Frankly I’m amazed of the public viciousness the American
Left has expressed in response to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Every form of hate and intolerance the Left has accused Patriot-Conservative-Christian
Americans of is being on full display by the American Left.
I discovered yesterday – from The Federalist – that the
Utah Governor (Spencer Cox) has been a promoter of Transgender acceptance. In
case you live under a rock, Transgenders believe, by human will, they can
biologically change the gender they were born with to another gender. A
BIOLOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITY! Hence mocking the Creator. That places Governor Cox
as a RINO. The Federalist points to other RINOs supportive of Transgenderism
which sadly included my Oklahoma Senator James Lankford (whom I voted
against in his last Primary). The title: “Gov.
Cox Has Spent Years Embracing The ‘Trans’ Ideology That Corrupted Charlie
Kirk’s Killer”.
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As Utah governor, Cox has regularly embraced
transgenderism and its accompanying delusions.
Since the
tragic assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, conservative
voters have rightly criticized weak-kneed responses from elected Republicans,
whose refusal to confront leftist-led political violence
has arguably contributed to the growing problem. While much of this frustration
has been directed at figures like GOP Sens. James Lankford
and Thom Tillis, there’s one notable Republican whose left-wing antics have
gone unaccounted for: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.
During a Sunday interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Cox
was asked by left-wing hack Dana Bash
about comments made by Trump ally Steve Bannon. Addressing Cox’s response to
Kirk’s assassination at a Utah university, Bannon reportedly called the
governor a “national embarrassment,” and said in part, “In a time where we need
action, he tells us to sing kumbaya and hold hands with Antifa.”
Cox acknowledged Bannon is “rightfully” angry but insisted
he is “not saying we have to just sing kumbaya and hold hands” and that “we
actually should disagree.” While he went on to praise Kirk’s willingness to
engage with those he disagreed with, the GOP governor handed legacy media the
soundbite they were clearly looking for by characterizing Kirk’s rhetoric as
“inflammatory.”
“What I’m saying is, we actually should disagree. I think
Charlie represented that better than anyone,” Cox said. “Charlie said some very
inflammatory things. And in some corners of the web, that’s all people have
heard. But he also said some other things about forgiveness. He said some
amazing things about, when things get dark, putting down our phones, reading
Scripture, going to church, talking to our neighbors.”
The moment may not seem like much when compared to the
pathetic responses from Republicans like Lankford and Tillis. But in actuality,
it offered Americans a window into the kind of Republican Cox truly is.
While the Beehive State governor deserves credit for
attempting to bring a sense of comfort to Utahns and other Americans grieving
Kirk’s assassination, it is impossible to ignore his role in promoting the same
destructive ideology that ultimately corrupted the mind and soul of Kirk’s
killer. As governor, Cox has regularly embraced transgenderism and its
accompanying delusions.
While speaking virtually to a group of schoolchildren in
2021, for instance, Cox advanced the false notion that one can choose their
sex and gender pronouns. After a female who proclaimed to be bisexual
introduced herself using her preferred pronouns, the GOP governor followed suit
and touted anti-American DEI ideology in the process.
“I am Gov. Spencer Cox, and I have the pleasure today of
hosting the first One Utah Student Town Hall, and my preferred pronouns are
‘he, him, and his.’ So, thank you for sharing yours with me,” Cox said. “I
believe in helping young leaders learn and grow by listening to them and by
providing platforms to share their voices. Leading with equity and inclusion
starts at a young age …”
Cox also previously listed his preferred pronouns in his
Instagram bio at one point, but has since deleted them, according to a March
2022 Daily Wire report.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Beehive State
governor’s track record on transgenderism gets even worse.
In spring 2022, Cox vetoed legislation seeking to bar trans-identifying
men from competing in women’s sports. His reasoning for doing so? That he
wanted to “err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion.”
“I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to
understand so much of it and the science is conflicting,” Cox wrote at the time
about a destructive ideology whose accompanying “medical” procedures harm its adherents.
Fortunately, the state legislature overwhelmingly overrode
Cox’s veto to protect the sanctity of women’s sports.
