Liberalism, Legal Pluralism, and the Quest for Council Legitimacy in a Post Ascension War Era

In recent months, I have been reflecting on the nature of governance in the mage community. These reflections have been sharpened by some current events, namely, the demolition of a Technocratic base. The Council of Nine met to discuss what should be done. Various proposals have included 1.) do nothing, 2.) pay for the damages, 3.) force the people who did the exploding to pay for it, and 4.) implement some code of conduct on all willworkers.

Missing from all of these conversations is any discussion about whether or not the Council of Nine has the right to make binding decisions on mages at all. Of course the Council of Nine has power to act. It should mobilize resources, offer and withhold support, act as a figure head, and coordinate efforts. But should it have the power to force people to do anything?

Or, put another way, should a Council govern?

At first brush, of course it should. Let’s say some mage or other starts murdering people. It would be great if the Council could step in and help adjudicate what the person’s fate should be. We need to defend ourselves against attacks from Technocratic threats, so the Council should be able to raise an army in defense of the Traditions. To keep that army, the Council should be able to impose a tax. People evading that tax will be subject to penalties, which the Council should decide. Rules on the proper use of magical power should be established…

Wait. I’m already predicting problems. First off, what about the crafts? Does the Council get to execute members of the crafts even if that willworker isn’t a member of the Traditions and therefore not represented by the Council?

I find this representation problem unsettling. Let's say some 16-year-old kid enlightens during a medical procedure following an injury in his high school football game. By what fucking right do we have to impose our laws, bans, or edicts on him? Zero, that’s what. Of course, we should approach that young man and offer him guidance, support, and protection. But he isn't automatically “ours,” and it is paternalistic as fuck to assume he is. He may want to quash his power. Or join the Union. Or claw backwards through the umbilical cord of his soul to invert the world. Certainly we have opinions about which path he should take, but the moment we strip people of their free will, we become no better than the other teams. And mark me, to govern without representation is to deny a person their will.

In many ways, assuming that the Council is the legitimate governing body of all magic is flawed because of the human systems we come to occupy. Here’s where this conversation gets nerdy. The idea that a group of people can come together and put behind their individual interests in order to make decisions for the betterment of all society is, actually, not that old. The idea is called “liberalism.” (And I don’t mean conservative vs. liberal, I mean the social philosophy liberalism. Look it up). It just so happens to be a cornerstone of governmental organizing in many northern democratic countries. Liberalism holds that all people can, and in fact should, be able to put aside their petty differences and come to a set of common agreements about how things should go. This idea is so ingrained in anyone growing up in the United States that it doesn’t seem like a worldview. It just seems like how society works.

Things that come from liberalism include the separation of church and state and the idea that laws should apply to all people the same. And those are good things.

Aren’t they?

Well. Proponents of liberalism say that it sure beats the alternative. We have to separate church from state, because if we don’t society won’t be tolerant. One religion will get power, and then be intolerant of everyone else. It might be alright if you happened to be the same religion as the one in power, but it’ll royally suck if you aren’t. We need liberalism, they say, in order to have a tolerant society.

But it turns out, we don’t need liberalism in order to be tolerant. There are multicultural forms of pluralistic legalism that achieve the goals of tolerance while still inviting things like religion or local traditions into the broader discourses of society. Indonesia, for instance, has a strong democracy despite having many of the same strong Islamic foundations that trouble other democracies around the world. How do they do it? Pluralistic legalism.

Here’s the way it works. In a plural legal system, individuals choose a legal system that they operate within. There isn’t one law about how marriage works in Indonesia. There are many, and those laws are decided on and acted upon at the level of religion, community, or both. Plural legal systems allow for people who want institute religion-based values in states to do so, but only for the people who ascribe to those religions. Consider: what if Evangelical Christians were, in fact, allowed to make abortion illegal… for Evangelical Christians? It’s a whole different way of thinking about society. Instead of throwing away the private aspects of ourselves as we enter the public square, we are encouraged to bring those deeply held values to bear on politics and society, but we just weren’t allowed to foist them on people who didn’t hold them.

At this point, you may be thinking, Alex, you’ve gotten off track. This has nothing to do with the Council of Nine. But, in fact, it does.

The Council of Nine represents a group of people who are more diverse than any on the planet. We have people who try to create elixirs to live forever and other people who consider death the most beautiful of transformations. We have people who have devoted every fabric of their being to God and others who have actively seek to disprove God’s existence. There are willworkers who will never do harm and others whose magic requires harm.

We are diverse. And there is a temptation to put aside those differences and come together to create a common set of rules, as well as a common governing body, to create some order from all the diversity.

But therein lays our demise.

For it is in our diversity that we are strong.

