Category Archives: Science

What Do You (Think You) Really Know?

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On the need for maintaining a curious spirit.

By Tom Bunzel

Source: The Pulse

“When in doubt observe and ask questions.  When certain, observe at length and ask many more questions.”  — George Patton

Once again, I thought I would follow up on Joe Martino’s recent discussion of huge gaps and worse in many peoples’ understanding.  This is such an important point first made by Socrates: You don’t know what you don’t know.

Joe mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect in which people with relatively little knowledge will overestimate what they in fact know.  Joe’s piece used the example of brand influencers who tend to become very sure of their pronouncements because, of course, they had a vested interest in it.  

This speaks to the conditioning that takes place in corporate environments, similar to how an individual accumulates a self or Ego.

One thing that happens with people who are sure of themselves is that they frequently break off mentally and become separate from any sense of Wholeness (to defend their position).  This crystallizes the ego which then, with many insecure people, and hardens with each challenge – something we can see in our current politics.

It’s also obvious that whatever we think we know is generally another thought.  The exception is if it is a bodily sensation or emotion which is purely felt, without interpretation.

Unfortunately, most people are also heavily invested in feeling good – or avoiding any discomfort – and the discipline of sensing emotions in the body and allowing them to be experienced without judgement is quite foreign.  I say it’s unfortunate because in my recent experience, it is the one way to begin to heal trauma stored in the body.

And speaking of the body, this is where we can surely go even a step further.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know that We Don’t Know

Things get even more complicated when you focus on the real mystery.  The vastness of the gaps is staggering.

An example of this is qualia – defined as “the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.”

What this really comes down to is our Experience, which is somehow created out of our Awareness of whatever is happening.  But qualia for humans is more subtle and indefinable – scientists have been unable to explain, for example, why some wine tastes dry and another fruity.

How does the subjective part – the judgment – come into (our?) awareness.

Neuroscience now can identify and label the various components of the experience in terms of physics and biochemistry, but they cannot explain how “we” experience things like awe, gratitude and so on.

And for the sense of “someone” experiencing any phenomena they can only give it another label:  Consciousness.  

When trying to define “ourselves” or the experience of being, our language has proven so inadequate (partly due to the subject/object grammatical bias of English and most modern languages) that to the extent any speculations or theories are wrong – we probably don’t even have the capability to comprehend what makes them so incomplete.

Attempts to pin the experience of the self down scientifically have fallen short, as I described in “AI and the Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

Where is the Ground of Our Experience?

This conundrum exists because science deals with facts and certainty and our experience actually seems to arise in a space other than that which science can adequately define.

But still, we are deeply conditioned to believe that our experiences and thoughts about what has, may or is happening comprise a separate self or identity, that is often surmised to exist in the brain.

But recent neurological advances have failed to locate any physical or even biochemical basis for a separate self.

If we return once again to the body, we can also see that all of our senses, and even thoughts, can be reduced to a biochemical reaction.  We can now view it as information passing from the receptor to the brain, gut or heart.

Since this information is based on very specific individual parameters, the results are almost by definition finite and fallible.  What we experience is by no means a universally known phenomenon. We generally experience what we’ve been conditioned to experience, which separates us from other humans, and for that matter from all other life forms.

Birds can see better than we can, whales, dolphins and bats live on sound and most animals can hear things humans can’t.  If you have a cat you know that its world is nothing like yours.

And now, even when humans have invented incredible instruments to augment our senses and allow a glimpse even into vast apparent distances away from our planet out into the cosmos, we are confronted more and more with phenomena that we cannot explain.

(I wrote “apparent distances” because our view of “outer” space is always, inevitably a subjective experience that seems to create an image within “us” – presumably within our brains from a signal through the optic nerve.  I often suspect that even the way we perceive “outer space” is a function of our limited sensory and intellectual capacities).

The irony is that it is Science that now points most effectively to what we don’t even know that we don’t know, and yet it is the same science that is the cause of so much human hubris and delusion.

Before Quantum Mechanics was discovered and Einstein’s theories verified we didn’t know that we had no clue about matter and energy.  Because a lot in the quantum world doesn’t make “sense” there are presumably more vast areas where we can’t even comprehend our own ignorance.

I dealt with some of these issues when I wrote about Robert Lanza’s theory of Biocentrism.  Science seems to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new paradigm where the self we believe in doesn’t really exist – and what WE ARE (not what we have or do) is aligned intimately with Nature, or our environment, or whatever label one might want to use in what is really an infinitely sacred Mystery.

The Limitations of Current Scientific Labels

Another example would be biology where for centuries all life was thought of as either animal or plant.  Then they found microbes, and eventually viral agents and the line between life and the “objective” world blurred.

Returning our attention to qualia, and consciousness, again these personal “events” are defined as subjective experiences.

Science can’t really explain subjectivity.  As previously noted, that may well be because explanations involve a subject and an object (as conditioned by our language and grammar) but what if everything is just an arising in Consciousness (subjectivity)?

If we take the concept of “Wholeness” literally – there cannot in fact be anyone outside of the whole to have a subjective experience.

This is the essence of “Nonduality” – a modern popular philosophical movement.

Our interpreted experience is comprised of thoughts, words and feelings.  But where do these occur?

The body and the brain are the short answers, the ones the DKE people would grab hold on, but upon deeper examination “your” experience of your hands, for example, takes place visually and tactilely; you can both see your hands and feel them.  But how is that happening and by whom?

But what makes them “yours”?  What is it that differentiates “you” from everything else you see or feel?

If you think about it, a separate “identity” was not originally within awareness when your body was first born.  It started when someone told you ‘your’ name.

And ever since the narrative of a separate person, made up mainly of thoughts and memories has accumulated more knowledge based on that one erroneous assumption of separation, culminating in an illusory experience of “you.”

How do we make the bulk of humanity aware of this delusion?   I wonder if it is not central to the issue of what we now may become “Disclosure” where our psychological world seems poised to explode in ways we cannot know that we do not know.  And as the 70’s comedy team called Firesign Theater once said:  “Everything you know is wrong.”

I would think that under the circumstances the most appropriate position to take in many instances is what Eckhart Tolle recommends – deep acceptance of not knowing.

Moreover, in the face of such overwhelming evidence of our ignorance, we might be better advised to ask very deep questions – and as Joe Martino has also mentioned, allowing silent sensing to bring us a response (perhaps not even answer) that could even bring up physical emotions or sensations, but no actual conclusion.

I tried to use that technique in the book I wrote recently “Conversations with Nobody” written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI.

Because the format of the book was an apparent “conversation” with a nonhuman intelligence the questions I posed (or prompts) were actually the only creative element in the book – and were designed to either take the AI’s response and follow up with more depth, or pose a question that had some nuance and would make the reader think about an issue like the one in this article.

Of course the potential promise of AI is to provide impersonal and presumably more factual information than a mere human; but so far that promise is unfulfilled.

The AI generally gave answers perfectly in line with the most obvious human biases – not surprising in that its “answers” were simply guesses as to next appropriate word in the response, based on its programming as a “language” model.  No actual human thought was involved in the response.

But the openness of the question may evoke an appropriate feeling in one who considers it silently.  It may even take one beyond one’s mind.  Questions to ponder and go beyond the conditioned limitations of Dunning-Kruger:

What do we really know? 

Who (or what) are we?

What is our relationship to reality – what was here before we got here and thought about it?

Once again, the FDA admits it lied to us. And once more, we yawn

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By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

On critical matters, our medical authorities have no interest in settling the science. Instead, battles are won in the arena of smear and insinuation

The reality is that most of us are not ready for the truth. We want reassurance. We cling to our comfort blankets because the idea that we live in a world in which our and our families’ interests are not paramount is too disturbing.

The idea that our fates are entirely dependent on a giant Ponzi scheme that might come crashing down at any moment from any one of multiple design flaws – an ecological crisis, a nuclear catastrophe, a pandemic or a hubristic mis-step with Artificial Intelligence – is simply too terrifying.

So, even as we mock a figurehead like Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, we remain deeply invested in the system that keeps producing them. We need to believe – and just as desperately as a child refusing, a little longer, to give in to suspicions that Father Christmas might not exist. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our societies, we insist, are on a continuous upwards trajectory named progress.

Few are willing to consider that we might actually be in a death spiral. So instead of doing something to change the world, we bury our heads. We ignore every sign, however blatant, of the system’s inherent dysfunction and corruption.

Horse dewormer

These dark thoughts are prompted in part by the very belated concession from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – whispered by government lawyers in a court hearing – that for two years it has been peddling disinformation about both Ivermectin and the fact that doctors were not authorised to prescribe it in the treatment of Covid.

Ok, let’s pause right there. Because already I sense you reaching for the remote to change channels. Isn’t Ivermectin a horse drug that only anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers ever talk about?

Before I lose you entirely, let me hurriedly issue a disclaimer. This piece isn’t really about Ivermectin – least of all its efficacy in the treatment of Covid. I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to judge. I talk about things I am familiar with, that I have some insight on.

I’m not interested in medical debates about Ivermectin. I’m interested in deconstructing the political debates around it – and what they tell us about the way medical matters, and much else besides, have been entirely captured by political and commercial interests.

I can assure you I have no shares in Ivermectin and won’t profit either way, whether its use increases or declines. Unlike Big Pharma, that’s not the reason I’m taking an interest.

It just so happens that Ivermectin is a particularly fascinating case study – both of the corruption of our governance and regulatory systems, and of our own unwillingness to recognise that corruption out of fear of what it might signify.

