So as I was watching my Philadelphia Eagles play the New Orleans Saints on Sept. 22, a realization about the state of society dawned on me.
For some context, the Eagles haven’t looked any good since their Super Bowl run in 2022. And this game was no different. Everything about this team just feels disjointed and discombobulated. Turnovers, bad defense, lack of rhythm.
No longer do teams have any desire to develop their talent, read their opponents, and learn how to gain in-game experience to get better. They just shake their magic 8 ball and wait for the answer.
But this isn’t a problem that only my Eagles are dealing with. This is an NFL problem. If you haven’t been paying attention, the product the NFL has been putting out there, for lack of a better word, stinks. And that can partly be attributed to the NFL not being a passers' league anymore. Instead, it’s trending toward more hard-fought, defense-heavy play styles.
Through the first two weeks of the 2024 season, passing yards have been the lowest they’ve ever been since the 2007 season. Seventeen starting QBs still haven’t even been able to hit 200 passing yards in a game. Put plainly, the NFL is boring.
But there’s something deeper going on here than mere mediocrity. And something jumped out at me in this game that finally gave me the words to describe what’s deeply wrong with the NFL.
Twice in this game, the Eagles went for it on 4th and short when they could’ve put points on the board with field goal attempts. And both times, they failed.
Why did they go for it?
Why abandon all common sense?
Because the almighty data analytics told them to.
Analytics are the major fad these days in pro sports. Every franchise across all pro sports has been scrambling to assemble the best possible in-house data analytics team to keep up with the analytics arms race. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t be considered a serious organization if your team hasn’t made some kind of serious investment in it.
Funnily enough, the Eagles were the ones who spearheaded the push for analytics-based football back in the '90s and were the first football franchise to have an in-house analytics department back in 2010.
And the problem is this: Teams are over-relying on data analytics to the point that pretty much all decisions are made in some form or another based on analytics. What this ultimately does is stunt and make fragile the development of everyone involved in the success of a team, from the players to the front office.
Tom Brady said it himself recently in an interview. He points out how the NFL has a developmentproblem. Rookie QBs are getting thrown into the fire and starting in their first year without taking the first few years to hang back and learn the team’s culture and program.
But even worse, QBs are no longer taking command of the game. The era of the “field general” QB is over. The QB no longer reads the defense and makes adjustments in real-time. Now, what you have is a young kid who simply takes the play his coach gives him and runs with it. And who did the coach get the play from? The analytics guys up in the booth.
No longer do teams have any desire to develop their talent, read their opponents, and learn how to gain in-game experience to get better. They just shake their magic 8 ball and wait for the answer.
It’s a very artificial, robotic process. And the product on the field is reflecting that.
So why does any of this matter?
What you’re witnessing in today’s NFL is just a small sample of society’s slow transition into full-on transhumanism.
Transhumanism? That conspiracy theory stuff?
Despite its conspiracy-theory-coded stigma, the transhuman agenda is very real and very apparent.
Let’s start with what it is. Simply put, transhumanism is the gradual abolition of roles human beings traditionally performed throughout history and, therefore, the abolition of what gave people’s lives meaning.
Transhumanism has been around for awhile. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has slowly made all kinds of manual labor obsolete, as the invention of new automated technologies have been able to complete tasks in place of human hands and minds. Sure, this has made life easier and more convenient.
But there is an existential hole left in its wake. When the roles that defined humanity are slowly taken away from humanity, how then do we define humanity at all?
When a rural rice farmer is replaced by a humanoid robot, what is the rice picker?
When a mother is replaced by a surrogate mother, what is the mother?
When labor no longer exists because all labor is performed by automated machinery, then what exactly are we?
The answer is that we become welded to the machine. We offload our labor (and therefore our ability to think) onto machines and, by doing so, cling to the machine in total dependence.
That is what’s happening here with today’s NFL. Owners, front offices, players, and coaches have all given away their unique ability to make high-pressure decisions at the highest level of pro sports in exchange for the almighty analytics department.
And that destroys any chance of achieving greatness.
