Anticonstitution for a Promethean Society

Creation of the first Promethean society must be the first major objective established for the Promethean movement by its leaders, the Prometheans. This society will be an example for the rest of the world, and the forerunner of a Promethean world. The Promethean Manifesto implied what a Promethean society must be like. This continuation of the Manifesto goes further in applying Promethean principles, and depicting a Promethean society which lives by them. A Promethean society has no official documents, without government to make them official, and so I call this an Anticonstitution. The difference between a Promethean society and the societies we have known is so great, we may often search for the language to express it. This change will be monumental.

1. Toward the Promethean Age (Introduction)

One day in the future, people will speak of their past as a time when there were governments and political power, because their ancestors had accepted those ideas. Historians may term this past "The Age of Government" or perhaps "The Age of Politics," much as we say "The Age of Empires" or maybe even "The Age of Dinosaurs." We must all remember that current conventions about what society means change. Awareness of this can keep us from being mired in the present, believing we must always suffer from the problems of today.

In many times and places, a society without a slave class would have seemed bizarre, unfeasible, or even inconceivable. Today, we understand that society can exist without this institution. We do not think it is strange for a society to function without slave labor. Even when slave labor is exploited, we think of it as an exception, not an integral part of society. And most importantly, we think of societies without slaves when we think of "societies." This change has come to pass because there lived courageous people who took dangerous steps toward changing the old order. Over many centuries, people learned to respect and value individual freedom enough to see that outright slavery had to end. People today realize that the extremely divisive institution of slavery was damaging to slave societies. Slavery even retards economic productivity; a society made of free men and women who can learn to do things for themselves, and are allowed to, prospers quite superiorly to a society composed of a few masters and many chained, uneducated slaves who do menial work. We too should look forward to the day when the partial slavery of the state has passed away, because of a courageous few freedom fighters who have once again redefined society.

If we really respect individual freedom and the importance of the individual, we cannot be satisfied with partial freedom. The abolitionists were not satisfied to see private ownership of their fellow human beings protected by the government, or considered a societal norm. The womens' rights reformers were not satisfied to see women live as the de facto property of their husbands. Civil rights activists were not satisfied with enforced segregation. And we must not be satisfied either. Until all people are truly free in every moment of their lives from control backed by socially-approved force, there are people still living under slavery.

We may exercise some control over the work we do, but we are still bound by acceptance of the principle of slavery — owing oneself to another regardless of choice, and we are still living within a slave society. In America today, an average of one-third of our working hours are said to be owed to the state. (These hours do not include the many other claimed taxes besides income which may push the average proportion to about half in America, or far past that in Europe, for examples.) The worth of those hours of our lives does not belong to us, or so we are told. Because this is two-thirds better than a slave's life, we call it freedom. And we have no choice. Or rather... we each have the same choice as a slave: to obey, or to resist against socially-approved force.

The Promethean movement must show that the compulsion of authority, that chain on our freedom, can be as unnecessary for human societies as slave labor. A Promethean society can prove this, and illuminate for all people that a truly free society goes as far beyond a modern society, as a modern society goes beyond an ancient slave kingdom.

Government seems useful, sometimes. Political power seems useful, sometimes — in the short term, for limited and mundane goals. But in truth, so was slavery. Slaves can work, and get some work done if properly forced. But the enormous toll on their humanity, and the humanity of the master who forces them and becomes dependent upon their efforts, finally outweighs all limited and mundane considerations. We know this. We must also learn that today, we do no wrong to name those in political power our dominant yet dependent masters, those who enforce their laws or whims our overseers, their force a ready whip, and we citizens all a kind of slave — who may only be half-enslaved, but remain only half-aware of it. What then can be said of the toll on our humanity?

One day too, writers of history will wonder how it was possible for anyone to believe in collective ideas which leave the individual unimportant. How ridiculous they will find past misunderstanding of human nature! How difficult they will find it to believe, that anyone ever believed life was something distinct from our individual perception, experience, action, thought, interest, instinct, and creation. Or, how very intensely people worked to mask that from their understanding, in order to rely on falser, shallower, more primitive, and more dangerous concepts. And this because they were not strong enough to feel distinct and responsible. A nation designed to channel the imagination into patriotic fervor and monopolize the energies of men for war, a religion which tells us "we are nothing before god" as we kneel in herd-like groups, a culture which determines who we are to be before we are born — such things will be unimaginable, one day. They will be echoes of a fragile past on the lips of historians, and humankind will move on.

This Anticonstitution must renounce the errors of the past and present. But I work to create the first of the societies of the future, a Promethean society, less out of opposition to what exists now, than out of hope for what could be, and love of what we could become.

Signed,

Colin Barth, also known by the Promethean name Phoenix
author of Anticonstitution for a Promethean Society and founding Promethean of the Promethean movement

Foreword by Darios

When reading any kind of prescriptive outline for a scheme, or strategy, or in this case a new basis for life and society, one must avoid the temptation to always think of such an outline as static. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, often extolled the idea of 'thought into motion'. He wished to avoid the affliction of petrified reasoning that seems to have become a bulwark in western thinking ever since Aristotle. We no longer live in a time when one can afford the simplicity of indulgence in black and white concepts — static, motionless and timeless concepts. We can still easily trace the influence of absolutes and thinking derived from absolutes in the modern western world. But such perspectives — one may now even call them habits I think — have not only become inappropriate but ultimately damaging, even lethal, to human beings. Absolute concepts easily turn one person against another, and by their very nature do not allow for compromise. We can see this clearly in current affairs in the applications of terms 'good' and 'evil' by parties who find themselves at odds with one another — diametrically opposed in fact, at least so each party would have us believe. Each party refers to the other as 'evil'. The application of the terms follows an obviously relative path and yet the parties themselves behave as if they each hold true to an absolute.

'May you live in interesting times', goes the old Chinese insult. We do indeed appear to live now in 'interesting times' but perhaps we can think of this as the dawn of a new era of change and opportunity, rather than the curse intended in the insult. While we see the repeated — and increasingly tragic and widespread — effects of outdated, immutable thinking, principles and concepts we at the same time have an opportunity to throw off the shackles of the past. We must not consider this lightly however — some things lie very deep in our psyches and do not take kindly to movement or activity nearby, never mind suffering usurpation by newer, more effective ideas, concepts and habits.

So, I recommend the reader approaches the Promethean Anticonstitution with these two things in mind that I have just briefly outlined (all too briefly, perhaps). Firstly, I urge the reader to remember that the Promethean movement and philosophy represents something organic and — most importantly — in motion. For too long have human beings suffered the weight of bureaucratic inertia in their ability to have new and effective ideas and techniques applied directly to their lives. Anyone who has sought a serious and effective change that would impact visibly on their own lives or others via the parliamentary system (or equivalent) will testify to this. I ask you then, the reader, to remember that this will always continue as a work in progress — that this work, and the movement that spawned it no longer considers that humanity should suffer domination from immovable absolutes, that humanity should instead embrace the 'thought in motion' that it deserves.

Secondly, I also ask the reader to pay particular attention to their reactions to what they find written here, and perhaps elsewhere in the writings of the Promethean movement. For, as I wished to highlight in my second paragraph above, some deep seated beliefs will occasionally arise — suddenly and with no warning — to bite you. We may often discover built in resistances that we were not aware of previously. These often represent mental and emotional hand-me-downs that we may have to look very deeply for to find the origins of. We often form expectations without realising we have done so — and these expectations, and the assumptions spawned from them will often lead us to reject many things out of hand. The power of habit remains an extremely powerful force in every aspect of the human being and the human life. Let us maintain awareness of this tendency then, so that due consideration can go into the reading of the ideas presented here and the thoughts, explorations and actions to which they give rise. When you read — read well!