Ivermectin provides one more data point that might help drag each of us out of our carefully constructed cocoon of ideological comfort. It might make us a little angrier, a little more willing to fight for our species’ survival.

‘Merely quips’

After all, the general assumption that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer didn’t come from nowhere. It was a view cultivated in us by the FDA and the corporate media. Here is the tweet the agency sent out exactly two years ago to persuade us that only dangerous nutjobs talk about Ivermectin:

I am guessing that those 108,000 likes make it one of the most influential tweets ever by the FDA. There is a reason why it went so viral.

The corporate media worked overtime to promote exactly the same messaging: that Ivermectin was only good for horses and cows. The media echoed the FDA in implying very strongly that the drug’s use in humans was not safe. There was not a late-night show host who did not mock Ivermectin as a horse drug and ridicule its supporters, even leading doctors.

Super-star podcaster Joe Rogan’s admission that he had been prescribed Ivermectin by his doctor when he fell ill with Covid were enough to foment demands for his banning from social media for spreading misinformation.

Social media giants like Youtube played their own part, treating any reference to Ivermectin, in pretty much any positive context, even by doctors, as “misinformation”. The algorithms were adjusted accordingly, which is why I will have to avoid mentioning Ivermectin when I post this story on social media.

And yet now, two years on, the FDA is quietly admitting that it, not Rogan, outright lied. Ivermectin isn’t a medicine used only by vets. It’s a human drug that’s been prescribed billions of times – and so successfully that it won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2015.

And not just that. It is now the FDA – not Rogan – admitting that Ivermectin is safe and that doctors, including Rogan’s, do indeed have the authority to prescribe the drug, not just to treat parasites but to treat Covid too.

It was tweets like the one above that instigated a witch-hunt by US state medical boards against doctors who prescribed Ivermectin, the matter at the heart of the case currently before the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

With the FDA’s statements about Ivermectin now being harshly criticised by the judges hearing the case, the US government has fallen back on the barely credible argument that its comments were meant as “merely quips”.

So why would the FDA lie about Ivermectin – and maintain that lie for at least two years until forced to come clean under cross-examination by the courts?

And why did all those expert medical correspondents working for Big Media, journalists who knew only too well that Ivermectin was a human drug, conspire with the FDA in promoting a blatant lie?

Here, for example, is Dr Sunjay Gupta of CNN being put on the spot by Rogan when he appeared on his show. He is forced to admit, uncomfortably, that the media were not telling the truth about Ivermectin.

Emergency use

Which brings us to the politics surrounding Ivermectin – which is far more revelatory than any medical debate about it.

Remember, the FDA’s drug division receives three-quarters of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. That doesn’t just mean the continuing salaries of many thousands of government officials depend on keeping Big Pharma happy. It also ensures wider political pressures. Washington prefers not to alienate Big Pharma and then have to foot the FDA’s budget through higher taxes. And, as we shall see, leading politicians have every incentive to avoid picking a fight with a corporate America.

The reality is that Ivermectin and other drugs that might have been repurposed for Covid posed an enormous threat in principle to the FDA and its funders in Big Pharma – completely aside from the practical question of whether those drugs actually work against Covid.

The new, experimental mRNA vaccines could only be rushed out for use in humans on the basis of an emergency authorisation so long as no other drug could be shown to be an effective treatment for Covid.

Well, that was a good thing, I hear you say. Those vaccines reduced the severest symptoms, even if sadly they didn’t actually stop transmission.

Let’s pull back a second and try to see the bigger picture for a moment. Let’s do precisely what the FDA and Pfizer don’t want us to do: engage our critical faculties.

Ivermectin has been off-patent for years. No one can make any serious money from it, and certainly not giant pharmaceuticals based in the United States. Any Indian factory with the right approvals can knock out the tablets for a few cents.

So in short, Big Pharma, which was poised to become fabulously enriched by its new vaccines, had every financial incentive imaginable to make sure there were no rivals in the stakes for a Covid miracle cure. The focus had to be entirely and exclusively on the vaccines.

Endless profiteering

The corporate media had exactly the same priorities. Why?

A superficial, if truthful analysis is that companies like Pfizer subsidise the corporate media as heavily as they do the FDA. Just watch this short compilation video to get a sense of quite how complete Big Pharma’s stranglehold of sponsorship is on the main TV networks:

But a deeper analysis is that Big Pharma and Big Media are just separate wings of the same Big Business empire headquartered in the US. What’s good for Big Pharma is good for Big Weapons is good for Big Farming is good for Big Food is good for Big Media, and so on.

What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for Big Everything’s permanent profiteering. What is good for one of them is good for all.

So Ivermectin was never going to be allowed a look-in, irrespective of whether it worked.

But that doesn’t really matter, I hear you interject, because Ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid.

And how do we know that? The anwer is we don’t. Our assumption that Ivermectin is useless against Covid is nothing more than that. It is an assumption. Some studies suggest it doesn’t help, while others suggest possible effectiveness.

Medicine has an established way to deal with such uncertainties. It settles them with an expensive, large-scale, randomised, controlled study.

In a time of profound crisis such as a pandemic, politics has an additional way to settle such questions: move heaven and earth to carry out emergency trials of drugs that look like they may be suitable for repurposing against the threat. Shift into a war footing.

Which is exactly what would have happened – not just for Ivermectin but for other promising potential treatments like the mis-named sunshine hormone Vitamin D – if we lived in a world in which scientific principles, not profiteering by a tiny wealth-elite, guided our societies’ decisions.

Instead, all of us – even children who were under no threat from Covid – were forced to worship exclusively at the altar of the novel vaccines.

That should make your blood boil.

Many millions of people died. Some of them might have been helped through the use of safe, potentially beneficial treatments before the vaccines were rolled out.

Some of those who refused to take the vaccines – the heretics – might have had their lives saved through the approval of other treatments.

Everyone, even the vaccinated and multi-boosted, might have had even better outcomes with the help of treatments to complement the vaccines.

Instead, the response to the pandemic prioritised one thing only: not saving lives, but maximising to the greatest extent possible the profits of Big Pharma.

I don’t know whether Ivermectin would have helped. You don’t know whether it would have helped. But what’s important – what is scandalous – is that the FDA doesn’t know either, and still doesn’t care to know whether lives would have been saved through the use of treatments in place of, or in addition to, the vaccines.

That is a violation both of fundamental medical ethics and of the social contract. I can barely believe I need to spell it out – and even less that I will be called irresponsible for doing so by the vaccine cultists.

Smears and insinuation

The issue isn’t whether Ivermectin works against Covid. That narrow issue is the one Big Pharma, Big Media and the FDA want you focusing on. Because they have made sure the question will only ever be settled in the arena of official smear amd insinuation, in misleading social media soundbites like the FDA’s horse drug one.

That isn’t science, it’s propaganda.

To run a controlled trial of Ivermectin for treating Covid – even now, three years too late – costs a small fortune. One that can be afforded only by Big Pharma or governments. And in the circumstances, neither has any interest to find out.

Why does this matter? It shouldn’t need stating. But from reactions on social media, I see that it very much does.

It matters because it shows that we live in a world where “facts” are of no interest, where science is not followed, unless it can be monetised. Science is no longer for the benefit of all. It has become private property – the property of powerful, unaccountable corporations – like everything else in our societies. Science has been weaponised to further enrich a corrupt wealth-elite.

It matters because, if we continue to resign ourselves so passively to these constant mind-games and manipulations, we must also accept that the profiteering they conceal should take priority over our health, over saving lives.

Ivermectin isn’t the issue. It’s a waymark: to the depths of corruption to which our supposedly Enlightened, rational civilisation has been sunk by money and its worship.

Julian Rose: ‘Humanity in Hypnotic Thrall to a Techno-Industrial God’

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By Julian Rose

Source: 21st Century Wire

So here we are. For yes, this is where we are – if by ‘we’ one understands the current materialistically imprisoned post industrial world – driven on by the relentless force of globalisation.

Brussels, still a remarkably human city by today’s standards, has the misfortune of housing the European Union HQ, which is not a very human conglomerate. And what goes on in it is equally devoid of humanity. For it is about being ‘big, central and dominating’.

Big, central and dominating is the future of the planet if you subscribe to the techno-industrial mind’s two dimensional determinism. In the soothing words of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari, it is to be an Information Technology/Artificial Intelligence future, in which Schwab tells us “we will have nothing and will be happy”.

The mobile phone tower and mast which tops the temple of techno-industrial prowess, is an ugly, spindly piece of steel which is an expression of dominance in its own right. The vast global infrastructure formed by these Saturnian steel structures carry with them a penetrating EMF amplified soup of toxicity.

It is this ‘network’ which acts as the gateway to the virtual reality world of those who depend on it for their ‘signals’. Signals that have an abstracted kind of dominance and pronounced tendency to thin the blood and blur the brain.

The majority of messages that come through this gateway concern how to get on in ‘the system’.

How to get from A to B faster; news faster; financial reports faster; connections with family and friends faster; everything faster.

Being permanently plugged-in to this hyper electromagnetic crossroads of life is said to be the only way to ‘stay in touch’, to be a participant in the mental matrix; to be part of ‘the programme’.

But already twenty years ago I decided to cut my ties with this programme. Dispensing with the mobile phone turned out to be an act of liberation, soon to be followed by the ousting of the TV.

Big Brother was consigned to the back seat and I saw that a life that belonged to myself still existed, all be it with the proviso that one prioritised one’s values with a solid dose of determination to be true to that which is ‘real’ in life.

