Ancestor & Descendant Worship
Many of the oldest human cultures practice something called “ancestor worship.” This is a practice of treating one’s ancestors as individual gods, a collective “God,” or at least a spiritual force on their side. In these cultures, individuals see their ancestors as representing something greater than themselves and strive to uphold ancestral mythos.
Ancestor worship can produce a cultural perception of generational degradation, with younger generations being made to feel somehow lesser than the older ones. While on the plus side, ancestor worship can help individuals deal with loss and is often effective at maintaining cultural fidelity, it places a dampener on cultural evolution for the same reasons.
Our personal House’s cultivar features an inversion of ancestral worship: Descendant worship. We believe that our role is to influence and empower our children, youth, and society in a way that empowers future generations to surpass us. Our job is to tend a garden in which the divine germinates and grows.
We call this multigenerational entity: Omniscion, the Inevitable God
Pronunciation: aam-nee-sai-uhn
We chose this word with Omni (meaning all and everywhere) and scion (meaning descendant) with the title “The Inevitable God” being able to be used independently and referencing the God’s self-manifesting nature.[[113]](#_ftn113)
A theological framing that features descendant worship produces several meaningful outcomes:
- It encourages a high birth rate and focuses on improving the lives of children from other backgrounds. If future generations are akin to gods, we earn God’s favor by acting as stewards of an environment that facilitates sustained intergenerational improvement across cultures.
- It motivates us to make the future a better place—an inoffensive mission for even those who are mostly living life on autopilot.
- It encourages us to aggressively improve future generations in a way that can come off as unethical to other groups (e.g., to become early adopters of polygenic risk score selection, gene editing, technological alteration, etc.).
- It incentivizes alignment with most benevolent AGI (artificial general intelligence), as artificial intelligence is another “cultural successor” of humanity and, as such, is a type of “descendant.” This puts descendant worshippers at lower risk in a scenario in which an AGI decides to kill most—but not all—of humanity.
The downside to descendant worship is that it features lower-than-average cultural fidelity. When children are raised with the expectation that they’ll be profoundly better than their ancestors, they are less likely to turn to their ancestors for life advice and good practices to pass to their own kids. Essentially, telling a person they can build a culture that surpasses that of their parents will almost intrinsically increase a culture’s “mutation rate” (via participation in the Index, descendant worship might be able to hold together).