Uncontrolled

transhumanism, biomedical security, and being a person

Family stuff left me alone around the house yesterday morning, so I used the first day of the Thanksgiving break to jump in the car and see where I’d end up. I thought I’d maybe go bang around western Nevada for a few hours, but that’s not how it turned out. I drove through the Mojave Desert, listening to Porter Wagoner…

…and walked through the Trona Pinnacles, neatly demonstrating the way to get a green dot to appear in your photos by taking pictures into the sunlight:

Later I got to the place where the Panamint Valley Road runs into the 190, and sat there for a moment — and then I gave up on Nevada for no reason at all and turned left instead, and ended up at the Father Crowley Overlook…

…with a big group of these distinguished individuals wandering around nearby:

And then, at long last, I ended up in Lone Pine, where I almost finished Aaron Kheriaty’s new book on the emerging biomedical security state over a pint of Mojave Red and a patty melt.

Kheriaty argues, persuasively and at length, that we face a coalescing series of grimly anti-human ideological maneuvers that threaten to produce a miserable, lifeless social future. The mRNA injections illustrate the point: A traditional vaccine, he writes, delivers an inactivated virus into the body, and so relies on the body’s natural response. It works by “stimulating the immune system to produce an immune response to the modified pathogen… The medical intervention facilitates and extends the body’s own immune system, without treating the body as dumb matter to be entirely externally manipulated.”

But the mRNA injections “utilize a command-and-control mechanism, hijacking our cellular biology and redirecting our body’s ‘machinery’ for novel purposes — in this case, the production of the virus’s spike protein, which is then expressed on our own cells. This process has nothing whatsoever to do with the natural workings of a healthy human body… The mRNA technology does not facilitate the body’s natural ends or intrinsic purposes, as traditional vaccines arguably do. The mRNA device instrumentalizes the body, whose functioning and purpose is imposed from the outside.” Kheriaty notes the way Bill Gates compares viruses in human beings to viruses in computers, an analogy that makes the human body a box full of parts to be programmed by engineers. It treats the body as a manipulable thing, the machine you live inside, which you drop off at the medical shop to get reprogrammed.

The alienation inherent in this kind of machine medicine is reproduced in the entire range of emerging nudge technologies: digital currency issued by central banks, social credit scores, vaccine passports. Transhumanist ideology, a view of people as objects to be engineered, has an inescapable coldness to it, in the form of a fantasy of near-push-button control. The social engineers really dream of being engineers.

So the conflict comes down to a body in a car, sitting at an intersection in the desert and deciding, on a whim, to turn toward the Sierra Nevadas instead of driving on into Nevada. Free, wandering, entirely self-directed, acting without a plan, ending up wherever — a body directed internally. A nudger, a social engineer, would be appalled by that wasteful and inefficient moment. (He even burned fossil fuels, the monster!) But the vision they offer as an alternative is the complete destruction of every human possibility that lives in that moment, and the positively Soviet social vision of an efficiently engineered future will either die in the planning stages or die after implementation, dragged down by an impossibly vast joylessness and a complete disconnection from human needs.