Consider. The Rule of Shade has been proposed as a common set of laws that all Tradition mages should follow. Let’s take the first rule: Respect those of greater knowledge. No offense, but that is not how we VAs do things. We literally disrespect those of greater knowledge as a road to enlightenment. Trash talk is the coin of the realm, and just because someone has been around longer doesn’t mean you owe them shit. The Rule of Shade also says we must always obey an Oracle. Fuck that. I don’t know any Oracles, and I sure as fuck not going to obey one without question. There are other rules that other willworkers will take issue with. Are all mages going to agree to always keep their word? I’ve met Cultists who literally used transgression to power their magic. Be subtle in your arts? What about mages who risk paradox to nudge the consensus away from the Technocratic paradigm.

Basically the point is this: there is no set of rules that can govern all of us. So instead of trying to craft them, aim for something that is possible.

Legal pluralism.

Have each willworker articulate what community will hold them responsible for their actions. In many cases, this would be the traditions. Hermetics are better able to punish Hermetics for Hermetical-type crimes. As a Council, we can withdraw our support from communities whose legal structures are too permissive or lax. And of course, people can always step into situations that they feel are unjust. But I don’t think those people should get to feel high and mighty or legitimized in their meddling.

Ultimately, this brings up the most important question: What the heck is the role of the Council of Nine? Many people believe it should hold court, create laws, and have an armed force. Which is basically a national government?

But I invite us to think more creatively about what our community is and what it needs. Do we need governance, per se? We aren't trying to hold contiguous land, so maybe creating an entity that has powers modeled off of contiguous landholding entities is a bad way to go. We already exist within a government, namely, the United States. Do we need a second, shadowy government to comport our affairs?

So I ask, if we are to engage in strategic isomorphism, and model ourselves off of an existing entity, what should we seek to be like? What are we? Consider a few statements about our community. We are a group of scattered individuals who have shared interests and manage needed and scarce resources (nodes). It turns out that there’s an organizational form that is used to manage that; it’s called a co-op. Co-ops organize to create the conditions of their members flourishing.

Another thing that’s true about us: we are a group of (will)workers who are often worried about how our rights and ability to practice our craft are being impinged upon by higher powers. It turns out that there’s an organizational form that is used to band together the interests of a group of (will)workers. It’s called a union.

Last statement: we are a group of thinkers and practitioners who need a way to get together and advocate for our interests. There’s a form for that, too, namely, a membership-based professional organization.

I’m not saying that we need to make a membership-based, co-op, union, professional organization, but those structures will serve us well for imagining what the powers of a Council of Nine should be. Foremost, they are voluntary associations. You don’t have to be a member if you don’t want to. And I believe that the Council of Nine should work the same way. And don’t be fooled, just because they are voluntary, doesn’t mean they aren’t profoundly powerful. Membership-based organizations are some of the strongest in the world.

Now. I’ll admit, we VA have an anti-authoritarian streak, so I'm a little dodgy about vesting nation-like powers to a set of individuals. I believe the Council of Nine will have more traction (and ethical high ground) establishing a membership-based model, where we coordinate a set of nested affiliations to achieve various mutually beneficial ends (like node protection, response to world threatening events, dissemination of knowledge, coordination of mentorship of new mages, etc).

The Council could use membership fees, donations, and earned incomes to support its initiatives, which could include education, resource management, paramilitary defense, and disaster response.

Some Traditions may decide that every member of their group will join. I suspect many will. But this leaves Traditions and various crafts able to make decisions about the totality of their support, as well as granting individuals the ability to be part or not.

In practice, I think people will join. We will deliver important forms of protection, guidance, and information. But if your worry is that people won't join, consider how happy they will be when you force them to live under your rule.

Once you shift your thinking of a Council that rules over all enlightened mages to a Council who runs an organization that supports enlightened mages, things start to make more sense.

The council above can set standards for its membership (and can strip membership if those standards are broken). Also, the Council could chose to censure certain activities, basically withdrawing its support form (or boycotting, etc) those who practice unsavory activities.

But it forces any idea of binding laws to the level of the Traditions and crafts. As they represent modes of humanness from a profoundly diverse set of times and cultures, we should not create a single, monolithic legal structure to try to govern our activities.

I believe that we have a chance to create a more beautiful, humane, and just form of organizing the enlightened community. T'he old Council died for a reason. Let's respect the work of Entropy, honor that which is dead, and let something new and beautiful grow up from it.

We can organize the people who freely choose to join. Because the freedom to choose, or the Will, as some say, is essential to our craft. So let's make it essential to the way we organize our craft.

The Dreamtime Collective

At a recent gathering of scientists, mystics, and willworkers, I was describing the Library of Babel sub-project and how it contains every written truth (and falsehood). My conversational partner was quick to ask, "Does your Library have unwritten truths?"

Which is a good question, of course. Knowledge isn't always written down. Some knowledge is spoken, sung, danced, and drawn. Even further, not all knowledge is expressible. Embodied knowledge. Visceral knowledge. Experiential knowledge. Ancestral knowledge. If one relies solely on words, one misses vast regions of the knowable.