Signed,

Danny Weston, also known by the Promethean name Darios
contributor to Anticonstitution for a Promethean Society 2003 edition and Promethean in the Promethean movement

2. The Nature of a Promethean Society

The essence of a Promethean society can be represented by two linked words, if we open each as a great door, seeing before us an expanse of implication and an intricate diversity of meaning. These words are Free and Individual. They represent the way we should live and the future we must create.

Free: the freedom of will and action, personal autonomy, allodial person and property, deliverance from restraints, the absence of dominating political power, association and interconnection among people without binds or boundaries...

Individual: defining the world from our selves outward, an environment of natural cooperative individualism, an end to collective illusions, the importance of diversity, insistence on our own value and promise, the knowledge that life constitutes an individual experience and can be an individual creation whatever we gain from one another...

A Promethean society is created for those whose purpose is the greatest personal self-expression, those who want to live to the fullest. For this, there must be freedom, not government control. There must be a belief in individuality over collectivity. The Promethean movement must engender and encourage a belief in human possibilities, both the bright buds nearly unfurled to grand, prominent blooms, and tiny seeds with merely the promise of growth. Thus we give life to future creativity and accomplishment, and to respect for others as fellow human possibilities.

3. Where Ideas Rule

There can be no government in a Promethean society, no official organization or compulsion. There must be real freedom.

A Promethean society is fundamentally different from all systems possible under government rule. A Promethean society is not based on libertarianism, in the sense of the theory of the most limited government necessary. This theory is inherently flawed if there is no necessary government, as I argue. But a libertarian in this sense of the word may insist that certain beneficial responsibilities of government are required, such as a government-controlled military, police, foreign policy and so forth. Against these anticipated objections, I say that first the means to accomplish all really necessary or desirable goals are not derived from the existence of government but originally from individual capabilities, and second that limited political power cannot long be sustained. What is political power, if not an agglomerated centralized monopoly on control, maintained by force? And behind the curtain of ritual and the rhetoric of upright duty, what is the temptation of its offices for the all-too-human heart, if not to acquire greater recognition of importance, and accumulate further power by exploiting authority already monopolized?

A careful and conscientious observer of history will learn this important lesson by example. The United States itself provides ample demonstration; its founders evidenced far more wariness of government tyranny than most modern libertarians (assuming for a moment sincerity rather than lip service among both). The American system of checks and balances and specified rights was designed to limit the power of authority. Yet, many founders who occupied its offices themselves acted to expand the powers of their offices radically — even "freedom-loving" Jefferson himself. (Ironically during the many years of British rule until the middle of the 18th century, when the sovereign and Parliament took a more intensive interest in managing their affairs, the American colonists had probably experienced appreciably more individual freedom than they would ever have after the Constitution of 1787.) By now, American government officials have power of an entirely different order. The presidency alone has far exceeded the powers of the British constitutional monarch, under whose rule Imperial oppression originally inspired the founding fathers' revolution. At best, the Bill of Rights has now come to represent those few rights which the government does not have over us, instead of specifically protecting certain critical rights, among all our others. If that is the legacy of the founding fathers themselves, what can be the implication, if not the failure of limiting government?

(For further support for this point from an economic approach, see The Minimal State and Fascism, part nine of Promethean Capitalism.)

Any system founded in practice upon the principle of power, not on the purpose of individual life, must ultimately value power over life. The foundation of a Promethean society rests on the rule of Promethean ideas which improve individual lives, instead of the political rule of some over others. This rule of ideas distinguishes Promethean society from mere anarchy as well; anarchy is literally just an absence of rule. In itself, the term implies nothing about guidance, or order. Without the right ideals in practice in a natural order, surely a condition of anarchy can only be sustained peacefully by an impossible powerlessness of impotent and disorganized people, for otherwise people would easily be dominated by slight force — life at its starkest and most brutish. Quickly or eventually a haphazard anarchy deteriorates to government and the order of the gun, metaphorically if not literally.

A Promethean wants neither a world ruled by force, as affirmed by all governmentalists, nor a humbly powerless world as idealized by some anarchists. The more power to achieve, and the more people are capable of expressing themselves, the more the Promethean dream will have been fulfilled. A Promethean wants a world ruled by the power of salutary ideas, especially the ideal of life and devotion to life.

In every society someone must rule in a sense; someone must be powerful, i.e. capable through one's own virtues or another's, and someone must have influence. But we should consider the means of that rule an issue at least as relevant as the identity and motivations of the rulers. Political power is based on the idea of rulers in office, who are backed by force. But it remains possible to rule through the influence of ideas, because ideas can have great power. Although technically a Promethean society is anarchic for the reason that it has no government, it requires more than just that circumstance, and benefits from more. A Promethean society will benefit from deliberate guidance through the influence of Promethean ideas, and a chosen, not imposed cooperative order which results from that guidance, part of a whole picture of natural order from the "chaotic" results of all the countless choices made by individuals.

(For a discussion of natural, "chaotic" order see Exchange and Markets, part three of Promethean Capitalism.)

Ideas always really rule underneath. Every act makes many implicit assumptions. Beneath every pattern of behavior for a person or society, principles and ideas show through. Philosophy in an inclusive sense is separate from nothing. But I also speak of understanding and acknowledging principles as the guides of society, and adopting the rule of ideas as a conscious and overt institution. We must go further with the rule of ideas than burying them underneath less important trappings and illusions, where they can be manipulated in secrecy. The influence of both concepts and values must be admitted; by openly establishing a rule of ideas in the hands of Prometheans we can make this true backbone of any society among people reliable and salutary in effect.

The notion that order can only exist through bureaucratic institutions supported by force must be overcome. There is no need for official approval of practices that reflect and apply beliefs, as this sanction only rubber-stamps what can be done anyway. The smoke screen of officiality obscures and interferes unnecessarily. More importantly, whenever a government obtains official status in a society — whenever people have acknowledged political power — all the symptoms of enforced power arise, the bureaucracy becomes increasingly bloated and stupid and sluggish, and the meddlesomeness and abuses of government become increasingly more frequent. Political power corrupts, with absolute reliability.

But where the needed ideas rule, especially individualism and freedom as ideals, where enough people have attained a life-interest, real freedom and order are both possible. And moreover: with Promethean values, expressed wisely, a society of people can function brilliantly.

(More later on the rule of ideas in the foundation of such a society.)

One very important principle behind a Promethean society is this: we as individuals are the real source of ability to act in association, and freedom proves necessary for cooperative achievement. In a Promethean society, beneficial functions which have in the past been conducted in the name of government, claimed as achievements in the name of authority, can and will be accomplished by individuals and their free associations.

4. Free Enterprise

Economic achievement forms a significant dimension of living in freedom. The economy of a Promethean society, or Promethean capitalism, can be concisely characterized as the free interactive achievement of individuals allowed to subjectively define their own understanding of capital according to their own priorities. The socioeconomic system commonly called "capitalism" today we can better characterize as fascism in disguise.

Fascism in the general sense involves authoritarian government control intertwined with limited freedom of action. Fascism as an economic system is defined by the partnership of business and government, and the interventions of government in commerce and commerce in government. Fascism tends to demonstrate more economic success than the total government ownership of communism, more productivity through relatively more freedom. (Socialism usually means essentially the same thing as fascism, government control intertwined with limited freedom, but with less of an emphasis on the collaboration of government and industry, and more on communistic centralized ownership.)

