The Grey Robes - Initiation into a Global Digital Priesthood with Max Borders

Initiation into a Global Digital Priesthood

*E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures*

Introduction

Do you have the sense that something is wrong with the world? That authorities are too powerful? Are you keen to unravel mysteries, serve a mission, and make meaning with others who feel the same?

We know that techno-wizardry and digital nomadism are not enough. We need more: a beating heart, a belief system, and a set of active practices.

Experience a powerful initiation into the Grey Robes, an order where philosophy meets innovation, and counterculture meets wisdom.

Max Borders, the author of The Social Singularity (2018), The Decentralist (2021), and Underthrow (2023) has a provocative vision. In this Parallax course he proposes to initiate us into:

MYSTERY: From fundamental questions to wide-eyed wonder
MISSION: From hierarchical authority to liberated networks
MORALITY: From vicious nihilism to the active practice of virtue
MEANS: From spiritual stasis to personal development
MEANING: From isolation and anxiety to community and self-sovereignty

Overview

In 2014, pseudonymous writer Scott Alexander identified an emerging tribe—an alternative to the partisan Red Tribe and Blue Tribe (reversed in Europe, but you get the idea). Alexander called this new group the Grey Tribe. The term has been picked up by many, including The Network State author, Balaji Srinivasan. What makes the Grey Tribe cohere is a commitment to decentralization and an orientation to invent the future.

In 2018, Max Borders published The Social Singularity, an important Grey Tribe manifesto. Today, Borders seeks to establish a fraternal order, so that the Grey Tribe can become more focused, synchronized, and potent. The Grey Robes. But the order is in its nascency. Borders thinks this networked band of anti-authoritarians cannot thrive on antipathy and techno-wizardry alone. The Grey Robes need a beating heart, a belief system, and a set of practices.

Borders has thus assembled the sacred rudiments of a priesthood in hopes the Grey Robes can expand their sovereignty. It starts with one’s inner cosmos but wells up into the thinking, feeling, and practices of an embodied being. First, she emerges into herself, then catalyzes her community, and then unites with illumined others around the World. These Renaissance Men and Women promise to bask in the Mystery, serve the Mission, adopt the Means, practice Morality, and make Meaning before they die.

Innovate around authoritarian powers
Embody new modes of seeing and being
Practice timeless virtues that ripple outward
Make meaning out of satellites and stardust
Realize your potential through embodied alignment
Ascend to new cognitive and psychospiritual heights
Employ arcana to reveal the unfolding mystery
Find deep solidarity in a new fraternal order
This course is nothing less than the genesis of a global priesthood dedicated to humanity’s liberation

Sunday class begins at March 10th 8 p.m. CET/ 1 pm EST via Zoom

Lesson One: Mystery

The Unanswerable Questions, the Unquestionable Answers, and the Gifts of Existence

In this lesson, we explore humanity’s oldest questions, the answers to which will send us on various forking paths yet unite us as an order. As a question opens her legs to an answer, the pair begets more questions and answers that beget yet more questions and answers. We acknowledge the power of dialectics and integration as we spread out endlessly from these Ur-questions like a fractal.

But as we telescope in and out of this fractal, perhaps to tell our own stories, form our own theories, or develop our own methods, we can ascend in our psychosocial development. Such practices, a duty of our priesthood, offer gifts of existence. We call these the Illuminations. We will explore these gifts of existence together as esoterics.

Lesson Two: Mission

We don’t just engage in intellectual and spiritual onanism, we exert ourselves in the world

The gifts of existence that proceed from this fractal Mystery are our spiritual reservoir, but our order comprises warrior-monks. That means we don’t just bathe in the Mystery, we dedicate ourselves to a Mission. But as most of humanity has lived under some variation of Pharaoh for more than 3000 years, a failure of imagination keeps us in servitude. Most simply cannot fathom “the consent of the governed” outside of democracy, which is an illusion—power’s spectacle. So we must criticize by creating.

