# Bondage

Topical guide entry for Bondage in the Mormon Transhumanist Association library.

Bondage in Latter-day Saint scripture is the systematic restriction of moral agency and eternal progression. The "chains of hell" described in Alma 12 and the captivity of the devil in 2 Nephi 2 represent literal constraints on human liberty. The Book of Mormon's cyclical narratives of captivity—from the people of Limhi to Alma the Elder—serve as typological blueprints for systemic societal entrapment. They demonstrate how populations forfeit agency to coercive powers. This spiritual determinism isolates individuals from the divine family, shrinking the capacity to act rather than be acted upon.

## The Biological Prison: Entropy and the Natural Man

Mortality is a temporary, necessary state of limitation. The natural man is an evolutionary inheritance—a biological system constrained by physics, disease, and inevitable decay. Aging and death operate as absolute forms of physical bondage. Our current evolutionary stage restricts our capacity for enduring joy and relational connection. As Lincoln Cannon argues, humanity has a moral imperative to conquer entropy. The fight against aging, incurable disease, and involuntary suffering constitutes active participation in the redemptive work of the Atonement, moving intelligence beyond the prison of genetic baselines.

## Instruments of Deliverance: Technology as Redemptive Grace

Technological innovation functions as an instrument of deliverance, breaking biological and environmental chains. Through applied science—such as genomic editing, neuroprosthetics, and post-scarcity energy infrastructure—humanity dismantles the historical bondage of physical limitation. This expresses the physical reality of co-creation. Grace empowers humanity to act upon the material world, healing biological defects and elevating physical systems toward the realities of a resurrected state. We partner with God in the ongoing creation to engineer environments that support expansive liberty.

## Technological Determinism: An old ruse under a new name

Lucifer’s proposal in the premortal council promised to save everyone by removing the possibility of choosing wrong, which is captivity marketed as safety, and it remains the most successful pitch in history. Its modern versions are recognizable: systems engineered to capture attention, surveillance that makes deviation costly, dependencies that quietly relocate a person’s decisions into someone else’s hands. Concentrated power produces this outcome whether or not anyone intends it, which is why decentralization functions as an antidote rather than a preference.

Technology therefore cannot be scored once and filed. The same tools that return capacity to the weak can strip it from the many, and the test is not how advanced they are but whether the people subject to them end up more able to act, refuse, and choose. Deliverance, on the scriptural pattern, requires someone willing to walk out and someone willing to open the door.

Emerging technological capacities introduce severe risks of novel enslavement. The premortal conflict over moral agency provides the framework for understanding modern existential risk. The proposal to destroy agency manifests today in algorithmic determinism, surveillance capitalism, and the monopolization of digital power. Carl Youngblood identifies centralized tech monopolies and opaque algorithms as the infrastructure of modern bondage. Systems that coerce behavior or strip privacy construct new chains. Lincoln Cannon similarly warns of technological fundamentalism, emphasizing that systems designed without ethical alignment optimize for control rather than human flourishing.

## Consecration and True Liberty: Building Zion

The pathway out of bondage requires aligning technological development with the Law of Consecration. Zion is a state of perfect liberty, achieved when advanced capacities and resources are consecrated to elevate the marginalized and eradicate systemic poverty. Providential transhumanism mandates that technological power be decentralized and guided by restorative justice. As articulated in Cannon's framing of the New God Argument, true liberty is achieved when humanity leverages its expanded capacities to uplift others. We fill the measure of our creation by engineering a reality where the chains of both spiritual determinism and physical entropy are permanently broken.

*See also*: [Accountability](/topical-guide/accountability), [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Bind/Bound](/topical-guide/bindbound), [Consent](/topical-guide/consent), [Ethics](/topical-guide/ethics), [Liberty](/topical-guide/liberty), [Oppression](/topical-guide/oppression), [Power](/topical-guide/power), [Suffering](/topical-guide/suffering)