Shoehorning radical gender ideology down Utahns’ throats
under the guise of “kindness” and “inclusion” also appeared to be behind Cox’s
decision to designate June as “LBGTQ+ Pride Month” in 2021. The move was “the
first such statewide designation in Utah’s history,” according to Deseret News.
While Cox did sign a bill in 2023 that purported to prohibit
damaging “trans” procedures for minors, the legislation, as Tristan Justice
previously noted in these pages, “doesn’t do much of
anything.”
“The new law signed by the Utah governor … only bars
transgender procedures and hormone interventions for minors who have not been
diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” Justice wrote. “In other words, minors can
find a sympathetic physician steeped in wrongly named ‘gender-affirming care’
who will give them a diagnosis that enables them to pump their bodies full of
wrong-sex hormones and amputate their healthy organs. Teens focused on
gender-bending can even be diagnosed online.”
Contrary to his apparent belief otherwise, Cox’s years-long
willingness to not only accommodate but promote “trans” ideology is the exact
opposite of compassion. Indulging and advancing the anti-truth delusions of
gender dysphoric individuals is harmful to them and — as evidenced by Kirk’s
assassination — others.
This is not to blame Cox for Kirk’s assassination. The
monster who pulled the trigger is ultimately the one responsible for such
barbarity.
But the fact remains that the cowardice of feckless
Republicans like Cox and their refusal to confront the left’s radical ideology
have helped foster an environment in which unhinged leftists feel emboldened to
step outside the norms of civil discourse. That is, these extremists have come
to view violence against their political opponents as an acceptable way to
acquire and maintain power.
Elected Republicans have a duty-bound obligation to crush
such violent forces using every and all legal tools available to protect the
lives of their constituents. Anything short of that is unacceptable.
Shawn Fleetwood
is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary
Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of
States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including
RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on
Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
“Charlie Kirk’s murder has left
America reeling and asking, “Why, God?” Author Eric Metaxas joins PragerU CEO
Marissa Streit to reflect on the life, faith, and courage of their dear friend,
Charlie. Eric explains why Charlie’s legacy calls believers to confront evil
with goodness, and how his death is igniting a revival of faith in America and
beyond.”
[Blog Editor: The early focus is Charlie Kirk and the how
vicious the Left has been toward Kirk’s political assassination. Then speculates
about multiple shooters of which Tyler Robinson was one but perhaps not the
killer, hence the patsy theory. Then moves on to other Leftist villains.]…MORE
DESCRIPTION of a combination of promotionals & Charlie Kirk info
links
I ran into a post from THE EXPOSÉ on Transhumanism. It
was posted today (4/28/25). However the focus is on a lecture given by Aaron
Kheriaty at Hillsdale College on February 2, 2024. THE EXPOSÉ
uses a Youtube video of that lecture that was posted on April 4, 2025. AND THE
EXPOSÉ produced an organized transcript of the
lecture for people to read for who choose not to watch a
55-Minute video (the lecture is about 35-Minutes followed by a Q&A).
Which incidentally is both fascinating and interesting.
For the few out of the loop of what Transhumanism
is, it is essentially a movement to meld humanity into a machine-like cyborg
plugged into an Artificial Intelligence neural network. For me this is a bit of
a Tower
of Babel agenda in which Elitists seek to become as God while
eliminating to devotion to the Almighty Creator. The Almighty did stand for the
Tower of Babel agenda and will not stand for a Transhumanist Agenda either.
“Transhumanism is a
philosophical, social, and scientific movement that advocates for the
enhancement of human capabilities through technology, aiming to transcend the
current limitations of the human body and mind. The central goal of
transhumanism is to improve physical, intellectual, and emotional abilities to
create a more advanced form of human existence. It is not only a futuristic
ideology but also a field that encompasses cutting-edge developments in areas
such as genetics, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, biotechnology,
nanotechnology, and cybernetics.”
“While some Christians will
recast transhumanism in biblical terms, the movement as a whole is
fundamentally opposed to an orthodox and biblical understanding of humanity.