By committing their hand in this unholy marriage to data analytics, NFL teams have stunted the organic growth of their players and coaches and, consequently, have created a debilitating dependence on the answers the computers feed them.
The ChatGPT-ization of the NFL is here, and its mediocre, boring, and robotic output is merely a reflection of what the rest of us are going through in our own lives here in 2024.
Geoffrey Hinton made headlines fortelling the BBC that artificial intelligence is an “extinction-level threat” to humanity. Hinton is no alarmist — he’s popularly dubbed the "godfather of AI" for creating the neural network technology that makes artificial intelligence possible. If anyone has authority to speak on the subject, it's him — and the world took notice when he did.
In May of 2023,Hinton quit his decade-long career at Google to speak openly about what he believes are the existential dangers AI poses to us "inferior" carbon intelligences. Moreover, ChatGPT’s debut in November of 2022, just half a year earlier, had already sparked a global reaction of equal fascination and trepidation to what felt like our first encounter with an elusive technology that had now welcomed itself into our lives, whether we were ready for it or not.
AI conjures up predictions of an Orwellian-like digital dystopia, one in which several oligarchs and AI overlords subject the masses to a totalitarian-like enslavement. There have been many calls for regulation over AI’s development to mitigate this risk, but to what extent would it be effective?
Ironically, artificial intelligence was not elusive at all before November 2022; it had embedded itself into our lives long before ChatGPT made it en vogue. People were already unknowingly using AI whenever they opened their smartphone with facial recognition, edited a paper with Grammarly, or chatted with Siri, Alexa, or another digital assistant. Apple or Google Maps are constantly learning your daily routines through AI to predict your movements and improve your daily commute. Every time someone clicks on a webpage with an ad, AI learns more about his or her behaviors and preferences, which is information that is sold to third-party ad agencies. We’ve been engaging with AI for years and haven’t batted an eye until now.
ChatGPT’s debut has become the impetus for the sudden global concern about AI. What is so distinct about this chatbot as opposed to other iterations of AI we have been engaging with for years that has inspired this newfound fascination and concern? Perhaps ChatGPT reveals what has been hiding silently in our daily encounters with AI: its potential or, as many would argue, its inevitability to surpass human intelligence.
Prior to ChatGPT, our interactions with artificial intelligence were limited to "narrow AI," also known as “artificial narrow intelligence” (ANI), which is a program restricted to a single, particular purpose. Facial recognition doesn't have another purpose or capacity beyond its single task. The same applies to Apple Maps, Google's search algorithm, and other forms of commonplace artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT gave the world its first glimpse into artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI that can seemingly take on a mind of its own.The objective behind AGI is to create machines that can reason and think with human-like capacity — and then surpass that capacity.
Though chatbots similar to ChatGPT technically fall under the ANI umbrella, ChatGPT’s human-like, thoughtful responses, coupled with its superhuman capacity for speed and accuracy, are laying the foundation for AGI’s emergence.
Reputable scientists with diverse personal and political views are divided over AGI’s limits.
For example, the pioneering web developer Marc Andreessen says that AI cannot go beyond the goals that it is programmed with:
[AI] is math—code—computers built by people, owned by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious hand wave.
Conversely,Lord Rees, the former U.K. Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, believes that humans will be a mere speck on evolutionary history, which will, he predicts, be dominated by a post-human era facilitated by AGI’s debut:
Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity—spanning tens of millennia at most—will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellect of the inorganic, post-human era. So in the far future, it won’t be the minds of humans but those of machines that will most fully understand the cosmos.
Elon Musk and a group of the world’s leading AI expertspublished an open letter calling for an immediate pause on AI development, anticipating Lord Rees’ predictions rather than Andreessen’s. Musk didn’t wait long to ignore his own call to action with the debut of X’s new chatbot Grok, which has similar capabilities to ChatGPT, along with Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s new AI chatbot integrated with Bing’s search engine.
Ray Kurzweil, trans-humanist futurist and Google’s head of development, famously predicted in 2005 that we would reach singularity by 2045, the point when AI technology would surpass human intelligence, forcing us to decide whether to integrate with it or be naturally selected out of evolution’s trajectory.
