@ An Alien's Angst

Human bodies are tools.

Otherwise meat sacks if not for the assumption that Selves are bound to and experiencing this world through them. For, it’s these Selves that are the sole source of moral worth and are the interest of morality as a whole.

This may sound novel or “woo-woo,” but the entirety of libertarian thought rests upon this premise: that these immaterial Selves exist, imbue individuals with “natural rights,” and are the sole moral objects in the universe. They are the things choosing to live in Objectivism, they are the continuities of consciousness for Locke, and they are the owners of bodies and their labor for Rothbard. Selves are the “You” and the “I” — the ownership entities.

In fact, it’s only through this relationship to a Self as either property or potential property that material items — bodies included — gain any moral significance at all.

This is why rights of any kind — which are, fundamentally, appeals to entitlement (aka ownership) — are impossible to have and credibly justify without acknowledging Selfhood, even if obscured. “Natural rights," especially — which function as a Self-respecting code for Selves dealing with other Selves in the material — are dependent upon not just their existence, but upon certain presuppositions about their very nature.

``` As a quick reminder, Natural Rights are:

1. The right to not be killed
2. The right to freely pursue one's own will
3. The right to own and acquire matter outside of the body ``` And, yes — this is a spiritual or, more pointedly, a transcendental argument. There is no such thing as an intellectually honest, materialist justification for natural rights or any kind of liberty ethic. Despite many popular attempts having been made, it is ontologically absurd for someone claiming to be a proponent of liberty to cling to a worldview that is devoid of the spirit-man.

Materialist logic necessarily renders us all down to mere biological shapes, annihilating the internal ownership entity and leaving nothing but survivalist values and consequentialism as guiding principles in human activity. And, this is why materialism is naturally and inseparably yoked to the authoritarian and collectivist ideologies that champion such things. It leaves neither good reasoning nor good path for a Self-respecting order, ensuring that rather than being discoverable within material constructs, the whys of liberty can only be found in the ethereal.

The Nature of Selves

Selves have a nature that is defined, in essence, by inherited divinity. Selves are spirits. But, because I haven’t yet posted on topics like the Alien God or Gnostic cosmology, you’re just going to have to ride if that threw you for a loop (which it did). I do suppose however, that this can clear some of the above up, so I’ll throw a few more keywords for the Alien God your way: expansiveness, potentiality, eternity, infinite.

But, as it pertains to Its emanations, Selves are most fundamentally:

Individuated — distinct, singular, and indivisible units of consciousness Intellectual — having the ability to experience and manipulate knowledge through reason, analysis, and synthesis of ideas Self-Conscious — conscious not only of their environment, but of their own being, condition, and interests Self-Owning — intrinsically and unconquerably autonomous, having the inalienable ability to make decisions regarding their own goals, directives, and experiences Sovereignty-Seeking — requiring personal space and domain Self-Seeking — desiring immersion and participation in The Fullness of Reality Self-Becoming — incorporative entities, constantly becoming more full versions of themselves (more expressed aspects of the Alien God) through their experience Transcendental — having an incorporeal reality that transcends and instrumentalizes the physical

And, all of these at once.

``` Transmission Note:

It’s useful to think of the first three being definitional and the last five being attributes that follow forth. So:

A Self is an individual unit of consciousness with the ability to know, reason about, and immaterially synthesize its reality according to its own interests. ``` On some level we’ve always known this and, logically, we've come to the conclusion that things that align with and enable the nature of Selves to be expressed in the material are necessarily Good. (Because matter has no innate value and that which benefits Selves is the only thing upon which to base moral reasoning in materiality.) This is how we’ve been able to conceive of and adopt a “natural rights” framework (which is really just a “Rights of the Self” framework) in a world where such a thing is entirely unnatural.

And, by adopting this "Rights of the Self" framework - this appeal to the most real things in the universe - we’ve discovered what is appropriate and what is not when it comes to dealing with ourselves and others: straight to the point, we’ve developed a liberty ethic. This is how we’ve become empowered to objectively assess the Goodness of rules and other living-together frameworks, which has allowed us to more effectively understand and resist paradigms of oppression. And, that’s is precisely what you’d expect as a result of “choosing the red pill” or eating fruit from “the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

This is forbidden Self-knowledge that, despite the world current, lets us devise systems that acknowledge difference, allow for plural structures, encourage choice, honor will, and permit pragmatic interactions with the world.

In summations, it gives us the opportunity to develop environments where Self-enabling activities are not only possible, but probable. And, in case you missed it just now, Self-Enablement is The Good.

While you can probably see where I’m going with this, the next question on your mind is most likely: what does this have to do with the series?

We’ll start getting there now.

Transcendental Supremacy

If you have a liberty ethic, then you are for Self-enablement. You believe in the Self, or “the individual” as it is so often called, as sovereign because you, consciously or not, believe in transcendental supremacy: all things not the Self object to the Self.

In essence, you are a dualist. Mainly, because reality is dualistic.

So, this can be more plainly stated as such: matter beneath spirit. And, as matter, bodies are property with their ownership determined just the same as any other piece — first through it’s primary and most intimate actor and then, by trade.

