This is part 1 of a 2-part series on Techno-dharma. The second part can be read here.
Techno-dharma is the chimera born out of the combination of Western modern translations of Eastern spirituality, typically Buddhism, and an unquestioned support of the technological system and its direction.
It tells us for instance that we should embrace all change, that it would be counterproductive to resist the trends unfolding in our society, whether technological or social. The idea that some forms of change can be egoic, and thus lead to a disastrously unbalanced world which stifles people's development, and who then feel compelled to expand the system at all costs so as to implement a chain of narrow solutions which never address the root of the problems, this idea never crosses their mind. To the techno-dharmists, there is no essential difference, between let's say the natural and the artificial, or between a sane culture born out of people living together for a long time and solving the inevitable problems which occur from collective life, and the insane patchwork of behaviors, ideas and attitudes we inherit from the dominant egregores of our time.
The reason why they do not perceive those differences is very simple: they need the system too much to see it in any critical way. They want their cake and eat it too, which is why they might complain about a few isolated problems of our times, such as the destruction of natural ecosystems, the wars in the Middle East, the alienation of modern people, the abhorrent state of industrial farming, the outrageous inequality in our times, the ubiquitous depression and apathy which can even be seen on people's faces, but never, ever, the system itself.
Ultimately their position, like the vast majority in fact, is arrived through the rationalization of the beliefs which gives them a comfortable life, in other words, people latch onto the beliefs which are reassuring. They are intelligent enough to realize the contemporary problems which afflict those around them, such as the soulless work, the emotionally deadened people, the ubiquitous sense of being disembodied and the anxiety and despair which result from the modern world at large, but what they want is to patch those up with what they call "spirituality", without ever looking at the system in its entirety, which is why their version of a "solution" usually consists in them being a coach, "for the benefit of all beings" as they say.
If they ever get to write, you can bet that they would never, ever say anything which is controversial in any significant way. 1 Being anti-war is okay, being against the system which demands an ever-increasing supply of energy, and which compels nations to go to war against one another is not. Being pro-nature is okay, being against the system which shapes people to be egoic and merely treat nature, the very soil of our existence, as a mere commodity is not.
The underlying temperament of this worldview then, far more important to understand than its mere ideas, is one of fundamental niceness, of being likeable. This is an important part of relating to other people of course, but when there is only niceness, what remains is a mask which will always get in the way of truth if it were to diverge from the agenda of being likeable. This is why this type of people is commonly found in the managerial class, the "nicest" out of the three. 2
The working class do not get much from pretending to be nice, and they are also far too close to the real problems of our society, which manifest in the decay of physical infrastructure for instance, and to the nastiness of other people, to afford the privilege to ignore them. On the opposite end, the ruling class have to engage in brutal power games just to maintain their privileges, and are also directly confronted to all the atrocities needed to fuel our system, such as the exploitation of human beings in the third world, or the destruction of nature.
The managerial class on the other hand is privileged enough to keep whatever they do not like at a safe distance, but also aren't directly exposed to the games of power and money which happen at the top. This makes them incredibly naive in terms of politics, because they see everything in terms of coordination and arguments, since this is what their job usually consists of, but never in terms of (finite) resources, or power dynamics.
This is how they can be optimistic about maintaining our current levels of technology without fossil fuels 3, or that worldwide peace could happen if people were simply more respectful of others. They avoid talking about finite resources, and the power dynamics over those same resources, because they have been on the receiving end of a system which ruthlessly extracts finite resources, and coerces people to prop itself up, which means they never had to examine in-depth where their prosperity comes from, and whether it is sustainable or not. After all, why would a privileged person ever examine their own privileges? What would they have to gain from that?
The working class are not always able to articulate in precise terms why they dislike those right above them, the managers, but there is often a lot of truth in their complaints. The most common points being brought up are about the hilarious incompetence of managers, their tendency to push for increasingly unrealistic goals, their insecurity which leads them to micro-manage or dominate meetings for no good reason, or on the other side a complete lack of leadership which results in a disorganized environment, and of course the sense that you have to listen to someone far stupider than you and who tells you how you're supposed to do your job.
But what transpires from all of this is the basic reality of having to obey to someone who is basically as selfish as everyone else, who has their vices and their agenda, but who then pretends to be acting for some noble cause, some greater good or desire to get people to work together. Ultimately however, the layer of niceness of the managerial class is just a coverup for their cowardice and lack of love. They fawn under the technological system, and start rationalizing all of its trends as being necessary or even good, because they need it too much to survive.
They think that they are wise for preaching a doctrine of no violence for instance, and they correctly point to the horrors of warfare, particularly modern warfare which is so inhuman that hundreds of thousands of people can die and merely be registered as a statistic. But what they do not realize is that the system needs non-violent people. The most efficient version of the technological system is one where there is no violence whatsoever, 4 because for one it disrupts efficiency, but more importantly because weak people are far easier to command, since they are necessarily dependent on high-tech and institutions to meet all of their needs, and will not have the strength to fight back if they feel like they are treated unfairly.