Our ultimate need is redemption, not reinvention. Shatzer reveals that many
Christian transhumanists operate with at least an implicit debt to open and
process theology, which states that God is ultimately open, improving, and
adapting, like creation (97). But this theology is at odds with the God who is
the unchanging basis for all knowledge and truth. God isn’t open and risky;
he’s sovereign and omnipotent. In a world of shifting sand, he is the rock to
which we can cling for hope and redemption.”
I appreciate the DOGE efforts led by Elon Musk. HOWEVER, a red flag
for me is Musk’s promotion of Transhumanism. At this stage I do not
know is looking at only the positive propaganda of human enhancement or is
ardently an anti-God Transhumanist. For now – to me then – Musk is enigma about
his end game versus his current DOGE actions.
Well…Those are my precursor thoughts to THE EXPOSÉ. You should watch or read Aaron
Kheriaty below.
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The transhumanist dream is to live forever. Living
forever in the digital cloud or the mainframe computer in the sky constitutes
the transhumanists’ religious doctrine. It is salvation by digital
technology.
Transhumanism is clearly a religion – indeed, a
particular type of neo-Gnostic religion, Aaron Kheriaty says.
“It attracts adherents today – including educated,
wealthy, powerful, culturally influential adherents – because it taps into
unfulfilled, deeply religious aspirations and longings. Transhumanism is an
ersatz substitute religion for a secular age,” he said.
After describing what transhumanists are aiming for,
Kheriaty said, “I can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is … a
philosophy of death.”
Earlier this month, he gave a lecture on transhumanism at Hillsdale
College CCA’s ‘Artificial Intelligence’ seminar. He
demonstrated how Yuval Noah Harari’s beliefs, the
same philosophy among many of today’s elites, can be traced back to an ideology
that existed during the 1940s, as demonstrated by C.S. Lewis’ book ‘That
Hideous Strength’.
Here’s the video link to my recent talk at Hillsdale College
on AI and Transhumanism. I’m including below the text of the speech if you
prefer to read rather than watch it.
My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man
chock-full of big ideas. He explained during the covid crisis: “covid is
critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimise, total
biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to
monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.” In
a 60 Minutesinterview with
Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: “What we have seen so far is
corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet,
what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin.”
He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted
by the population during covid:
We now see mass surveillance
systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected
them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously,
surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin … Governments
want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what’s
happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood
pressure; what is our medical condition?
Harari is clearly a man who wants to … get under your skin.
He just might succeed. Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical:
“Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really
acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading
humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer
human life.” As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the
Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he’s going up in a
balloon.
Forgive me, but a few last nuggets from Professor Harari
will round out the picture of his philosophy, and his lofty hopes and dreams:
“Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have
this soul or spirit, and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening
inside me, so, whatever I choose, whether in the election or in the
supermarket, that’s my free will – that’s over.”[i] Harari
explains that to hack human beings you need a lot of computing power and a lot
of biometric data, which was not possible until recently with the advent of AI.
In a hundred years, he argues, people will look back and identify the covid
crisis as the moment “when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially
surveillance under the skin – which I think is the most important development
of the 21st century, which is this ability to hack human
beings.”
People rightly worry that their iPhone or Alexa have become
surveillance “listening devices,” and indeed, the microphone can be turned on
even when the device is turned off. But imagine a wearable or implantable
device that, moment-to-moment, tracks your heart rate, blood pressure and skin
conductance, uploading that biometric information to the cloud. Anyone with
access to that data could know your exact emotional response to every statement
made while you watch a presidential debate. They could gauge your thoughts and
feelings about each candidate, about each issue discussed, even if you never
spoke a word.
I could go on with more quotes from Professor Harari about
hacking the human body, but you get the picture. At this point, you may be
tempted to dismiss Harari as nothing more than an overheated, sci-fi-obsessed
village atheist. After years binging on science fiction novels, the balloon of
his imagination now perpetually floats up somewhere above the ether. Why should
we pay any heed to this man’s prognostications and prophesies?
It turns out that Harari is a professor of History at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestselling books have sold over 20 million
copies worldwide, which is no small shakes. More importantly, he is one of the
darlings of the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) and a key architect of their
agenda. In 2018, his WEF lecture at the WEF, ‘Will the Future Be Human?’,
was sandwiched between addresses from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
French President Emmanuel Macron. So, he’s playing in the sandbox with the big
dogs.
