Transhumanist Wager, The (59 page)

“You may vehemently disagree. You
may believe that some all-powerful god will resurrect you; that some divine
force will reincarnate you; or that your soul will miraculously merge into some
super-mystic consciousness. You may pretend any damn thing you want, but your
pretending cannot, and will not, change the nature of life and objective
reality around you. The stark truth has always been right before your eyes—that
nothing will save you from death. The obviousness of this overwhelms us every
time we see a loved one or a friend whose body is lifeless, never to reach out,
touch, and communicate with us again. Death is final. So final, that our entire
civilization’s understanding of it was has always been that death is
inevitable, that death is natural, that ultimately, death is destiny.

“I have come here today to tell you
something of vast universal implication, something that brings a glorious new
promise to our species: Death is not destiny. Death is neither inevitable nor
natural. I don’t tell you this as some starry-eyed religious preacher looking
for followers; or some crooked political statesman trying to get elected; or
some greedy business executive trying to make money off you. I tell it to you
as a rational, scientific-minded human being—a fellow sojourner along the path
of life. I tell it to you as a man who has witnessed what 10,000 of the
smartest minds on the planet have done with human biological death in a mere
seven years of working to conquer it. I also tell it to you as a man knowing
what a few billion people could do working to overcome it.

“Human death means many different
things to many different people: a permanent cessation of consciousness; a
chemical decomposition of organized matter; a spiritual passage of the supposed
soul to an afterlife. Transhumanists have a unique definition: Death is a
malfunction of the human experience. It’s a reversible error, a transitory
cloak of emptiness, a curable disease—a highly curable disease if dealt with
properly. I’m here today, speaking to billions of you, because Transhumania and
its citizens have banded together with resolve against our intolerable
biological mortality. We are now here to deal with human death properly, as a
disease that can be cured and also eradicated.

“The Transhumanist Wager is the
inevitable result of an advancing scientific civilization. Through our
choosing, we have brought this wager—this choice—directly to you. We have
generously laid it at your feet, for each and every one of you, from the
highest to the lowliest, to ponder and act upon. The choice we offer is simple:
Die or join us. To die is to continue in your meager ways, your lackluster
philosophies, and your futile material successes, with nothing but gravestones
and Internet obituaries to memorialize you at the end of your lives. To join us
is to begin the greatest adventure and leap of progress our species has ever
known—a chance to harness and participate in the pulse of eternity. You can
help us challenge the very nature and propensities of the universe. You can
drive forward the engine of evolution and maneuver it in favor of every man,
woman, and child on the planet.

“On the surface, the choice you
should make is obvious; however, most of you are skeptical, cynical, and
critical, if not downright opposed. No matter; in time, I believe many of you
will see the rationality of joining and supporting the mission of
transhumanism. I believe a transformation in your minds and attitudes will come
to pass. The overwhelming magnitude and brilliance of the life and the
philosophical paradigm shift we are offering will sway your opinions. The sheer
possibility of a bright future will turn you towards us. You will be, after
all, joining a newly kindled planet that is promising a greater future for all
involved. The undeniable logic and value of the offer will overcome your fears,
reservations, and biases.

“My Transhumanian colleagues and I
openly invite you to join and support us, to become a part of us. A part of a
brave new future with the human species seeking transhuman advancement in every
way. But in order to be a part of us, you must change. You must radically
change, and literally become like us. Most importantly, to do this you must
change the way you think. This is no small endeavor. To fundamentally change
your thought processes and perceptions of the world, you must undergo a massive
evolution of your values.

“The way one thinks about values,
and how one determines their personal worth and place in existence, is
everything. If one does it wrong, irrationally, and foolishly, then everything
in one’s life is wrong, irrational, and foolish. That is why you must now
totally change your erroneous thoughts and methodologies. You must change the
cultural, religious, patriotic, consumerist, and moralistic indoctrination
you’ve been force-fed your whole life. You must change the outdated biological
propensities of yourself if they offer no value. They are obstacles for those
of us who want to overturn death’s grip and our species’ biological fragility.
They are cumbersome chains of deception and falsity. They are barriers for your
pursuit of the best in yourself and the possibility of your infinite life. They
hold you back. And if you become a part of us, they will hold us all back and
squander our precious time to accomplish our goals on Earth.

“Yet, before a true evolution of
values occurs, each of you must ask yourself a critical question: Why do I want
to avoid death? The answer is simple: because you love life. Even in your
darkest psychological despair, or your deepest religious brainwashing, or your
most exhausting hardship, or your worst catastrophic horror, the thing we call
life is miraculous. It’s an undeniable gift in a universe of trillions and
trillions of light years of empty space, unconscious energy, abounding mass,
and quantum potential. All of us stand in awe of the incredible specter of
events that has landed us here on Planet Earth. A nearly infinite amount of
calculations, effects, and happenings must’ve occurred so that each of us could
be here today as a living, thinking, consciously aware human being with the
power to change and exploit the universe. A similar amount of happenings
must’ve occurred so that your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your
fellow human beings also appeared. The awe of the universe and the life it has
brought to each of us is extraordinary. I declare to you today that if
Transhumanians should be known for one thing above all else, it should be our
deep love, respect, and appreciation of the miracle of our lives in this
universe. We are a people desperately in love with life.

