Energists

The Energists were a Chinese religious movement whose teaching made action sacred, but whose distinctive interpretation ultimately embraced stillness as another form of energy. Their rise shows how a doctrine could travel from popular religious enthusiasm into education and a broad union of science and religion, even as its central idea shifted from ceaseless movement to a balance of opposing forces.

Origins and Educational Influence

The movement appeared in China in the aftermath of the American madness, a disease that had severely disrupted the country’s northern coastal industries, agriculture, and transport. The narrative presents the Energists as a new sect that seemed to arise spontaneously within China. They preached a reinterpretation of Buddhism centered on the sanctity of action, offering a religious response in a society that had just endured a major crisis.

Within a few years, the Energists had captured the educational system. Their success was not uncontested: adherents struggled with reactionary members of the older universities before securing that influence. The result was more than a change in religious affiliation. Chinese youth were taught to admire movement in all its forms, and the movement’s language of action entered the institutions that shaped public understanding.

Action, Stillness, and Scientific Doctrine

The Energists’ success did not mean that the doctrine was received uniformly. Despite the new teaching and a much higher wage scale that gave workers private mechanical locomotion, the Chinese masses continued to regard action chiefly as a means toward rest. The gap between official praise of movement and popular preference for repose became a defining tension in the Chinese interpretation of the New Way.

That tension acquired a scientific rationale when a native physicist argued that the supreme expression of energy was the tense balance of forces within the atom. The Chinese applied the idea to themselves, claiming that their own quiescence represented the perfect balance of mighty forces. In this interpretation, worship of activity could include worship of inactivity, and both could be grounded in natural science. Stillness was not simply the negation of the Energists’ original teaching; it was presented as a concealed form of energetic equilibrium.

The Discoverer and the Secret of Power

A later religious tradition attached the Energists to the story of the Discoverer and a dangerous scientific secret. About a century after the establishment of the First World State, a rumor in China concerned the mystery of Gordelpus, the god of motion: the reputed means of releasing energy locked in the opposition of proton and electron. The Energists claimed that the young Discoverer was an incarnation of Buddha and that, because the world was not yet fit for the revelation, he had entrusted the secret to the Scientists.

This was a religious claim about the preservation and proper timing of knowledge, not evidence that the Energists themselves possessed the method. Their account made scientific secrecy part of a sacred history: the Discoverer had offered access to divine power, judged humanity unready, and left the knowledge in the hands of a guarded scientific elite. The International College of Science’s restrictions on entry, experiments, and disclosure gave such rumors an institutional setting in which they could persist.

From Sect to Wider Religious Synthesis

Roughly two centuries after the First World State was formed, the President of the World called a conference to unite science and religion. On an island in the Pacific that had become a center of cosmopolitan sentiment, leaders of Buddhism and other major religions agreed that their differences were differences of expression. They shared worship of Divine Energy, understood as activity or tense stillness, and recognized the Discoverer as either the greatest of prophets or an incarnation of divine Movement. Scientific reasoning was invoked to declare these interpretations identical.

The Energists’ earlier synthesis of action, rest, and natural science thus belonged to a much wider religious settlement. Where older societies had suppressed heresy by force, this age sought uniformity by explaining differences away. The convergence gave religious unity an appearance of intellectual agreement, while also strengthening science’s exceptional authority: scientific principles had transformed material life, and the scientist had come to represent power as well as knowledge.

The Limits of a Civilization of Motion

The wider religious order made movement an obligation. In its mature form, the creed held that people earned eternal preservation through action, whether by their own exertion or by controlling natural forces. Flying, dancing, and athletics acquired religious prestige, and ritual flight became both worship and a socially sanctioned outlet for adventurousness. This order echoed the Energists’ sanctification of action, though the evidence does not identify the sect as the author of every later ritual or rule.

The civilization’s reliance on energy also exposed the limits of that ideal. Oil supplies ran out, and coal from Antarctica became essential to powering transport and industry. When even the deepest coal deposits were exhausted, the flying aristocracy and religious authorities resisted reducing ritual aviation; they instead called for greater devotion to it and treated the shortage as a test of faith. The contrast is stark: a religion that had made both activity and stillness intelligible through scientific ideas belonged to a society unable to respond rationally when its material sources of power failed.