In his WEF lecture, Harari explained that in the coming
generations, we will “learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds,” such
that these will become “the main products of the 21st century
economy: not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and
minds.”[ii] The few masters of the economy, he explains, will
be the people who own and control data: “Today, data is the most important
asset in the world,” in contrast to ancient times when land was the most
important asset, or the industrial age when machines were paramount. WEF
kingpin Klaus Schwab echoed Harari’s ideas when he explained: “One of the
features of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn’t change what we
are doing; it changes us,” through gene editing and other biotechnological tools
that operate under our skin.[iii]
Even the dreamy-eyed Harari admits there are some potential
dangers with these developments: “If too much data is concentrated in too few
hands, humanity will split not into classes but into two different
species.” That would not, one supposes, be a good thing. But all things
considered, he is more than willing to take these risks and forge ahead with
this agenda. To be fair, Harari does not advocate for a future totalitarian
state or rule by all-powerful corporations, but hopes to warn us of coming
dangers.
In an exceptionally naïve proposal, however, Harari believes
that the obvious problems posed by a tyrannical biosecurity state can be solved
with more surveillance, by having citizens simply surveil the government: “Turn
it around,” he said in a talk at the Athens Democracy Forum, “Surveil the
governments more. I mean, technology can always go both ways. If they can
surveil us, we can surveil them.”[iv] This proposal is – not to
put too fine a point on it – incredibly stupid. As most of us learned in
kindergarten, two wrongs don’t make a right.
The WEF made waves a few years back by posting on their
website the slogan, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.” Although the
page was later deleted, the indelible impression remained: it provided a clear
and simple description of the future envisioned by Davos Man. As the WEF
savants predict, at the last stage of this development, we will find ourselves
in a rent-only, subscription-only economy, where nothing really belongs to us.
Picture the Uberisation of everything.
To get a sense of this future, imagine the world as an
Amazon warehouse writ large: a mandarin caste of digital virtuosos will call
the shots from behind screens, directing the masses below with the aid of ever
more refined algorithmic specificity. The prophetic Aldous Huxley foresaw
this Brave
New World in his 1932 novel. These changes will challenge
not only our political, economic, and medical institutions and structures; they
will challenge our notions of what it means to be human. This is precisely what
its advocates celebrate, as we will see in a moment.
Corporatist arrangements of public-private partnerships,
which merge state and corporate power, are well suited for carrying out the
necessary convergence of existing and emerging fields. This biological-digital
convergence envisioned by the WEF and its members will blend big data,
artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetics, nanotechnology and
robotics. Schwab refers to this as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will
follow and build upon the first three – the mechanical, electrical and digital
revolutions. The transhumanists – who we will meet in a moment – have been
dreaming of just such a merging of the physical, digital and biological worlds
for at least a few decades. Now, however, their visions are poised to become
our reality.
Mechanisms of Control
The next steps in hacking human beings will involve
attempted rollouts – which we should vigorously resist – of digital IDs, tied
to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans or face IDs,
demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial
transactions and bank accounts. These tools will be combined with central bank
digital currencies, giving governments surveillance power and control over
every one of your financial transactions, with the ability to lock you out of the
market, to limit your ability to buy and sell, if you do not comply with
government directives.
Using biometrics for everyday transactions routinises these
technologies; we get used to them. We are conditioning children to accept
biometric verification as a matter of course. For example, face IDs are now
used in multiple school districts to expedite the movement of students through
school lunch lines. Until recently, biometrics such as fingerprints were used
only for high-security purposes – when charging someone with a crime, for
example, or when notarising an important document, for example. Today, routine
biometric verification for repetitive activities from mobile phones to lunch
lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools
used in transactions. We are instrumentalising the body in unconscious and
subtle, but nonetheless powerful, ways.
Those with economic interests in creating markets for their
products – whether vaccines, digital surveillance hardware and software, or
harvested data – will continue to deploy the carrots and sticks of access to
medical care and other services to strong-arm acceptance of digital IDs in
underdeveloped nations. India, for example, is very far along this road right
now. In developed nations, they will initially use a velvet glove approach of
subtle nudges, selling digital IDs as convenience and time-saving measures that
will be hard for many to turn down, like skipping long TSA security lines at
busy airports. The privacy risks, including the possibility for constant
surveillance and data harvesting, will fade into the background when you’re
about to miss your flight if you can’t skip to the front of the TSA line.
