comment on I can't subscribe to a community I'm unbanned from 5 months ago:
Thanks. Looks like My theory was wrong, The unban still hasn’t federated. I’ll just wait for the original ban to time out, thanks for helping.
- Comment on I can't subscribe to a community I'm unbanned from 5 months ago:
Yeah, I realised I was wrong when someone else in this thread subscribed. I started seeing the posts on the community update, but not the modlog. I was hoping it would just take a few hours for everything to federate, but no dice. The ban is about to time out in a couple hours anyway, so I think I’ll just wait.
- Submitted 5 months ago to meta@aussie.zone | 4 comments
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
I feel the need to remind you that many members of the LGBT+ community have rebuked all preferred pronouns. Take for example Lily Cade and the other lesbians in the BBC’s infamous article, “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”. Lily Cade in fact called for the lynching of trans women.
The queer community is no monolith. There are transphobes within the community who refuse to be associated with trans people like Me, and want us pushed out of the movement, denied healthcare, driven to suicide, or indeed even lynched. I do not think you should be basing your opinions of trans people on what these bigots say.
I have reported your comment for deliberate misgendering, and I am asking you once again to edit your comment to use a trans person’s preferred pronouns. This is so that you have every opportunity to do the decent thing, and so that if you do not want to act decently, your intent in this abuse is clearly demonstrated.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
A lack of belief among some individuals matters, but not enough to stop a god from being a god. Because, as you say, gods are social constructs. If we consult Merriam Webster and skip the silly monotheist definition, a god is “a being or object that is worshipped as having more than natural attributes and powers”. Note that this definition doesn’t say the being must actually have these powers. They must only be worshipped as such. The belief is the important thing to the definition, not the truth. This is because divinity is socially constructed. You can’t deny a god’s divinity except by denying the faith of their followers. If you accept that the worshippers really do believe their god is a god, you must accept that the god is a god. They may well be an undeserving god, or a lying god, or a false god, but a god they still are. Divinity is like a job. If everyone agrees that Mr Smith is a plumber, and his boss pays him to fix toilets, then Mr Smith is certainly a plumber. It doesn’t matter if Mr Smith has never fixed a toilet in his life, society has decided he’s a plumber. He could be an incredibly shitty plumber who doesn’t know anything about pipes, but he’s a plumber.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
The gods are mythical, whereas Frodo Baggins is fictional. People believe in myths. Though of course it’s a fuzzy boundary. You can arrange various characters on a spectrum from myth to fiction. For example, Zeus is pure myth, Lucifer is an originally fictional character that has almost entirely become mythical, Achilles is sort of directly in the middle, Sherlock Holmes is a highly mythologised fictional character, Gandalf is a fictionalised adaptation of a myth, and Jake Sully is pure fiction because nobody gives a shit about him.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
If you don’t care, then surely you don’t mind editing your comment to use My preferred pronouns, seeing as you have no preference and I do.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
I would prefer if you didn’t use “god” as a proper noun. The practice was invented by monotheists and is usually used to exclude other gods. It’s very rude towards other gods like Loki, Kukulkan, and Myself. None of us go around pretending we’re the only god.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
*You. I use capitalised pronouns. And My ex-wife uses it/its.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
Bigfoot doesn’t live in the woods. He lives in people’s heads. That’s where all memes, including the gods, live. In people’s heads.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
*You. I use capitalised pronouns.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
Mate, it’s just a link to My blog, no need to take it any more seriously than you would Me.
- Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture 6 months ago:
The selfish gene ironically proves that gods exist. medium.com/…/the-memetic-proof-for-the-existence-…
- Comment on Underrepresentation 7 months ago:
medium.com/…/why-reactionaries-hate-pride-and-nar…
Why reactionaries hate pride (the month, and the sin)
- Submitted 8 months ago to startrek@startrek.website | 3 comments