Was he correct?
The proof of these varying predictions will be in the pudding, which is being concocted in our current cultural moment. However, ChatGPT has brought timeless ethical questions in new clothing to the forefront of widespread debate. What does it mean to be human, and, asGlenn Beck poignantly asked in an op-ed, will AI rebel against its creator like we rebelled against ours? The fact that we are asking these questions on a popular scale is indicative that we are now in a new era of technology, one that strikes at deeply philosophical questions whose answers will set the tone for not only how we understand the nature of AI but moreover, how we grapple with our own nature.
How, then, should we mitigate the risk of our worst fears surrounding AI becoming a reality? Will we, its current master, inevitably become its slave?
The latter fear often conjures up predictions of an Orwellian-like digital dystopia, one in which several oligarchs and AI overlords subject the masses to a totalitarian-like enslavement. There have been many calls for regulation over AI’s development to mitigate this risk, but to what extent would it be effective? The government will hold all the reins to AI’s power if directed toward private companies. If directed toward the government, tech moguls can just as easily become oligarchs as their rivals in the government. In either scenario, those at risk of AI’s enslavement have very little power to control their fate.
However, one can argue that we have already dipped our toes into a Huxleyan-like enslavement, in which we have traded seemingly menial yet deeply human acts for the convenience technology serves on a digital platter. An Orwellian-like AI takeover won’t happen overnight. It will begin with surrendering the creative act of writing for an immediately generated paper “written” by an AI chatbot. It will progress when we forego the difficulty of forging meaningful human relationships with AI “partners” that will always be there for you, never challenge you, and constantly affirm you. An Orwellian future isn’t so unimaginable if we have already surrendered our freedom to AI on our own accord.
Avoiding this Huxleyan-type of enslavement — the enslavement to AI’s convenience — requires falling deeply in love with being human. We may not be in charge of regulating the public and private roles in AI’s development, but we are responsible for determining its role in our daily lives. This is our most potent means of keeping AI in check: by choosing to labor in creativity, enduring the inconveniences and hardships of forging human relationships, and desiring things that ought to be worked for outside our immediate grasp. In short, we must work on being human and delighting in the fulfillment that emerges from this labor. Convenience is the gateway to voluntary enslavement. Our humanity is the cost of such a transaction and the anecdote.
What would make you get a Neuralink brain-computer interface? Most people respond with an automatic, “Nothing.”
But the assumption is that a brain chip would be unnecessary, a way to level up, to become smarter or stronger.
Here’s what we all suspect: Once everyone agrees to an implant, it’s only a matter of time before chips are getting hacked, commercials are mandatory, and money gets involved.
God forbid, let’s say you’re diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Your mind will deteriorate slowly until your wiring completely abandons you. But what if a brain-computer interface could preserve your memories and cognitive functionality? Or let’s say you’re paralyzed and getting a neural implant could restore any damaged nerves and allow you to move again.
This is the hope that led 30-year-old Noland Arbaugh to become the first human to receive a Neuralink brain-computer interface. A swimming accident damaged his spine, leaving him a quadriplegic. And so far, the technology has made life at least a little easier. The process hasn’t gone entirely smoothly, but the implant has given Noland more freedom of movement. He can also use his mind to play chess and Civilization 6.
Now, a second patient has been greenlit.
Only Homer Simpson would buy the first-generation flying car, right? Not if you’re desperate enough.
Here’s a hypothetical that is murkier than the previous two: What if your child died and you had the chance to download his consciousness and implant it into a brain-dead human? Or into some sort of android, when robotic technology is advanced enough?
For many of us, this isn’t a logical or moral dilemma but a spiritual one. Tackling dementia and paralysis concerns the restoration of a living body. But when death comes into the equation, we are forced to ask, “What about the soul?”
For decades, futurist Ray Kurzweil has balked at the idea that humans have souls that should be left alone, untouched by human hands. Who could have guessed that Kurzweil, like so many other brilliant nerds, would be toppled by Joe Rogan’s Socratic method?