Since there is not really an alternative to a liberty-oriented society operating this way, this principle manifest in a multitude of ways in the societies claiming to be so already. The most obvious are people selling their body’s labor or transferring ownership of their body to some other entity after death (historically common alternatives include slavery and desecration). Yet, for reasons that don’t make any sense (or do when you factor in hyleticism), this idea of the Self owning and operating the body is difficult for many to wrap their heads around.

Still:

“My arm is hurting me.” ”I’m losing control of my body.” ”Your heart valve is malfunctioning.”

We already talk about our bodies like they’re reducible objects owned by something that is not the body itself, but something using the body as a sort of interface; as if our bodies were a crucial utility for interacting with and executing our wills within this world, but were not really us.

This betrays the fundamental understanding that bodies, while certainly living things, go in thralldom to Selves. It even betrays that this relationship has a moral dimension. For instance, we know that it is not Good for a body to function against or without the will of its Self, which is why statements like the above set a negative tone and lead us to call for correction.

Specifically, we know that health is better than sickness and ability is better than disability because spiritual agency trumps material condition. Nature/matter does not have any legitimate claims to suppress or otherwise limit the Self’s activities, and the corrections we issue due to this knowledge are the foundations for human advancement.

In fact, they’re expressions of techne, which is instrumental knowledge or the applied knowledge of how things can be used. And, they have to be because issuing corrections against nature can only be done technologically.

``` Transmission Note:

Techne is directly descended from what I'm calling "dry gnosis" - knowledge of the nature of reality. It cannot be executed without it and is inherently a subversion of nature/matter for the purpose of Self-enablement.

As this blog goes on it will become more and more obvious that all of these ideas are internally consistent with each other: Gnosticism, anarcho-capitalism, transhumanism, and futurism.

Straight Gnosticism, without the whitewashing and contamination by the Catholic egregor, simply does not lend to ideas of authoritarianism, Self-sacrifice, "oneness," nature-reverence, or primitivism. ``` Medication, fashion, canes, prosthetic limbs, glasses, make up, surgery, vaccines, etc… — all of the things you like most and have yet to discover you do are manifestations of techne. They’re manipulations or transformations of things to suit the will of the Selves and there’s not really an argument to be made — beyond Darwinism or nature-worship — that techne or technology are themselves “bad.” On the contrary, they are the means of Self-enablement.

Transmorphosis

While this post may have seemed like a detour from the overall series thus far, the point I’m trying to make is twofold:

a) Selves are the only moral subjects in the material universe. b) Selves, by nature, own their bodies as vehicles for their own will.

And, because ownership entails rights to manipulate and transform material to one’s own ends, it stands to reason that Selves have not only rights, but imperatives to modify their bodies when their will and expression are not adequately served by them. Anything else is an argument for cruelty, suffering, and moral failure.

The very suggestion that Selves do not have rights to modify their bodies to any possible degree — unless consensually vowed or contracted — is, definitionally, Evil.

It is an entertainment, if not an act, of Self-denial.

And, now that we’re on the same page…

Transing is just the application of techne to our bodies. It is the next logical step in issuing corrections to our condition, making the Selves of the realm more capable of pursuing things like hylevatesis, Self-actualization, and Gnosis — spiritual elevations that divinity itself compels them to pursue. However, instead of being mere treatment for the weights of bodily non-compliance and the disability it entails, transing is the cure for these things.

Despite the current state of transitional procedures (particularly on the gender side), continued development in these areas can allows us to modify our bodies thoroughly, permanently, and directly in order to bring them into line with our individual wills. Transitional technology (transtech?) will grant us an unprecedented mastery over our presences and, by extension, unprecedented amounts of agency.

On the ground, these modifications will be primarily for social penetration.

That is because, as touched on earlier in this series, most of one’s ability to access and take advantage of meaningful resources is determined by their capacity (or the recent capacity of their relatives on their behalf) to continually pass a series of socio-physiognomic checks as part of the human social protocol.

But, an intelligently implemented transmorphosis of bodies to conform with images of the Self (mapped to the socio-physiognomic condition) has an ameliorating scope far beyond just race, gender, and any body mod trends. Such a thing opens the door to optimizing our lives in areas ranging from aging to ability to vocation and even habitat.

Giving 60-year-olds the youth and beauty of 25, growing new legs for the amputees, making ugly men pretty, and cognitively enhancing the ill-evolved are all wonderful possibilities at the tips of our fingers when we accept the legitimacy of transing into our societies. Yet, much more powerfully, it is poised to change the very fabric of this reality in new, Self-defined ways, and this is the line of thought by which we hylevatize the universe.

Using our newfound modifications, we will eventually become both the aliens and the creatures in the lagoons; unbastardizing premature matter into it’s previously unbeholden, Aeonic form through our transformational play at every corner of the realm.

But, while all of that may have sounded quite liberal and unruly, there are still lines and there are still ethical considerations to have firmly in mind when it comes to technologizing to the vessel in which a Self is bound. What these considerations are will be explored next.