Anti-Transhumanism is Demonic, Monstrous Psychopathy

two can play this game. (bonus article)

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Kryptogal, you know I love you. You are an intelligent beautiful woman. You are not a peasant. You are a privatized bureaucrat who upholds the rule of law and civilization itself.

I actually do not know what to do, and I will not pretend to know. It would require me going back and getting something higher than a 2.7 GPA in high school, which is not one of my interests. But I know that you are higher status than me, and it tickles me pink to think that you are reading my blog and ironically self-identifying as low status (“us peasants”) for the purpose of sarcastically poking fun at me.

Kryptogal’s statements aren’t offensive in themselves; they aren’t statements at all, but a humorous and playful mirror of my ideas. It’s not that deep. I’m not sure that Kryptogal cares or thinks about philosophy from first principles. She’s just having fun on the internet. If she wasn’t having fun, I don’t think she would be reading me.

Kryptogal represents the majority of my audience who are not actively hostile toward me, but find me like a bearded lady at the circus. Not someone you want to bring home to your parents, but someone who inspires curiosity and gawking. Eventually, the minstrel show grows old, and most people leave the circus and go home. But there are a few who are deeply affected, and something within them changes…

This article isn’t directed toward those people, like Kryptogal, who find me “stimulating” while disagreeing with me on an intuitive level. Rather, it’s the self-styled psychologists who wish to pathologize philosophy out of existence.

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Anti-transhumanists are monstrous, demonic, evil psychopaths, but not in a cool way. They are not vampires or werewolves or Genghis Khan. They are not badass. Anti-transhumanists are concentration camp prison guards who want to keep us enslaved in a plantation of mediocrity for their own sick moralistic pleasure.

The principle spiritual crisis of our age.

The sin of Nazism was the fetishization of a particular blood and soil and a hatred of internationalism. In the case of communism, the sin was a desire to wage war against the rich for the benefit of the masses. Anti-transhumanists share both these sins: they worship a particular “natural” biological configuration, the assemblage of DNA by natural selection, and they resent with suspicion the wealthy and the powerful.

This is hellworld, this is the gulag. “This is for your own good,” says Big Mom.

Morally speaking, the desire to reduce life to a series of formulaic rituals like gardening, chattering, gossiping, child-rearing, and yarn-spinning is psychopathic, monstrous, demonic, and evil.

The critique against me is that I am too arrogant, too critical, too cutting, too hateful and misanthropic and cruel. This critique proceeds from the belief that humans are a collection of hobbies, and depriving people of their hobbies is equivalent to killing them.

But as Christ says,

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 16:25)

The one who “will save his life” is the hobbyist who shields himself from all pain and harm. To be clear, this is not exclusively the pain or harm of the physical body, but also mental and emotional pain, the kind that comes from self-critique. Those who wish to bury their heads in the sand, to ignore and forget the standards of divinity, to rest and repose in the doldrums of mediocrity — these men are saving themselves from seeing the face of God, which by all accounts, is a painful and even fatal event.

When we compare ourselves to the perfect ideals of the heroic, the shame and guilt which results only compounds with age. An old man looking back on his life, having accomplished nothing great, has a need to sarcastically, ironically undermine the concept of greatness. Everyone who is unable to attain greatness rolls their eyes and calls the ideal itself “pretentious.” It’s a bucket of crabs mentality.

The problem with the world today is not that our age is uniquely violent or uniquely short-lived: quite the opposite. We live in a time of unprecedented pacifism and unprecedented longevity. Anyone telling you that we need more of these excesses is beating a dead horse, digging the hole deeper, going further into decadence.

To be clear, I denounce needless, wanton, random violence:

Violence isn’t a product of risk-taking behavior, but hysterical behavior. People who are violent are extremely fearful.

The problem isn’t a lack of violence in itself, and the solution is not more violence. The problem is that, although we live in a time of pacifism, the perceived solution is more pacifism. The problem isn’t long lives, and the solution isn’t short lives, but people continue to believe that life-extension is somehow a “solution” to the problem of the age.

It’s like being depressed, taking anti-depressants, continuing to feel depressed, and thinking, “Hmm, what I really need is a higher dose.” The desire to suppress technology is just more safetyism, harm reduction, and self-preservation — exactly the opposite of what we need.

If anything, innovation has radically slowed over the past 40 years. Think of what was achieved from 1850 to 1950 — from horses to airplanes, swords to nukes! At no point did academia concern itself with “bioethics” or “AI safety.” The populist backlash against further evolution is like a patient crying out in pain mid-surgery, or a premature birth.

The pain of industrialization, and indeed, all the violence and oppression of civilization, can only be justified if it leads to the total spiritual transformation of the species. Those who oppose technology endorse meaningless slavery. The whip of Egypt without the pyramids or temples is a meaningless experiment. Those who fear the future should be exiled to the jungle, where they can live “natural” lives of picking scabs and eating bugs.

Name Calling

When men wish to harm women, they call them dirty, low-value, and unlovable. When women wish to harm men, they call them weird, weak, and alien. The worst thing for a man to do to a woman is to not desire her; the worst thing for a woman to do to a man is to exclude him from the tribe.

These tactics of shaming and social exclusion are not arguments, but a form of aggression. In order to resist this psychological warfare, it is necessary to insulate one’s self. This insulation is then pathologized by the attacker as “autism” or some other mental illness.