Unless we collectively decline to participate in this new
social experiment, digital IDs – tied to private demographic, financial,
location, movement and biometric data – will become mechanisms for bulk data
harvesting and tracking of populations around the globe. We should resist –
including by opting out of the new face ID scans at TSA airport screening
checkpoints, which we can still legally do.
Once fully realised, this surveillance system will offer
unprecedented mechanisms of control, allowing the regime to be maintained
against any form of resistance. This technocratic dream would entrench the most
intransigent authoritarian system the world has ever known – in the sense that
it could maintain itself against any form of opposition through monopolistic
technological and economic power. The suppression of dissent will not require
handcuffs or prisons; it will happen in large part through the system’s
financial controls, especially if we adopt central bank digital currencies. Try
to resist or step outside the system’s strictures and the doors to markets will
simply close. This means that once this system is in place, it could prove
almost impossible to overthrow.
Microwaved Eugenics
Harari – who I cited extensively at the beginning of this
talk – is among the more prominent members of a new species of academics,
activists and “visionaries” who refer to themselves as transhumanists. These
folks aim to use technology not to alter the lived environment, but to
fundamentally alter human nature itself. The goal is to “upgrade” or “enhance”
human beings. This is both possible and desirable, as Harari explains, because
all organisms – whether humans or amoebas or bananas or viruses – are at bottom
just “biological algorithms.” This is the old materialist, social Darwinist
ideology turbocharged and techno-upgraded with the tools of gene editing,
nanotechnology, robotics and advanced pharmaceuticals. Transhumanism is
microwaved eugenics. There is nothing new under the sun.
The 20th century eugenicists referred to disabled
persons as “useless eaters.” Echoing this rhetoric on multiple occasions,
Harari has puzzled over the question of what to do with people in the future
who will refuse AI-mediated enhancement – folks he refers to as “useless
people.” “The biggest question maybe in economics and politics in the coming
decades,” he predicts, “will be what to do with all these useless people?”[v] He
goes on to explain, “The problem is more boredom, what to do with them and how
will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically
meaningless, worthless.”
Harari suggests one possible solution to the problem of what
to do with all these useless people: “My best guess at present is a combination
of drugs and computer games.” Well, at least we have a head start on that, a
fact that does not escape Harari’s attention: “You see more and more people
spending more and more time, or solving their time with drugs and computer
games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs,” he explains. This is where Harari
predicts those who refuse to be hacked for AI-enhancement purposes will find
themselves.[vi]
Encountering Harari’s thought was not my first brush with
the transhumanist movement. Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at Stanford
University sponsored by the Zephyr Institute on the topic of transhumanism. I
critiqued the idea of “human enhancement,” the use of biomedical technology not
just to heal the sick but to make the healthy “better than well,” i.e., bigger,
faster, stronger, smarter, etc. The event was well attended by several students
from the Transhumanist Club at Stanford.
We had a cordial discussion and I enjoyed chatting with
these students after the talk. I learned the symbol of their student group was
H+ (“humanity-plus”). They were exceptionally bright, ambitious and serious
young men and women – typical Stanford students. Some of them had read their
Plato in addition to their Scientific American. They sincerely
wanted to make the world better. Perhaps there were a closet authoritarian or
two among them, but my impression was that they had no interest in facilitating
world domination by oligarchic corporatist regimes empowered to hack human beings.
Nevertheless, I got the impression that they did not
comprehend the implications of the basic premises, the axioms, they had
accepted. We can choose our first principles, our foundational premises, but
then we must follow them out to their logical conclusions; otherwise, we
deceive ourselves. These Stanford students were not outliers, but
representative of the local culture: transhumanism is enormously influential in
Silicon Valley and shapes the imagination of many of the most influential tech
elites. Proponents of transhumanism include the Oxford University philosopher
Nick Bostrom, Harvard geneticist George Church, the late physicist Stephen
Hawking, Google engineer Ray Kurzweil and other notables.
