The species in which peace and mutual support are the rule, prosper, while the unsociable species decay.
― Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
We are a cyclical species, and so are the things we create. We’ve been alive and self-aware long enough to know that we create little in the way of permanence, so if you’re waking up finding yourself in the surreal position of watching the realtime collapse of the civilization you were born into, know that you you’re in good company with millions of people throughout human history.
Empires fall because systems change. Systems change in a crucible of nature, ideas, fears, and innumberable other factors. Civilization collapse is a mosaic of spendid horrors, but it also prepares the soil for future stages of human advancement. You could even say that, on the balance, it’s a good thing.
When you consider Rome circling the drain from Cicero to Caligula in about a century, it isn’t hard to look around the landscape of American politics and be pelted by parallels. Other than making the obvious comparison between Donald Trump and Caligula during the collapse of Rome, we can assume that most things that apply to America will apply to Western democracies in general.
For this article, we’ll set aside the nature, duration, and details of any potential societal collapse. What follows is already applicable and already beneficial to human quality of life and future perseverance. Would things like an ecofascist police state or nuclear war shape specifics about our needs and responses? Of course.
But for now, we’ll stick to the knowns.
Dark Ages, But Not Really
Part of the reason we don’t know as much about “late antiquity” – the period of time after the collapse of the Roman Empire – is because people were busy getting about the work of laying the foundation for Western history that followed. In many ways, it was quite a cultural rebirth; new artistic styles and literary forms flourished. People were free to experiment with new forms of government. It’s easy to imagine this as a time of people hopelessly lost, in chaos and terror, but remember, these were people who lived under Caligula.
For them, this was a revolution.
It is in the shoes of those people of the Late Antique, then, that we find ourselves. We have a lot to look forward to! Rest assured that this damage to the human psyche is going to manifest as some unprecedented art, music and literature. We’ll assuredly find new ways of self-governing put to the test as well.
While we can and should celebrate the death throes of the American imperial experiment, we also have to be deathly concerned about the vast systems we depend on, the most vulnerable among us, and the specter of anti-revolutionary ideologies like ecofascism.
Unlike our Late Antique counterparts, our collapse is exacerbated by the greatest existential threat our species has ever known: ecological collapse.
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
At last, we arrive at two truths which will inform everything else:
1. Civilization as we know it is going to be disrupted and fundamentally change soon.
2. Humans have evolved to survive in cooperative groups. This is when we are at our most resilient, and within those groups, the members have identifiable and explicable needs.
If the post-Roman collapse was a peaceful river kayak trip with some serene vistas and turbulent rapids, then our transition is Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride; careening into the forest with a stolen car full of our friends. Circumstances change faster than we can adapt our longterm plans. External stressors manifest and disperse with terrifying regularity.
The Sept
From the day you are born, you carry a societal debt you had no part in negotiating. Individuals, organizations and state entities wield class power to extort your labor and use existential threats as leverage to force your compliance through homelessness, loss of healthcare, access to food and water, and displacement from the entire economy of human life.
The purpose of a sept, at its most essential, is to remove and undermine as much of that leverage as possible. To restore human dignity, autonomy, and sovereignty.
The word sept in its most common usage, refers to a clan – specifically one outside of its ancestral homeland. It comes from the Latin root septum, which means enclosure. This simple etymology is almost all the description we need.
To understand the sept, you have to understand that it already exists within an ideologically hostile environment. Any society that is violently politically bent on white Christian homogeneity, and economically bent on wealth extraction is, and can only be, hostile to anyone who might sincerely call themselves a Luciferian Dominionist.
A sept is more than just an extended familial relationship, however. It is a social group designed to function as a versatile, capable community, able to adapt and respond to an increasingly chaotic world, while meeting its members’ human needs. A healthy sept should provide most people the kind of acceptance and support they want from most other types of groups, but can never find because those groups always exist to serve another primary purpose: a religious congregation, a club based on a narrow interest, a friend group with nebulous roles and rules. A sept exists only to serve its members.
