Weekly Technetic #26: Summer Vacation

This post marks the halfway point of The Weekly Technetic's first year. Along the way, we've looked at quite a variety of topics. This week, as my fellow denizens of the Northern Hemisphere are baking under the summer sun, let's take a look back. Specifically, let's look at the Keys of Technetism and what they offer for us in light of what we have discussed since we last saw them.

To believe, all you need to do is believe.

In a world full of dogma, asking someone to believe has to be a breath of fresh air. As technetism never demands any specific belief, it's your choice what you believe. As long as it supports humanity and our species' continued progress and advancement, there's nothing wrong with it.

That said, there are plenty of religions, philosophies, and ideologies that are not compatible with technetism. Christian sects which preach predestination, as we saw last week, cannot be technetic, because they remove our agency. In a more controversial direction, we can also say that transgenderism is anti-technetic—with a few exceptions, such as a "transition" coming after a person has already had children—due to its sterilizing effects.

The list could go on, and indeed it does, but we only need to see the pattern here. To be technetic, you must believe in something, and that something must provide a positive benefit to yourself and to humanity as a whole. That's all. We are inclusive, although not all-inclusive.

Learning makes us better.

If anything distinguishes the technetic from the average person, it is the Second Key. We are learners. We are readers, listeners, and thinkers. Today, this is a rarer quality than it should be. Mass and social media have become propaganda intended to hinder our learning, to dumb us down, even as political maneuvers have done the same to our children.

Beyond spreading the positive message of technetism, following this maxim is the best way to build a better world. Learn, then teach what you have learned. Sometimes, that will anger people, especially those who have a vested interest in an ignorant populace. Ignore them if you can, or fight them if you must. Either way, never stop learning.

We protect our own, from the family to the species.

Families, communities, and humanity as a whole are all under attack. These attacks have gotten worse in the past six months, and this is why we need to keep the Third Key in mind. We protect our own.

That starts with those closest to us: our children, our parents, our siblings. From there, the circles of protection grow larger but weaker. We will defend our extended families, the aunts and uncles and so on, though not to the same extent as our immediate family. This is a biological imperative—they represent genetic relations of varying degrees of closeness—but also a social one, because a society which does not respect the family unit cannot endure.

The "village" or "neighborhood" unit also deserves a decent level of protection. While our neighbors are not necessarily related to us, they are close in the physical sense. Their well-being reflects on our own, and they provide a network of social connection and aid in times of needs. Or they're supposed to.

We can continue expanding outward, looking at our county or state, our culture or race. But these connections are more tenuous. Don't spend as much time or effort on them when you have more important matters to worry about.

Knowledge should only increase.

The Fourth Key is almost anathema to modern institutions. Cancel culture and the communist tendency to rewrite or disguise history have both contributed to a collective decrease in some areas of knowledge. To put it another way, anti-human forces are attempting to create a new Dark Age.

We can't fight that by ourselves, but we can stem the tide. Seek out forbidden knowledge and share it with others. Whether that's unadulterated temperature records, results of clinical trials, the birth names and sexes of celebrities, or the histories of undesirables, it is our duty as technetics to find this information. We must then turn it into knowledge that can be taught.

Nothing should ever be forgotten by humanity as a whole. There is no knowledge so dangerous that it deserves to be buried, and no information whose dissemination should be illegal. Yes, we understand the boundaries of polite society, so we don't, for instance, teach the gory details of sex and sexuality to children—our anti-humanist foes can't even say this much—but we still learn them. So it should be in any area of humanity.

The art and the craft are sacred expressions of humanity.

A local county executive candidate has a campaign sign that says, "Make Vocational Education Great Again." Although it's surely little more than an advertising ploy, it is by far the most technetic message I've seen on the side of the road in years. Vocational education is exactly what the vast majority of children, teens, and young adults need to be focusing on. Academia, by contrast, should be reserved for those who want it. But that's a political message, not a sacred one.

The sacred aspect comes in when you realize that arts and crafts are the exclusive domain of humanity. Our species' oldest artifacts are cave paintings and tools. We know these belong to humans, because no other animal on this planet has the ability to create such complex expressions of intent. Some of them build, yes, and some can use natural items as rudimentary tools, but true construction is our domain.

By creating, we are following in the footsteps of five thousand generations of modern humans before us. By using our talents, we can shape the world, taking natural materials and making them into something refined and beautiful. If we so choose, that is. Not every creation of humanity has beauty, as any look at "brutalist" architecture will prove. But even these ugly blights are human, and they earn a measure of respect simply because of that.

A hoard is worthless if never spent.

The Sixth Key is intended as a metaphor for teaching, the "hoard" referring to the knowledge we have learned but fail to spread, but it also works if read literally. As the rich get richer, we can see their lack of human empathy on full display, and the suffering their hoarding behavior has caused to us all.

From the metaphorical standpoint, however, there isn't much difference. Knowledge continues to be hoarded by corporations, governments, and high-profile individuals. Restrictive copyrights, paywalls, and other methods prevent the spread of knowledge; in a sense, "pirates" are the true technetic heroes for their efforts in circumventing attempts at limiting our ability to share.

Much more heroic, however, are those who truly support an open culture. Look to initiatives such as Creative Commons and the various open-source software communities for guidance on expressing both our sacred need to create and the social necessity of freely teaching others our knowledge.

You are a self and a soul searching for truth.

Finally, we come to this. The search for truth is one that never ends. The spiritual half of a human is one we cannot ignore, so the truth we seek may come in that form. Or it may not; instead, you may only ever find a material or physical truth for yourself. What matters is the search itself.

If anything is the true lesson of technetism, it is that: the search never ends. We may set goals along the way, checkpoints or waypoints on the road to truth, but the end is nowhere that can be found on a map. Learn, teach, create, and give. But remember why you're doing these things. You want to make yourself and everyone around you better. That, not the nebulous spiritual benefits offered by most forms of religion, is what we seek in our physical lives.

If you walk the technetic path, you will have the opportunity to find yourself along the way. And you will find parts of you that you never knew were there. In the past six months, I have seen this for myself. I ask only that you accept that statement and believe it is worth emulating.