The Transhumanist Dream
Returning to Harari’s 2018 talk at the WEF, he admits that
control of data might not only enable human elites to build digital
dictatorships, but opines that hacking humans may facilitate something even
more radical: “Elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life
itself.” With his Davos audience warmed up, he then waxes to a crescendo: “This
will not just be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, it will be
the greatest revolution in biology since the beginning of life four billion
years ago.”
Which is, of course, a pretty big deal. Because for billions
of years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life,
as he explains: “All of life for four billion years – dinosaurs, amoebas,
tomatoes, humans – all of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and
to the laws of organic biochemistry.” But not anymore: all this is about to
change, as he explains:
Science is replacing evolution
by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design – not the intelligent
design of some god above the cloud, but our intelligent design, and the design
of our clouds: the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud – these are the new driving
forces of evolution. At the same time, science may enable life – after being
confined for four billion years to the limited realm of organic compounds –
science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm.
The opening sentence here perfectly echoes the original
definition of eugenics from the man who coined the term in the late 19th century,
Sir Francis Galton who was Charles Darwin’s cousin: “What nature does blindly,
slowly, and ruthlessly [evolution by natural selection], man may do
providently, quickly, and kindly [evolution by our own – or by the cloud’s –
intelligent design].” But what is Harari talking about in that last sentence –
life breaking out into the inorganic realm?
It’s been a transhumanist dream from the dawn of modern
computing that someday we will be able to upload the informational content of
our brains, or our minds (if you believe in minds), into some sort of massive
computing system, or digital cloud or other technological repository capable of
storing massive amounts of data. On this materialist view of man, we will then
have no more need for our human body, which, after all, always fails us in the
end. Shedding this mortal coil – this organic dust that always returns to dust
– we will find the technological means to … well, to live forever. Living
forever in the digital cloud or the mainframe computer in the sky constitutes
the transhumanists’ eschatology: salvation by digital technology.
This project is physically (and metaphysically) impossible,
of course, because man is an inextricable unity of body and soul – not some
ghost in the machine, not merely a bit of software transferable to another
piece of hardware. But set that aside for now; look instead at what this
eschatological dream tells us about the transhumanist movement. These
imaginative flights of fancy have obviously moved well beyond the realm of
science. Transhumanism is clearly a religion – indeed, a particular
type of neo-Gnostic religion. It attracts adherents today – including educated,
wealthy, powerful, culturally influential adherents – because it taps into
unfulfilled, deeply religious aspirations and longings. Transhumanism is an
ersatz substitute religion for a secular age.
That Hideous Strength
I cannot emphasise enough the importance for our time of
C.S. Lewis’s book, ‘The
Abolition of Man’.Lewis once remarked that his
dystopian novel, ‘That
Hideous Strength’, the third instalment in his “space trilogy,”
was ‘The Abolition of Man’ in fictional form. Those who have
learned from ‘Huxley’s Brave New World’ and Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’would
do well to also read ‘That Hideous Strength’, an underappreciated
entry in the dystopian fiction genre. Back in 1945, Lewis foresaw Yuval Harari
and his transhumanist ilk on the horizon. He brilliantly satirised their
ideology in the novel’s character of Filostrato, an earnest but deeply misguided
Italian scientist.
In the story, a cabal of technocrats takes over a bucolic
university town in England – think of Oxford or Cambridge – and go to work
immediately transforming things according to their vision of the future. The
novel’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, is recruited away from the university to
the technocrats’ new institute. Mark desires above all to be part of the
progressive set, the “inner ring” that is steering the next big thing. He
spends his first several days at the NICE (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments)
trying in vain to ascertain exactly what his new job description entails.
Eventually, he figures out that he has been retained mainly
to write propaganda explaining the Institute’s activities to the public.
Somewhat dispirited – he is a scholar of the social sciences, after all, and
not a journalist – he sits down at lunch one day with Filostrato, a member of
the NICE inner circle, and learns a bit about this scientist’s worldview.