Fascism exhibits intrinsic financial instability because it can only partially imitate the natural behavior of a free market, and can never have the efficiency and productivity of an unrestricted economy. Fascism also tends toward social instability, especially because fascist governments seek to exploit collective origins of prideful strife such as nationalism and racism, and pursue military power projection and war in order to maintain and extend control through political power. The most authoritarian fascist systems are almost as self-consuming as communism; very short and predictable spans are endemic to those governments, unless they resort to imperialist expansion. For instance, WWII was planned in advance, as early as 1933, to slightly precede central bankruptcy in the early 1940s. Nazi Germany may be the most recognized example of modern fascism. However, most modern nations such as the United States and Japan are clearly also examples of a less extreme fascism (a word with a telling etymology from Italian fascio meaning political group or bundle and the Roman fasces, wrapped bundles of rods including an axe carried ceremoniously in ancient Rome, and appropriated as a symbol by Mussolini and other political organizations such as the US government; fasces have signified penal, regal, and imperial power at various times in history, and collective national unity, particularly in the modern age, often associated with e pluribus unum — "from many one" — or "united we stand..."). Likewise, the generally more authoritarian "People's" Republic of China has not been evolving from communism to a free capitalism, at least thus far; it has been evolving from abject communism to a severe fascism akin to National Socialist Germany in certain social controls and military mobilization of economic resources, though apparently a much lighter fascism in some respects (freer in terms of economic interference, and with less taxation than the United States). The differences between the economies of all of the modern era fascist states, from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to China, the US, and Japan, have been only in local peculiarities and degrees of control (including not only economic control, but also control of other expression). The basic conceptions ruling underneath and within remain very similar, and similarly undesirable.

And that explains why semantic contests are actually not so important here. The basic socioeconomic problem remains political power, authority, which readily becomes authoritarian. Throughout history, people have resisted authoritarian domination operating under almost every socioeconomic-or-sociopolitical label. Though how they fought has varied as much as their other beliefs, the common bond among freedom fighters of every nominal allegiance, which so many antagonists-by-misunderstanding have in fact shared, has been a refusal to suffer the oppression of political control over individual, personal choice. That many freedom fighters have failed to recognize this as common ground or even to enunciate that motivation at all, or that so many have unwisely compromised with a new authority, does not alter the importance of the vision they once almost grasped.

Fascism, communism, socialism... these controlled economies function all too much the same, as variations on that old monstrous, withering theme: control over individual expression, in particular economic action.

But, Promethean capitalism does not amount to just another variant of a controlled economy. Promethean capitalism involves an economy truly based upon what each person adopts as value in a basic, personal, profound, and unlimited sense, with the freedom from force which is necessary in order to pursue any sort of valued capital without interference. Thus Promethean capitalism improves upon the best elements of the tradition of capitalism.

Promethean capitalism, real free-market capitalism, preserves the independence of business from compulsion. The first Promethean society will be the first really free-market capitalist society, with the first modern economy of entirely voluntary and unrestricted exchange. A Promethean society will have the unprecedented virtue of not suffering from the congenital, stifling, and often terminal symptoms of fascism. Such a free market is a natural, organic circumstance. It is a complex system in mathematical scientific terms, not a managed system. In other words, this will finally be capitalism as an economic system, but not a political system. Capitalism properly understood is nothing more, or less, than the economic dimension of individualism. It incorporates all the benefits and pitfalls of individual expression and self-interest. In short, it is just the economic aspect of a free life.

Like all other dimensions of life, this Promethean economy will be managed only through the adoption of standards, and other voluntary contracts and agreements. Examples include the arbitration of property and environmental stewardship. As another important example, a Promethean society must function without an officially-enforced standard of money. A government monopoly on currency cannot be part of a free market. Indeed, official currency is perhaps the prime means of social control; what economic power could any organization have more pervasive than exclusive rights to print and manipulate money, and thereby influence the psychology of value itself? Thus every government's insistence on a regulated, legalized, and above all exclusive currency. Government and government money have no place in a truly free society, which must include voluntary exchange of every thing of value, from raw materials to ideas to money. Instead, a private standard or standards will be adopted at foundation, which may change in the face of competition. Privately "printed" currency is already successful in electronic forms, and any standard of currency will function which is accepted by both parties of an exchange.

A real free market does not necessarily allow for the ultimate remedies to all the economic ills which may be encountered; there can be mistreatment in a free market, and unfortunate chaotic events will still occur (see Charities, part ten of Promethean Capitalism). Nor does a free market provide the greatest and most profound remedy in itself. Integrated strength and the motivation of a life-interest are the greatest remedy for human problems. A free market is simply the best economic circumstance to encourage that motivation, and the possibilities of self-expression. Practically, people must be able to protect themselves from abuse by others within a free market — but they must do so through desirable means. Any checks on the practices of business will be through voluntary means only. Because of this totally voluntary basis, the severest problems such as the monopolies of controlled economies will not exist, and the balance of choices will have great power. In a Promethean society, each person can choose with complete freedom to patronize one business over another, and each business owner can choose customers. Every employee can decide whether to work for a business, every business can decide whether to hire. When business and commercial practices are believed despicable, the issue can be decided by the response of partners, employees, and customers, with the advice of private agencies who monitor and arbitrate. (Imagine for example Better Business Bureaus which have acquired serious impact.) Maintaining a reputation for quality and honesty in business and employment will acquire even greater importance than it has today.

A most magnificent effect of the freedom of each person to make economic decisions for themselves will be unprecedented and presently unimaginable prosperity. For people to cooperate and freely circulate their talent, wealth, and knowledge — without every exchange of significance being monitored, or regulated, or taxed, or prohibited — will be a magnificent thing. Opportunities will abound to reward both talent and hard work. The power of cooperation will have no limits, producing an abundance of everything desired in that free market.

(After the links noted above, see also four other essays on Promethean capitalism: Corporations and Corporatism, Commercialism, The Economic Zero-Sum Fallacy, and Nature and Promethean Capitalism, parts eleven through fourteen of the series Promethean Capitalism.)

5. A Promethean Renaissance

Promethean capitalism is part of a greater idea behind a Promethean society: the freedom to define goals subjectively, as one desires, and the freedom to pursue them. Promethean capitalism describes just the economic dimension of that openness for self-expression.

In every society which accepts the right of authority to legislate and enforce laws, there always looms the threat of laws designed to restrict creativity, or manipulating enforcement of existing laws to the same end. Under the guise of decency or upholding societal standards, artists, scientists, and thinkers of all kinds have consistently undergone official harassment, even under those governments which guarantee freedom of expression. The prospect of eventually being able to exert control over artistic and ideological expression through legislation has usually served as enough incentive for the efforts of censorship movements.

Historically, the sciences have been repeatedly plagued by the attacks of ignorant people, often those with powerful political influence. The "Dark Ages" of scientific discovery supplies one grievous example in which great scientists and thinkers were silenced and executed by the keepers of religious orthodoxy. But today also, even remarkably advantageous discoveries such as genetically-engineered foods and medicines or stem-cell research often evoke fear regardless of evidence, and consequently, indiscriminate political leverage toward regulatory bureaucracy (which actually empowers fascist industry-government collusion). But in a Promethean society, discoveries in every field of learning will advance with great rapidity, unhindered by the enforcement of small-mindedness, fear, and senseless limits.

The innovation and application of technology will be augmented, unhindered by the taxation of productivity or by control through the enforced, legal grants called patents. Governmental patents restrict the cooperative accumulation of ingenuity, and very often engender unnatural monopolies for corporations by enforcing perpetuating intellectual property, from the old Bell/AT&T telephone monopoly to Monsanto's genetically-engineered seeds today. This does not necessarily mean that free agreements to respect the exclusivity of an invention should not exist within an industry. But making voluntary agreements makes competition possible, at least, and not illegal. Official patents also require the involvement and intervention of government in inventions, and other useful ideas. The institution of patents is rarely questioned, though it should be. It is yet another institution of economic fascism mistakenly accepted as necessary. (See also Property and Arbitration, part four of Promethean Capitalism.)

