For well-motivated transhumanists, for therapeutic transhumanists (as we might call them - a category including most of the people who openly call themselves by that name of transhumanism); it is the project to alleviate all pain and distress, maximise gratification and fulfillment, abolish ageing and sustain human life indefinitely. In other words, it is a kind of extrapolation of medicine from treatment into enhancement.
At a mild and quantitative level, this soft-transhumanism has nearly always been a part of human life - the idea to use human knowledge and technology to enhance human life. But taken as an imperative, when regarded as a kind of religion-substitute; even well-motivated transhumanism is deadly - because by its focus on trans-cending human limitations, it implies trans-forming humans into something else...
So that if the human condition entails suffering, then humans ought to be abolished; if humans cannot be prevented from ageing, then we should devise some alternative 'life' that is immune to ageing; if humans persist in dying, then humans should be replaced by something that doesn't die...
If the abolition of suffering is the primary goal, it implies the abolition of life - which would be the only way of ensuring that nobody and nothing suffered. Bottom line transhumanism is therefore only one step away from advocating death as prophylaxis.
Transhumanism also provides no reason for having children - and many reasons to avoid having children - since children usually suffer, and are typically a cause of suffering in their parents. The safe option is to avoid them.
Or, short of death, abolishing human consciousness, which greatly intensifies the possibilities of suffering. This suggests that a lobotomised life, a tranquillised life, a sedated life, a false-virtual life, a drugged-euphoric life are all preferable to a conscious and free life insofar as they entail less suffering or more pleasure. Even if such a life led to rapid death, it would be preferable on a purely hedonic calculus.
But there is another side to transhumanism; which is the transhumanism that denies itself and operates by deception and dishonesty.
This is the transhumanism of mainstream, modern, almost-ubiquitous totalitarianism - a transhumanism that aims at omni-surveillance and micro-control of the population.
This transhumanism sells itself as hedonic - as enhancing - but is motivated by the agenda of control. It is the strategic push for intercommunicating 'smart' technology, for omnipresent cameras and microphones, a society in which everyone carries a tracking device (smart phone) that monitors their activity to a fine level of discrimination - and seeks always to extend this (artificial 'intelligence', self-driving cars, the skies filled with drones...) - and to make it mandatory (microchip implants etc.).
This transhumanism has infiltrated medicine, with a massive and expanding use of prescribed psychotropic drugs - mostly SSRI-type 'antidepressants' and 'antipsychotics' marketed as 'mood stabilisers'...
These types of drugs (especially when given to young children and teens and essentially normal adults, as at present) have a pronounced overall tendency to blunt emotions and induce a state of indifference - to partially-zombify people, to put it crudely. They all tend to increase suicide rates. Certainly they do more harm than good, overall - yet usage continues to expand - driven by serious problems of drug dependence and withdrawal symptoms, which are denied and hidden.
Much the same applies to the top-down mass campaigns of propaganda, funding and coercion to induce 'gender' uncertainty and same-sex attraction in children; and to 'treat' such situations with permanently harmful hormones and mutilating surgery. This is a crystal clear case of totalitarian transhumanism pushing forward under the guise of therapeutic transhumanism.
This totalitarian transhumanism is, I believe, an existential approach to social engineering, a core aspect of spiritual warfare; driven by the demonic powers of evil, and with the ultimate aim of compelling humans actually to want and to choose damnation.
So far, this totalitarian transhumanism has been spectacularly successful in persuading people that this is what they want. In this post-religious, anti-religious world it seems that most people are not just prepared to trade off freedom and privacy for amusement and convenience - they are positively queueing-up, and shelling-out large sums of money, to do so...
This totalitarian transhumanist agenda aims to implement a comprehensive system of surveillance and control so complete and dominant that it will be able to shape human emotions, motivations and knowledge as required.
My point here is to ascertain whether they are correct - supposing the totalitarian transhumanist agenda does, as seems to be happening, go-through to a very high level of completion. Suppose the world becomes one of omni-surveillance and micro-monitoring and control of behaviour...
Suppose the world is a single gigantic and interlinked System which affects the entirety of perception and extends into our bodies (via brain and hormone influencing microchips, or whatever might replace them).
Suppose that the demonic evil powers are in control of this total-system - so that they decide what we perceive - and are substantially able to entrain our emotions, and our reasoning processes.
Is this lethal to human agency or freedom of will; or not? Is a wholly controlled human brain-and-body also a wholly controlled person?