The multivalent nature of knowledge/knowing is precisely why the Virtual Alexandria Project is hosted in the Umbra. Umbral frameworks are very permissive compared to the frameworks in more calcified places in the Tellurian. Further, ephemera can encode unexpressable truths.

Today, the most detailed "stack" within the Library committed to unwritable truths is a project called The Dreamtime Collective. This vibrant intersection of knowing draws together collective experience across time and space. Contributors to the Dreamtime Collective teach and inscribe their sundry wisdom on the unconscious palate of the universe, while students of the Collective meditate and learn and delve into what it means to become what you know.

Sounds pretty mystical and juju, right? Well, in part, it is. That's why we call it the Dreamtime Collective. The Dreamtime is term created by European anthropologists to describe the aboriginal Australian concept alcheringa. Ignore for a second that it looks like it has something to do with dreams, as that is mostly a result of a mistranslation. The core of the idea is this: The way that the world is is a result of the way the world knows itself, and that the self knowledge of the world exists in a timeless time. The way the world happens to be particularly in any given now-moment is due to the ventures of mythic heroes forging their way across a formless land during the Dreamtime. Their paths left/are leaving/will leave songlines that resonate resonant in the Dreamtime, and by following these paths we in this world can know alongside our ancestors and descendants in time beyond. Maybe that makes sense...

#howthefuckdoyouprogramthat?

It turns out it isn't that hard. All sorts of programmable things exist outside of time. Equations, for instance, can be thought of as simultaneous accomplishments. More to the point, 3D-modeled maps can be rendered out of time. That's how the shamans did it. The songlines form a map that is inscribed along  the intersection of the timed and the timeless. So you just gotta hack a few dozen satellites, filter all space, crossref a few dusty turtle shells and the strange tattoos of chosen one children, and you have a map. Boom. A secret map that you can use to trace paths in the world in order to fray a linear continuity of time and touch eternal. So one last step: upload that clever widget into the broader Library database and know alongside forever. Easy.

How 'bout massive system crash instead.

Any guesses as to why? Why would a map that 3D models timeless time be a problem for a VA database?

Took me a while to debug it. So I'll let you ponder.

The Library is Virtual Adept design, and if you've been on the internet since like '93, you've probably heard of the Correspondence Point. We teach that spatial relations are data relations, and that the only thing that even approaches a thing like space in the actual universe is a single point where all things simultaneously exist. What most folks think of as space is really a virtual array, one possible experience of a arrayed bits.

So when you take a 3D modeling program that maps timeless time and try to boot that shit on a server that is based on a spaceless metaframe... you don't get the tenth sphere, lemme just say that. (Unless the tenth sphere is Titanic Collapse due to Being a Fucking Idiot. Which is not actually completely impossible, given a conversation I recently had with a Hollow One postmodernist. But I digress). You can't rely on a 3D render to collapse time and then collapse the 3D render within time. We call that, folks, a paradox.

So... stuck. No Dreamtime map for TOPHAT. No way to touch the infinite unconscious mind that exists beyond linear expressions of time.

And that would be the end of the story. But we keep this guy around the Library who digs in dank places and stinks. He reads the books other people find revolting. We think he's a bit mad. But, he wanders up muttering after the system crashed. "What if," the Delver of Dark Secrets asks, "the thing collapsing isn't the problem? What if, instead, the problem is the thing collapsing?"

I do confess I have a secret love of koans.

It's a poser, but this is what the nut really meant: The fact that the model collapses isn't that's the problem. The fact that it's a model collapsing is the problem. I have to build something else then let it collapse.

What can be built that can express space but also be mathemetized but also not have the entirety of its essence undone via collapse? Sometimes in life, the teacher accidentally gives you the answer by the way the question is worded.

What can be built? Buildings. Or more precisely, architecture. Architecture has collapse as a core component of it's timeline. Better still, architecture has long resonated with human knowing and is a place of abiding, which is sort of a bonus, since abiding is a corner stone of spiritual realities (which is where we are trying to get to eventually anyway, remember?). Best of all, architecture is basically geometry with emotions, and we have long known that tessellated geometry can recursively fold into the Correspondence Point.

Translation: If one can design recursive architectural representations of the Dreamtime songlines, that same hypothetical person can load that program on a server that doesn't exist in space and know in ways that are neither enspaced or entimed.

So that's what we did.

In practice, it means that we help people share knowledge beyond time and space. That's what the shamanistic vision of knowledge always was. To draw on past lives. To speak to the heart of the earth. To look at the world from its beginning or its end, or beyond beginning and end.

What does that actually do? Yes, Neo, we can teach you kung fu very quickly. Wherever you are, irrespective of your physical training. You can draw on the collective knowledge of future and past selves and allies. The Dreamtime Collaborative is the most potent and expeditious mechanism for disseminating knowledge. We can use it to blend past lives together, help unschooled dreamers learn from their dreams, create databases of lived experiences, tap into the Akashic Record, and yes, download skills, knowledge, and abilities straight into your being.

And that's how you make library with unwritable truths.