Prosperity will enable those whose interests or abilities do not lie in the creation of monetary wealth to have the leisure necessary to create wealth in their own way. Already, limited freedom has begun to make this possible; art which does not pay for itself has found a home in the free time general prosperity provides to artists. Once, art was generally reserved for those who were independently wealthy, or sponsored by nobility or royalty — sponsored by government, in other words. This excluded most artists from the means necessary for their art, or else controlled or influenced the substance of their creativity. By now, most creative people have some partial opportunity to dedicate themselves to their creation, but only because predecessors have had whatever freedom they have had to make their own money, and devise more productive and prosperous ways which can circulate everywhere. The "information age" economy which gives me the leisure to write these words demonstrates one legacy of these individuals. Devoting oneself to creativity and art will be even more unhindered with the greater prosperity and freedom of expression in a Promethean society.

Education and learning proves important for everyone in any society, at any age. But the assisted development of the young is an especially important issue. The most terrible intellectual failure of a centralized fascist society is surely centralized education. It certainly appears charitable to say that one public school in one-hundred adequately fosters its students. The number of avid young minds which have been turned off in those stale institutions, the number of spirits broken, and the overall cultural degeneration which has resulted through public education, seems absolutely beyond estimation. Immature human beings need support, and stimulation, and teachers who care about them and the work of teaching. Instead, most public school students are incarcerated in a bureaucratic prison of soul-crushing boredom, rote memorization, wasted time, apathy, ridicule, and practiced uniformity. These unfortunates may not encounter their first opportunities for real learning until college, if they have not already been warped and poisoned beyond hope of recovering to become confident and curious human beings. In a Promethean society, educational institutions will exist to serve students, not the state, not teachers' unions, not an artificial orthodoxy, and not the petty egos one encounters so frequently in schools today. Private education will evolve to awaken young minds to the world, not to indoctrinate them, as teachers experiment with new techniques and philosophies of teaching, unrestricted by centralized programs and controls. Experimentation in a variety of methods and schools of education proves essential to discover how to teach well and what is worth learning. The choice between different ways is likewise essential.

"The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others."
— Grayson Kirk

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
— Yeats

In a Promethean society, art and learning will flourish, and cultural and creative flowering may surpass the memory of the European Renaissance, the Golden Age of Islam, or the peak of Classical Greece. In the retrospect of far distant futures, those who inherit the legacy of a Promethean renaissance may record its history as a more rapid, breathtaking, and essential advancement of civilization than the accumulated progress in ancient China, India, or Mesopotamia.

The power of ideas provides a special means of furthering such advancement: working to foster and circulate an understanding of the value of creative and cultural self-expression, in disparate areas of accomplishment. Easily, people forget the worth of what other people do; they become myopically focused on their own interests, and disrespect other disciplines. From studio arts to business, philosophy to architecture, writing to chemistry, technological innovation to filmmaking, creativity lives behind many masks. Promoting this diversity too is a task for the Promethean movement, and rewarding in itself.

6. Foundation

Somewhere in a carefully prepared and chosen place, the Promethean movement will one day found the first Promethean society, according to the philosophy of Prometheanism. A part of our world will have been carefully selected among other candidates, especially for advanced progress in understanding and becoming receptive to the ideals and ideas of Prometheanism, as a result both of the efforts of the Promethean movement to educate the people already living there and their own brave efforts to come to grips with something new, and improve their own lives. The Promethean movement will also assist the emigration of people from societies and mindsets they can and should leave behind, to create and develop a new society. Prometheans will guide the birth and evolution of this new world according to the principles of individual freedom and diverse individuality. And from this beginning, this shining example, a Promethean world will later grow.

In this founding, the Prometheans will in no way incorporate discrimination based on collective myths, such as racism, nationalism, culturalism or sexism. Prometheanism requires a thoroughly individualist perspective; this Promethean society will be based on the identity of each individual as a separate, independently-understood person, each with individual self-expression. I would guess that especially moving beyond culturalism, meaning blanket notions of culture and particularly monocultural bias, might be the foundation's most important supersession of a collectivist myth.

Cultural conflict has probably been the major reason why division by collective has scarred human history, and prevented the cooperation of individuals. Just as we should not view cultures as distinct entities, but rather accumulated traditions which multiple individuals share, we should not make the mistake of comparing whole cultures against one another. Cultures are internally diverse, because they arise from an exchange of ideas between different people. This casts a similar absurdity upon considering multiple cultures incomparably equal (that insidious postmodern trend of so-called "multiculturalism"), and calling one culture the overall inferior of another (a justification for the European conquest of Africa and the Americas). Not only does any such attitude fail to make sense, it describes cultures too poorly to be useful, and it does considerable harm. To benefit from all cultural traditions, we must be open to evaluating the varied elements within cultures, leaving behind some elements while drawing upon others. For example: studying Aztec culture reveals a centralized religious institution of human sacrifice and an obsession with hopelessly owing one's life to mystical forces, rather than living for oneself. But every culture has worthy aspects; in this case, trade was highly developed, agriculture was sophisticated, an exalted valuation of beauty pervaded Aztec life, Aztec poetry can be enthralling, and Aztec architecture amazed the visiting conquistadors. And people from so-called "Western culture" did found an intellectual tradition endorsing individual freedom, yet, these ideas were applied very intermittently indeed. Every cultural accumulation of traditions and ideas has boasted grand progressions, and stubbornly clutched primitive or uninspired antiquities. In any culture, woven together from materials disparate in time and mentality, we even find, tightly interlaced, both durable parts that fit us well and fraying scraps that clothe us poorly, but we need not copy the whole patchwork for ourselves. Applying this lesson offers a profound advantage for one individual, or a society of individuals.

One of the most encouraging traditions in America has been "the melting pot," a healthy individualist process in which many European traditions mixed together in peace, more seamlessly than they ever had in Europe. The fluid diversity of the melting pot appears responsible for most of the cultural depth in America. If only this openness had extended as seamlessly to non-Europeans — and had continued as strongly up through modern day, instead of the modern tradition of group separatism. (Still, it is due to the legacy of that American tradition of cultural openness, that I now do not consider it misplaced to spend the same day cooking middle-eastern couscous like sticky rice, practicing yoga on an Afghan rug, using an ancient Norse myth as a metaphor, and reading Nietzsche and Jung — who themselves drew on many cultures in their writing.)

The Promethean founding principle of diversity holds that a society grows stronger for drawing on the best of many cultures, just as any group grows stronger which can draw on the best of many different individual perspectives. During the foundation of the first Promethean society, emigration to join that society must be open to the inhabitants of every part of the world. Discrimination based on collective myths such as racism and ethnic hatred will not be incorporated in that foundation. A major task for Prometheans will be ensuring this and devaluing such foul attitudes before, during and after the founding, so that diversity may bring richer lives for all in cooperative self-expression, and never become a source of strife and division.

In encouraging people to come, Prometheans will be able to draw out many of the most creative, most driven, and most individual people in the world — who are very often the most oppressed and undervalued in the world today. Just as many of the brightest within National Socialist Germany fled to the relative freedom of America, or European immigrants crowded to Ellis Island in the last century, there will be a new hopeful exodus. The first Promethean society will be able to represent just such a contrast of freedom and opportunity to the nation-states of today.

Ideas have a primal influence within any society. Shared ideas are the most basic foundation of any society, and even more in a Promethean society. With the rule of ideas, Prometheans will be able to preserve and promote individual self-expression and further individual strength, while minimizing pressures which constrain and suppress individuality and individual development. They will help to establish individualism and individual choice as social values. They will teach opposition to collectivism, because many collective ideas and their application threaten any society of individuals. They will demonstrate tolerance and cooperation in finding civilized, sophisticated methods of solving disputes and ameliorating problems, if called upon. In this way and other ways Prometheans will become examples of the civilization they wish to build, for actions become ideas.

Prometheans will preside over the start of this society, in order to guide and initiate, but they will not ever assume a governmental role with political power, even in the process of founding. No one should be trusted with such power. Who could safely be trusted with the accepted, instituted right to enforce his choices over the choices of other people? Government does not provide a reliable temporary means; political power, once granted, is rarely dissolved, only transferred or increased. Instead, Prometheans will become leaders through the persuasion of ideas and ideology, just as they will have brought about their "rule" not by violence or voting but by communication, education, and inspiration.

