Weekly Technetic #17: Salvation
I'm writing this the day before Easter, and that makes me think about certain things. Over a third of the world's population calls that Sunday the holiest day of the year, yet a much smaller percentage can actually tell you why. Even fewer could tell you the reasons behind using rabbits, eggs, and candy as symbols for it.
For Christians, Easter represents salvation, and that's what got me thinking. Growing up in a devout family, I was "saved" in that sense at a very young age. In the three and a half decades since, I've never once seen any evidence of that having an effect at all. I constantly suffer from depression and anxiety. I've considered taking my own life on multiple occasions. I spent over a year effectively under house arrest, and I'm still barred from some public places. I didn't get my first full-time job until a year ago. My first relationship came when I was 34. I can count my friends on my hands with fingers to spare.
Of course, my family would respond by saying, "None of that matters, because it's all about what happens in the next life."
No thanks. If I have to spend this life in constant suffering, why would I ever hope that another one would be any better? My brain isn't wired that way. For whatever reason, I just don't see it. I don't see how 40 years of pain—all I've allotted myself at this moment in time—can be repaid like that.
Technetism came about because of that unhappiness. The overly religious want me to suffer in silence for their nebulous reward of the hereafter. The atheistic humanists and anti-humanists, on the other hand, won't even offer that much; increasingly, that side's response to my suffering is that I deserve it for being a straight white male.
I needed something else, something that could offer a worldly counterpart to the spiritual notion of salvation. Philosophy, at least in the classical sense, provides that. Generations of thinkers contemplated human nature, the way we organize into societies yet retain our individuality, the steps we can take to better ourselves in our brief time in the sun. I find that very appealing, far more so than nihilism or blind faith.
By understanding the human mind, I've been able to better understand the human spirit, and I've found that there is nothing more beautiful, more powerful, or more misunderstood in this world. All our minds can be "saved" in the technetic sense, and we don't need an empty tomb to do it. We only need to take a minute to think about thinking.
The forthcoming first book of technetism is titled The Prison of Ignorance, and I named it that because I saw the first goal of the technetic, the first step on the road to this sort of materialistic salvation, as escaping that prison. We cannot call ourselves saved if we are slaves to ignorance, no matter the source of that ignorance.
Our kind of salvation on earth, then, comes from knowledge. And it's perfectly fine to mix technetic salvation with the more traditional sort. The holiday of Easter, for example, has provided two thousand years of stories and histories, and all of those are worth studying for both insight and inspiration. It may even be that your search for earthly salvation brings you to one form of spiritual salvation. If so, I congratulate you, for you have surpassed your guide on the technetic path.