The Transhumanist Wager

by Zoltan Istvan

  “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.

  “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 con
stant 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 br
ains are capable, while negotiating your way through life; the second is to incessantly question everything.

  “Reason is the only means for human survival on this planet. And it is also our only means for arriving at coherent truths. Anything else belongs in the domain of the mystic, the domain of the insane, or the domain of the thief whose aim is to take something valuable from you for their own gain. The best way for an individual to apply reason in their life, given their goals, is by constantly evaluating as many pertinent scenarios as possible for their actions; then, undertaking the most statistically probable ones to follow, that will work out in their greatest favor. You must strive to emulate the pure computational process of a goal-driven computer. Most of you do not use reason and logic so constantly in life. Most of you regularly incorporate irrationality, erroneous past prejudices, and the whims of spontaneous emotions in your daily decisions; your minds weakly bend to what you want to see and feel regardless of what is really happening. This is a byproduct of the baggage culture, where all your inner yearnings, reactions, and interactions with the world are fabricated delusions, part of an overreaching conformity trap. It’s impossible think and live that way, and still make any transhuman sense of life.