A primary mission of the Prometheans and other members of the movement in the founding of this society will be the protection of individual choice and freedom and security. At the birth of the first Promethean society, alternatives to government institution for this purpose will be started by Prometheans, or arise naturally from among the other members of that society.

7. Beyond Law

"There are such as consider it virtue to say, "Virtue is necessary";
but at bottom they believe only that the police is necessary."
— Nietzsche

People must learn to rely on their own judgment, on their own choice, and on their own sense of responsibility. Only then will these faculties become fully realized, much as any child needs opportunities to practice independence in order to mature. But what of lapses in civilized behavior, and the lack of respect for others? What of the occasional but inevitable violations of others, which result from complexes and weakness? The lack of integrity in some, which leads to the direct affront and injury of the bodies or property of others, necessitates having a social response in place. But should it be legislation and law enforcement?

First of all, law is not effective at real improvement. Legislation does not act to give people truly integrated strength as people — only developing our self-expression and our sense of ourselves can do this. Laws prohibit and force. But the most desirable and effective way to cause a human being to do something, is to make him want to. And, the most desirable and effective way to make a human being refrain from doing something, is to make him not want to. Compared with law, the rule of ideas is completely preferable; persuasion through beliefs provides a consistently better option.

Criminal laws exist to control behavior defined as unseemly, bad, or evil by government legislators. Other laws are passed to make citizens "better people" or improve them morally. But by what definition of what is good, and what is bad? People believe in the ability of laws to prevent what is bad and encourage what is good... but this even sounds naive and immature, does it not? If we proceed to look further with eyes clear and wide open, we can see: that simple belief is founded on so much shaky assumption and faulty premise, that it has the quality of folk superstition or the make-believe of children...

Blind faith in the principle of law ignores the subjective nature of morality. A morality as understood here is merely an attempt at a codified accounting of certain mental and physiological experiences one finds very comfortable or upsetting. These experiences are naturally subject to perspective, and so there are as many moral attitudes and moral sensibilities as there are perspectives. Even though the point of a morality usually aims at social conformity, commonalities and generalizations among moral perspectives constantly branch into divergence. Cultures and subcultures are rarely internally consistent in ideas of what is seemly and what is unseemly. Morality tends to be reduced to simplistic principles in an attempt to make it established and permanent as the recognized standard of behavior, most especially Thou-Shalt-Nots or similar admonitions, but the definition of right and wrong changes nonetheless. Life has the characteristics of fluidity and change. It would be simple if laws could be passed down which were always applicable, but we need changing definitions because of the factor of change in our lives. Considering these things, why should we be surprised at the endless and bitter argument over the institution of moralities in the static form of law? Yet, a legal morality makes even superficial points of morality subjects for official enforcement and recrimination, as if official social morality has been decided with overwhelming and enduring confidence.

Furthermore, law assumes the worth of hammering out and enforcing a societal morality, some morality. We should not be afraid to ask: why assume this? For what reasons has this been assumed by others? And should we now agree? We should not be afraid to ask: Why adopt a morality, at all?

If life demands adaptation to its fluidity and change, what can come from codifying "what we as a society believe in?" What can we gain from inscribing a momentary fragment of belief and holding it aloft as the rock solid tablet of law, as though people should not adapt what they believe — and will not change their beliefs anyway, their understanding of the law, if not the letter of the law? It proves limiting to rely on static definitions of what we recognize as beneficial. Laws cannot fit what living really is or should become. Like concretized moral fortifications, laws form inflexible, bulky, unsubtle boundaries even when effectively reinforced, but when permeable to dangerous transgressors they still persist as daily obstacles for everyone else. Instead of struggling to establish some unnatural permanence, we need only make sure that we make the most of change, and in other contexts people know this and use the knowledge well. Yet in terms of establishing and interpreting law, official legislative and judicial systems render it all but impossible. Their inefficient monopoly is backed by force. So, we cannot safely push aside the rigid framework of the legal process, a jury-rigged juggernaut lumbering along, too slow and clumsy, lacking the pliability individuals need to shape and reshape social interaction at the personal level.

We should also question why we should be pretending that a society believes anything at all. I believe, you believe, a lawmaker believes, but what does it mean for a society to believe in right and wrong? Such an expression really means: some portion of the population wishes to force their opinions on people who hold other opinions, and to succeed in this, they depend on invoking their opinion on behalf of society. They do so to instill a moral, psychosomatic, "gut" reaction, so that enough pressure can be mustered to influence those who would otherwise have been beyond their reach. This applies to a wide spectrum of rights and wrongs. Some are widely held beliefs, such as the immorality of cold-blooded murder. In such a case, those who approve of cold-blooded murder are too few to have much significance. No, to invoke morality for a society seems most useful for those with contentious opinions, opinions which might be strongly opposed otherwise, from anti-abortion activists, to the pseudo-scientific environmental indoctrinators of public school children. How successful would the former be in exerting influence, if they informed pregnant women of the results of their options with some objectivity? Or the latter, if young children were not presented with a cruel cult of hunters, loggers and whalers versus an idyllic, bowdlerized ecosystem inhabited by cartoonish animals? More important is the example of state control overall: supporting the government must be made a moral requirement, and disobeying and even questioning too much must be damned with moral force in morally evocative language, as unpatriotic, antisocial, uncharitable, anarchistic, radical, dangerous, treasonous, criminal — otherwise reasonable judgment would prevail against so very many things done in the name of state, society, government, country, community, family, common decency. Asserting general morality thus serves as a tool for social manipulation, based on simplifying, stultifying, and propagandizing unthinking reactions. Must we always live this way, like societies of immature children?

We do have an alternative to the morass and mess of instituting morality. The important goal involves striving for a complex, adaptable understanding of what has value, and what should be avoided. Virtually nothing proves useful and productive and life-advancing in every situation, virtually nothing always proves harmful or useless or life-retarding. Surpass codified, overly-simplified understanding... surpass morality. Prometheanism envisions an adaptable understanding of what advances life, unlike all moral systems, from Objectivism to the spectrum of Christian sects. In that sense, we might call it amoral, or postmoral, or metamoral. One day this complexity will be possible for many people. In the meantime, we must allow each to form judgments for themselves. We must have freedom, we must avoid the temptation to officially enforce morality (or amorality), because we insist that we know what is good and what is bad, and others do not. Although preventing the transgression of individual freedom is necessary in a Promethean society, this function need not require officially enforced morality. It does not seem inconceivable that at some future time this function will no longer be associated with morality and its transgression at all — rather, simply identified among things obviously beneficial and necessary to life's advancement, known to have a role almost as natural and basic as growth or sustenance.

The beneficial effect of law amounts to restricting actions committed through human weakness. But, laws also perpetuate this weakness, as members of society become dependent upon them. Laws are contradictory; they exist for human weakness, yet they preserve it. Because so much interest is devoted to the process of making laws, interpreting laws, and enforcing laws to manage transgressions, because money and effort and belief remains focused on this system, we do not come to expect anything else from one another besides the transgressions to which the institution of law relates. Trusting in human weakness and preparing for it so seriously and dutifully becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anything so justified in fear of what could happen deserves our mistrust. Without control — if laws and law enforcement were dissolved in the whole world instantly, right now — there would be chaos, of course! But people become that irresponsible only when reliance is placed upon enforcement more than on creating the sort of mindset which can make wise and considerate choices without being forced to do so. And there are many people, even now, who conduct themselves with respect regardless of what they are forced to do. They do this because they have integrated strength and respect for themselves, which causes them to respect others from a natural sense of honor — a parallel of their self-respect. And many more can become this, in a more conducive society.