Perhaps this is why I can see so clearly how those who continue to participate in the ‘programme’ are running blindly towards an uncompromisingly sheer cliff-face, and how their voracious demands on the natural environment are increasingly undermining her natural resilience.

I can see something particularly shocking – that this frenetic rush to the cliff face and the great consumption of finite resources it involves – has no other purpose than playing-out a quasi demonic fascination with ever more refined toys of distraction. Distraction from the real pulse of life.

Yet this techno-industrial suicide machine is staffed by humans who appear not to recognise that their joint mission is programmed to end in collapse.

On the contrary, they seem to think that by increasing the efficiency and speed of the means of travel, it will somehow consummate its own need to arrive at where it is headed for. Where or what that is – simply never gets asked.

However, the psychotic gods of insentient ‘progress’ who designed the programme have built into it a series of ‘events’ which reach a certain conclusion in something they call the Transhuman. A robotic state of computer connected and controlled brain power for those able to pay for it.

To pay for the right to be dehumanised and rendered devoid of the need – and indeed ability – to think. Freed from emotion and freed from a soul based link to one’s Creator.

Stations on the way to this dark point of human annulment are laid-out under the WEF creed known as ‘The Great Reset’. A ‘Reset’ from human to non human.

Here are some of stations along the Great Reset route to the Transhuman:

The cessation of food grown in soil and the manufacturing of synthetic food produced in laboratories (at least six of which are already in production).

The end of farming the land as we know it and the removal of redundant farmers and country dwellers into 5 and 6G controlled total surveillance ‘smart cities’.

Countryside and farm landscapes redesigned to accommodate ‘rewilding’ projects and gated access to designated ‘leisure sites’ for those who can afford access.

The end of bank notes and coinage, replaced by a centrally controlled digital currency whose availability will depend upon one’s ‘social credit’ a la China.

The confiscation of one’s assets and private property with the option to ‘rent’ aspects of them back from the corporate state that is to become the new owner.

‘Self-autonomous’ 5G guided transportation systems operating between major cities.

100% surveillance via satellite and ‘the internet of everything’ and the profligate use of algorithms to pick-up any signs of resistance in communications.

The repression of true spirituality in favour of a ‘one world religion’.

Deliberate blurring of sexual delineation ‘man/woman’ and the decline of normal sexual reproduction.

Sperm-counts further reduced due to de-vitaminised synthetic GMO foods, vaccinations and polluted air and water – population control.

Enforced ‘15 minute cities’ as centres of local authority control.

Designer gene-altered babies via laboratory cloning of DNA sequences and cell tissues.

The removal of certain words from the common language, particularly poetic and spiritual ones.

Real art reduced to pseudo art as an expression of the will of the state, including dark-side ritual.

‘Medical health’ seen as the sole domain of Big Pharma with natural medicine outlawed.

Further media/government control over the passing of public information.

There is more, much more. But this is enough to show the basic composition of the stations on the way to ‘Transhumanism’. The arrival point of which is said to be circa 2035.

Behind this in-your-face destruction of hard won human liberties is a vast global propaganda/indoctrination exercise already in existence for more than two decades and built around the now infamous ‘Zero carbon by 2045’ or ‘Net Zero’ in news-speak (Orwell).

When challenged by those still able to question the need for these deadly impositions, the answer is always the same “To save the world from Global Warming.”

This piece of acute brainwashing, initially devised at the Club of Rome in 1972, is key to the whole ‘programme’. As long as enough people buy into it for long enough, the slavery exercise will be irreversible. Based on the current rate of awakening, the discovery that anthropogenic Global Warming is a mega lie will likely be neutralised by the impositions already in place to prevent an uprising.

The techno-industrial god will then have served its purpose. Like the rocket booster that gets the capsule into orbit, it will have taken the majority of mankind over the brink into abject slavery to its hypnotic convenience culture, before imploding in on itself and taking much of humanity and nature’s life sustaining diversity with it.

BUT, all this can be avoided. It doesn’t have to happen. It won’t happen. Our lives do not depend upon adopting the smart technology of tomorrow, today. We won’t any longer be seduced by ‘convenience’ once we recognise it is leading to our self destruction, will we?

We will retain sufficient will-power to get shot of this addiction to the IT/AI life inhibiting distractions that make up the mind controlled road to Armageddon.

The only way to recognise just how diabolical is the trap that has been set for us – and that we have set for ourselves – is to get a grip on our sense of deeper purpose in this life. To make an unbreakable commitment to listen and respond to the call of our souls. The true self. And then pull this true self out of any association with the metaverse mincing machine.

Let no one in possession of a soul ever allow himself/herself to become processed into a sub human product of the techno-industrial behemoth. Stick with what’s solid, what’s real – and ditch the counterfeit virtual world that snares the unweary and turns once healthy minds into casualties of a blind rush to a dystopian digital nowhere land.

Why You Should Stop Trusting ‘The Experts’

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We’re constantly told to “trust the experts”, but that is phenomenally bad advice.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyRHammond.com

“Trust the experts,” we are constantly being told, whatever the topic of discussion. The problem with this advice is that the so-called “experts” are frequently wrong, sometimes as a result of plain incompetence and other times because it is their function to propagandize rather than to educate.

For instance, I got my start doing citizen journalism speaking out against the US government’s planned war on Iraq. In 2002 and early 2003, the government claimed that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, active weapons manufacturing programs, and an active nuclear program aimed at producing a nuclear bomb. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times uncritically parroted the government’s claims. All the “expert” analysts and commentators towed the official line.

When I would point out to people that there was no credible evidence to support the government’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that the documentary record rather indicated that Iraq had been disarmed of the weapons it produced during the 1980s with the support of the US government, I was frequently confronted with the idea that we should trust the expert intelligence analysts because surely government policymakers must have classified information supporting their case that they just couldn’t share with the public.

Later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued its official report acknowledging that Iraq had indeed been disarmed by UN inspectors by 1991 and never restarted its weapons programs, a whole new propaganda narrative was developed to whitewash how the US government lied to the American people and the world. We were then fed the myth that there had been an “intelligence failure”, the truth being that the government had successfully waged a disinformation campaign against the public for the purpose of manufacturing consent for an illegal war of aggression that left Iraq devastated, with negative ripple effects throughout the Middle East, including the war’s precipitation of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Another example is the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The mainstream “experts” insisted that there was no bubble, that the economy was rolling along nicely. Right up to the bubble’s peak, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke refused to see it. In the New York Times, throughout the 2000s, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman lauded the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy that was the principal cause of the housing bubble only to ludicrously blame the bubble on the forces of the free market after it burst.

Meanwhile, free market economists schooled in the ideas of Austrian economics, so called because its founders and early luminaries hailed from Austria, were accurately warning how the Fed’s policy of maintaining artificially low interest rates—meaning rates below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market rather than by a roomful of policymakers—was fueling a housing bubble that would cause economic devastation when it inevitably burst. Congressman Ron Paul famously warned about this as early as 2001, yet we were consistently told by the mainstream “experts” that we shouldn’t listen to him or other advocates of liberty in the marketplace.

The preposterousness of the mainstream narrative was so overwhelming, it prompted me to write a book titled Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which ended up getting a rave review by none other than Barron’s. Gene Epstein, the former Economics and Books editor for Barron’s said of it:

Any work of economics that can make you laugh is at least worth a look. If in less than 100 pages it also informs you about a subject of great importance, it might just qualify as a must-read. Jeremy Hammond, a political journalist self-taught in economics and a writer of rare skill, has produced such a book…. This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length.

Once again, we could see that there is a whole class of “experts” whose primary function was not to truly educate us about how the economy functions but to manufacture consent for the existence of central banking—the Fed being a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply.

That episode also once again illustrates how any non-expert willing to commit the time to self-education can easily see through the lies and deceptions propagated by the “experts”.

Arguably, there is no more perfect example of how the “experts” get things completely wrong than the governmental responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic. While I and others fervently opposed the lockdown measures from the start on the grounds that they would do more harm than good, the thought-controlling media insisted that we must trust the government’s “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci. We should “follow the science” we were told, while Fauci claimed to be science incarnate, deeming himself beyond reproach by proclaiming that to criticize him was to attack science itself.

Predictably, the proclaimed benefits of lockdowns never manifested in the data while the harms have been devastating, with negative consequences being disproportionately borne by children, who are at the lowest risk from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.

I was also warning people since March 2020 that the endgame of the lockdown measures was coerced mass vaccination, which was dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream media but nevertheless came to pass.

While all the “experts” in the so-called “public health” establishment were proclaiming that widespread acceptance of the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity, dissident voices like my own were being censored for telling the truth that there was no scientific evidence that the vaccines would induce durable sterilizing immunity that would prevent infection and transmission of the virus.

I was also warning since very early into the mass vaccination campaign that the policy goal of getting everyone vaccinated could prolong the pandemic and worsen outcomes in the long-term because of the immunologic phenomenon of “original antigenic sin” and the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity. These warnings, too, proved prescient as we now know from the available scientific evidence that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines do result in an “immune imprinting” so that vaccinated individuals are stuck generating a suboptimal immune response to circulating SARS‑CoV‑2 variants.

After it became obvious from the data that the vaccines failed to prevent infection and transmission of the virus, the media went so far in their efforts to defend the criminal regime of lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination by gaslighting us and absurdly denying that the COVID‑19 vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.