Why should you be interested in joining or forming a sept as opposed to a gun club, activist group, advocacy chapter, or even a prepper group?
Firstly, those are all things that could be done both within and outside of your purview as a Luciferian Dominionist. Secondly, those are highly specialized groups designed to do one job, and even prepping groups tend to overlook longterm social cohesion, or preparing for short term survival while ignoring long term skills like agriculture.
Clearly that can’t be achieved through superficial, casual ties. It might sound intense to you, but you have to keep in mind that we’re facing problems our species has never faced before. The common social groups most of us have access to now are very privileged in their disposability. We can afford to throw away entire communities rather than work on them. We can afford to pretend we don’t need people, because enough people around us provide us with a kind of herd immunity from the worst facets of human life.
The delusion of the lone wolf is over. But for this to work, you have to believe that you can improve a community that isn’t working for you. There’s no point in sticking around a top-down dictatorship, or some form of artificial hierarchy where people just appoint themselves and rule without qualification. The sept is, lastly, a body designed to evolve and improve. The sept is insular, but the sept is internally transparent; septs are designed to hear the members it has, and not to have members it doesn’t want to hear.
The Enclave: A Life Worth Living
Western democracy is dead and late stage capitalism is crushing the life out of everyone. How are we supposed to live?
You could say, “any way but the way we’re living now”. I won’t tell you that there’s only one way for humans to congregate, but I can tell you that after three years of intense study and discourse, I’ve arrived at what I think is a very natural, reliable way for people to live, especially through times of difficulty and scarcity, that’s backed up with tens of thousands of years of evidence (as opposed to the wobbly Jenga tower of capitalism that’s only a few hundred years old):
An agrarian group of 200-300 members in which the entire community participates in food production and preservation, but also has specialized members, a leader-and-council organization, is homogenous in values only, and tied together socially by a non-invasive religio-spiritiual framework. This seemed a very natural fit for a Luciferian community that prizes individuality and justice as a means for avoiding common religious pitfalls, while still retaining the capacity to embrace atheists, and people adhering to other belief systems.
The community must also have a very strong security culture to protect its members and infrastructure from predation (mainly by the failing state and predatory right-wing idealogues), but it’s important to note that the enclave should not be an insular survivalist compound; people are going to suffer under the collapse of capitalism, and the enclave is intended to be a local stabilizing factor.
Fortunately, we have real-life examples we can examine for what does and doesn’t work for us. Some isolated religious communities function well and prove their endurance, but are bound together by abuse rather than necessity. There are farming communes that are peaceful and function extremely well, but are neither ideologically nor physically prepared to endure any sort of external stressors. In most of the cases, we find that the positive community aspects stand on their own, and wouldn’t become less effective if the negative aspects (such as abuse, authoritarianism, or even over-communication or too-horizontal leadership) were replaced by something healthier and more functional.
The enclave is the ultimate goal of Luciferian Dominionism, because only through that way of life will we be able to liberate ourselves from the systems designed to prey on us, insulate ourselves from their inevitable collapse, and be able to help others as they crawl from the wreckage. It’s the only way to establish Dominion, which is our religious basis for independence and ecological stewardship.
The enclave allows more than mere hardscrabble survival in an unpredictable, changing world. It allows us to have those things that are inherent to a human life worth living: art, beauty, and meaning. We must have bread, but we must have roses too.
As of this writing, our earliest septs are working closely with (and as part of) our leadership to find what does and doesn’t work for them. These will never be complete, nor perfect systems. That isn’t human nature. Human nature strives to constantly improve, to tweak, and transform, and we want our entire organization to reflect that. We can’t be too prescriptive for a world we can’t fully envision.
Learn more about how septs and enclaves work, or how to join or start one, by joining our community group on Facebook, signing up for our mailing list or reading our sept formation guidelines.
