Transhumanist Wager, The (60 page)

“To cement their totalitarian
agendas, these supersized institutions’ advancing baggage culture implemented
ever more effective methods of control over society. Chief and most potent
amongst them was the inversion of
reason
, where cultural forces obliged
you to rationally accept the irrational. By corrupting the rational way you
thought and interpreted life, they simultaneously corrupted the necessity and
power of reason altogether. In that devious way, mysticism, ancestral divinity,
the supernatural, religion, and even the institutions’ all-important puffed-up
selves were seen as valid outcomes of a supposedly sensible, straightforward,
and successful society.

“Altruism was another foul form of
control—the outlandish idea that everybody else comes first but you. Filial
piety was similar; children’s life ambitions were stifled so they could remain
loyal and attentive to aging parents and family. Another means of control was
consumer addiction to unnecessary materialism, part of a comprehensive
worldwide distraction program that met with overwhelming success. The same can
be said for how humans groomed and clothed themselves—now a petty, global
pastime. Bombardment of advertisements instilling loyalty to corporations was
another. Unnecessary but sensational news has been one of the latest crazes. A
new one still gaining strength is celebrity worship. Insanely, the list goes on
and on.

“To transhumanists, the most
grotesque of all the methods of control was the perpetuation of fear in your
lives; not by the threat of violence, but by implicit guilt. This powerful
psychological addiction of worrying about what others think of you, and about
what is socially acceptable to others, has been systematically instilled in
humans for thousands of years, perpetrated by every world religion, ethnicity,
and government. Its aim is to weaken people’s wills and to silence their most
precious independent tool: the ability to freely, guiltlessly, and publicly
judge and criticize the world around them. In that way, people became afraid to
pick apart others and their behaviors; afraid to deride society and its
routines; afraid to upend their own world and circumstances; and, ultimately,
afraid to differentiate between good and evil, utility and irrationality,
strength and weakness, equal and non-equal—essentially all value itself. Such
pervasive social control through the fear of others’ opinions has left you
meek, ashamed, and largely unwilling to openly question or challenge a thing
like the omnipresent state. Or your sacred heritages. Or the rife sense of
needing to be wealthier than your neighbors. Or your supposedly sinless and
perfect gods. The spicy, troublesome, confrontational bigot in you is often
your best and most useful part, and they have strangled it out of most of you in
the guise of what they call ‘open-mindedness’ or ‘politically correct social
behavior.’

“Ultimately, implicit guilt and
culture’s many other devices of submission are designed to make you totally
subscribe to one single concept: you should be afraid to rise to being as
powerful an entity as you can; you should be afraid to try to become God. That
is the essence and outcome of your baggage culture. And until today, this is
where modern human civilization has brought you.

“Did you ever wonder why your major
religions have made blasphemy the greatest sin—the one that can’t be forgiven
and is damned by eternal suffering? Or why your governments have made democracy
the holy grail of sociopolitical orders, where everyone is equal despite lack
of merit? Or why your ethnicity compels you to obey the laws and mores of your
forefathers, who are archaic and long dead? Or why you spend endless hours
making pennies only to consume things that make zero difference in the ultimate
outcome of your lives? Your acceptance and sanction of your culture and its
conditioning propensities is the key to their entire power over the human race.
With it, you remain meek in your fairytale thoughts, for which they created the
structure, language, and possibilities.

“The truth is so simple to see once
you understand it: Religion, ethnic heritage, state power, material addiction,
and media entrapment are nothing more than pieces of an intangible
psychological construct designed to keep you thinking and living a certain way.
It’s designed to keep you in fear of becoming as powerful as you can be; to
keep you producing for others and contributing to
their
overall gain,
and not your own.

“Today, our species’ baggage
culture is a gargantuan mindless monster, consuming and dominating everything it
can. Even its main pushers—the overarching institutions—can’t control it
anymore; instead, they always find it controlling and devouring
them
.
There’s no escape from the confusion and redundancy anymore, from the vestigial
aspects of stacking useless cultural constructs upon each other. If you think
one tailbone in the human body is pointless, imagine a hundred of them weighing
you down. Figuratively, that’s what baggage culture looks like. Many of your
thoughts are piles of ignorance and erroneous ideas stacked upon piles of
ignorance and erroneous ideas. We are unable to think freely and escape our
slovenly, derelict pasts.