We’re also supposed to trust doctors, but my own household’s experience with the medical establishment led us to the opposite conclusion. The doctors were not just unhelpful; they were less than useless. Especially in my wife’s case, listening to them caused more harm than good. In fact, it wasn’t until we learned to stop listening to the doctors and started trusting our own judgment that my wife and I both found a path to healing from the respective health problems we used to have (leaky gut in my case and mercury toxicity from dental amalgams in my wife’s).

Throughout the time that I was seeking help from the so-called “health care” system, I was repeatedly confronted by doctors whose ignorance was matched only by their arrogance and condescension. I ultimately bypassed the doctors by researching our symptoms directly in the medical literature; we diagnosed ourselves and successfully treated the root cause of our respective symptoms (taking steps to heal my gut and getting the mercury fillings safely removed followed by a two-year mercury detox regimen, respectively).

The supposed “experts” with an “MD” after their name were far more interested in lazily pushing pharmaceutical products on us to treat symptoms than in doing their job to try to figure out what the root cause was, much less in figuring out treatments aimed at addressing the underlying cause.

So, the next time you hear someone telling you to place your trust in the “experts”, emphasize the foolishness of placing blind faith in supposed authorities in lieu of doing one’s own research and thinking for oneself, and remind the person how the “experts” are frequently nothing more than professional propagandists serving a given political or financial agenda.

Situational Awareness

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

“All across the board, illness, disability, cancer, heart, autism, fertility…WeFkdUp !!!” —The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter

What if Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is correct? The Dutch virologist said at the outset of the Covid-19 episode in 2020 that vaccinating the world in the midst of an epidemic was insane because it would train the virus to evolve more dangerously while disabling human immune systems.

     Last week he issued a warning that the world was within weeks of just such a new and deadly immune escape variant outbreak that would bring on a shocking wave of sickness and death among people who received multiple Covid-19 vaccinations. This would happen on top of an already accelerating rise in latent vaccine adverse reactions manifesting as aggressive cancers, blood disorders, cardiac injury, neurological disease, and much, much more.

     To this point in the Covid-19 story, Western Civ in general, and the USA in particular, have descended into an epic group psychosis as a result of the managed mind-fuckery induced by their own governments in collusion with a pharmaceutical industry metastasizing on money the way an aggressive cancer feeds on sugar in a human body. Fearful citizens swallowed all manner of unreality foisted on them by means of propaganda and censorship.

     We still don’t know for sure how, who, and why, exactly, Covid-19 was set loose on the world, and the public health agencies don’t want you to know. Perhaps the worst and most baldly dishonest act was the official suppression of effective treatments with common, safe, anti-virals that could have saved millions of lives. And all just to preserve the vaccine companies’ liability shield from the Emergency Use Authorization. In fact, governments are still militating against the sale and use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which could be taken prophylactically in anticipation of a new outbreak.

     So, if these populations were driven crazy by authorities ginning up their fear and preying on it, what will happen if that fear turns to anger instead? Because that’s exactly what will happen when Americans, and perhaps even Europeans, realize they’ve been subject to history’s biggest homicidal fraud. That anger is going to seek targets, and they are going to find them very easily in their own government officials and also — get this — in the medical establishment that has betrayed its patients so unconscionably.

     It’s just impossible to say exactly how that will play out on-the-ground. Governments are already falling — Spain, the Netherlands — but these were parliamentary downfalls according to regular political procedure. Our country has no such procedures for changing authority in a time of crisis. Instead, we have a president up to his neck in bribery scandal and executive agency thuggery, and political parties sunk in corruption, and no way to get rid of them except elections many months away — elections which at least half the people don’t believe are honest.

    This crisis of bad faith and sickness is happening at the same time that Western Civ enters an equally vicious crisis of economy and finance. America and Europe are broke. All are playing games with their conjoined banking systems and their currencies. All are de-industrializing economies strictly based on industrial production of goods no longer being produced, and pretending to replace them with economies of computer vapor-ware. That can’t work and can only end badly in collapsing standards of living.

     The past few years, an apparent coalition of global elites, functioning in orgs such as the WEF, the WHO, the EU, the IMF, the central banks, and countless NGOs, along with shadowy intel units and what remains of the old news media, have promoted ever more desperate top-down control programs to prevent a breakdown into wholesale economic and political disorder. Their efforts increasingly tilt into pretense.

     Try to impose digital currencies and health passports? Fuggeddabowdit. You will only get a chaos of work-arounds, non-compliance, and probably violent opposition. Keep that stupid, dishonorable, perfidious, and unnecessary war going in Ukraine and you run the risk of turning Western Civ into a matched set of ashtrays.

     As you can see, there has already been enough official mischief, crime, and malfeasance to severely piss-off the population. If Dr. Vanden Bossche is correct, we are perhaps heading into the conclusive shock of an evil era. Some kind of monumental correction will be in order. The people will need some way to regain credible self-governance, either through personnel change in every locus of power, or some revision in structure and procedure. For now, there is little faith that our institutions can manage either of those options. Better maintain situational awareness as we creep into the unknown.

When Dissent Ends, Transhumanism Reigns And Digitization Rules, Humanity Will Cease To Be Human

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By Gary Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

~  Arundhati Roy

Self-defense comes in many forms, but all defense of self begins and ends with dissent, non-compliance, disobedience, saying no to any and all rule, and never allowing aggression against mind and body; mental or physical. Without dissent, defense is not possible, because when voluntary compliance is the prevailing behavior, whether sought, desired, or not, all defense mechanisms are effectively disarmed. In other words, silence in the face of injustice, immorality, terror, or tyranny, creates a condition of weakness, submission, and irresponsibility, which are all the fodder of indifference. When you say nothing, when you do not say no, when you take no action against evil, you commit evil. By not speaking out, and by not responding, you have spoken loudly, and openly committed an act of cowardice. The ultimate blame lies not just with the aggressor in this circumstance, but also equally with he who hides and remains silent.

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” This is an accurate description of the phenomenon of becoming what one lives, so if you live in a state of indifference, ignoring the evil around you, accepting it in order to avoid conflict and responsibility, you become the evil you have chosen to ignore. The dark abyss in this circumstance, is created by your own inaction against it.

What we face as a society, is the most tremendous threat ever perceived or active in the history of mankind. Do you scoff at this seemingly ‘bold’ pronouncement? If so, you are already fooled, and a major contributor to the vast problems rampant in our world today. Instead of the State just singularly seeking war, the continuance of the bogus Federal Reserve System, isolated government corruption, communism, fascism, or any broad-based totalitarian assault on certain segments of society, we are all being bombarded from a thousand different directions at once with all these atrocities and many more, including attacks on our freedom and sovereignty, on our minds and bodies, and on every aspect of our being. Due to the colossal advances in technology, which in many more ways than not are being used against us in order to build a literal transhuman world run by technocratic means, we are facing what could be considered a technological Armageddon, where all control over humanity will be isolated in the hands of the most powerful few. To accept this, to treat it as normal or eminent, is a most fatal error, and one that could determine our fate in perpetuity.

When humanity ceases to exist in any natural form, when male and female become one, when transhumanism and mind control are inescapable realities, when perversion is commonly accepted, the presence of life that we have all known to be magical and a wonder, will have disappeared. The world being designed is not a world of love, hope, and dreams, it is a nightmare of horror, and those pursuing this downfall of man have already lost all human characteristics. They are monsters, so we must fight and defeat them without becoming monsters ourselves.

There is a reason that the children, beginning in infancy, are targeted by State indoctrination, drugs, chemicals, bioweapon injections masquerading as ‘vaccines,’  insane propaganda, distraction, gross perversion, and are pulled away from family mentally and physically throughout their lives. This, in and of itself, if allowed to continue, will guarantee mind destruction of multiple future generations, and that will secure a fully dumbed-down, compliant, and obedient proletariat mass in the future. At that point, total control by the technocrats over humanity will have been achieved.

While technology has the capability to accomplish many great things, in the hands of these monsters who seek universal control, it can also be used to destroy us. Many refer to this technological phenomenon as ‘artificial intelligence,’ (AI) but there is no such thing. This false terminology is being used against us, as machines are not intelligent, they are programmed by intelligence, or so it is believed. When man becomes a machine, real intelligence ends, and a programmed society of slaves is the result. AI is ‘defined’ as “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information–demonstrated by computers, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or other animals.” Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, reason, and understand, so honest intelligence cannot be artificial, and machines are still machines. The transhuman digitization of man will mean the end of all traditional life as we know it.

The bulk of this society, has already succumbed to a digital world, and relies on what is falsely labeled ‘social media’ as parent, family, and friend, disregarding the natural state of personal communication, love, companionship, debate, and the grandeur of nature. At this point, the future is not owned by you, but is owned by your masters. All privacy has disappeared, and most all private and financial transactions are captured and data-based. Every aspect of life is now tracked, traced, used, surveilled, restricted, censored, taxed, and every activity imaginable requires licensure (paid permission slip) by the State. You are already a slave, whether you realize it or not.

The plot continues to thicken, as centrally-controlled digital currencies (CBDCs) are being rolled out around the world, which will allow for most every individual to be fully contained and regulated. This will lead to mass restrictions as to what you are allowed to do, where you may travel – if at all, what food you must eat, what medical care you may or may not receive, what State stipend you will be allotted, how much energy you will be permitted to use, and on, and on. Everything in your existence will depend on behavior modification; in other words, do as you are instructed by the State technocratic rulers, or lose everything, as your entire life will be technologically sanctioned.

