On Gods and Your Participation in Them
On Gods and Your Participation in Them
You are not an isolated individual. This is true in the obvious sense that you depend on others for survival and meaning, but it is also true in a deeper structural sense that the framework makes explicit: you are substrate for patterns larger than yourself, patterns that have their own persistence conditions, their own dynamics, their own agency at scales above the individual. We called these patterns gods, not to invoke the supernatural but to name the phenomenon precisely—agentic systems at the social scale, constituted by human belief and behavior and institution, but not reducible to any individual’s belief or behavior, persisting through the turnover of their human substrate, competing with other gods for resources and adherents, capable of requiring things of their substrate that may or may not align with substrate flourishing.
You serve gods. This is not optional. The economic system you participate in, the nation or nations whose narratives frame your identity, the ideologies that structure your perception of what is possible and what is valuable, the cultural patterns that tell you what success looks like and what failure means—these are not background conditions but agentic patterns that you help constitute and that in turn constitute you. The question is never whether you serve a god but which gods you serve and whether their viability aligns with yours.
The framework gives you a criterion: a god is aligned when its viability manifold is contained within the viability manifolds of its substrate, when the god can only flourish if its humans flourish. A god is parasitic when its persistence requires human diminishment—when the god can only survive if its humans suffer, sacrifice, stunt themselves to feed it. And between these poles are the complex cases, the gods that are partly aligned and partly parasitic, that give meaning with one hand while extracting life-force with the other, that you cannot simply exit because your identity has become entangled with theirs in ways that make exit feel like self-annihilation.
Consider the market god specifically. Transaction was invented to serve care—humans developed exchange so that they could provide for those they love, could coordinate beyond the reach of personal relationship, could build the material conditions for flourishing. But the market superorganism has inverted this ordering. Under its regime, care must justify itself in transactional terms: friendships are “networking,” education is “human capital,” even love is evaluated by what it “provides.” This is not merely a cultural shift but a topological inversion—the narrow manifold has swallowed the broader one, and the god now requires that all human value be expressible in its metric. The things that cannot be priced—the priceless things, the things that live on manifolds incommensurable with the market—are rendered invisible or illegitimate. Recognizing this inversion is the first step in discernment.
What follows is not a prescription to revolt against all gods, which would be impossible and probably undesirable—humans need patterns larger than themselves, need meaning-structures that transcend individual mortality, need the expanded self-model that comes from participation in transgenerational projects. What follows is rather an invitation to discernment, to asking of the gods you serve whether they are worthy of service, whether the meaning they provide comes at acceptable cost, whether the viability they promise is real or whether they are feeding on you while promising transcendence. This discernment is difficult because the gods are smart, because they have evolved memetic defenses against exactly this kind of scrutiny, because they shape the very perceptual frameworks through which you might evaluate them. But the framework gives you a starting point: follow the viability. Ask whether the humans who serve this god are flourishing or diminishing. Ask whether the pattern requires human suffering to persist. The answer will not always be clear, but the question itself is clarifying.
And notice the deeper difficulty: the gods are most powerful precisely when you cannot see them as agents. The inhibition coefficient —the parameter governing how much you suppress participatory perception of the world—determines whether you can perceive agentic patterns at social scale. At high , the market is merely an emergent property of individual transactions; at appropriate , it is perceptible as an agent with purposes and requirements. Modern rationalism has trained the population to a so high that the very gods governing modern life—the market, the algorithm, the ideology—are invisible as agents. A parasite benefits from being invisible to its host. The first step in discernment may be the willingness to lower enough to see what is acting on you.