And we cannot afford to rely on law for another reason: even if a specific law seems beneficial now, it will serve to legitimate and perpetuate the system of authority. Law is an institution of governmental power. The vaunted idea "law" is an establishment of government control over your life to limit self-expression. Throughout your life this control will not always be exerted for beneficial purposes. It will be abused. And, dependence upon the institution of political power weakens people. It takes over for us, increasingly detracting from our own faculties.

Law enforcement is based on reaction to the transgression of a static code, law — rather than doing what is necessary or beneficial in a situation, using an adaptable basis that considers evolution and change. That reaction of law distills to little more than punishment. Punishment in retribution constitutes the practice of criminal law and criminal law enforcement. This purpose of the criminal "justice" system ought to produce more objections than it does, but it seem encouraging that there are now many people who are able to sense the foulness of the motivation involved. What advantage do we derive, in human terms, from exacting revenge? Yes, revenge, let us recognize the perverse hunger so often called justice. If this system were simply keeping order and protecting people, it would dissolve disturbances, confine dangerous people, track down stolen property, and so on. But it also includes terrible prisons and hard labor, it incarcerates people for consensual acts, and it even executes. It destroys human life without necessity. This can only continue as an institution because the primeval appetite for cold revenge still dwells within the hearts of so many supporters. However indeliberately complicit each human being, the justice institution feeds this hunger, and feeds upon it. But the principle of law, too, props up this lingering institution of revenge. Without law, there would not be this means for organized and socially acceptable vengefulness.

"And others are proud of their handful of justice and commit outrages against all things for its sake, till the world is drowned in their injustice. Oh, how ill the word virtue comes out of their mouths! And when they say, "I am just," it always sounds like "I am just — revenged." With their virtue they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies, and they exalt themselves only to humble others."

— Nietzsche

A Promethean society must go beyond enforced power, beyond social compulsion, beyond artificially-limited expectations, beyond glorifying institutional revenge as justice. Law cannot serve as the fundamental institution of a free society in which the individual can and should advance. There can be no official legislation or enforcement, or any other centrally monopolized regulations. Law in this sense is a basic limitation.

Instead, disputes will be settled through private arbitration. This can initially be provided by the Promethean movement during the founding, in the event that no such services arise soon enough. Civil law is easily replaced by adopted standards of independent arbitration. The private, independent replacement of criminal courts requires cooperation of independent arbitrators with private police services.

Such security services would be adopted naturally as standards. People often desire and sometimes need assurance of their protection, including their property, beyond their own capacity for self-defense. They also need preservation of order, the most common service provided by the police today, to dissolve social disruptions and stop unruly behavior. Using one form of support organization or another, private guards and detectives would meet this demand and become adopted as trusted standards. In a Promethean society, these services will be provided only by private, independent sources, with initial establishment of services dedicated to individual protection accomplished through the Promethean movement, if necessary. Just as private fire fighters might be supported by fire insurance, just as private security services like those watching over homes and businesses today might link with the resources of insurance groups to guarantee protection of property, people themselves might be effectively protected by another future partnership evolved from familiar roles — and in the rare occasion for it, insurance might provide for private investigators to apprehend those who have injured others and prevent further harm, as overseen by the post-criminal counterparts of judges, the functional descendants of today's arbitrators. But whatever the manner of their evolution from what we know and use today, the services adopted as standards would be as independent and unmonopolized as any de facto standard that has resulted from choices.

The most important point in the operation of such services without law concerns the motivations behind them. These services would exist to serve members of society, either for profit or as charitable organizations, not as political appendages removed from the interests of their clients. They would have no barbaric legal mandate to use deadly force against individual people. Thus, they would be the most likely to be streamlined to act only in beneficial ways: protection of life and property, separation of really dangerous people from others, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They would lack incentive to do otherwise, and would have great incentive not to exceed their purpose. Otherwise, they would not be used as a standard.

And with the Promethean rule of ideas, motivations would be guided further by ideals. Nothing purely consensual can ever be a direct violation of others, and therefore, those acting as standards in the Promethean tradition would have no cause to interfere in consensual matters. In methodology, those who believe in Prometheanism do not value revenge or cruelty, they despise them as signs of weakness. Punishments do not strengthen individuals; punishments weaken individuals. A Promethean society, and the private standards of enforcement and arbitration adopted there, will use other means. Social pressure, rejection and boycotts can be effective for less extreme offenders of person or property, especially when organized through independent agency or agreements between companies. Arbitrators or other groups who keep databases of unscrupulous businesses and individuals, such as violators of contract, can advise people of those they would be unwise to trust. Companies can agree to band together and refuse to deal with companies who do not fulfill their obligations — which supports their mutual interest. In the worst cases, measures such as confinement or exile from the society would be used, not harmful violations of person. And the preference in every case will be to heal whatever complexes and weakness are responsible for such behavior. Finally, the frequency and extremity of actions which hurt others will be decreased with the success of the Promethean mission; augmenting the integrated strength of people, a process of development made possible by greater self-expression, will lessen weakness and its symptoms.

All beneficial services now accomplished by judicial government and government police — the jobs of arbitrator and guard, the roles of decision and security — can be accomplished without any governmental, bureaucratic judicial and enforcement systems, without law, and beyond law. This replacement of criminal justice systems, and this evolution beyond recrimination, offers to us a rare opportunity to guide a tremendous development in human history. I look forward to achievement of this goal with great expectation, and to the heroic responsibility for it.

8. We Defeat Ourselves... By What We Believe

Today it seems almost expected for many within a society to have terrible problems. But we should teach ourselves to expect more. Problems such as the world currently experiences can only be explained by malicious and mistaken ideas. With the assumption of necessary or desirable functions by private hands, and with the effects of freedom and individualism instead of coercion and collectivism, real solutions arise for grievous problems. In time, Prometheanism can be the ultimate solution to many difficulties of human manufacture. Some are quickly solved by the elimination of government interference, others require the adoption of new ideas supported by continuing dedication.

Some modern examples:

The real solution to poverty. Widespread poverty, misunderstood as a distinct phenomenon, an enemy to "war" against, really describes a combined lack of prosperity we can almost invariably trace to interference and limits restricting the creation of wealth through achievement. Such a lack of prosperity breeds the perception of hopelessness, and recasts achievements of the past as unattainable ghosts. A depressed economy becomes accepted and expected. When I visit, for instance, parts of south-side Chicago which are so dilapidated and ruined they might as well have been carpet-bombed, I am always amazed at how many denizens come to find such surroundings acceptable, instead of wondering why once-thriving streets now barely have one store. The primary reason: a fascoid economy, and socialist redistribution programs — which are always restrictive and violate individual property, but are usually botched as well, and often spectacularly so. One result of the real freedom in a Promethean society will be incredible and unprecedented prosperity, from the absolutely liberated market of Promethean capitalism. Prosperity comes through freedom to create wealth, and in this Promethean society there will be no controls placed on the productivity of individual and cooperative effort. Traded wealth will flow as water through affluents relieved of blockages, mires and diversions. All charity will be voluntary. None will be based on compulsory redistribution with its enormous waste and detrimental effects, especially the weakening effects of dependence. These effects are clearly demonstrated by programs like "social welfare."

Illegal and controlled substances, and the drug war. Recognition of individual freedom demands the freedom to make mistakes which affect oneself, as well as succeed on one's own terms, and freedom's overall benefit excuses those mistakes. Therefore, whether one approves of drug use or not remains beside the issue of trying to control it. Freedom remains the issue. Whether cocaine kills, or tobacco could affect a disease in your body, your body must belong to you regardless, to treat however you see fit, to seek out benefit and risk, health and harm, with the full discretion befitting self-expression — something irreplaceable by bureaucratic fiat or popular opinion. (Note that in a society where no one is forced to pay for others' health problems, there is less excuse to police others' health habits — otherwise, policing supposedly unhealthy eating will likely follow close behind.) In a Promethean society without a government to perpetrate a "drug war," no one would waste billions of taxed dollars fighting an impossible struggle against the rule of supply and demand, to control individual choice. Historically, such attempts to force people to be healthy usually have a great deal more to do with cementing government control (for example, the now commonplace violations of person to search for illegal substances), or fascist industry-government alliances and leverage, such as Hearst's manipulation of marijuana into a feared illegal drug to insulate his industries from the competition of hemp products.