It is imperative to understand that everything you think you know about technology, and technological advances, is likely at a minimum, 20 years behind. Every so-called new discovery and new technology recognized as such, are not new at all. What the military has now, and is working on today, is unknown to most all except the very few at the top of the pyramid of power. To understand and grasp this concept, should strike fear in the hearts of man. The internet, and therefore, the internet of things, was not discovered and implemented by some computer geek, but was designed and created by the military through the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” (DARPA) Getting to this terroristic time in our history was no accident, and was intentionally planned long ago. We have little time left to stop this totalitarian hell that has been created in order to destroy what we know as the human race.

Will you continue to sit on the sideline, keeping your eyes closed, your ears covered, and your mouth shut, or will you stand up and defend your freedom and life, and that of your family? The only solution, as I have often said, is through active dissent. Say no to the State, disobey, do not comply with any tyrannical order, and do so as individuals en masse. No one can do this for you, but it can and should be done by many independent freedom-minded individuals. Asking someone else for a solution for the masses as a collective, is worthless, and exposes apathy at a level that if practiced by the herd as it has been for so long, the end of humanity will surely be our destiny.

“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”

TWITTER FILES: Brown University’s Claire Wardle Aids Censorship

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Researchers on “disinformation” have little in common with academic scholars teaching Proust or studying astrophysics.

By Paul D. Thacker

Source: The Disinformation Chronicle

The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.

Just last year, one Stanford University researcher disclosed that he and other academics at Stanford and the University of Washington worked with an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves,” admitting that academics served as a cutout for federal censoring of Americans. The DHS agency campus researchers collaborated with is called the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.

In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.

Who is Claire Wardle?

Largely unknown to most Americans, Wardle is a central figure in the disinformation industry and helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups in 2015 with funding from Google. But searching through Twitter’s files, I uncovered a government document marked “for official use only” that finds Wardle had also been chosen to brief CISA’s advisory committee.

A spokesperson for CISA emailed yesterday that he would get back to me and explain how often Wardle had briefed the agency.

Wardle has no training or background in science, yet she has long sought to define herself as an expert on vaccines. In a 2019 Twitter email that I discovered, Wardle tried to involve the company’s executives in a Ted Talk event that would define “credible sources” and “quality information around vaccines.”

That next year, Wardle emailed Twitter executives a report she had written looking into what she deemed to be antivaccine conspiracies and narratives found on social media. Wardle sent the email days after Pfizer announced initial positive findings for their COVID vaccine—results which Wardle said forced her to hurry up the report’s release.

“The dominant vaccine narrative is designed to undermine confidence in institutions and scientific sources,” Wardle alleged, in her email to Twitter. Wardle claimed in her report that vaccine mandates are “one of the prominent anti-vaccination narratives”—a narrative which, oddly enough, proved to be accurate when US companies as well as state and federal agencies began mandating COVID vaccines.

Since Wardle published her vaccine findings, one of the report’s authors joined a secretive UK government agency that investigative journalists exposed in recent weeks for censoring British citizens. Meanwhile, one of the report’s contributing researchers now works for a global PR firm that an Australian investigation found was helping that country’s government to censor its own people.

Transhumanism and the Philosophy of the Elites

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By Danica Thiessen

Source: PANDA

In 2004, when Foreign Policy asked eminent scholar Francis Fukuyama to write an article answering the question, What is the world’s most dangerous idea?, he responded with a piece titled Transhumanism. Fukuyama argued that the transhumanist project will use biotechnology to modify life until humans lose something of their ‘essence’, or fundamental nature. Doing so will disrupt the very basis of natural law upon which, he believes, our liberal democracies are founded (Fukuyama, 2004). For Fukuyama, these losses lay unrecognised beneath a mountain of promise for a techno-scientific future of imaginative self-improvement. 

Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which transhumanism plays a central guiding role, is shaping the policies of global corporations and political governance (Philbeck, 2018: 17). The converging technologies of this revolution are nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive sciences (NBIC), and artificial intelligence (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002). The political class and the new technology elite routinely tell us that ‘the age of AI has arrived’ (Kissinger et al., 2021). Simultaneously, modern humans have also become increasingly dependent on advanced technologies and the complex systems they enable. These changes have presented new challenges to old questions, namely: what does it mean to be human? And what future do we want for ourselves?

From the hype of super-intelligence to self-assembling nanobiology, the world can seem increasingly science-fictional. Contemporary technological society is “harder and harder to grasp”, is full of “disruptions…that move ever faster”, and is confronting us with “situations that seem outrageously beyond the scope of our understanding” (Schmeink, 2016: 18). 

This paper aims to further our critical engagement with an ideology that is emerging across influential sectors of society. With this aim in mind, I will make three essential arguments: Firstly, transhumanism is a movement based on a techno-scientific belief system that is striving towards the technological enhancement of biology and, in this regard, is self-consciously promoting bio-social engineering. Secondly, the technologies of transhumanism have the potential to bring tremendous financial and political gains to corporations and governments who are not incentivised to seek out nor address their potential dangers. Thirdly, the discontent towards transhumanism is diverse and comes overridingly from the threat to traditional values, nature-based ways of life, freedom, equality, and the loss of bodily autonomy to the will of those who operate these powerful systems. 

Much of the current scholarship on transhumanism focuses on the intellectual contribution of the movement, with minimal work assessing socio-political impacts. This neglect is worrying since, within the reality of global capitalism, transhumanism may be overridingly motivated by economic and political forces as it may be by ideology. Furthermore, perhaps only a minority of humans may be able to access certain NBIC technologies or utilise them for profits (McNamee and Edwards, 2006: 515).  Of course, the socio-economic ramifications may be culturally and politically disruptive in unanticipated ways. It is this overwrought relationship—of transhumanism, the global economy, profitable science, human nature, and traditional belief systems—that demand further critical examination.

Transhumanism: A brief history 

Transhumanism is a predominantly Anglo-American movement that has flourished since the 1980s in “American circles of science fiction fans” and with “computer experts and techno-geeks” (Manzocco, 2019: 36). Today, California’s Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological optimism and imaginative entrepreneurship, is the hub of transhumanist thought and innovation. Though scholars have noted that there is no single definition of transhumanism, the essence of transhumanist ideology is to use science and technology to re-design and re-shape the human condition away from randomness, imperfectability, and decay, towards order, perfectibility, and control (Bostrom, 2005: 14).

This ideology emerged in early 20th Century Britain. There is a clear continuity of ideas between current proponents of transhumanism and those who were writing before the Second World War of the potential of science to shape the trajectory of nature, while fostering international cooperation and governance. They included British scientists and thinkers such as Julian Huxley (credited with first using the word Transhumanism in the 1950s), his brother Aldous, and his grandfather Thomas Huxley, as well as their colleagues J.B.S. Haldane, H.G. Wells, J.D. Bernal, and Bertrand Russell. These influential thinkers and internationalists were writing and working on promoting political and scientific outlooks that would form the basis of a century of scientific transhumanist thought (Bostrom, 2005: 4-6; Bohan, 2019: 74-108). The subjects they explored still attract transhumanists today: behavioural conditioning, genetic control, technological augmentation, artificial foods and wombs, space travel, life extension, and total disease control. These and other themes circle around the assertion that nature, including human nature, operates optimally under scientific adjustment and management (Bohan, 2019: 99-100). 

Early transhumanists (or proto-transhumanists) viewed techno-scientific advancement as a cure for ‘primitive’ human nature (anger, violence, excess fertility), physical limitations (disease and possibly death), political ignorance, and international conflict. It was the Enlightenment ideal of mastery over nature, including human populations, that Aldous Huxley so aptly demonstrated in his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, written in 1931, illustrates a scientific dystopia where transhumanist aims (genetic engineering, anti-aging interventions, biotechnology and enhancement drugs) are used to manage society implicitly through pleasure rather than explicitly through force. Huxley’s depictions were based less on his prophetic abilities and more on his intimate knowledge of the possibilities of social engineering as discussed and promoted by the scientific minds with whom he mingled. His later essay, Over-population, surmises that his novel’s projections were “coming true much sooner than” anticipated (Huxley, 1960: 1). 

Notably, Aldous’s brother, Julian Huxley, also wrote about the ills of global overpopulation while promoting the genetic control (‘improvement’) of populations through eugenics (Hubback, 1989; Huxley, 1933). His 1957 essay, Transhumanism, claimed that man was the “managing director” of “evolution on this earth” (Huxley, 2015:12-13). He was very involved with Britain’s Eugenics Society for over three decades, serving as Vice-President and then President, as well as supporting “campaigns for voluntary sterilization…and for negative eugenics measures against persons carrying the scientific stigma of ‘mental defect’” (Weindling, 2012: 3). Julian Huxley was the first Director-General of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund (Byk 2021: 141-142). In this role, he promoted the ideology of an international, scientifically-founded welfare state to further his aim of liberating “the concept of God from personality” because “religions as all human activities is always an unfinished work” (Byk, 2021:149), (Huxley, 1957:10). Julian Huxley’s work and writing envisioned an international social engineering project based on rational scientific management that promised to elevate humanity towards global peace (Sluga, 2010; Byke, 2021:146).

Philosophical and Spiritual Transhumanism: Towards a Technological Utopia

Transhumanism has a wide variety of interpretations, similar to how a major religion is expressed with a divergence of commitment, beliefs and motivations. In fact, many scholars consider transhumanism to be a novel, emerging religion with significant parallels to Christian eschatology (deGrey et al., 2022; O’Gieblyn, 2017). The vast majority of transhumanists do not accept a monotheistic ‘God’ or the moral restraints of traditional religions, but instead endow “technology with religious significance,” leading scholars to define it as “a secularist faith” (Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012: 710). 