As our own Peter Gietl put it, “Joe Rogan might be the perfect foil for a futurist and woo peddler like Kurzweil. He knows just enough about these subjects to be dangerous but also asks questions with an Everyman logic that is a perfect antidote to cut through the vague science this man spews.”
How can we understand evil within the context of artificial intelligence?
Maybe we shouldn’t be worried about artificial intelligence but rather artificial consciousness. Or, even more harrowing, artificial spirituality.
The boundaries of our social cosmos are already distinctly psychological. Where previous generations were afflicted by vast unknowables, comical ignorance, and inanimate technology, we’re lost in the squall of the digital unconscious, the connected brain, and data centrality — total interconnection by digital means. That’s without any devices implanted.
A brain chip is internal. Social media is external and much less invasive. Yet look at the damage that it has caused, to children specifically, affecting notions of play, body image in pre-teen and teenage girls, and even sexuality and ideas regarding gender.
Elon Musk is calmly but direly urging us to start preparing for a world full of AI that’s smarter than us.
I’m a big fan of Elon and his role in what Jonathan Haidt has described as the “techno-democratic optimism” unique to America in relation to tech. But in this situation, it’s important to remember that the man owns the brain chip company.
We all know that the dignity of any revolutionary medical tech is at the very least vulnerable to abuse. Plastic surgery didn’t begin with breast implants.
Customization is an integral part of our new world. But where is the limit? What about genetic engineering? What about designer babies? These technologies are no longer plot devices in science fiction. It’s going to happen in real life, as people are increasingly willing to medicalize their lives.
Here’s what we all suspect: Once everyone agrees to an implant, it’s only a matter of time before chips are getting hacked, commercials are mandatory, and money gets involved.
We’re already witnessing widespread “de-materialization,” where physical objects are becoming obsolete as the world becomes increasingly digitized.
You see this in the subscription model. You used to own movies. If you didn't, you rented a physical copy. Music used to be owned on physical media too. Now these items are accessed via subscription.
Then there are the political implications. The brain is the source of all human behavior. If someone figured out how to control it, he could manipulate society to his advantage, fiddling with our species’ most dangerous tendencies and habits.
We’ve moved past biopolitics — the elites’ control of our bodies. Now we live in an era of psychopolitics, where elites grip not just the politics, not just the body, but the total of the mind of citizens.
Neuro-technologic reality also changes immediately. No one can keep up any more. The transformation of our habits, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and actions is hard to prove and even harder to monitor. So why would we hand over our most important possessions — our brains — to a dubious invisible network, the same network that facilitates pornography and BuzzFeed?
The language of online is structured mostly as exclamatory and imperative slogans. Declarative statements often serve as a Trojan Horse of discourse that is actually combat.
It is part of the reason that everything seems so hard to resolve. The pace of life is daunting. We don’t even fully realize it. But we feel it. Things are different and we don’t know why.
Inject a silicon chip into your brain, and there’s no way to know how much it has changed you.
Our cultural illness is neuro-technological. It’s something we signed up for, and it sends constant updates. An automated disease manifested through emotion but guided by some unknown could lead or already has led to neuro-totalitarianism.
On the other hand, it would be cool to order DoorDash without having to move at all, so sign me up!
Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on.
The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica.
This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.”
Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds.
This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable.
This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day.
Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives.
Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian.
In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.”
Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will.
This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save.
C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.”
He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.”
Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago.
The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross are perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate.
The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression.
Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them.
A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post.
The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed.
EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facilityyoutu.be
Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense.
The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed.
G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps.
This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it.
“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis.
The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.
I did not expect to encounter questions like this when writing a bioethics brief on gene manipulation back in 2015. When researching the ethically questionable uses of gene manipulation, I encountered a collection of scientists hell-bent on the quest for immortality, determined to use every tool in their arsenal to transcend mankind's current limitations.
You would expect to find such sci-fi-worthy aspirations espoused by pseudo-scientists and fan fiction bloggers not by minds affiliated with the world's elite academic institutions — Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT, to name a few. These scientists called themselves "transhumanists" and were spearheading what was, at the time, a fringe movement despite their prestigious academic affiliations. Their chief aim is to facilitate humanity's evolution through modern technology into a "post-human" species, one that is unhinged from current human limitations, like weakness, ignorance, and, especially, death.