Defining marriage. Societies currently involve a legal definition of marriage, with different tax rules for married couples, the prosecution of bigamy, etc. Without an official, enforced definition of marriage, everyone would remain free to define marriage any way they would like. This would help to resolve issues such as homosexual marriage, and religious and cultural conflicts over what does and does not seem appropriate for a marriage and for families.

The end of police brutality and the solution to judicial injustice. In a Promethean society arbitration, individual protection, and the guarantee of property and contractual agreements (such as loans, credit, etc.) are all services which are voluntarily patronized. Due to the power of choice between competitive services (advised by independent agencies) a disapproving perception will quickly disempower private police and security personnel who use excessive force, biased arbitrators, and any independent standard which does not inspire confidence. This power of choice appears evident even today in the more privately-owned industries; when poor or dangerous goods and services are marketed, the reputation of that company suffers and they lose business (unless they receive substantial fascistic support). Obviously, people will be even more responsive to the bad reputations of private police or arbitrators, because employing those services requires even more trust. The abuses which are commonplace in contemporary criminal justice systems will be rapidly and consistently eradicated.

Rampant crime. Crime becomes a concept out of place in a Promethean society. Crime involves the idea of guilt, a debilitating social pressure, and ill describes the matter at hand: substantive harm inflicted on others. And crime basically means illegality, which a Promethean society does not have. But there are direct attacks on the person and property of others, also considered crimes in most societies today, which are terrible in a Promethean context. Such acts as theft, murder, and rape will not be commonplace in a Promethean society. The greater reliability of independent, competitive police services will help to contain them, and prosperity helps to lessen the appeal of stealing, but these both offer indirect solutions. We find the larger solution in the Promethean mission of strengthening people, in an integrated sense. The "criminal type" lacks strength in some of the most important areas. Such people typically do not have enough self-assuredness, self-control, and self-awareness, and lack a sense of autonomy, ability and fulfillment. They lash out from insecurity, fear, and the irrational spite bred by such weakness. They are only strong in the sense that they are independent enough and capable enough to act on their impulses. In every person we can identify elements of strength and elements of weakness. The "criminal type" incorporates a sort of leverage between those elements, the weakness using the strength to commit grievous acts. Except for harm caused by accident, a kind of integrated weakness leads people to harm others. In short, people who victimize and exploit are not healthy people. They need to be assisted in healing themselves, if this can be accomplished — for the ultimate solution is to further balanced, integrated strength within members of society. Prison offers no solution at all. Prisons grind people down, at least as they now exist. Inmates lose much of the integrated, balanced strength they did have, becoming weak and feeling less confident, and less human. This ruination has the reverse effect of what is needed. Prisoners are released weak in spirit, yet physically capable, naturally, of committing crimes. In fact, they are far more likely to lash out again. First, because they are weaker people in integrated terms. Second, because they will be forever defined as reviled criminals by others, by their sense of moral guilt, and by belonging only to the criminal culture of prison.

Minority identity and self-segregation. There is nothing problematic about celebrating and enjoying aspects of one's cultural background and making the best use of them. But it is divisive and harmful to identify oneself primarily as a member of a group, rather than as a unique self. Even private race-based scholarships, grants, or special advantages of any kind are in some measure furthering separatism and collective thinking. If the members of a self-defined group name themselves by the group (e.g. Hispanic women, African-Americans, Jews, Korean immigrants), then those excluded from the group will identify them this way as well. Not, it seems likely, as people with individuality. This can eventually contribute to many terrible things: racial, sexual, and cultural conflict, official or de facto imposed segregation, group hatred, even genocide. Again, there are great advantages to a "melting pot."

The end of racism and sexism. Racism cannot exist without a collective understanding of race. Sexism cannot exist without a stereotyped, collective understanding of the sexes. Discredit and dissolve these illusions, and replace them with an understanding in individual terms. This is the only enduring solution. It is the Promethean solution.

But all in all, human beings have surely endured the most dreadful symptom of past and present societies in manufacturing wars and genocides from the means of mass violence.

9. Ending War

It is impossible to eradicate all conflict, and in fact conflict is the nature of life. Much of the diversity of human life involves differences of viewpoint and perspective. A society without argument would not be alive. Any group without the play of contentious opinions forms a stagnant society, with a withering culture.

However, the necessity of armed conflict as we suffer from it seems far less clear. In fact, Promethean society opens the way to eventually end warfare as we know it.

Once it was thought that the spread of democracy would end warfare, since democratic nations would be less likely to instigate wars and other state-sponsored violence. But the hopes of democratic political scientists have been dashed by such vivid evidence as the war of 1812, the American Civil War, the stunningly pointless and catastrophic First World War, the many Balkan conflicts, et cetera. Even inside the borders of democratic nations, people suffer from state-sponsored violence; in America for example, the most extreme instances include the deliberate genocide of native tribes following the Civil War, and within long-secured American borders, the incarceration of American citizens of German, Italian, and especially Japanese descent during the Second World War. The lists of evidence against the "peaceful democracy" myth are very long by now, and continue to lengthen. Democracies do start wars with other democracies, as well as with non-democracies, and sponsor internal violence — depending upon influential convictions. Communist theory and doctrine also held that communist societies would not instigate war. But the list of communist aggression, or even just the list accumulated by the self-proclaimed communist nations, makes that promise of peaceful communism appear as a sick joke. The extreme degree of central control under communism makes the initiation of both foreign aggression and internal state-sponsored violence shockingly effortless for communist leaders.

With the lessons of history come this realization: nationalism of any kind will not mean the end of war. Government of any kind will not mean the end of war. Any collectivist organization backed by force will tend toward strife.

An environment in which causing bloodshed is seen as acceptable and necessary is a legacy of collective division. Very few individuals ever desire a personal war or hate an enemy, left on their own terms. Such people are seen as thugs. But for large groups to act that way — nations, ethnic groups, religions, and so on — is commonplace, and accepted as usual and normal. The leverage of a very few with political power or influential opinions over a mass of people makes this possible. Often such leaders seek war out of motivations connected to personal complexes and weakness, so endeavoring to follow the best of people is one formula for a solution. This is the oldest solution, and its limited success may count as one reason why war is not constantly raging, everywhere. But obviously, to judge from history, this does not make a reliable or permanent solution. Attempting to make "group choices" in large numbers, people become herd-like, falling prey to demagogues and mob mentalities, as well as the faulty mechanics of their institutions for nominating leadership. And, if we obey the control of political leaders, someone always has to be in office — but what if there are no worthy choices? Trying to commit to the best possible political leadership provides no solution at all, and so there is war.

We must remove the leverage from this picture, the means by which leaders move the mass toward organized violence. First, the accepted concept of instituted political power, "following the leader" wherever the leader tells you to go, makes this possible. So, we cannot suffer that to exist, if we are to end organized violence. But there is more — everything which just caused you to accept people as "the mass" when you just read those words of mine, every assumption causing a group of individuals to act like a mass and conform even on an issue so worthy of consideration as the use of force, must also be challenged and dissolved. Collective national, cultural, racial, or religious bias is rarely the immediate cause of organized violence. But these are its real enablers. To imagine a collective "enemy," one first needs to think in collective groups. Only then can we begin to say: "It is Us versus Them." And then, it is very easy to be persuaded into conflict. This is the pattern of group factionalism, the pattern of division allied with force:

Fear of "the other." Suspicion. Hatred. Posturing. Jingoism. And then, always the inevitable excuses for battle, war, the spilling of blood, suffering, disease, and death.