It happens that Filostrato has just given orders to cut down
some beech trees on the Institute’s property and replace them with trees made
out of aluminium. Someone at the table naturally asks why, remarking that he
rather liked the beech trees. “Oh, yes, yes,” replies Filostrato. “The pretty
trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but
not the brier. The forest tree is a weed.” Filostrato explains that he once saw
a metal tree in Persia, “so natural it would deceive,” which he believes could
be perfected. His interlocutor objects that a tree made of metal would hardly
be the same as a real tree. But the scientist is undeterred and explains why
the artificial tree is superior:
“But consider the advantages!” he says. “You get tired of
him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It
never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and
mess.”
“I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather
amusing,” Mark says.
“Why one or two?” Filostrato replies. “At present, I allow, we must have
forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then,
why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth.
In fact, we clean the planet.”
When asked if he means that there would be no vegetation at
all, Filostrato replies, “Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English
fashion, you shave him every day. One day, we shave the planet.” Someone
wonders what the birds will make of it, but Filostrato has a plan for them too:
“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree, I would have the art birds
all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the
singing, you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers
dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
Mark replies that this sounds like abolishing pretty much
all organic life. “And why not?” Filostrato counters. “It is simple hygiene.”
And then, echoing the rhetoric of Yuval Harari, we hear Filostrato’s soaring
peroration, which would have been right at home in World Economic Forum’s
annual meeting in Davos:
“Listen, my friends. If you pick
up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not
say, ‘Oh, this horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it? … And you,
especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own
on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath … And
what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are
clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms – sweat, spittles,
excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and
the organic are interchangeable conceptions … After all, we are organisms
ourselves.
“I grant it … In us, organic
life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that, we want no more of
it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like
what you call the blue mould – all sprouting and budding and breeding and
decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we
learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to
build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of
dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”[vii]
Someone interjects that this last part does not sound like
much fun, but Filostrato responds, “My friend, you have already separated the
Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away …
Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it
away, then real civilisation becomes possible.” Keep in mind that this was
written decades before the invention of in vitro fertilisation and other
assisted reproductive technologies, as well as the sexual revolution that brought
widespread acceptance of the oral contraceptive pill. As Lewis reveals at the
end of the novel, however, the NICE is not controlled by brilliant men of
science but is ultimately under the sway of demonic forces.
In both the real character of Harari and the fictional
character of Filostrato, we find men who embrace, indeed celebrate, the idea
that human beings can shed the messy business of organic life and somehow
transfer our bodily existence into sterile inorganic matter. We encounter in
both characters the kind of man who wants to bleach the entire earth with hand
sanitiser. Were we not nudged, perhaps a bit too far, in the direction of
Filostrato’s dream during covid, as we attempted to fully disinfect and sanitise
our lived environments, and transfer all our communications to the digital
realm? Have we not also moved in this direction by spending more waking hours
glued to screens in a virtual world than interacting with people in the real
world, while reams of behavioural data are extracted from our every keystroke
and click for predictive analysis by AI?
Organic matter is alive, whereas inorganic matter is dead. I
can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is, in the last analysis, a
philosophy of death. But we must grant that it has become an influential
philosophy among many of today’s elites. In one way or another, all of us have
been seduced, to some degree, by the mistaken notion that by massively
coordinated vigilance and the application of technology, we could rid our lived
environments of pathogens and scrub our world entirely clean – perhaps even
thwarting death.
As the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce pointed out,
philosophies that begin from faulty premises not only fail to achieve their
purpose, they inevitably end up producing the exact opposite of their stated
goals. Transhumanism aims at superior intelligence, superhuman strength and
unending life. But because it is grounded in an entirely false notion of what
it means to be human, if we recklessly embrace the transhumanist dream, we will
find ourselves instead in a nightmare dystopia of stupidity, weakness and
death.
Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a psychiatrist and director of the
Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy
Centre. This lecture was adapted from his book, ‘The New Abnormal: The Rise of
the Biomedical Security State’ (Regnery, 2022).
[vii] Lewis, C. S. That Hideous
Strength. HarperCollins, pp. 169-170.
Rhoda Wilson:
While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia
(until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for
private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and
writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the
introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness
that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own
benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them
do it once they made their final move. See Full Bio
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