At the time, Humanity+, the world's largest transhumanist organization, adopted Oxford professor Max Moore's definition of transhumanism as: The continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology.
To mitigate the public backlash against Moore's eugenics-encroaching definition, Humanity+ has since qualified its aims to ensure that it, in fact, does not "advocate for the concept of immortality for elitists" but rather "for all humanity." Some may "rest assured," but I certainly don't. The historical and philosophical connection to eugenics is too close to ignore.
Similar to their 20th-century eugenicist predecessors, transhumanists are the latest iteration of Neo-Darwinists. The term "transhuman" was coined by the Darwinist and early transhumanist Julian Huxley, the brother of the "Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley. After World War II, Julian was appointed as UNESCO's first director-general. During his post, he partnered with Charles Galton Darwin, the cousin of the father of evolution himself, to explore how the new technology developed during the war to elevate humanity's evolutionary trajectory.
It is no coincidence that both Huxley and Darwin were committed eugenicists. Their founding of transhumanism was the natural ideological progression of their eugenicist beliefs. Eugenics sought to create a super race through population control, abortion, and euthanasia. Transhumanism aims to create a transcendent race through technology not available to their eugenicist predecessors. Their aims are the same; they only differ in capacity.
Huxley's 1927 book "Religion Without Revelation"gives insight into his future aims:
"The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way — but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature."
The ironic nature of transhumanism is that it appeals to a desire that is, in fact, deeply human: the yearning to transcend the human condition, which is as old as humanity itself. As the transhumanist philosopher and Oxford professor Nick Bostrom wrote:
"The human desire to acquire new capacities is as ancient as our species itself. We have always sought to expand the boundaries of our existence, be it socially, geographically, or mentally."
He's right. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Prometheus stole Zeus' fire. Ponce de Leon sought the fountain of youth. Humanity's main problem, as Nietzsche rightly diagnosed, is that we are "all too human." However, while most people have historically sought salvation in entities transcendent of themselves, transhumanists are determined to work out their own salvation through becoming transcendent entities akin to those found in holy scriptures. As the pop-transhumanist author Belinda Silbert wrote:
"Responsible Omniscience; Omnipresence; Omnipotence AND Benevolence would be the totality of the sensory apparatus of the new human."
When I first encountered the transhumanists in 2015, I was reminded of what was, at the time, the most recent "Amazing Spiderman" film starring Andrew Garfield. The villain, Dr. Curt Conners, attempted to heal his deformed arm by injecting himself with the isolated gene that enables lizards to regenerate their tails. When the experiment backfires and transforms Dr. Conners into a mutant lizard, he gladly disowns his humanity and makes the contentious claim:
"I spent my life as a scientist trying to create a world without weakness, without outcasts. I sought to create a stronger human being, but there's no such thing. Human beings are weak, pathetic, feeble-minded creatures. Why be a human at all when we can be so much more? Faster, stronger, smarter. This is my gift to you."
Max Moore couldn't have said it better himself. However, it’s critical to consider why this fictional champion of transhumanist values is the villain to the rest of us. IfMax Moore is correct in his assessment that the "body is not sacred" but rather a "pure, random accident," the worldly salvation transhumanism offers may justify its questionable means.
However, the visceral reaction to consider Dr. Conners the villain emerges from the implicit belief that there is, in fact, something sacred and dignified in being human. That is why strength, knowledge, and power unhinged from human dignity appear grotesque and become the inspiration behind supervillains. Is it any coincidence that superheroes often embody the same traits as their villains but only differ in their defense of human dignity?
Transhumanists have become more mainstream and tempered in their language since I first encountered them nearly a decade ago. Still, their aims remain just as ambitious and morally fraught. Though they appeal to a profoundly innate desire to transcend the human condition, their movement, like their eugenicist predecessors, comes at the cost of human dignity. Is that a price we are willing to pay? Or will we,to paraphrase Julian Huxley’s brother, cry out for “God, poetry, real danger, freedom, goodness, and sin"? In short, will you still yearn to be human?
