Transhumanism: Military Intelligence Operations Cloaked in the False Promise of Transcendence

Lissa Johnson, Daniel Broudy, David A Hughes, Propaganda in Focus

“All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal”.— Albert Einstein, in a letter to Heinrich Zangger (1917)

Abstract: With the coordinated global release of the Covid-19 narrative in late 2019 and the subsequent illogical demands of governments — allied with transnational organisations and pharmaceutical giants — many people around the world began questioning the hasty, unprecedented, and sweeping technological and technocratic changes being made to societies in the name of a highly marketed “medical emergency”. Despite new policies emanating from authorities to isolate, to mask, to restrict all social contact, to accept without question unique experimental gene- and nanoparticle-based injections, and to abide by novel and absurd social norms, many people pushed back against the apparent tyranny. The more enthusiastic that governments were in deleting civil rights, suppressing freedom of speech and due process, the more that people sought to expose the story behind the mainstream Covid-19 narrative. This article, the first in a series of four, considers that story as it intersects with the trajectory of transhumanism. Here in Part 1 we examine how the current uninterrupted global push for a total top-down alteration of humanity, of human biology, of human emotions, and social relations, relates to a philosophy and history of well-funded and highly efficient business and military operations framed as necessarily rational and inevitable. We address the obfuscatory meanings of transhumanism so far propagated, and begin uncovering transhumanism’s roots in the military-intelligence complex, taking NASA and its purported demand for cyborgs in space as our starting point. With a focus on primary sources and military-intelligence material, we lay the foundations for the subsequent three articles in the series, which offer an alternative possible way of understanding the current unfolding process as one aimed at transforming human beings from natural and sovereign creatures to controlled synthetic forms of life.

Introduction

In these times of great political, economic and societal uncertainty, we can be certain of one thing. Communities across the globe are beset by all the insidious forces of radical change that wo/men in power can dream up for the people they pretend to speak for and rule. The forces of change rank in the command and control of a larger war striving at every turn to camouflage the long-planned transition of humankind. Everything is subject to capture in the programs of transformation for nationhood, personhood, personal identity, agency, and sovereignty. Some people recognise the tensions and the weapons deployed to bring about total captivity and change. Others deny the evidence of the campaigns waged against them.

The difference between these extremes might be explained by the most contested space in the present war — the struggle for the heart and mind. As Edward Bernays reminds us, the mind must be continuously occupied, “every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers”.[1] Fear and a deep sense of urgency, therefore, must be engineered so the projected sacrifice of bodies will, in the final tally, be found justified. So it is, also, with warnings issued to people today that we must be on edge and ready to confront the threats posed to the environment by our own diseased bodies, carbon footprints that must be reduced, poisoned ecosystems, and the intelligent machines our self-proclaimed masters fund and deploy for our “salvation.” The trans-human turn into a post-human world, populated by compliant cyborgs, is claimed as an inevitable step in directed evolution. “Enhanced” humans, the technocratic PR assures, will possess new superhuman abilities and will defeat their own mortality with routine nano-upgrades.

How are we to contend with such antihuman operations conspiring against us? In the words of Elon Musk, we must merge with machines to avoid becoming like monkeys.[2] ’Futures’ strategist to the Rockefeller Foundation and Chinese Department of Education, Michell Zappa,[3] similarly warns that humanity has “no other option than to be dragged, kicking and screaming”, to the “precipice” of a future involving gene therapy, artificial organs, synthetic blood and vasculature, and bioelectronic drugs.[4] Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, the self-styled “International Organisation for Public-Private Cooperation”,[5] likewise portends that the future of technological innovation, “doesn’t change what you are doing — it changes you. If you take genetic editing, just as an example, it’s you who are changed”.[6] He says technology will “in the end” lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities”.[7] The technological determinist mindset behind all such pronouncements is designed to leave no room for resistance or contestation.

Organised by transnational elites, the lockstep march of humanity into what has been called the Bio-Nano Age, the Virtual Era,[8] or the Fourth Industrial Revolution,[9] reflects the transhumanist aspiration toward a post-human future. The gradual, inexorable march has been ongoing for decades, rooted in eugenic misanthropy while packaged in false promises that man can transcend the limitations of the flesh and, aided by new and novel technologies, live forever. The intellectual, physical, and spiritual move for a transhumanist form of immortality is also grounded in a socioeconomic transition that reduces humankind to hyper-rational “market actors configured always … and everywhere as homo economicus”,[10] serving not human welfare but monopoly capital’s bottom line. In other words, a billionaire class. As a consequence, it further means that the new technocratic colonists, funding these emerging markets in bodies, brains and bloodstreams, will seek control over all means of human (re)production.