The answer is metaphysical - not evidential. If we believe that there is in Man that which is eternal and divine - the Real Self then that will always be free, agent, able to choose... If we believe that Real Self stands-outside of 'material' reality - and controlling the brain and body does not control the Real Self...
In other words, if the arena of freedom is thought, and if the thinking of the real self is immaterial - then this cannot be touched by the most successful totalitarian agenda; and the demonic plan is destined to fail.
So, are the demons making a mistake? Are they wrongly supposing that they can control thought by controlling the brain?
No - it is Not a mistake - because the demons already have in-place a metaphysical system which negates the Real Self.
For a long time, materialism (positivism, scientism, reductionism) has been the inbuilt assumption of official, media and all public discourse. This discourse intrinsically assumes that the Real Self cannot exist, because nothing immaterial (nothing spiritual) can exist. So the mind is wholly the brain, and the brain is the mind - and everything else is an illusion, a deception, a mistake...
In practice, this means that although the Real Self cannot be controlled, and cannot be destroyed; the situation has long since been created and sustained that the Real Self can be ignored - indeed ought-to-be ignored, since it is irrelevant, imaginary, an epiphenomenon. Insofar as the thinking of the Real Self reaches awareness, it will therefore be ignored or rejected.
As I have said, this has been going on for a long time by now. For example; a century ago Freud replaced Conscience - which concept carried a quasi divine imperative; with the Superego - which was implanted by parents and teachers as a mechanism of social control. At a stroke, the promptings of conscience changed from potentially divine nudgings, to an instrument of oppression that should be suppressed or ignored.
In a future totalitarian transhumanist society, the same would apply. Our Real Selves would still be present, and free agents; but we would - by our metaphysical assumptions - regard the Real Self as false, unreal, deceptive... and we would suppress or ignore it.
Thus the Real Self is utterly negated by inbuilt (often unconscious) metaphysical assumptions; and the merely-brain processing is a wholly-controlled unit of The System. Humanity has been captured - and can be directed to any goal desired...
I think this is a very important matter for us to get clear - since at present it looks very much as if the strategy of totalitarian transhumanism will succeed. There is little insight about the intentions and implications of current trends in surveillance and control. There is a general metaphysical denial of the immaterial and the divine.
Everything is in place - and the only delay is caused by the process of rolling-out the technology everywhere and to affect everyone...
Is there hope it will fail? Of course there is hope - each and any person can reject the agenda. I'm just saying that it does not look like this is happening.
The other hope - which is more realistic - is that the modern System will collapse before it can be fully implemented. I find this quite likely to happen - since there is a genetic decline in human capability (from the chosen sterility of the most intelligent and able population, and from the accumulation of deleterious mutations due to relaxed natural selection).
Geniuses have all-but disappeared from The West, we have already almost-ceased to make significant 'breakthroughs' in science and technology; and the failure would be expected to spread to R&D incremental development, then to repair and maintenance, then to the ability to manufacture and distribute...
And all this is exacerbated and accelerated by the deliberate dysfunctionality of 'affirmative action' preferences for women, specific races and classes, non-Christians, and those who identify with the goals of the Sexual Revolution. So we are not even trying to have the best people doing the most important jobs.
So, it is not unlikely that the totalitarian transhumanist agenda - which requires mass advanced technology and a reasonably-competent workforce - will be intercepted and prevented through our faults and blindness and wicked intent; rather than because of our understanding, foresight or virtue.
Prevented, therefore, by a wholesale collapse of modern civilisation; of agriculture, manufacture, medicine, trade and transport - with rapid and colossal mortality (measured in billions) from starvation, disease and violence.
Yet even that scenario (entailing the greatest quantity of acute suffering the world has yet seen) would almost certainly be better than the alternative of a permanent, comprehensive, global system of damnation...
Note added: I forgot to mention that in talking of transhumanism I speak as something of an ex-insider of the 'therapeutic' style of the thing. I was writing from this perspective in my psychiatric and psychopharmacology writings from about 1998 up to the middle/ late 2000s - and my writings from this era were and are hosted on David Pearce's hedweb.com server (Dave being one of the co-founders of the World Transhumanist Association, now renamed Humanity+). There is a video on YouTube from the summer of 2008, of a lecture I gave in which I set out the possible futures as Transhumanist or Religious. It was shortly after making this clear to myself that I became a Christian.