According to conservatives, the world we live in, today, can rightly be called dystopian. White, black, and Asian Americans all have below-replacement fertility. The number of people never attending church has quadrupled from 10% to 40% in the last 30 years. Of Harvard students, 28.9% are non-heterosexual. This isn’t a result of “luxury beliefs” among the upper class, because it aligns with the 28% of all Gen Z teens who identify as LGBTQ. Intelligence is declining.

Whether conservative style themselves as “right-wing” defenders of Christianity, or “left-wing” defenders of the working class, they are dogmatic presentists. By presentism, I mean the idea that all future technology is evil, but all current technology is good. They never want to go back to the stone age, just to 2005.

Very rarely do any of them examine the question of technology from first principles and decide which is “humanist, organic, natural” and which is “transhumanist, inorganic, unnatural.” At most, they will suggest returning to their own childhood, reductio ad nostalgia. When in doubt, simply state that, “things were better when I was a kid.” Can the phones from the teens, freeze everything where it is, and continue life in infinite stagnation.

This is a deeply unserious and childish position, the worst form of populist democracy.

Technology is ok, so long as the majority votes on it. Minorities and billionaires be damned! And if the majority votes to genocide the minorities and expropriate the billionaires, what is wrong with that?

Conservatives are unwilling to take any logic to its conclusion. They believe that there is a virtue in ignorance, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But we do live in a profoundly broken world, even by conservative standards. It is our duty to take radical action to struggle against the brokenness of this world.

Conclusion

As I write in my article on Peter Thiel, transhumanism is, in itself, not a coherent, precise, or well-defined ideology. Thiel is a Republican who fears wokism and the Democratic Party, which I argue is an ill-founded fear related to his own personal, selfish biases (as a war profiteer). I believe the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for transhumanism, because it is willing to invest more into education and research, while removing social stigma around reproductive and biological freedom.

The stupidity of the anti-transhumanists is that they lump all random arguments which could be called “transhumanist” into a bucket and pretend that the refutation of one is the refutation of another.

Some transhumanists are life extensionists; I oppose this. Some transhumanists believe in aliens; I express no such belief. Some transhumanists believe in the singularity; I do not. In fact, when you add up all these beliefs together, I stand as a minority against the majority of so-called transhumanists.

Even calling myself a transhumanist is a bit confusing, because it leads people to associate me with beliefs and preferences that I do not hold. Hence, you actually have to read what I write, rather than dismissing me with a psycho-pathology.

Conservatives never go far enough. They claim that technology is bad, but not all technology, just recent technology. This is a foolish and shallow claim. Language is a technology, the state is a technology, contraception is a technology, and all of these technologies have profoundly changed the human experience. Anarcho-primitivism is the only consistent refutation of technology from first principles, but it is so silly, emotional, and absurd that very few conservatives get there. Many conservatives worship the idol of the Amish, but few ever join them.

The conservative disgust toward technology is hypocritical and selfish. It is an ideology centered on the pursuit of comfort. But God calls us to become uncomfortable, to be challenged, to be made anew.¹

If technology were to be frozen today, the result would be a dwindling population of increasingly fat, stupid, sick materialists. Taxes would continue to rise; the state bureaucracy would continue to balloon; regulations would pile up. Our descent into a Kafkaesque hell on Earth is like a clownish fat man falling backwards down an escalator. Ridiculous, comical, pathetic, and horrifying.

Conservatives offer no solution to this process except to yell “STOP, YOU FREAK!” This is an ineffective non-answer to the problems which confront us. It’s not an attempt to confront the dragon, but an insult against the risk-takers who refuse to cower in fear in their gardens.

It would be like Frodo choosing to bury the One Ring in his backyard and waiting for Sauron to show up rather than going out to Mordor.

Conservatives yelling STOP! will either accomplish nothing, or they will grind civilization to a halt. That which does not grow, dies, and so our civilization will enter a dark age without innovation.

I am confident, however, that a Charlemagne will arise who can reorganize our fallen civilization and rechart our Faustian course.

Conservatives are parasites and ankle biters at the heels of innovators. They are annoying. They are self-righteous. They are ineffective, pathetic, and resentful. Eventually, they must be overcome.

When conservatives fashion themselves as defenders of humanity, they are worshipping humanity as an ideal in itself, without any sort of higher morality. The end result of this kind of thinking is a parasitic state which suppresses all innovation in the name of “normalcy.”

Any honest person can see the pretense of “normalcy” as a shallow veneer for a broken world. Every spiritual person who understands the human body as a mere vessel understands that the perfection of the body is a commandment from on high. Anti-transhumanism is the universalization of “beautiful at any size.” It is the worship of ugliness in the name of nature.

To suppress the spirit is the worst idolatry of the flesh: it is gerontocracy, the worship of the old over the new.

All they have is insults; they never think. Let’s say that technology, thus far, has made us sad, lonely, crazy, dumb, disembodied and alienated. Is the solution therefore to freeze technology in place for all time, so we can exist in this sad, lonely, crazy, dumb, disembodied and alienated state for all of eternity? These anti-transhumanists are Satanic, and wish to reduce humanity to a form of cattle to be farmed for their own fearful smugness and self-satisfaction. They wish to suppress the Heroic and reduce us to a race of pets.

The progress of technology is painful. Like Aeneas or Odysseus journeying into the underworld, we must push on. Like Lot leaving his home, we must not look back. To hesitate only prolongs the pain. Pull off the band-aid, and unleash the future!

1. The Christian belief that technology is a force of perversion is never rigorously applied to that most perverse fundamental technology of all: writing. The Bible is technology!