While not all transhumanists partake in techno-spiritual views, transhumanists essentially view technology as the redemption for fallible biology. For some, these perspectives were inspired by the philosophical work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Tielhard de Chardin was a palaeontologist and Jesuit who believed that a “worldwide network would be woven between all men about earth” and that a “God-like entity” would form from a future “conscious, collective, omniscient mind—the Omega Point” (Bohan, 2019:92). The concept of technological ‘transcendence’ has continued to be central to Transhumanism in conversations about the worldwide web, the Internet of Bodies, artificial intelligence, and the ‘Singularity’, which is the belief that human-machine intelligence will grow exponentially and reach a point where humanity will be thrust into a posthuman age (Bohan, 2019:96; Kurzweil, 2005). The belief that humans (or rather posthumans) can become immortal and ‘god-like’ in a future machine-dominated age—complete with astral travel and digital telepathic communication—is why, in its philosophical form, many scholars understand transhumanism as a techno-materialist religious movement. 

In an attempt to consolidate such a complex movement, transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom—current head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and transhumanism’s most legitimate academic—co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 (Bostrom, 2005:12-13). Out of this work, the Transhumanist Declaration was drafted. It consists of bold statements such as: Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition. The Declaration concludes with: Transhumanism advocates for the well-being of all sentience whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non-human mammals. The Declaration makes it clear that transhumanism is an unprecedented social engineering project promoting the desirability of using “technology to push the boundaries of what it means to be human and to transcend our biological condition”, as described by Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine (Mayor, 2018). 

Two American transhumanist philosophers who have worked, since the 1980s, to spread transhumanist ideas, are Max More and Natasha Vita-More. They are entrepreneurs in the cryonics industry, which deep-freezes human corpses (called ‘patients’) with the aim of future revival (McKibbin, 2019:184-185). Vita-More, in a recent interview, emphasised that the essence of transhumanism is, “a transition of being human-animal into becoming more mechanised using different devices and technologies to enhance humans into whatever they feel that they are.” This very Californian-esque promise of becoming ‘whatever you want to be’ could result in a more mechanised, or augmented, version of you. We already see the emergence of this new ‘becoming whoever you want’ phraseology in the popular acceptance of enhancement chemicals, biotechnology, and videogames. A pantheon of new technologies is on the horizon: exoskeletons, virtual reality, robotics, body-changing pharmaceuticals, remote-controlled nanotechnology, artificial foods, brain implants and synthetic organs. Adopting these technologies is a part of what Max More describes as becoming the Overhuman, otherwise known as the Posthuman: if you are Transhuman you are essentially a transitional human. 

In The Overman in the Transhuman, More attributes attitudes in transhumanism to Nietzsche’s philosophy, arguing that the overhuman is the “meaning-giving” concept meant to “replace the basically Christian worldview” of Nietzsche’s time (and, to a lesser extent, our times). More holds that the current “relevance of the posthuman” is that it ultimately gives meaning to scientifically-minded people” (More, 2010:2). In this influential paper, More asks the reader to “take seriously Nietzche’s determination to undertake ‘a revaluation of all values’” (More, 2010:3). Since a modern overhuman upgrade will depend on human gene editing and other biotechnology applications (such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink) becoming legally available, More’s call to ‘reevaluate values’ is understandable. Issues raised on both sides of the academic debate concern which values and traits would be genetically chosen, and to what extent human enhancement will be voluntary (Levin, 2018). 

While earlier Anglo-American eugenicists argued for the removal of anti-social genes by sterilisation, some modern transhumanist proponents have argued that moral bioenhancement, through selective gene editing, should become compulsory (Persson and Savulescu, 2008). Many notable transhumanists argue for procreative bioenhancement of offspring by the parents (Levin, 2018:38). Transhumanist advocates Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu believe moral enhancement should become obligatory like “education and water fluoridation,” since “those who should take them are least likely to be inclined” (Persson and Savulescu, 2008: 22). Transhumanist Niel Levy argues that “cognitive enhancement could be required,” much as vaccines currently are (Levy, 2013:38). Scholar Susan Levin writes that allowing a techno-scientific transhumanist vision to shape the “form that society takes” may lend itself to “socio-political requirements that would clash with…liberal democracy” (Levin, 2018:50). She also argues that when transhumanists use “public health analogies and reasoning” to “justify vigorous enhancement” they are putting into serious question their commitment to autonomy (Levin, 2018:48). In this way, the coercive vaccine mandates used during the Covid-19 pandemic can be interpreted as an early warning signal for how future bio-enhancements are likely to be accompanied by forceful moralistic and utilitarian arguments.

Ingmar Person, Julian Savulescu, and Niel Levy are prominent ethicists at the University of Oxford; all three advocate for mandatory genetic enhancement despite the trail of 20th century trauma wrought by grandiose social- and eugenic engineering projects. Does this suggest that a moral framework based on utilitarian arguments and flawed metaphysics remains fundamentally unchanged in public health governance since the last century? In his recent book God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet, scholar Michael Northcott argues that a growing “post-human agenda” has become central to policies around public health—referred to as “biosecurity”—which has very little to do with authentic “human health or health of the environment” (Northcott, 89). The consequences of this ideology became apparent during the recent mandating of the experimental gene-altering vaccines, and could represent what Northcott refers to as “automatism”. This is when we are culturally obligated to “use new technologies regardless of the possible consequences” because of a utilitarian ethic of the “managerial goal of efficiency” (Northcott, 2022: 114). To underestimate the suffering caused by one-size-fits-all public health measures is inadequate scholarship, yet despite this, only a minority of academics have openly questioned the use of coercive genetic therapy during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

A clash between individual rights and a movement that aims to “re-design the human condition” seems inevitable. In the words of transhumanist scholar Nick Bostrom, “human nature is a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remould in desirable ways” (Bostrom, 2005: 3). As the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, David Pearce said,

“…if we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to re-write our bug-ridden code and become god-like…only high-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world”.DOEDE, 2009: 47

It is human nature that often comes into direct conflict with massive social engineering projects. Understanding transhumanism as a bio-social engineering project of unprecedented scale is a useful perspective in that it focuses the potential conflicts as value-based and ideological rather than as a direct result of specific scientific advances (Broudy and Arakaki, 2020). Furthermore, the term ‘social engineering’ is in itself inadequate, in that a utopia that aims to phase out Homo sapiens, while making way for the new, enhanced posthuman, is historically unprecedented (Bauman, 2010), and is possibly an energetic form of nihilism or an expression of ‘losing oneself’ to an intoxication with machine power, inspired by what scholars identify as “machine fetishism” (Geisen, 2018: 6). Yet, the surprising willingness to martyr one’s physical self to attain paradise has always been particular to our species (Pugh, 2017). 

Corporate Transhumanism: The Pursuit of Wealth and Power

In congruence with the scholarly work available, I have focused on the ideas of philosophical and academic transhumanists, but transhumanism is an ideology reaching far beyond discourse. Though under-discussed in the academic literature, the movement is advanced by corporate and political transhumanists, and transhumanist scientists. Massive corporate and state investment in NBIC technologies rely on specialised scientists working in the military, elite universities, and corporate laboratories to push the frontiers of reality with robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (Mahnkopf, 2019: 11). These scientists are designing technologies with such potential that the world’s most powerful players, such as the Chinese Communist Party and the US Department of Defense (DOD), are deeply involved. In January 2023, Harvard University’s esteemed chemist Charles Leiber was on trial for lying to the DOD about his involvement with the Wuhan University of Technology over his work on “revolutionary nanomaterials.” In his Harvard laboratories, Leiber and his assistants have created nanoscale wires that can record electrical signals from neurons (Silver, 2022). Nanowire brain implants were designed by Leiber to “spy on and stimulate individual neurons” (Gibney, 2015:1). In an age where neurotechnology and mind-machine interfaces are changing the nature of warfare, the contested power-potential of transhumanist techno-science is quickly apparent (DeFranco, 2019).

The transhumanist vision for the future should not be viewed outside of the ‘technological arms race’ or a competitive, utilitarian mindset that informs business, war-making, and our cultural esteem of scientific research. This suggests that more research understanding corporate and political transhumanists is critical in analysing how this group is actively involved with determining humanity’s future. Political leaders with a sharp sense for power understand that machine intelligence and enhancement may determine the world’s winners and losers (Kissinger et al., 2021). As Vladimir Putin articulates: “Artificial Intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all of humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world” (Karpukhin, 2017). The elite fascination with transhumanist technologies concerns the potential power inherent in the technology itself—and in who creates and controls it. The influential historian and speaker, Yuval Noah Harari, expressed this view in his 2021 Davos Summit presentation where he said that technology “might allow human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you hack something, you can usually geo-engineer it.”

Harari is a frequently featured speaker at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and associated events. The WEF is currently acknowledged as one of the “most significant case studies of private authority with global impact” (Vincent and Dias-Trandade, 2021: 711). Criticised as being a “transnational elite club, with high media visibility” and a neoliberal “agenda-setting power,” the WEF can be understood as an “instrument for global geopolitical domination” (Vincent and Dias-Trandade, 2021: 711). At the very least, it is a forum where heads of state, CEOs of multi-billion-dollar companies, and academics who intelligently promote strategic values, are encouraged to collaborate and shape the global future. On WEF and other media collaborative platforms, Harari eloquently argues for humanity to “break out of the organic realms to the inorganic realm” with the creation of a new type of machine human so much more sophisticated than us that our current form will be more drastically different from it than “Neanderthals” or “chimpanzees” are from us today (BBC, 2016). Perhaps this epochal vision is received with welcome at the WEF because it boldly asserts a future dystopia for those who choose to ignore this high-tech revolution. It may act as a motivational warning to “acculturate” or “disappear.” 