They also think that they are wise for accepting the trend by which the system completely erases any essential difference whatsoever. To them, masculinity and femininity are useful social constructs, but they do not point to any difference in essence, which doesn't exist anyway. They like to justify this as some sort of "non-duality", which they see as the "highest" teaching—they usually see everything in an implicitly quantitative lens, more later—as if modern trends are grounded on the same principles which give rise to Nature, or even the Universe as a whole.
The truth is that they do not perceive any fundamental difference in anything because they have lived their entire life in utterly mediated environments, which have no need for the embodied polarity of sexuality for instance. Our world is increasingly becoming sexless 5 not because it is becoming closer and closer to the Divine, but because human qualities and the human body, consciously experienced, are utterly useless to the system.
Men who are attracted to Techno-dharma become metaphorically castrated, something which they do not mind because they are often weak and do not have much initiative, as evidenced by their worldview which is fundamentally cucked by the technological system, in that they justify all of its activities because it is convenient for their survival.
Women on the other hand find themselves in Techno-dharmic circles because it is often the closest thing they will find which can make them feel better in their body. The real solution would be to live in a world where men love women, and decide to embark on a quest to master their tools—not just the literal tools we use to build things, but also their mind and body—so as to honor the Divine manifest as women. We obviously do not live in such a world, because the system enslaves men to work for it, which leads women to either be helpless, or in our times, become deformed men who too work for the system.
Because women tend to be more loving than men, they feel this void significantly more acutely, but the problem is that they do not have any resources around them to even make sense of the situation. Love is so useless to the system that very few people even know that they do not know what it is. As a result, women go through countless avenues to cope with the void where Love is supposd to be. These can be categorized according to the 4 elements:
Of particular interest to our discussion here is that some forms of meditation 8 can be used as another narcotic, which is often the gateway into the whole Techno-dharma for women. They find that they can manage their anxiety and all other kinds of feelings by focusing on their breath, which suggests to them that maybe, if we simply patch up our current system with some form of spirituality, then perhaps we can solve most of the individual problems which plague people's lives.
Sadly, they are wrong, for the problems of the system, and deeper than that, those of the ego which build it, are far deeper than that. You cannot use method to make a loveless person more loving, or turn an unconscious person into a conscious one. Ego can co-opt anything, misinterpret anything for its own convenience, and this slippery nature is not one that be accounted for with more instructions, or methods. Our world might become more functional if meditation were to become widespread, but the hole at its center, where love, freedom, beauty, curiosity, and all the conscious qualities we experience in life, are supposed to be, wouldn't magically be patched up.
Returning to Techno-dharmists in general, they do not see any fundamental differences in anything because to do so would require a spine to assert that some things are genuinely better than others, one of the cardinal sin of the religion of niceness. Doing so would confront them with the fact that their own life might be rather mediocre and riddled with compromises.
Techno-dharmists rarely, if ever, have any sense of individual character. In fact they might even relish in its absence, again justifying it as some aspect of the "non-duality" they love, that iff God is One, Absolute, then surely the most spiritual people have no need for any distinct human qualities, and they can just be bland covers, reciting spiritual cliches in a monotonous voice about how "we are all One" and "Love is the answer".
The idea that the Divine could manifest itself as a multitude of unique forms, as evidenced by Nature and its stupendous diversity, and that a life well lived reflects such uniqueness not only in one's worldview, but also in one's soft consciousness, tone of speech, posture and even physical appearance, that never appears in the ideas of the Techno-dharmists. They do not pay attention to appearances because it would reveal the obvious fact that they are all bland copies of one another, and they do not take seriously the idea that different people might hold radically different views about how to live collectively, despite their frequent reminders of the importance of "diversity".
They might say that everyone is different, unique, and is on a different path, but their life and attitude to other people certainly doesn't reflect that. When their own ingroup voices the same bland platitudes about spirituality in slightly different ways, they think that this is diversity. When people offer a thoughtful critique of the entire system we live in, not just its isolated parts, and how it betrays the human spirit and genuine spiritual Truth, then those are seen as unconscious, reactionary, childish rebellions, or not high enough on the hierarchy of Spiral Dynamics or whatever model of psychological development they subscribe to. 9
Their inability to engage with anyone who is genuinely different from them is most obvious in how they relate to people from the past, particularly the dead people they like to worship: the Buddha, Jesus or Lao Tzu. They like to imagine that if those great people were alive in our times, they would basically be like them: practicing "spirituality" while being largely accepting of the technological system.
The idea that all great spiritual teachers would violently reject the ersatz world we live in is totally unacceptable to them. Lao Tzu for instance says that "To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day", something which is completely at odds with a system which can only understand more, and is thus in constant need of more energy and more technology, which is why even spirituality itself is co-opted as a new form of technology, or psycho-technology as some would call it. Spiritual Truths about the limitations of ego and the importance of overcoming it get co-opted into new and more elaborate systems of self-augmentation, ways for the self to be more functional and powerful, which is why Techno-dharmists often talk much about methods and ideas, but rarely about the ego which can latch onto to those as a way to feel safer.