Humans are hardwired for worship. Even people who swear off all religion can’t help but worship something, whether that something is technology, entertainment, or themselves.
“In the absence of any guardrails or authorities they can trust, [people] will start worshiping just about anything,” says James Poulos of "Zero Hour."
Author and writer Joe Allen joins the show to discuss another thing – a particularly dark and sinister thing – that humans have begun to worship: transhumanism.
For those unfamiliar with the term, the Oxford dictionary defines transhumanism as “the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.”
There’s a reason this concept has long been explored in the entertainment industry, and it’s not only because the idea has the makings of a great science fiction story; it’s because the obsession with transhumanism is very real indeed.
“I think the motivation behind [transhumanism], the broader worldview behind it, which is essentially a religious worldview – that's what's most important to communicate,” says Allen, whose book “Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity” just dropped this past August.
“Many transhumanists, post-humanists, futurist technologists – they would like to see it as some sort of scientific worldview, and it is, but ultimately it's a religious worldview that takes scientific fact and plays forward the historical progression of technology into something like religious prophecy,” he tells James.
“What is [transhumanism], and how do we know it when we see it?” James asks.
“Transhumanism is simply the desire to attain magical power, really, by way of technology,” explains Allen. “It's the dreams of all the wizards and occultists of old and priests, coming into reality by way of technology.”
Allen also explains that it’s important for people to understand that transhumanism has many names. “I think optimalism, futurism, accelerationism – those words will probably be the terms that really describe it going forward,” he says.
“What is being put forth for us as the measure of improvement or optimization?” asks James.
Allen explains that when the term transhumanism was coined back in 1956 by Julius Huxley, a renowned eugenicist, “it was really focused on improving the human mind, the human intellect, [and] human culture” via the classical Greek principles of “strength, beauty, and intelligence.”
However, the movement has since evolved — and not in a good way.
“The machine becomes the standard, so you have all the same sorts of classical principles of beauty, intelligence, [and] strength, but now rather than looking forward to the smartest human, the strongest human, the most beautiful human, you now are looking forward to the strongest, most beautiful, and most intelligent machine,” Allen says.
“People are struggling out there,” says James. “They look worse, their health is worse … sperm counts are dropping, IQ is not doing so good – just kind of across-the-board decline, and so why are we seeing that spread so swiftly and so powerfully at a time when ostensibly the people in charge are trying to boost us up into some kind of superhuman plane?”
To hear Allen’s fascinating explanation, watch the clip below.
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The American Medical Association has floated the suggestion that there's no moral reason why taxpayers should not subsidize the provision of wombs from dead or living women to transvestites so that they can carry babies.
A peer-reviewed paper published in the AMA Journal of Ethics in June concluded that even "if there are limits on subsidies, the case could be made that no moral obstacle stands in the way of justifying subsidies for UTx [uterus transplantation] for some transwomen and transmen, just as there seems to be no fully persuasive argument against gestating a child via UTx."
Timothy F. Murphy, a professor of philosophy in the biomedical sciences at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and Kelsey Mumford, a medical student at Dell Medical School with a gender studies certificate, neither one a medical doctor, claimed that in light of the success of UTx in real women, men "who want to gestate their own children" and men who "want uterus transplants to consolidate their identities but not to gestate children" might take interest in the procedure.
After all, their inability to ever normally bear children might leave them experiencing "psychological dissonance in a way that undermines their health and well-being," according to the academics. "The lack of a uterus also closes off the prospect of gestating a child in a way that is available to women as a class. It follows that lack of a uterus is an obstacle to full participation in the social goods attached to women's identity."
The paper's authors insinuated, on the basis of a 2021 bioethics paper, that transvestites may no longer need to suffer disappointment on account of reality, claiming there are "no absolute barriers in anatomy, hormones, and obstetric considerations that would rule out the possibility of successful UTx" in men.
After arguing that it may not only be morally justifiable but scientifically possible for men suffering gender dysphoria to carry children in wombs lifted from real women, Murphy and Mumford broached the matter of cost.