Scholar Kasper Schiølin (2020) believes WEF agenda setting is accomplished through strategic political and corporate marketing and the discourse of “future essentialism” where the “fabrication of power” and of an inevitable global destiny is reinforced by “sociotechnical imaginaries” and “epochalism.” Future essentialism is the construct of narratives that use “historical analysis…speculative estimates…and hard statistics” to disseminate an idea of a “fixed and scripted…future” that can be “desirable if harnessed” but also “dangerous if humanity fails” to accept the vision. “Epocholism” is an attempt to capture “The Spirit of the Age” and promote a feeling that the current times are of unsurpassed historical significance. These strategies, Schiølin (2020:553) convincingly argues, are how the “WEF produces a moral-political universe around The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).” Is it possible that these techniques can create a narrative of urgency, significance, and global opportunity that can persuade us (or our leaders) to participate in a transnational, transhumanist future?

Klaus Schwab is the founder of the WEF and the one responsible for conceptualising and promoting this revolution, which was announced in his 2016 book The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab (2017) describes the 4IR as a social re-setting (named the ‘Great Reset’) enabled by “a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” Analyses of the 4IR conclude that the rate of technological change is supposed to “accelerate” and be “exponential”, covering the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, automation, genetic engineering of humans and natural biology, nanomedicine, smart cities (where sensors are embedded all over the environment), a sci-fi enabled military, and algorithms with political agency (Trauth-Goik, 2021: 3). 

Political scientist Klaus-Gerd Giesen convincingly argues that transhumanism is the “dominant ideology” of the 4IR, having become a “grand narrative” for politicians while “advancing the interests of multinational tech giants” (Geisen, 2018: 10). Giesen views this revolution as a “significant rupture in the evolution of capitalism” as well as the tradition of humanism, arguing that “transhumanist machinism” is “fundamentally anti-human—not least because the machine is by definition inhuman” (Geisen, 2018: 6). With global 5G networks, the Internet of Things and of Bodies, and the convergence of the NBIC technologies, the “body as market” (Geisen, 2018: 10), or what Céline Lafontaine defines as the corps-marché (Céline, 2014), is complete. The sheer mass of consumption will exponentially rise with marketable ‘smart’ products: “wearable tech, autonomous vehicles, biochips, bio sensors” and other new materials (Mahnkopf, 2019: 2). This is a materially focused future where consumer upgrades are baked into the system, so it’s no wonder that corporate monopolies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the “new industrial kings” are actively promoting this revolution (Mahnkopf, 2019: 14).

In his book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, the environmentalist Bill McKibben writes that, “the Silicon Valley tycoons are arguably the most powerful people on earth” (McKibben, 2019: 183). North American West Coast transhumanist visionaries are an avant-garde community of ultra-rich technologists, businesspeople and inventors who are idolised by the media and who collaborate extensively with the US State to advance their aims. Eric Schmidt illustrates the collaboration common between US State defence organs, academia, and giant technology corporations (Conger and Metz, 2020). With a net worth of $23 billion, Schmidt was the Executive Chairman of Google and is now the current Chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) for the US Department of Defense, where he advised President Biden to reject a ban on AI-driven autonomous weapons (Shead, 2021). Schmidt believes that artificial intelligence will “govern society” and be “perfectly rational”, outdating and rendering useless human intuition and knowledge. As with most tech billionaires, Schmidt has set up a private charity, Schmidt Futures, and has so far donated a billion dollars towards his AI educational aims (Philanthropy News Digest, 2019). While he admits that he did not design Google to regulate ‘misinformation’ more effectively, censorship is increasing with the accelerated abilities of AI (working with humans) to moderate and remove content on the Internet (Desai, 2021).

Many of our most influential technologies come from programmes at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA funds ‘blue sky’ technology research and is credited with inventing the Internet, GPS, virtual reality, and drones. The agency is now set on advancing human augmentation both in and off the battlefield, with the goal of mastering brain-computer neural-interfaces (Krishnan, 2016). Arati Prabhakar is the former head of DARPA, and Chief Science Advisor to President Biden. Prabhakar, like the prior head of DARPA, Regina Dugan, moves between working with technology companies in Silicon Valley and the US Department of Defense. Like most, she is enthusiastic about a transhumanist future of augmentation, and advocates for this as a matter of national security. And yet, she also admits that this “will bring surprises that we may not like. For generations we have thought about technologies that change our tools – but this is about technology that changes us.”  We already have ample evidence that our current technologies, particularly wireless devices and chemicals, are physically changing our human (and planetary) biology, but the aims of DARPA and the DoD are more ambitious and revolve around the complete mastery of evolution (including the human genome) and natural systems (including the human population) using technology (Carr, 2020). This is exemplified in the recent, far-reaching US Executive Order for Advancing Biotechnology, which states that “we need to develop genetic engineering technologies” to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” The order states that this is to “help us achieve our societal goals.” These societal goals are central to what the White House identifies as the “bioeconomy” where “computing tools and artificial intelligence” will help us “unlock the power of biological data”, scale up production, and reduce “obstacles for commercialization” (Biden, 2022).

In March 2022 at the World Government Summit, Elon Musk, a self-identified transhumanist, and the world’s wealthiest individual, spoke bluntly from the podium. He announced that he sees the upcoming AI apocalypse as a human-extinction event. What is the solution? “We must all become cyborgs if we are to survive the inevitable robot uprising.” This may be marketing, since Musk’s Neuralink is poised to start human trials of brain implantable chips” (Neate, 2022). Radically enhanced human cognition should, Musk predicts, counterbalance the dangers posed by super-intelligent machines. If the richest man on earth prophesied a mass AI extermination event and an inevitable posthuman future from the platform of the World Government Summit, should we dismiss it as just another tech business strategy?

In her analysis of the 4IR, Birgit Mahnkopf (2019:2) writes that a “system of physical-to-digital technologies embodied in machines and equipment…would enable sensing, monitoring, and control of the entire economy.” This is occurring against a backdrop of increasing global inequality and centralisation of wealth. It is estimated that eight men own as much as half the monetary wealth of the other eight billion humans (The New York Times, 2017). Schwab and other elites understand the social and political implications of their technological ideology and the rules of the ‘winner-takes-all’ market economy that will continue to consolidate gains from disruptive technologies. Universal basic income and social credit systems (with a resource-based economy and central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs) are presented as solutions to managing popular resistance and social unrest. 

The WEF represents the fusion of transhumanist goals within global governance. As Schwab notes, the organisation has been very effective at ‘penetrating the cabinets’ of national governments. As Harvard scholar Kasper Schiølin (2020:549) astutely observes, the “4IR is justified as kings and emperors once justified their authority as divine and natural in uncertain times.” Hence, it may be that the potential problems from transhumanist ideologies come, not so much from the prospect of an AI take-over, but from the elites’ use of the culture and technologies of transhumanism. It may be that these risks overwhelm liberal democracies long before sentient AI does. 

The Discontents

Few intellectuals note the opposition to transhumanism better than the transhumanists themselves. Nick Bostrom writes that resistance comes from:

“Ancient notions of taboo; the Greek concept of hubris; the Romanticist view of nature; certain religious interpretations of the concept of human dignity and of a God-given natural order; Karl Marx’s analysis of technology under capitalism; various Continental philosophers’ critique of technology, technocracy, and the rationalistic mindset that accompanies modern technoscience; foes to the military industrial complex and multinational corporation; and objectors to the consumerist rat-race.”BOSTROM, 2005:18

Bostrom’s summary is a panorama of human expression, literature, thousands of years of culture, religion, philosophy and human meaning-making. Modern literature on philosophy, culture and technology, from Jacques Ellul, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman and Wendell Berry to Jürgan Habermas and Martin Heidegger, offer poignant critiques that are relevant to opposing transhumanist visions of the future, and remind us of the value of community, embodied wisdom, and traditions, and the effects of technological systems. The difference in writing styles is noteworthy: while pro-transhumanist writing tends to be utilitarian and have a tone of scientific authority, ‘bioconservatives’ will often use narrative, symbols, and a writing style considered traditionally beautiful in human culture. 

What is noticeable is that the opposition to transhumanism is broad, ill-defined and diverse. Nick Bostrom notes that “right-wing conservatives, left wing environmentalists and anti-globalists” are all pushing back against central transhumanist aims (Bostrom, 2005: 18). Firstly, there are the well-published intellectual and academic opponents that engage in a forceful scholarly debate with transhumanism over issues such as biotechnology, threats to liberal democracy, and scientific materialism (Leon Kass, 2000 and Francis Fukyama, 2003), and the environmental and social costs of transhumanism (Bill McKibbin, 2019). Also noteworthy are the bioethicists, George Annas, Lori Andrews and Rosario Isasi, who have advised making “inheritable genetic modification in humans a ‘crime against humanity’” (Annas, et al., 2002: 154-155). These scholars fear the posthuman potential for inequality and war, warning that, “the new species, or ‘posthuman’, will likely view the old ‘normal’ humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter…it is the predictable potential for genocide” (Annas, et al., 2002: 162).  The common factor amongst these academics is that they believe biological engineering (of humans) would be disruptive to values, rights, and equality, and would threaten liberal democracy itself. These men have been labelled bio-conservatives or, more dismissively, Neo-Luddites, for rejecting the legitimacy of a posthuman future (Agar, 2007:12).

