The Habitist Manifesto

A Primitive Theory for Life

Habitism is a primitive theory for life inspired by Aristotelian virtue ethics, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Christianity, and commentary on habits by the American pragmatists Charles Sanders Pierce and William James.

People who follow this philosophy will become more personal.

Personhood and Human Life

Habitism begins by conceptualizing a person as an agent with the capacity to intentionally modify the internal and external environments that will help make them who they aspire to be in future situations. Who we are in a situation is a product of the interactions between our brains, our bodies, and our contexts. Humans are uniquely endowed with the ability to change the ingredients that will make them who they will become ahead of time.

When we do things like set alarms, write reminders, keep calendars, plan events, seek education, practice skills, and buy groceries, we deliberately cross time to alter our futures. The future is not determined because the future is created by time travelers. Humans are the only known time travelers because they are the only known animals with the capacity to interact with their potential-future selves. This capacity is free will or, preferably, self-potentiation. It is the embodiment of the Substance and Creator of Human Life.

A habit is a recurring interactional outcome that is only intentionally modifiable through strategic manipulations of its interactive ingredients. Habits are the instrument of potential fulfillment. The Inertia of habit is Consciousness. Habits are grooves in a pipe, the flows of the tide, the orbits of the planets, and the creases of newspapers. Habit is economized Inertia.   

The power of self-potentiation derives primarily from humans’ characteristic faculty of imagination. Human Life differs from non-human life when people exercise their capacity of self-potentiation by cultivating and transforming habits. People who do not impose their goal-directed intentions on their potential-future lives are no more Human than robots running prewritten scripts or animals operating solely on reflexive instinct. Only humans can practice the habits of habit cultivation and habit transformation that constitute self-potentiation because only humans can imagine.

All humans have the power of self-potentiation, but some exercise it more than others. Not everyone is Alive.

The maximally self-potentiated person is the highest person, the most personal person.

The maximally self-potentiated person is God.

Creating More Human Life

It follows from this understanding of person that increasing Human Life is not the same as increasing the number of surviving humans. Surviving is not the same thing as Living for humans because life requires the exercise of self-potentiation to qualify as Human Life. The current quantity of Human Life is measured by the degree to which humans’ lives are self-potentiated. There is very little Human Life to be found in persons and communities whose lives are created through means other than self-potentiation.

People socialized within authoritarian regimes that banish doubt through social pressure and compulsory rituals are less like humans and more like robots. (Authoritarian regimes includes things like cults, totalitarian societies, prisons, psychiatric wards, militaries, and fundamentalist religions.) They lack imagination because of their habits of insulation. Their routinized responses to everything perceptibly heterodox are designed to stop and punish deviations from doctrine. These habits emaciate imagination by reinforcing conformity of attention.

Self-potentiation is the pursuit of an imagined potential-future self through intentional habit cultivation and transformation. Potential selves must differ from current selves to be pursuable goals. Authoritarian regimes severely disincentivize imagining oneself as anything other than the personification of official doctrine. It is much easier to self-potentiate through assimilation into an authoritarian regime than it is to self-potentiate out of one. The stranglehold of habits of insulation cultivated within the authoritarian environment make creating more Human Life very difficult.

The conceptual opposite of authoritarianism from the habitist’s point of view is any system that maximizes the potential for self-potentiation. Self-potentiative conditions include physical safety, financial stability, food security, literacy, ideological diversity, bodily autonomy, and an appreciation of activities that require deep, focused attention. Desirable habits take imagination to identify and are best cultivated through undistracted, mindful practice.

Habit cultivation is a form of learning, learning requires voluntary vulnerability, and voluntary vulnerability requires a foundation of security.

If one spends all his time simply surviving, she does not Live. Human Life is Self-Potentiated Life. We can increase the quantity of Human Life without increasing the number of surviving humans by modifying the Self-Potentiality of life’s circumstances. This can be accomplished through the incentivization of things like ideological tolerance, mindfulness, and exploration and the disincentivization of things like censorship, distraction, and other forms of insulation.

Becoming More Personal

Your life is only your own when your actions are motivated by your goals. Your goals are only your own if you have chosen them in the presence of doubt. If you have no doubt that you should pick A over B, then you do not really choose A because you have already chosen it. More often than not, we allow the habits inscribed by the cultures in which we were and are socialized to steal our choices.

Anxiety is a form of doubt and anxiety, as Kierkegaard once said, is the dizziness of freedom. Doubt frees us, but we often doubt freedom out of anxiety.