Since the estimated costs for the procedure run between $100,000 and $300,000, at least for females — there's presently no indication how much it would cost for a man, since it's never been done before — Murphy and Mumford indicated that "all parties interested in UTx will look to both private insurance and government providers for help covering costs."
While acknowledging that most states and the federal government do not presently subsidize fertility treatment for women and that there will inevitably be various criteria for eligibility, the paper's authors concluded that there are no moral obstacles in the way of granting men uteri or enabling them to carry children in their naturally barren bodies.
This paper appeared in an issue entitled "Patient-Centered Transgender Surgical Care."
Mumford introduced the issue with an editorial, wherein she noted that "we have now reached a tipping point" in the field of gender dysphoria-affirming genital mutilation and hormone treatments, where the "focus has largely shifted from fighting for its acceptance as a treatment modality and increasing patients' access to it toward ethical stewardship of this now-validated and accessible set of procedures."
"Rather than funding objective medical studies on transgender medicine, the AMA has chosen activist positions on this delicate topic," Dr. Martin Makary, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told the Washington Examiner.
"Why don’t they fund a study on the 10-year regret rate of children who undergo transitioning surgery? What is the suicide rate among those who undergo aggressive hormone or surgical treatment versus long-term talk therapy?" asked Makary.
"Medicine has many crisis issues today — overtreatment, the medical-industrial complex, stagnant cancer research, and skyrocketing health care costs," continued Makary. "It’s odd that the AMA is skipping over these giant issues to focus on uterus transplants for transgender people."
The Daily Mail reported that uterus transplants have only been executed successfully around 100 times worldwide for women. It is a multilayered process that takes over 18 months on average.
Makary told "Fox & Friends" that it's medically possible to do, but the "question is, should it be done?"
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It’s certainly ironic that the World Economic Forum, an international organization supposedly dedicated to improving the state of the world, harbors the idea that people can be “meaningless and worthless.”
That’s a direct quote from Yuval Noah Harari, advisor to Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF.
Harari predicts that future developments in artificial intelligence will inevitably result in mass unemployment.
“The biggest question in maybe all of economics and politics of the coming decade will be what to do with all of the useless people,” Harari says.
By “useless people,” he means all of the displaced workers who used to have jobs before AI ripped them from their hands.
He is concerned that this unfortunate group will become bored and need some way to find meaning in their lives because “they’re basically meaningless and worthless,” he says.
How gracious of him to consider the plight of the expendables.
But lucky for them, Harari, in all his profound wisdom, is already thinking toward a solution: “My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most.”
No, that is not a joke. That is not taken out of context. He actually suggests total incapacitation as a solution for unemployed people.
And yet somehow it gets even worse.
“Transhumanism boiled down to its bones is pure eugenics,” Harari says.
For those who don’t know, transhumanism is the theory that humans can essentially become immortal by evolving beyond their current physical and mental limitations while eugenics is the study and practice of tampering with gene pools to increase the likelihood of desirable traits while reducing the likelihood of undesirable traits.
“History began when humans invented gods,” Harari says, “and will end when humans become gods.”
“Only the non-useless [people] will go along with transhumanism,” he continues.
This kind of thinking and talk might be great inspiration for the next big dystopian novel, but to even consider these ideas played out in reality is beyond despicable.
Harari’s message “certainly has echoes from our history,” Stu says.
And it’s absolutely true – Hitler, who was also a supporter of eugenics, preached similar ideas to brainwash the Germans.
Unfortunately, many Germans thought, “No, it’s the shiny new future,” Glenn says, “and they allowed it to happen because the old system wasn’t working.”
Our current system may not be working, but “we must not allow it to happen this time,” Glenn pleads.
To learn about what you can do to combat the insanity of Harari and others like him, watch the full clip here.
To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Parents should talk to their children about what makes humans unique and beautiful and warn them to be wary of anyone seeking to demote humanity from being the pinnacle of creation.
Man can feel like a woman. He can never be her. That’s the joke, and it will always be funny.
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