Likewise, Jesus was against usury, the practice of taking interests on a loan, yet our entire world is built on an economical system where charging interests is the norm, from people having to work for the system to repay their loans, to companies being able to bootstrap themselves by borrowing money to pay for their infrastructure. He also said that if you want to be perfect, then you should go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven 10, something which the Techno-dharmic coaches aren't too keen on doing. And he certainly never compromised his message of Love and Truth, only talking to "those who have ears to hear", not to the crowds which cannot understand anything subtle, and even accepting one of the most grueling forms of death in the form of the crucifixion.
What the techno-dharmists would say in response is that some of those ideas were simply outdated, particularly the ones linked to economics, and that we cannot expect everyone to behave like a saint and go to the extremes that people like Jesus would go to.
Fair enough. I'm not here to uphold some impossibly high standards of morality which I myself do not even come close to meeting. But I'm also not fooling myself that I'm some type of holy person on a mission to benefit all beings, by charging $250 an hour for the privilege of having a video call with me.
I'm writing this because the sheer blindness of the techno-dharmists is abhorrent, because it labels itself as a form of spirituality, which is supposed to uphold Truth no matter how unfashionable and unlikeable it may be. Instead what we have are people who cherry pick passages of the teachers they like, so as to justify their own cowardice and narcissism as wisdom. To be blind is one thing, to be blind and believe that one has the Truth is the sin of Pride, the deadliest of all of them.
1 You can bet for instance that they have nothing controversial to say about the covid debacle, which utterly ruined local businesses and which drove inequality to unprecedented levels, concentrating the wealth ever further to the top of the pyramid, on top of confirming for many that their government has the power and willingness to restrict their freedom if they ever felt the need to do so. Quite frankly, they would prefer to never, ever talk about covid, and pretend that it didn't happen. This is how "niceness" maintains itself, by never talking about the brutal reality which less fortunate people are forced to wrestle with.
2 I'm using here the trichotomy of working, managerial and ruling class, instead of the usual lower, middle and upper class, because the former categorization is more reflective of people's temperaments. Someone who works as a plumber is most definitely working class, not just in terms of their job but more likely than not, their attitude towards others and life, but in terms of income they are usually middle class, or not that far from it. The economical middle class might be disappearing, but the difference in temperaments certainly isn't, which is far more important in this discussion here.
3 See for instance We are not mining with renewable energy and The Nuclear non-solution from The Honest Sorcerer on Substack.
4 I hope it is obvious that we do not live in the most efficient version of the technological system, because humans crave freedom so much that they would rather go mad than live in a world where they are mere keys of a piano, as Dostoevsky writes in Notes from Underground. Not that such a version of the system would be good to live in of course. Not only would there be no need for human freedom, there would be no need for any human quality whatsoever, whether beauty, love, curiosity, innocence or courage, and instead all of our time and energy would get channeled into the expansion of the system.
5 Which ironically means that women become de facto objectivized, because there is very little femininity in them, and to the extent that it exists it is seen as "weak", which means there is only form remaining, a nice pair of breasts on top of which sits an expressionless face. Nominally speaking, we are supposed to believe that the modern world is the best time for women, even though their "freedom" amounts to being treated like men in an utterly dehumanizing and alienating society, a world where genuine attraction and love are scarcely found, something which women feel significantly more deeply than men, but which they can never voice out loud because modernity makes us blind to the qualities which have been lost.
6 Or they might turn to lesbian relationships in their hatred of men
7 For men, the path of escape usually consists in work, constant thinking, video games and pornography. They usually prefer doing rather than watching, which is also why their equivalent of fire isn't one of anger, but one of obsession and domination: achieving things, telling others what to do, feeling superior to others. The numbness and fawning strategies do seem fairly similar across men and women though.
8 Meditation is incredibly broad. It's like having a single word for "exercise", which is somewhat useful to distinguish it from most worldly activities which do not involve much consciousness, but different forms of meditation might be aiming for totally different goals and states. But still, the fact remains that in the West, much of meditation is about managing anxiety and your thoughts, a tranquilizer for the pain of the modern world.
9 Techno-dharma is not the same thing as being obsessed with those models of psychological development (others include: Susanne Cook Greuter's model, Kegan levels) but there is still a pretty significant overlap. I might write about those models and the worldview which fawns over them, if I ever find the need to do so. The main problem I have is that they only concern themselves with the mind and the complexity it can hold. They don't seem to care so much about Reality itself, or relationships and human beings themselves, which leads them to think about how to create the effects of empathy, such as being able to understand someone's worldview, without really looking at empathy itself, which is grounded in conscious experience of the other.
10 Matthew 19:21
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Chimera Mimetics Plasticspirituality Technology Gender Essence
2025-11-10