The Mission then is nothing less than to instantiate a decentralized, consent-based order. But as we adopt technologies that promise to lateralize our relationships—instead of submitting to arbitrary authority—we create new paths of exodus, opening new horizons of possibility. We become more potent and self-sovereign as we approach The Social Singularity (a theoretical point in the future beyond which humanity transitions from hierarchical to networked organization.) Understanding ourselves as living in a domination-based order, we explore the concept of asymptotic anarchism, the idea that we might just fight to move ever-closer to The Social Singularly but never actually get there.

Lesson Three: Morality

We will become practitioners of Virtue and animate society with it while staying embodied

If the Grey Robes are to create a global consent-based order—and our means are well understood and practiced—we must embrace a timeless morality. But bare, abstract rules are bloodless and impotent unless morality animates those who live by them. Something similar can be said about abstractions of Western philosophers in the deontological and consequentialist traditions. Virtues, as with yoga and music, must be practiced to empower the practitioner and animate society. Vices are actively to be avoided and shunned. And because politics is just the institutionalization of vice, the Grey Robes seek to transcend politics.

But what are the primary Virtues and Vices? And how are we to practice them? Furthermore, given that human beings are no angels but rather hairless apes who evolved from creatures that slinked from the deep, how can we acknowledge that we both have a dispositional grain (which we call the Archetypes) and a set of urges and taboos that we repress (which we call the Shadow)? We’ll hold the Virtues in dialectic juxtaposition with the Archetypes and the Sacred Shadow to reveal how we can become better people while still being human.

Lesson Four: Means

As Warrior-monks, we must practice and use means to serve the Mission

Warrior-monks on a Mission need Means. Those Means include a combination of thoughts, words, and actions. We begin by channeling the Elemental Drives, which we must bring into balance within ourselves in order to bring about their balance in society: “As within, so without.” The Elemental Drives are named such not just because they are in some sense basic but also because they are symbolized by the four ancient elements: Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. These elements are created through an alchemy that crosses masculine and feminine forces with the drives of sex and death. And freedom, we learn, is feminine.

But once we have understood the need to balance the Elemental Drives within ourselves, we must do something. Because the Grey Robes only turn to violence in defense or retaliation, we have two preferred means: communication and innovation. Thus, the Grey Robes train in the Arcana of Persuasion and Subversive Innovation. We will review the imperatives of each, which must be practiced like any other artform.

Lesson Five: Meaning

We will create meaning from nothing, ascending the spiral, and look after each other

Without meaning, there is nothing. Too many are still trapped in the postmodern era with its irony, relativism, and residue of nihilism. While acknowledging these as features of the fractal mystery, integration becomes a vector of meaning-making. The Grey Robes know at some level that there is a mission behind the Mission, to live out our telos as meaning makers. How can we find meaning in the multiverse? Or make meaning out of nothing? What are the primary ways of making meaning, starting with the basics and moving into the complex?

We also have to consider that moving through complexity is hard. It challenges us cognitively and spiritually in ways that mean we either languish in stasis or develop dynamically. For its members, the Grey Robes have exapted the integral spiral into sub-orders we call the Ascending Orders. This exaptation offers a model of progress and a heuristic of development. It is not a map standing in for the territory. It is a way to keep our members from getting lost in the postmodern wilderness or trapped in the past. It is not “colonial as hell,” unless you mean the Grey Robes wish to colonize the world with happiness, harmony, and prosperity. In the process, we reserve a harsh warning for so-called systems thinkers.

We close with the idea that there is magic in mutualism. What are our common pleasures? What will be our rituals? How will we look after each other? And what about our motto?

Max Borders is the author of The Social Singularity (2018) and The Decentralist (2021). His latest book is called Underthrow (2023). Currently, he is working on two major projects: a cosmopolitan constitution designed to open the era of open-source law, and a global fraternal society dedicated to the mission, morality, and meaning of the “Grey Tribe. Borders is founder and Executive Director of Social Evolution, an organization dedicated to liberating humanity and solving social problems through innovation. He is also co-founder of the event experience Future Frontiers, which succumbed to COVID in 2020 after eight years.