✾ Aura, a Lady.

Cult of Prosperity

The cult of Prosperity is one of the major beliefs of the Hydran Republic, practiced by several related cults. It was widespread in the early, wealthy class that abandoned Civic space when the current technarchy rose to power, who then fled into the newly congealed Hydra Isola and became the founders of its modern state. The capital of the Hydran Republic, Prosperity, is named in honor of the complex worshipped by these cults.

The cult has roots into earlier ancient cultural syncretism. In their liberal mixing of cultures and legacies, many of the ancients came to build a belief in the inherent power of “superstructures”. Gods in this kind of faith, usually called complexes, do not have per-se personhood or will; they are inherent conditions of human existence that occur naturally as humans interact between themselves and perform the societal scripts and follow the incentive systems produced by the particular condition. In the execution of this repeated, distributed game, participants come to harmonize with one another and produce systems that are more than the sums of their parts. While many ancients had a prosaic respect and interest for this kind of phenomenon, the suggestion that human intelligences could produce a direction or 'will' that lies 'outside' a human — something possibly nonhuman by definition — naturally pushed some to bestow this kind of phenomenon with the name of divinity. Thus, Generosity as a goddess exists if and when people are generous, and guides people who are generous in the kind of society it wants; the same for Strife, for Prosperity, and so on.

This kind of faith, with its focus on the reduction of the agency of single people and subsumption in a larger system, is easy to subvert and bend to horrifying, deeply harmful ideals. It is clearly part of the foundation of the Civic technofascistic belief — except that it replaces the idea of a spontaneous human direction with the conspiratorial thought that the action and system one abandons themselves to is the 'will of the ancients' supposedly accessible by interfacing with the nanoswarm through augmentation. Also, it is easy to give it a corporatist bent; if superstructures have a touch of the divine, it is easy to point to the fact that for-profit companies, where enormous groups of humans are guided by the same scripts and hew to the same incentive systems, are superstructures of this kind as well; this is the kind of faith that the modern-day Hydran cults mostly espouse.

It is important to observe, for these latter cults, that abandonment of the self to a social script means that a social script has to be written — and clearly, the idea of Prosperity in such a script can be written to play in numerous ways, more or less respectful of those involved. The one espoused by Hydran cult leadership, intentionally and traditionally, is hierarchical: in order for someone to be prosperous, there must be a yardstick to judge their prosperity with — to judge whether they are or are not prosperous. This is taken to mean that for one to be prosperous — and thus part and parcel of Prosperity as a goddess — there must be someone else who is not as a point of comparison. This push for hierarchical thinking permeates Hydran culture and has given rise to excesses meant to increase the social divide between classes, including the foundation of the upper city of Agua Alta as an explicit way for the prosperous to separate themselves from the ‘regrettably necessary’ labor that prosperity requires.