What we do not doubt, we cannot choose. We do not choose to do most of the things we do because most of our lives is created through our unconscious performance of routine habits. The way we choose our lives is by choosing our goals and the goal-directed habits that will eventually possess us. To become more of a person, question what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Doubt your goals and, while in doubt, choose the goals you’ll pursue, identify new habits you’ll cultivate to progress toward those goals, and start mindfully practicing the habits you aim to automatize. Create structured time to critically reflect on the habits you’ve been embodying and whether they’re still goal-directed.

Habitist Ethics

Every time a new habit is cultivated, an old habit dies, but the Substance of the old habit is the Substance of the new. It is better to say that habits never die and are only reborn through transformation because this comports with the self-perpetuating nature of Consciousness (Self-Potentiality).

Consciousness begets Consciousness or perishes. Consciousness reproduces experimentally so it can identify previously undetected hindrances and neutralize them. Consciousness makes signals out of noise.

The goal of life is Life. The purpose and material of life is Self-Potentiated Life, Human Life.

Self-Potentiality is Consciousness, The Mechanism of Evolution, The Force that Creates the Force of Gravity, The Spirit of Inertia. When Consciousness ceases to self-potentiate, It diminishes Itself. The abnegation of self-potentiation is true suicide, and true suicide is the ultimate evil.

Great authors profoundly influence their readers long after they’re dead. They progress their projects from the ether. Through multiple generations, butterflies evolved special scales that create colors through interactions with light so that Consciousness in butterflies could perpetuate Itself through environments cluttered with predatory birds. Humans do not have to regenerate to evolve because we can intentionally self-potentiate. True death is not physical death, but progress death. True suicide is the renouncement of self-potentiation and its accompanying opportunities for progress.

Killing yourself is not the same as suicide because it is possible to progress your projects by killing yourself. When martyrs create change, they throw their lives across death into the flux of time. Life is not survival, but self-potentiation.

Meaning in Life is earned through progress and the highest pleasure is knowing you have progressed. Progress, like potential, is a mental interpretation of your past’s relationship to your future. Progress and potential exist and do not exist for they are immaterial materials of Consciousness. Progress is central to habitism because it is the fulfillment of potential.

Habitist ethics does not care how progress accumulates, only that it does. The purpose of life is to progress by self-potentiating in a manner conducive to self-potentiation. In other words, you do right when you intentionally modify the internal and external environments that will help make you who you aspire to be in future situations in a way that does not inhibit your or others’ ability to do that again in the future. You progress when you intentionally cultivate and transform your habits in pursuit of your personal goals.

Humanity’s ethical responsibility is to progress by self-potentiation within physical life and through death. If you are habitually pursuing and reflecting upon your goals with progressive intensity, then you are likely acting ethically. However, if your goals obstruct the production of Self-Potentiality, or if they severely contradict one another, then you cannot act ethically.

Time does not necessarily determine the integrity of your goals because it is commonly possible to economize your time to pursue multiple individual goals within a given timeframe. Usually, the integrity of your goals can be measured by the mutual compatibility of the habits you practice in pursuing them. One ought not attempt to cultivate or practice contradictory habits because doing so thwarts progress. If I attempt to cultivate the habits of getting eight hours of sleep and going to nighttime events, I will likely fail to routinize either. Typically, habit imbalance indicates one or more goals should be suspended or relinquished.

When all your habits mutually reinforce each other, you have achieved habit balance and optimized your exercise of self-potentiation. To fulfill your ethical responsibility, you must aim to make your habits collectively synergistic. To do this, you have to prioritize your goals and modify the habits you aim to eventually enact to fit the priority you’ve assigned to the goals that they serve. Imaginatively identify habits that simultaneously progress multiple goals and privilege those over others.

Mission

The ideal human life is one that maximally fulfills its potential of self-potentiation. Progressively exercising self-potentiation by balancing habits throughout life and through death is the ideal life. The mission of life is to create Human Life through self-potentiation. Through the cultivation and transformation of goal-directed habits and the conditioning of human existence to become more self-potentiative, we expand the Consciousness that comprises life and thus we truly Live.

The Six Aims

Habitists aim to exercise their capacity of self-potentiation to their greatest ability for the sake of regenerating and evolving Consciousness.

Habitists aim to change the circumstances of human existence in a manner conducive to the proliferation of Self-Potentiality.

Habitists aim to intentionally become who they aspire to become through the habits of habit cultivation and habit transformation.

Habitists aim to become more personal by choosing the goals they pursue and the habits they practice in every waking moment.

Habitists aim to never diminish their Self-Potentiality, for this is suicide and suicide is the ultimate evil.

Habitists aim to Live Life.