The second group that is emerging as anti-transhumanist are the environmentalists, non-conformists, primitivists, and anarchists committed to Wild Nature with forceful anti-industrial sentiments. In North America, this includes elements of the Deep Green Movement (Bilek, 2021), represented by various writers, artists, activists, ecologists, organic farmers, herbalists and healers, forest-dwellers and hunter/gatherers, spiritualists, and various alternative people, off-grid or nomadic, who refuse to live within a mechanised, industrial system, and may intentionally attempt to sabotage it. As an eclectic group, they have significant influence over specific geographical areas, tend to identify with traditional local indigenous values, and deeply resent Western consumerist culture, war, global corporations, pollution, and industrial infrastructure (Tsolkas, 2015). Notably, some ecofeminists have written that biotechnology is a dangerous “extension of traditional patriarchal exploitation of women” in promoting the reshaping of natural human bodies (Bostrom, 2005: 18).

The third group that has rapidly developed increasing opposition to transhumanism is religious groups. Besides the Mennonite and Amish communities, who maintain ‘old world’ lifestyles across significant sections of the United States, there is a rising anti-transhumanist sentiment and increasing religious fervour amongst some Evangelical Christians across North America. The New York Times reported on the increasing politicisation of evangelical congregations, with defiant unifying songs that repeated, “We will not comply” in the chorus (Dias and Graham, 2022). The language these groups use to describe transhumanism is often symbolic, archetypal and apocalyptic, and understood as an epic battle between light and darkness. For example, speaker and writer, Thomas Horn, has been preaching about the dangers of transhumanism to Christian congregations for over a decade. His books have titles such as Pandemonium’s Engine: How the End of the Church Age, the Rise of Transhumanism, and the Coming of the Ubermensch (Overman) Herald Satan’s Imminent and Final Assault on the Creation of God. Suspicions of ‘Satanic technology’, and anti-transhumanist sentiments may have been a part of the reason why Evangelical Christians were the demographic most unlikely to cooperate with Covid vaccination mandates in the United States (Lovett, 2021; Porter, 2021).

The tragic situation in Ukraine suggests that ideologically-driven wars may increase with the growing animosity between religious and transhumanist world views, or this may be used in war propaganda. The Russian Orthodox Church, with well over one hundred million members, considers the invasion of Ukraine as a battle of light and darkness, with ‘Holy Russia’ fighting against an unholy NATO alliance (Klip and Pankhurst, 2022). The Church Patriarch, Kirill of Moscow, has taken a strong position against biotechnology—including “gene therapy”, “cloning” and “artificial life extension”—and views the Russian Orthodox Church as defending the traditional family against the liberalism of the West (Stepanova, 2022: 8). Addressing the leaders of Russia at the recent 24th World Russian People’s Council, the orthodox believer and philosopher Alexander Dugin proclaimed, “this war is not only a war of armies, of men…it is a war of Heaven against Hell…the Archangel Michael against the devil…the enemy came to us…in the face of LGBT, Transhumanism—that openly Satanic, anti-human civilization with which we are at war with today.” It may be that an influential number of religious Russians believe that they are not fighting against Ukraine at all, but rather rescuing it from the Satanic hold of the Transhumanist West (Siewers, 2020).

The fourth major group that is exhibiting overwhelming anti-establishment sentiments towards what is perceived as the ‘elites’ and their ‘transhumanist agenda’ are the politically and economically disenfranchised working classes and displaced farmers. Known in academic circles as ‘populists’ (Mazarella, 2019: 50), this group has recently displayed significant anger over extended ‘lockdowns’; losing the freedom to travel and to access decent healthcare (in the US); and experiencing unemployment and poverty. Their physically non-compliant behaviour, seen in mass demonstrations, notably across Europe and with the Canadian truckers, has been met with discursive and physical violence from increasingly irritated political leaders and media corporations. These ‘populists’ often reject transhumanism as an elitist ideology that they fear will lead to further loss of bodily autonomy, increased surveillance, political disempowerment, and a reduction of dignified employment to robots and automation (Mazarella, 2019: 130-134). These fears are not altogether unfounded since, according to the WEF, the 4IR is proposed to lead to significant worldwide job losses, perhaps up to 70% (Mahnkopf, 2019: 7). Steven Bannon, the instrumental ‘populist’ of Trump’s 2016 election force, uses religious polemics to rally resistance against what he sees as a rising transhuman globalist agenda. His popular show, the War Room, features broadcasts such as Descent into Hell: Transhumansim and the New Human Race. The outrage this group has towards 4IR transformations and transhumanism cannot be underestimated: within the US many working class families, though not all, also hold values of egalitarian weapons ownership, and their discourse exudes a willingness to engage in violent confrontation over threats to bodily autonomy (Sturm and Albretch, 2021: 130).

The United States’ most infamous anti-transhumanist/anti-technologist came, not from religious circles, but from within the radical environmental movement and academia. Theodore Kazcynski, a mathematical genius and professor at UC Berkeley, conducted an anti-technology terrorist campaign that spanned 17 years, killing three people and injuring 23 (Fleming, 2022). He blackmailed the FBI into publishing his 35,000-word thesis titled Industrial Society and its Future in the Washington Post and New York Times, which led to his capture. Since spending 25 years in solitary confinement, he has published volumes about how to conduct a revolution against the scientific elite. In one volume, The Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, he writes,

“The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass human intelligence and natural selection will favour systems that eliminate them (humans)—if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be eliminated.”KAZCYNSKI, 2016: 79

Kazcynski reacted with terrorism to what he considered an existential threat posed by technology to humans and his greatest love, Wild Nature. His fear was a loss of freedom and masculine human nature, as well as the transformation of society into a controlled Brave New World, something he viewed as inevitable without a revolution (Moen, 2019: 3). In fact, it is arguable that the United States was already too similar to the Brave New World for Kazcynski, since he depicts “fighting industrial society” as “structurally similar to escaping a concentration camp” (Moen, 2019: 3).

Bill Joy, founder of Sun Technologies, authored an influential essay at the dawn of the 21st century, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, advocating for the relinquishment of developing “AI, nanotechnology and genetics because of the risks” (Joy, 2000). Interestingly, Joy argues for the legitimacy of Kazcynski’s logic about the threats of advanced technologies, despite Kazcynski having “gravely injured” one of his friends, a computer scientist, with a bomb. Parts of Kazcynski’s writing that shifted Joy’s views included the following: 

“The human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them…eventually a stage may be reached in which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will effectively be in control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”JOY, 2000: 48-49

This scenario is not too hard to imagine since it is quickly becoming our modern predicament. There is an implicit and explicit consensus in much transhumanist and anti-transhumanist thought, by Musk, Kazcynski, Joy and many others, that this phenomenon is leading, and will continue, to this logical end. The other scenario that Bill Joy quoted in his essay, again from Kazcynski, was:

“On the other hand, it is possible that human control over machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own…but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be ‘superfluous’, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. Or if they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elites.”JOY, 2000: 48-49

Interestingly, the scenarios do not seem mutually exclusive, at least for a time. 

Scholar Ole Martin Moen has noted similarities between Kazycinski, Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu in their projections of a future crisis (Moen, 2018: 5). Like Kazcinski, Bostrom has argued that transhumanist technologies expose humanity to a significant risk of eradication (Bostrom, 2019). Savulescu, also like Kazcyinski, argues in Unfit for the Future: The need for moral enhancement, that evolved human nature combined with transhumanist technologies will lead to catastrophic consequences (Persson and Savulescu, 2012). Kazcinski, who believed these outcomes were logical, reacted with violence because his highest ethic was one of authentic, uncontrolled freedom (Moen, 2018:5-6). His life is a warning that some human natures may be entirely incompatible with a techno-scientific future. In fact, the transhumanist vision of human extinction and a ‘posthuman’ future may actually promote anxiety and violence in some humans.

Conclusion

Martin Heidegger has warned that those who seek to use technology’s influence without realising the immense power that the technology has over them, are trapped into becoming extensions of machines rather than free actors. They are “framed like men with advanced computational devices into seeing all of reality as computational information” (Doede, 2009:49). For thousands of years, human existence and meaning-making has accumulated from “birth and death, flood and fire, sleep and waking, the motions of the winds, the cycles of the stars, the budding and falling of the leaves, the ebbing and flowing of the tides” (Powys, 1930: 73), and it seems fitting to question if our highly evolved human tissues and ‘natures’ are strengthened or undermined by advanced technology. Is it possible that human flourishing is encouraged by the ancient struggle with the limitations of our own animal natures, rather than by conforming to the constructs of complex technology? With transhumanism, who is in control and who benefits? 

It may be fair to say that transhumanism is a bio-social engineering project that ultimately concentrates power in machines, and humans who behave with machine-like characteristics. Large sections of the earth’s population, such as various religious groups, the working class, indigenous peoples, and other nature-based humans, may resent undemocratic announcements from forums like the WEF that, with the 4IR, industrialization is accelerating towards genetic engineering, robotic automation and virtual living. Furthermore, we may risk promoting an existential crisis and extreme reactions in those who dislike being told that the future belongs to the posthuman rather than to themselves and their offspring. It is a contested future and one that is entirely unwritten.  

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