“Consider the typical religious,
government, ethnic, corporate, and media headlines you hear every day:
Poverty
and Hunger Continue Rising Around the Globe; Religious Terrorism Kills Dozens;
Government Heads Clash over Insurmountable Debt; Ethnic Strife Sparks Threat of
New Civil War; Housing Crisis Looms After Superstorm; New Virus Outbreak
Resists Antibiotics; Celebrity Stars Besieged by Sex Scandals.
Everything
you see and hear around you is pushed by sensationalistic breaking news
reports, flashy advertisements, and fearmongering end-of-the-world dramas and
threats. The onslaught of bombastic information and the fraudulent feelings it
creates are constant and ubiquitous, reigning havoc on everything they
influence. Throw in universal sex objectification, panicky environmental
doomsday scenarios, omnipresent male chauvinism, and an abysmally deficient
planetwide education system, and the impact on today’s world is easy to see.
You can’t make a move or think a thought without being inside its encumbering
web, without participating in it as an integral player. And, in the end, none
of it makes a damn bit of difference to you in a real way—you’re still going to
die. The clock on your life is still ticking down every second.

“There are those few throughout
history, especially in this last century, who saw this bondage for what it was,
and tried to defy it. Nevertheless, every time some new champion attempted to
stand up and break out of the baggage culture with rational progressive ideas,
with cutting edge science, with creative intellectual unorthodoxy to improve
the world, the powers and concepts that existed deemed it anarchy, criminal, and
the work of some great revolutionary evil. Even today, one can still get stoned
to death in many places in the world, if they stand up for the truth and say
such things aloud. Or they will get arrested, covered with a black hood, thrown
into prison, and tortured by the supposedly humanitarian A10 governments. Or
they will be forever forced into exile and branded a villain of humanity by
everyone else everywhere. They forced those few outliers to the fringe of
society for being different, then cast them as heretics, criminals, and
traitors—warning all others that only God, the nation, ethnic heritage, or a
large bank account, could change and explain the world. And then, only through
a renunciation of one’s sins and wild notions, and by living a quiet, untroubled
life in society.

“They closed the trap when they
added: Now, quickly, all of you, salute the flag and your leaders; then go get
a job, get married, mortgage a house, have some kids, go to church, pay your
taxes, save for your old age, give to the poor, and don’t you dare break the
law of the land—
their
law, based on thousands of years of religious,
ethnic, and powermongering government. To further confuse you and keep everyone
subdued, they cultivated and nurtured your addiction to materialism by offering
you shiny trinkets for shamelessly low prices, and told you to busy yourself
with buying every consumer brand name possible from every supermall and corner
store you know; that impressing everyone with your sophisticated knowledge and
enthusiastic participation in the latest fashions and trends was the highest
pleasure of life; that buying was patriotic and the best proof of your worth as
a person. Commercialism and obsessive material acquisition were the last gilt
bars cast for their perfect cage, to keep you submissive and conforming.

“Some seven billion of you have
signed on to this bullshit. Some seven billion of you are religious
consumer-addicted patriots. Some seven billion of you have been brainwashed to
play nicely with your brothers, sisters, and neighbors, regardless of who they
are. To embrace egalitarian socialist ideas. To bow to God, politicians, fear,
and everything else. And to worry about what kind of car you drive, what brand
of shoes you wear, what color your nail polish is, what sports team you root
for, what church or mosque you kneel in. Is it any wonder that a few hundred of
my self-motivated engineers defeated seven billion of you? Is it any wonder
that I stand here in control of all 25,000 of your planet’s nuclear devices, with
the ability to annihilate each one of you if I want?

“Again—questions: How did that
happen? Why did that happen?

“Are you beginning to understand
why an evolution of values is necessary for you? Are you beginning to see how
foolhardy and misled you are?

