The Deceit of Transhumanism
In James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar, humans were able to embody beings called “Na’vi.” The Na’vi are a fictional humanoid species native to the moon Pandora. Through the use of advanced technology, humans were able to remotely control and inhabit genetically engineered Na’vi bodies, known as “avatars.” This allowed humans to interact with the native population and explore Pandora more intimately to facilitating resource extraction from the moon for the sake of corporate profits.
The avatars in Cameron’s movie are genetically engineered bodies grown in labs designed to be controlled by a human operator through a neural link. The human operator lies in a pod-like apparatus, and their consciousness is linked to the avatar’s nervous system via a neural interface. This allows the operator to experience the avatar’s sensory perceptions and control its movements as if they were physically present in the Na’vi body. The central character, Jake Sully, eventually becomes fused with his avatar, thus permanently inhabiting a new body.
One of the key concepts in Karl Marx’s theory of value is the idea of commodity fetishism, where the social relationships between people are mediated through the exchange value of commodities. Jean Baudrillard’s work takes this idea further by exploring how capitalism has evolved to a point where the sign value and symbolic representations of commodities become detached from their material attributes. He argues that in a hyperreal society, the simulated signs and symbols associated with commodities become more significant than their actual use value or exchange value.
Baudrillard’s analysis introduces the concept of the “simulacrum,” which refers to copies or representations that have no original referent or reality. In this context, Baudrillard suggests that capitalism has reached a stage where the production of commodities and their representation in media have become so detached from any original reality that they become self-referential, leading to a blurring of distinctions between reality and simulation.
The problem of “biological essentialism” is a construct to transhumanist ideology. The idea is that if we are not real bodies resulting from natural history then we can become anything we (or others) want. We can remain human (if we wish) when at the same time we become more than human by radically altering our physical bodies, such as via cyberneticization, or upload some thing that appears to others as our self into a computer program—not an avatar but some thing. Again, if being human is at all what we desire. (Maybe we desire something else.)
It also means that other things can be human (whatever that is) and humans can integrate themselves with other animals and things. It is a world in which avatars, furries, and gendered souls are real possibilities. A desire to go beyond the third order simulacra that already exist everywhere and step into the fourth order—into the Matrix.
Transhumanism is a profound expression of alienation. It’s the idea that we can escape our bodies or modify them to the point where we are something else or more than we are now. That we can be modified. It’s the fascist dream expressed by the futurism that became a fundamental element in both Italian fascism and German national socialism. It’s Filippo Marinetti’s “dreamt-of metallization of the human body”—bound up not only in a loathing of the human body and an obsession with medicalization of everything but the aesthetics of war and conquest. Of destruction.
Transgenderism is a subset of transhumanism wherein the individual is alienated specifically from his gendered body and believes that by altering it through technology he can escape its reality. It is the delusion that he can become what we thinks he is through destructive cosmetic alterations. It’s the same as the man who thinks he becomes a lizard by splitting his tongue, cutting off his nose, tattooing his body, and implanting horns and other bumps and lines under his skin. He becomes nothing but a self-harming and mutilated human being.
All this is why progressives are so enamored by the medical-industrial complex and, more broadly, scientism. It’s why those drawn to progressivism are natural allies of corporate state elites—they express the social logic of corporatism. It’s why they seek mRNA jabs. It’s why they are ready to be chipped—and chip everybody else. It’s a generation raised on latter iterations of Star Trek—the holodeck—but never taught to differentiate between science fiction and reality.
freedom and reason 