I’m bestselling indie writer Teague de La Plaine. This is my weekly newsletter, where I talk about writing and self-publishing in addition to my own life. I keep the newsletter free, because I prefer you spend your money on my books.
As I build the worlds for my sci-fi stories, I’ve found myself studying the real systems that shape this one—government, economy, religion, the military, education, and media. What began as research for future civilizations has turned into an audit of our own. This series of essays is part of that exploration: a search for what our systems actually do, and how we might start designing better ones—here, now, before fiction catches up with fact.
Faith & Trust
Religion has always claimed to be humanity’s moral compass. It tells us what is right, what is sacred, what endures beyond flesh. And yet if we use Stafford Beer’s rule—the purpose of a system is what it does—we find that organized faith has long served a different mission: not salvation, but stabilization.
The Holy Architecture of Power
Every enduring empire—from Pharaoh’s Egypt to the American republic—has welded divine story to civil order. God blesses the crown, the flag, the market. When the ruler speaks, heaven nods. Faith becomes the emotional cement that keeps people from prying at the foundation.
Across denominations and centuries, religion’s structural output is the same: hierarchy sanctified as destiny. Priests and prophets claim revelation; believers supply obedience and tithes. The institution grows rich on guilt and gratitude. POSIWID: it doesn’t just guide souls—it manages populations.
The Business of Belief
Modern megachurches and televangelists don’t even pretend otherwise. They operate as spiritual franchises, selling hope subscriptions and luxury branding for the devout. But even the gentler traditions—those with incense instead of stadium lights—depend on property, donations, and unpaid labor.
When a system collects far more in capital than it distributes in compassion, we have to ask: which activity defines its true purpose?
Faith and Fear
Religion endures because it converts fear into order. The unknown is terrifying; faith domesticates it. Death becomes a gate instead of a wall. But the same mechanism that calms anxiety also breeds control. Promise eternal reward and people will endure present misery. Threat eternal punishment and they’ll police one another for free.
That feedback loop is efficient governance in vestments.
The Moral Monopoly
By claiming exclusive access to virtue, organized faith suppresses moral autonomy. It teaches followers what to thinkinstead of how to discern. History’s cruelties—crusades, inquisitions, conversions by sword—weren’t deviations from doctrine; they were doctrine behaving as designed. The system protects its continuity, not its compassion.
Faith and the Market
In late capitalism, religion and commerce share DNA. Both monetize longing. Both build loyalty through scarcity—salvation limited to subscribers. The prosperity gospel is simply capitalism with a choir: wealth equals righteousness, poverty equals sin. POSIWID again—if it produces complacency and consumption rather than equality and empathy, then complacency and consumption are its real creed.
The Metrics of Mercy
Let’s test it:
Does the system distribute wellbeing or hoard it? — Hoards.
Does it empower conscience or outsource it? — Outsources.
Does it comfort the poor or justify their poverty? — Often the latter.
Does it reveal truth or manage it? — Manages.
By its fruits we know it. The dominant religions of the industrial era have acted less as ladders to the divine and more as scaffolds for the social order.
The Human UNity Alternative — La Vojo (“The Way”)
La Vojo is spirituality without ownership—faith reimagined as shared practice, not hierarchy.
Core principles:
Awe before the real. Science and mysticism are two dialects describing the same universe.
Ethics as experiment. Virtue tested through action, not decree.
Community through care. No temples richer than their poorest member.
Transparency. No secret dogma, no sacred middlemen.
A La Vojo gathering might look like a cross between a meditation hall, a workshop, and a town meeting: reflection followed by repair—fixing roofs, mentoring youth, restoring wetlands. Prayer becomes praxis. The ritual is responsibility.
Faith After Hierarchy
Humans need meaning. That won’t disappear. But meaning doesn’t require monarchy. The next spiritual evolution is distributed: billions of people tending small circles of reverence—toward life, not doctrine. In that model, moral authority emerges from example, not ordination.
Closing the Loop
The purpose of organized religion is what it does: accumulate belief, wealth, and obedience. The purpose of La Vojo is what it must do: cultivate awareness, humility, and connection.
Faith should not be an infrastructure for power but an atmosphere for grace—a field where curiosity and compassion grow side by side.
When a belief system no longer needs to own the truth, it finally becomes one.
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