The Temple and the Brothel
As we create new prosperity zones and digital collaboration spaces, two ancient institutions recommend themselves, at least symbolically.
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
—John Steinbeck
Underthrow readers are pioneering types. Whether you’re into founding new jurisdictions or helping to build a global cryptographic infrastructure that raises the costs of predation and parasitism, we have to acknowledge that the frontier has always had two features that seem like they ought to be miles apart.
The Temple and the Brothel are almost always the first to be built whenever pioneers settle. This is almost archetypal. So, I make an observation, not a normative claim. For better or worse, these fixtures have served human beings, particularly pioneer men, which “took a man out of his bleakness for a time.”
Now, I don’t want to argue the rightness or wrongness of the world’s oldest profession, much less engage in theological debates. These are beside the point when considering the pragmatism of the New Pioneers. My only concern is that, in meatspace, some variation on the Temple and Brothel trope will be necessary to create sustainable city-states and not just commuter tech parks. As for the digital realm, we seem to have plenty of brothels but not nearly enough temples.
The Twilight of the Nation-State
We are of the mind that the nation-state has outlived its usefulness. It, of course, is not a thing but a hypostatization—an abstraction that stands in for the composition of rulers and rules within borders. It amounts to a net negative. Quite literally, in financial terms. The United States continues debt spending at a rate that threatens its empire.
“So what might replace it?” asks Jamie Bartlett of the nation-state.
The city-state increasingly looks like the best contender. These are cities with the same independent sovereign authority as nations, places such as Monaco or Singapore.
Indeed, when you look at the richest jurisdictions on earth, almost all are small countries or city-states. Bartlett continues:
For a very long time, power was always found at the city-level. For thousands of years, urban settlements with self-government and city walls provided protection, services in exchange for tithes and taxes, and a set of rules by which to live and trade.
The Hanseatic cities for example – with their own armies and laws – pooled their economic weight to improve their bargaining power with other nations in the early 13th century, and became an economic powerhouse in the Baltic trade route. These cities – which included Bremen and Hamburg – realised they shared much in common, and that their mutual interests might be best served by working together.
I would love to see something like The American League as a consequence. Of course, until more of us see the wisdom in the Great Breakup, pioneers will try to find ways to establish new jurisdictions, many of which will be aspiring city-states.
I understand that any name with “states” in it will be freighted with downsides ruler/ruled dynamics. Cities, like nations, might still be violence monopolies when you’re within their borders. But the thing is, city-states have to compete with other city-states when decentralization opens the door to jurisdictional arbitrage. If you want to keep people in your borders, you must serve them better.
But what does it take to serve people better?
The Shadow and the Sacred
Maybe the “brothel” needn’t be so literal.
Perhaps it can be a sexier, seedier part of town with plenty of red lights, different unspoken rules, and underground venues that let people explore the shadows of the city and themselves a little without volcanic activity. As Jung reminds us,
The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there. As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal, overwhelming forces.
These are centers of culture and creativity. To be sustainable, one might argue that every city needs this district so life doesn’t seem so dull. Because it is in quotidian cycles that we sometimes find volcanos erupting.
Maybe such cultural centers can draw young folk who might eventually meet, marry, and mate. After all, a demographic crisis looms. But once they marry and mate, people will need ways to nourish their spirits and find community, if not commune directly with their Higher Power. One might need that from the start. Your jurisdiction will never be truly animated if it remains a tech park surrounded by suburban housing. Instead, it will become a soulless commercial/commuter destination, or it will fizzle out entirely.
The problem with the Brothel today is not that it exists but has spilled into every facet of modern life. Instead of volcanoes erupting, “the brothel” has seeped into other membranes of our lives, or better, what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls spheres—bubbles, globes, and foams—which develop their particular internal rulesets and cultural norms. Some of these bubbles should be brothel-free. Despite the promise of the Internet Age, digital ubiquity involves tradeoffs. One such tradeoff is an unsettling liminality that causes globes to replace bubbles and foams when certain aspects of life should be reserved exclusively for foams and bubbles.
Such is a sense in which Underthrow is a sphereology project.
Bubbles (Microspherology)
Intimate Enclosures. Focuses on personal, intimate spaces that emotionally and physically envelop relationships, forming the fundamental units of human interaction and identity.
Globes (Macrospherology)
Expansive Ideologies. Explores large-scale, encompassing spheres that represent holistic worldviews and philosophies, shaping collective human experiences and societal structures.
Foams (Plural Spherology)
Intersecting Cells. Describes complex, overlapping spaces in modern society where individual and collective spheres meet, creating a network of connected yet distinct bubbles.
Maybe the “temple” needn’t be so literal, either. The world is craving a spiritual reset. And that reset must be achieved at each level of spherology.
Can it be a set of beliefs and practices that start in the digital and touch the hearts of the many before finding patches of dirt around the world where people can gather? First, we build a temple of the mind. Then, we build real temples to congregate.
Tomorrow, I will post a podcast I did with the Parallax team where we touch on the idea that any revolution in counterpower—decentralization—will require a spiritual fire to animate it. This fire should be nothing like the thymic ressentiment of social justice but, instead, resemble the passion of those for whom Mission and Mystery are mutually reinforcing energies. These energies impel us forward as we use our powers to focus on instantiating “plural sphereology”—institutions that resist the platonic dreams of The One True Way and restore a healthy balance between bubbles and globes, similar to Nozick’s “organic unity.” Sloterdijk might permit us to view our project as a “globe of foams and bubbles,” in contrast to the centralist project, which seeks to force its globes into every sphere and scale of our lives.
What might it look like to have the Temple and the Brothel in healthy overlap?
In Vajrayana Buddhism, sexual imagery primarily symbolizes the union of wisdom and compassion, serving as a metaphor rather than encouraging errant sexual activity. Practitioners aim to transform their sexual energy into blissful consciousness to further the pursuit of enlightenment, focusing on controlling and directing this energy towards spiritual ascent rather than mere physical intercourse—much less promiscuity. The literal application of tantric sex can help husbands and wives have and keep intimacy that weaves sex and spirituality together for lifelong bonds of intimacy. Imagine a couple of twenty years looking into one another’s souls, sharing intercourse for three hours instead of three minutes.
In our effort to create an Empire of the Mind, we are roughing in the contours of a life that promotes healthy moderation and acknowledges the symbolic significance of the Temple and the Brothel held in balance.
Thanks to Tom Amarque, Alexander Bard, and Andrew Sweeny for inspiration here.