“I believe that similar thoughts
and feelings of a love of life, as well as a desire for immortality, lie within
each one of you. I believe that the core of our genes is imbued with these
concepts, and that the overpowering urge to survive is our deepest, most
elemental impulse. Survival is synonymous with a desire to live and an overall
love of life. If you are alive, then you are more in love with life than not;
otherwise, surely you would have ended your lives by now. Yet, who amongst you,
who is sane, would willingly die if they could avoid it? Life for humans is not
a choice, but a prerequisite of existence. The choice comes afterward. The
choice is the Transhumanist Wager—the right to stand up and fight for the life
you love, and to preserve it. Humans are natural fighters. We are also natural
gamblers. And it has been taught throughout history that the greatest value you
could stake is your own life. There is a far greater stake possible to each one
of you right now: to keep that life. To keep it forever. To believe it’s your
right to keep that life forever. To desperately desire to keep it, and make it
as strong and successful as possible. To fight for it as Transhumania has
fought for it.

“Yet, absurdly, billions of you
have never acted that way. Billions of you have never even asked basic
transhuman questions: Why must I die if I don’t want to? Why must I have such
an imperfect and disease-prone body? Why must I be a meek, transient visitor in
this magnificent universe, and not an interminable master of it as I would
prefer?

“There are simple answers to these
quintessential transhuman questions. From the day you were born until this
moment, two things have been hounding you, blinding you, and holding you back.
The first is the human race’s defunct culture. The second is our species’
handicapping mammalian biological instincts.

“Human culture is the most
debilitating of the two. For many thousands of years now, the human race has
been indoctrinated to submit to orthodoxy and to cower before authority, and to
swallow endless nonsense from both. You have been brainwashed to sacrifice your
innermost desires, your most obvious needs, your most natural outlook on
reality, just to live as a hostage in a cage of carefully regulated and
fabricated cognitive existence. Virtually everyone and everything—your
countries, customs, faiths, leaders, relatives, friends, lifestyles, even your
own memories—have been manipulating and pressuring you to shun fresh,
unconventional thoughts. Especially transhuman-oriented thoughts. There has
been a pervasive worldwide moratorium on thinking about what the human being is
capable of and its possible evolutionary advancement in terms that make a
substantial difference in reality.

“Why has this happened? To
transhumanists, the reason is obvious: You—the people of the world—have allowed
it to happen. Each of you is guilty for not heeding a higher calling: a more
logical, more ambitious, more sublime direction for your life, and a journey to
your best self. Your great flaw is the mistaken way in which you choose to
interpret existence; your subscription and obedience to the cultural constructs
that government, organized religion, ethnic heritage, mega-corporations, and
mass media have built around, and within, nearly every thought and action you
make. Their web of indoctrination has wholly swamped your lives. Sadly, most of
you don’t even know this has happened. Most of you are living on this planet in
utter delusion, conforming to a largely manufactured and forced reality.

“Throughout your lives and modern
history, civilization has erroneously subscribed to the vision that the human
being is a marvelous, ingeniously assembled specimen of life: a work of divine
creation and sweeping beauty, whose culture and intellect is profound like the
cosmos itself. What a joke. The cruel truth is we are a frail, hacked-together
organism living within a global culture of irrationality, pettiness, and
deception. The specific reason our existing human culture is so malformed is
that, throughout history, past cultural constructs of more primitive societies
were not discarded as they became irrelevant or outdated. To survive, it was
not evolutionarily required to rid ourselves of unnecessary idiosyncrasies and
practiced customs—such as nonsensical superstitions, masochistic religiosity,
and shackling morality—even though they were foolish to uphold. As a result,
damaging, wasteful, and useless behavioral patterns were passed on both
socially and individually from generation to generation.

“So now, modern humans are a
weighed-down species, burdened by cumbersome past rubbish that’s mostly crudely
stacked, obsolete cultural constructs through which our minds perceive reality.
On Transhumania we have a specific term for this:
baggage culture
. And
it’s caused nearly all human life to be degenerate and apathetic compared to
what it could be. Our species’ mindset and powers of perception are currently
too lumbering and unfit for what a sophisticated, nimble entity really needs of
itself. Our lives are cursed because of the polluted cultural prism our
thoughts must exist within and communicate through. In Sisyphean tragedy, we
are doomed to grovel, to falter, to repeat our same pathetic mistakes, day
after day, year after year, century after century. We need to transition from
our defective culture into a new one that directly confronts these issues and
sets our minds and transhuman possibilities free.

“The twisted history of our baggage
culture extends back many millennia. It started long ago with the inception of
civilization, when charismatic leaders and ruling clans began forming permanent
communities. Over time, these rulers learned they could preserve their
platforms of power by controlling their communities’ thinking and behavioral
patterns. Their agendas were simple: dominate with fear through violence;
stifle revolutionary and freethinking ambitions; teach adherence to leadership
and community before self; implement forms of thought and behavioral control
that encourage social cooperation and production, such as communal customs,
prayers, taboos, and rites. Variations abounded, but these were the early
convoluted versions of human culture and its main intent: to control.
Henceforth, culture’s core function became a means of forcing conformity, to
transform the individual into a tool of submission and production for the
ruling elite.

“As generations passed, these
rulers and their predecessors continually revised and enlarged their constructs
of culture, force-feeding the functional and nonfunctional—rational and
irrational—parts to your forbears. Naturally, it didn’t take long in
evolutionary terms before people everywhere existed within a universal baggage
culture, full of compounded dysfunction. Of course, in modern times, control of
human culture has changed hands from the ruling elite to whole governments,
religious institutions, multicontinent ethnic groups, and most recently, to
mega-corporations and mass media. As the complexities and population of the
world ballooned, baggage culture continued to prove versatile and useful to
whatever cause it engaged. Nations governed through it. Religions preached
through it. Ethnic groups taught their heritages through it. Big business sold
through it. And the media communicated through it.