Even without the means of political control, demagogues can still persuade groups to fight for any reason. But it is nearly impossible to persuade separate people who think for themselves, people who believe themselves separate, to act unthinkingly as a group. The mistaken belief in our collective belonging, our division into groups, is the predominant circumstance enabling the violent madness human beings commit against one another. The collective concepts we identify with, especially nation, ethnicity, and religion, are highly responsible.

Genocide appears as the worst scourge in the larger disease of mass, organized violence. There can be no genocide without a collective understanding and heavy sense of genos, Greek for race, kind, or class. Genocide is always more likely and more possible with much centralization and political power. Four of the more notable cases from this century are National Socialist Europe, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China, and especially Cambodia under the "Khmer Rouge" (soi-disant the Party of Democratic Kampuchea). Political tyranny provides the most efficient means for the execution of genocide. Such a government typically keeps information on identity and location. A more centralized and monitored rule more easily directs its citizens to inform on one another, restrict and intern one another, even eradicate one another. Governments temporarily or invariably powerful in the extreme are also the most likely to exploit hatred and fear of perceived minorities. This division distracts other citizens, making them easier to rule and more supportive of government — and more supportive of centrally-organized genocide. It was for these reasons that Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and their comrades were so much more... efficient, than the disorganized Turkish army officers who tried to kill Armenians under their power early in this past century, or those officers who reportedly did the same in the Balkans, more recently.

But in a Promethean society, there is no government, there is no political power, there is no nation-state, there is no dominant culture (there is a diversity of cultures and subcultures), there is no race or ethnicity which predominates others (there are many, with no one having mandated status), there is no Us-versus-Them (there are individuals, who are aware that they are individual), there are no leaders one must follow, there are no orders one cannot refuse... and there is no war.

In fact, in a Promethean society vigilance vis-a-vis the collective, political societies outside is the only reason to employ military forces for external defense. There is no "external," otherwise. A Promethean society is composed of people, who happen to reside in a place. Organized violent struggle between Promethean societies would be impossible, as Promethean societies cannot "border" one another; a Promethean society does not "own" territory, its members do. One Promethean society would meld easily into another, because autonomous individuals and their shared principles, such as individual freedom and identity, characterize a Promethean society — and no further demarcation.

The only real, enduring solution to the problem of war requires the world, in its entirety, to leave behind collective and political society and become a Promethean society. However difficult and distant this goal, it is the only way for war to finally come to an end, unless this end is also the end of humanity, or of life worth living.

In the meantime, the defense of a Promethean society would not be maintained by armed forces under a government monopoly, controlled by the whims of politicians. Instead, like all beneficial and necessary services, independent and private defense associations will exist to provide the same service. Collaboration for defense is advantageous to everyone in a society. This suggests the tradition of the militia, which would exist, but there would also be need of professional military personnel, always vigilant and trained.

Promethean soldiers would not fight for political objectives. Their job would not be to follow the orders of their commander, no matter what. Their job would be protection; that would be the source of their pay, and their funding, and their honor.

An important factor of the success of Promethean militaries will be the rule of ideas. Not only will competition and public scrutiny provide an incentive for these services to perform well and serve the direct interests of people within a Promethean society. The Promethean societal ideal of a devotion to life will guide military personnel even farther away from abuse of their force. They will act in consideration of individual liberty and protection, even in action outside of their Promethean society.

Promethean defense services would also be superior to the nationalist and other collectivist armies they would have to fight. The bureaucratic inefficiency and lack of proper leadership within government militaries is justifiably infamous. Soldiers are very often asked to fight under strategically absurd circumstances, due to extraneous political considerations — the reason for much attrition in war. Such is the price of bureaucratic inertia, and having politicians make military decisions. These militaries are also collectivist, based on the manipulation of units in a rigid hierarchy. Some organizers of nationalist armies have been struggling to achieve greater adaptability and articulation within military units, even revising doctrine with unusual daring in their bid to make optimal use of individual ability. Yet they will always fail to fully grasp the fundamental worth of the individual, and the realization that increased military effectiveness is primarily gained through individual augmentation, diverse capabilities, and individually-focused organization. They simply cannot understand or implement this fully from within an institution of sociopolitical centralization and collective assumptions (and more often, military planners simply neglect the more problematic human element in favor of technology). The next fundamental advancement in warfare will be the individualist army, and it will only be possible in a Promethean society. Individualism will always be superior to collectivism, and no less in the military realm. And when Promethean soldiers fight, they will fight without the artificial political restrictions of nationalist armies. Nations fight according to recognition of nation; foreign policies are based on the respect of nation-states or other coalitions and their diplomatic relationships, not respect of individual autonomy. This amounts to an artificial, unrealistic handicap in military terms, and in terms of respecting the lives involved in war. Promethean defense services will be able, and will have the incentive, to pursue the most rapid, efficient, and bloodless strategy to conclude a conflict. In strategy, personal fighting ability, adaptability, even technological advantages (which will be augmented by Promethean capitalism), Promethean soldiers will be unequaled.

(See Fighting Future War for expanded material on war.)

War is a very important subject to me. But war is far more than important, to all.

Within the past hundred years alone, hundreds of millions of living, breathing men, women, and children have been put to an end in warfare and genocide.

The old ways and old societies which are responsible are simply becoming too dangerous for us.

I have studied the history of war for as long as I can remember. If I have learned anything, I have learned this: over human history, war has become more and more threatening in its practice, more and more pervasive in scope and intrusion into human lives, and rapidly, now, in our modern age, increasingly devastating and shattering in its repercussions.

How many people will perish in the next world war? How much learning and art and civilization will be lost? How much individual spirit and brilliance will be chaotically crushed and wasted? How much of everything that is life will pass away?

War now becomes too terrible to endure. One day, perhaps frighteningly soon, human beings may fight their way to the collapse of human civilization, or the extinction of humanity.

I know this could be the future, so I am adamant in demanding change.

10. The Future

The fulfillment of the Promethean mission promises not only avoidance of disaster, not only escape from the mistakes of the past, not only freedom from what has been. Even the first long-term objective of this mission, founding the first Promethean society, promises to reach far beyond solutions to the problems of past and present societies.

The foundation itself will become a great adventure, which will lend a sense of purpose to Prometheans and other members of the movement. For Prometheans to dare to strive towards such a magnificent goal, to ready themselves for it, to commit Herculean effort to it, and to achieve it — this is something to live for! It will be a story to be told and retold. Even to contribute more modestly ought to be a source of great pride. And to everyone, everywhere, this adventure will embody real heroism in epic form: life, writ large. The world will see a clear example of what is possible for human beings. This manifest legend will bring hope of future human endeavor, inspiring further greatness and great deeds... an arrow pointing forward and up to future heights for humankind.

Freedom is not only possible, but necessary if people are to fulfill their own promise. But there is more to furthering self-expression than removing the chains upon it. Prometheans must foster individual strength, capability, and diversity as living and active values, with the goal of strong, capable, fulfilled human beings. Initially, the identity and character of living in a Promethean society will seem most miraculous for healing the wounds and scars of a mistaken past, and magnifying what exceptional greatness there has been. In time, this life will grow and evolve to be a breadth of living undreamed of today. Those who live in the future will be capable of far more, and they will become far more. That is the promise, the vast potential of a Promethean society.

"Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra!
But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?"
— Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

END of Anticonstitution for a Promethean Society.

If you have read The Promethean Trilogy I: The Promethean Manifesto and The Promethean Trilogy II: Anticonstitution for a Promethean Society and want to become involved with the Promethean movement you are invited to join us — or read The Promethean Trilogy III: The Way of Prometheus. Additional writings can be found here.

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