“But first, there is one more
specter haunting and hindering you. In addition to living in bondage by baggage
culture, you are also handicapped by your biology. Humans operate tens of
thousands of years behind evolution with their inherited instincts, which means
our behavior is not suited towards its current environment. On Transhumania, we
like to say evolution is always late to the dinner party. We have instincts
that apply to our biology in a world that existed ages ago; not a world of
skyscrapers, cell phones, jet air travel, the Internet, and IVF fertility. We
must catch up to ourselves. We must evolve our thinking to adapt to where we
are in the evolutionary ascent. We must force our evolution in the present day
via our reasoning, inventiveness, and scientific technology. Our outdated
instincts now trick us from knowing right from wrong, practical from
impractical. We must stand guard against our genes, less they chain us to
remaining as animals forever.

“The human body and its biology
constantly highlights our many imperfections. Compared to humans, rats have
better noses for smelling. Pigeons have sharper eyes for seeing. Crocodiles can
run faster. Earthworms can survive underwater longer. Cockroaches can survive
far colder temperatures. Humans are only best at reasoning. Yet, computers can
already beat the best of us in chess, math, and physics. And the robots we’ve
made are far stronger than we are, can handle more danger, and can fly through
interstellar space without us. Obviously, the human body is a mediocre vessel
for our actual possibilities in this material universe. Our biology severely
limits us. As a species we are far from finished and therefore highly
unacceptable. The transhumanist believes we should immediately work to improve
ourselves via enhancing the human body and eliminating its weak points. This
means ridding ourselves of flesh and bones, and upgrading to new cybernetic
tissues, alloys, and other synthetic materials, including ones that make us
cyborglike and robotic. It also means further merging the human brain with the
microchip and the impending digital frontier. Biology is for beasts, not future
transhumanists.

“Our outdated biology’s emphasis on
social interaction is also dangerous for the overall evolutionary ascent of the
human race—so dangerous that new questions must be asked immediately. Are so
many of you necessary on this planet? Should the least valuable of you be
allowed to procreate? Is the sexual ritual even functional anymore? Does
matrimony serve purposes outside of private property and economics? Are social
customs like monogamy foolishly conservative? Should all violent and dangerous
repeat criminals be executed without delay? Should society insist that all
government and military leadership be equally split between females and males?
Should all televisions be destroyed and Hollywood bulldozed? Should
corporations be barred from catering to the weak, petty sides of human nature?
Should religion and superstitious faiths be globally outlawed? These are
challenging and thorny questions to ask. Yet, they should be asked, and the
best answers should be implemented if we are to be true to our highest selves.

“For a long time, civilization has
operated off the principal of attempting to uphold the greater good of the human
race, cajoling us all to participate in mammalian truisms. Today, however, the
greater good is not the best or most efficient path of evolutionary advancement
for the species. Society and the evolution of the human race may not be best
served by having so many billions of people living together—to breed disease,
poverty, crime, corruption, civil unrest, and resource destruction. In our past
history, evolution and exponential growth of the species were suitable when we
needed more offspring to guarantee gene distribution, or more bodies hurling
spears at a mammoth we were communally hunting. Now, evolution can be harnessed
best by quality, not quantity; by the smartest rational guidance, not more
baggage-culture-driven progeny. If you’re not necessary and do not serve a
transhuman purpose, and you also destroy resources for those who are necessary
and serve transhuman purposes, you may not be allowed to exist.

“The world is on the threshold of
so much revolutionary change. Clearly, our inadequate biological makeup and our
baggage culture prompt an evolution of all values for every non-transhumanist
on the planet to prosper in that change. The result of your lives thus far and
the outcome of this war prompt it. Your survival and your best self are literally
at stake. But to accomplish an evolution of values, you must carefully plan to
navigate the correct path for your future; otherwise, you may end up no better
than you are now. There are two all-important ways to navigate a correct path
in the new transhuman future: The first is to constantly use the utmost
reasoning of which your brains are capable, while negotiating your way through
life; the second is to incessantly question everything.