Given that the value of human data is morphing into a key commodity[11] and given that the corporate “state must be involved in the [process of capital] accumulation, [by] mystify[ing] its policies and call[ing] them something they are not, or … try[ing] to conceal them”,[12] who better than state-corporate, “public private partnerships” to manage the emerging market of trans-humans for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Bodies (IoB)?[13] The movement finds at its centre the world’s wealthiest and most influential actors, spanning all sectors of power: a transnational elite urging a host of technological adulterations advertised as upgrades to biological lifeforms (humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms).

How are we to recognise the key signs of this fundamental transformation? A vivid image of an unfolding posthuman future is now coming into view in the wake of the global push for total compliance with government-mandated injectable bio-nano gene therapies. The Kavli Foundation, for example, ostensibly a grant-making body, has partnered with key agencies in the expanding global network of “public private partnerships” pushing gene-based nanotechnology and synthetic biology around the world, including the US Military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition to their interest in vaccines, all three organisations are part of a White House-funded initiative known as “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies” (BRAIN), including projects in nanoscience, brain-machine interfaces, and bioengineering.[14,15] The European Union also has its own Human Brain Project,[16] which it describes as “one of the largest research projects in the world”, forming part of its Future and Emerging Technologies initiative. The Project brings together 140 universities and institutions across 11 countries to focus on artificial neural networks, neuromorphic computing, AI, neurorobotics, and neuro-inspired technologies.

In the context of this abrupt worldwide turn towards gene-based, bio-nano solutions to purported social ills and emergencies, the following four-part series seeks to build upon existing literatures by critically examining the underlying transhumanist trajectory that drives such developments.[17-19] In particular, it aims to elucidate the role of the military-intelligence complex in transhumanism, as part of an ongoing project to transform humans for servitude in a new ‘utopia’ ruled and managed by the gurus, sages, and supplicants of a presently unfolding technocracy.

Defining Transhumanism

Casual talk of transhumanism in polite company may evoke curiosity or confusion. It may engender in the imagination thoughts of armed survivalists trading rumours of government plans to microchip citizens like livestock. Exchanges may trigger vague memories of popular tropes in pulp fiction or fantasy film, integrating trans-human fascination with morbid entertainment and comic book superheroes who merge with machines. It may recall the cinematic special effects of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) where Maria’s life force is transferred to a sheetmetal cyborg. Perhaps the many approaches to treating transhumanism have been baked into layers of cultural reproduction in order to create the appearance of some conflict between fringe irrelevancy and utopian aspirations shared among elites. These ambiguities may be a feature of social engineering through media and education to incite public indifference and disengagement.

As a global project of control over (re)production and human beings, transhumanism entails a constellation of theoretical, practical, and ideological strands, each of which involves what appears to be a mixture of esoteric mythologies, empirical realities, and media hype, infused with technological developments, political spin, tangible circumstances, and the spectacle of unending public relations campaigns. Separating the material reality of this well-funded global project from the confusing forms of propaganda that support it can be complex and challenging.

Not least among the complications involved in defining transhumanism is that the usual approach to defining the term acts, itself, as a propaganda device. Proponents of transhumanism consistently define their project in evaluative and positive terms, as a quest for augmented ‘evolution’, human ‘enhancement’ and the overcoming of human ‘limitations’. According to the Transhumanist Manifesto, which has been published by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, transhumanism is:

A worldview that seeks a quality of life that brings about perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, visionary solutions, and critical thinking — the transhuman. The transhuman is a biological-technological organism, a transformation of the human species that continues to evolve with technology[20]

Humanity+, the source of the Transhumanist Manifesto, defines transhumanism with reference to Max More, one of the pioneers of the movement, positioning transhumanism as:

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities[21]

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Bringing Transhumanism Down to Earth, Part 1: Military Intelligence Operations Cloaked in the False Promise of Transcendence