The Economist ~ BiteSize introduction to Dioism Part 1

Day 1,132, 08:19 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,


During a recent adventure on the amazing eUK forums, which you should all join regardless of your home country, I stumbled on a sad fact. The original meaning, cause, values and practice of Dioism have been lost, and replaced by various bastardised forms which miss out much of the original content. Wearing my hat as High Priest of Dioism in the UK, I have begun to proselytise with the intent of enlightening those who haven’t had the chance to see the meaning of the eReligion in all its glory. Please look at it objectively~ if you agree with a lot of what I’m saying here, then there is no reason you can’t be a Dioist. Even membership of other sects and cults is not a huge object- many branches of Dioism (such as Theocracy) accept the existence of other values, ideas and leaders alongside Dio.



Origin of Dioism

This article will be dealing with the origin of Dioism. I find sometimes that when a group has shared values and beliefs, they find it hard to articulate them in a way which is accessible to outsiders. Many of you will have read, or glanced over, the Book of Dio and will be wondering how the quasi-mystical text applies to a game like eRepublik. Some natural Dioists are turned off by the religious overtones, the creation stories, or the legends of a time most of you didn’t live through.

However the important thing is that these stories, myths and histories are the glue which binds the first Dioists together rather than the religion itself. In searching for the meaning of the eReligion, we must go to its source.

Dioism was born on day 9 of the eWorld, when Dio looked at the new world in all its capitalist glory, and realised something different was possible. This is not to say Dio or his followers are necessarily communist: they rejected all old-world ideas and concepts as irrelevant to a world based on data, avatars (created personalities) and war. Dio knew that the game would naturally appeal to a certain type of citizen: the warmonger, the nationalist, the capitalist. He therefore sought his first followers not amongst the population of the game, but instead amongst the members of anarchic imageboard 4chan, specifically the videogames board which he used.


Babby

This decision is one of the most important for coming to understand Dioism. Dioism instinctively disregards all notions of nationality or nationhood. It rejects all borders, all real life terms and values, and focuses instead on creating an entirely new set of social norms which are applicable in this game. It is in a sense the ultimate rejection of role play and the rigid lines the admins have pushed upon us. For Dioists the game is about exploring new ideas, about community, about pushing boundaries. We didn’t create a new world simply to relive the same conflicts, the same battles of values that we fought in the old.

Coming from an anarchic imageboard, the children of Dio made another decision which would shape the growth of the entire eReligion. Rather than choosing America as their home (where half of 4chan posters originate) or eSweden (where Dio was born), they chose something different, they chose Pakistan. Some of the gamers amongst you will recognise the catchphrase from the popular game Bioshock, which featured an underwater lawless state called Rapture, after which a certain infamous section of our forums is named. Dioists sought to make an entirely new state on a so-far blank slate, rather than recreate and old-style nationalist state. It is for this reason that I said that Rapture is in a sense a Dioist creation- it reflects the values at the core of Dioism. Self-regulating, community based anarchy.

So Dio chose Pakistan, and they came. Children of Dio, devoted to ending the concept of petty nationalism, the idea of “get rich quick”, the idea of government by the few not the many. Without any competition from nationalist citizens (Pakistan was completely dead), almost a thousand Dioists poured into the country in a matter of days and weeks. Once there, they completely dismissed private property, government, nationalism and all the associated gimmicks the admins introduced to push into the familiar patterns. Fight for your country, spend gold, defeat your fellow citizens. All these concepts were analysed and pushed aside.



The Dioist Super-power instead recreated itself as a vast community-driven state. Truly multi-cultural, the children of Dio were born of all races and nationalities in real life, but chose to dismiss and ignore them in favour of a greater battle for the soul of the game. Once the game began to take off, and citizens from rival forum group Flashback Sweden began to populate the game, the Dioists began a conflict which still exists today. Unlike other countries they didn’t choose their enemy based on petty real life reasons, but instead based on ideological differences between themselves and the Flashback Sweden members. On one hand was Pakistan- a vast economically centralised state with massive state companies, huge gold reserves and a binding ideology of unity and anarchic social decentralisation. On the other hand Sweden was a capitalist state, with similar values of social anarchy but without the unity that Pakistan strove for. The differences created the conflict, and helped to define Dioism.



I’m going to close this issue here. I hope that some of you have come to understand that Dioism is a little bit more than just stories and ideas, and in fact represents a social rebellion against the concepts of the game itself. Dioism stands first and foremost for the idea that we make our own game, we don’t necessarily just follow the tram lines the admins have made for us. If you follow that belief yourself, you might be a closet Dioist 😉

Next time I’ll be continuing the story by explaining how the book of Dio was a allegorical representation of these values, and how it helped build a fledgling community into a global eReligion.

Iain Keers


I’ve praised Dio today...have YOU?

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