X-Message-Number: 22591
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 11:32:03 -0700
Subject: The White Lodge of Cryonics
From: Peter Merel <>

Let's see, where are we up to? Both the main orgs have problems. I 
don't think it's fair to say the problems threaten their ability to 
continue. But it seems like if we lost a few more key players to injury 
or politics we'd reach that point. We place a terrible burden on those 
few of our number who are willing to shoulder it. Running a cryonics 
org isn't fun. It's isn't entrepreneurial. It's obviously a grind.

If we had more adherents, more potential income sources, that might 
change. But the mode of presentation of cryonics we have used since the 
publication of Ettinger's book will never provide such change. We 
appeal to rationalists. And there simply aren't many of them.

We're butting up against psychological fundamentals here. God and 
Death. Responses to these aren't hard-wired, thank goodness, or else 
even we pervects wouldn't have been able to shake 'em and approach the 
matter rationally ourselves. But plainly for 99.99+% of humanity, the 
scientific explanation of a rational precaution against an avoidable 
fate has no meaning at all.

And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with those "deathists" we rail 
against. They're perfectly normal people. It's just that you can trust 
a perfectly normal person about as far as you can spit. No farther. 
It's we kinky immortalists who have the problem here. It's our problem, 
for us to solve. Once we honestly accept that - that we don't need to 
agree with the normals, but only to find a way to work with them - we 
might be able to do something about it.

We need to create a class of people to tend our bodies when we've 
de-animated. Employees won't do it - anyone whose loyalties depend on 
the highest bidder isn't someone I want my existence to rely on for 
several decades. We need a class of people who are fundamentally and 
psychologically locked in to doing it. We need them to be mind-fucked 
into doing it. We need a class of true-believers, thralls, people who 
would actually die to keep the nitrogen topped up in the dewars.

Do you suddenly feel a pang of guilt? Is it even slightly fair to ask 
someone to die so that you can have a chance to live again? Well, no, 
it's not. It's bald-faced egotism and megalomania to want to do that.

And yet there are people who will do it for us. If not for us, for 
someone or something far stupider. Robert Anton Wilson's "Secret Of 
Power" is that "a disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to 
attach itself to". Since 99.99+ % of humanity are determined to be 
non-rational thralls to someone or something non-rational, is there 
really any terrible moral problem in proposing some proportion of them 
be thralls to US?

Is Pete about to turn Elron on cryonet? No, I'm not proposing to do 
this per se. I'm proposing that we talk about it and turn it over in 
our minds. Look at the angles. I personally don't want to enslave 
anyone. I prefer to think we could do this by actually freeing enslaved 
minds. That people would enter such an organization in full-on disciple 
mode, and as they progressed through the ranks they'd be taught more 
and more rationality until, at the top, they'd become cryonicists and 
transhumanists themselves.

Plainly this idea is distinct from Venturism, at least as that is 
presently contemplated. Venturism is a cult of rationality and 
fair-dealing - and so inherently self-limiting - where this would be a 
cult of irrationality and subterfuge. There are precedents for this; 
tao chia, the rationalistic/philosophical version of taoism, was 
preserved through multiple generations by allowing its tenets to be 
incorporated in tao chiao, the entirely loopy religious version of 
taoism. And then there's the jesuits and pythagoreans inside 
catholicism and the kabbalists inside judaism.

Maybe we could adapt Shinto. The Shintoists are ancestor-worshippers, 
and scrupulous ones. If we could convince 'em that this is the best way 
for great grand pappa-san to smile on their endeavors ... but given 
where Cryonics is and who we are I think we'd be best off preying on 
the christians.

Joe Smith's story is a veritable how-to manual for grafting your pet 
kink onto christianity. Smith's was polygamy where ours is immortalism. 
Can you think of any reason why the Mormons should have the big white 
marble temple in every town and we should not?

Awaiting the pillory,

Peter Merel.

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