Human Entrance to Transhumanism

These books provide an essential and well-informed briefing on the reprogramming and reorganisation of human life in terms of human-machine merger, the Fourth Industrial Revolution through 5 and 6G, the Internet of Bodies and the Internet of Things. In case you hadn’t noticed, this process is already underway and has been accelerated during the COVID crisis where media manipulation through propaganda and fear mongering has produced largely docile and compliant populations with independent thinkers censored and deplatformed. As James pointed out in his previous book The Empire of Scientism reviewed in the last issue, the underpinning metaphysic is mechanistic, materialistic and left hemisphere dominated – we are just hackable animals to be directed and controlled through technology and eventually implants - as foreseen by George Orwell. The inner, depth and heart dimensions are entirely absent from this view, which is a fundamental denial of soul and spirit; as Martin Buber would say, I-It relationships have trumped I-Thou. This is a culturally perilous situation requiring a coherent spiritual response to stop this juggernaut in its tracks and prioritise the human over the machine.

Kingsley describes how the ‘consensus reality paradigm’ is being socially managed to produce a radical shift in our way of life towards totalitarian digitised techno-surveillance enabling social engineering on an unprecedented scale. The three parts of his book cover the collapse of consensus, resetting of new narratives underpinned by biocapitalism, biosecurity and corresponding biopower, while the third considers bodily futures and potential ‘upgrades’. We have already witnessed the power of narrative control influencing perception and behaviour as a form of social management, reinforced by creating social divisions between the compliant and the resistant heretics – all this serves specific agendas in remaking the global mindset and moving us towards a biosecurity state dominated by the infosphere as a form of technologised governance or technocracy. Immediate engagement of the fear-based limbic system closes down critical analysis at the very time when our fundamental human responsibility is to resist the forces of dehumanising nihilism. (p. 137)

Kingsley’s innovative concepts of biopower and biopolitics describe how the state claims jurisdiction over human bodies ‘to create a totalised and singular form of power’ as a new form of social management that denies individuals sovereignty over their own bodies within a biocapitalist system based on commercial gain and market dominance. Remote patient monitoring and health trackers are estimated to generate $20 billion annually from next year, and the big players are investing heavily in what could develop into ‘a very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system.’ All this will be sold in the name of health, reinforced by psychopolitics, leading to ‘an age that is void of the very core qualities of being human in a living, organic world.’ Hence the central question for us all: ‘what does being human mean to me, and what is human freedom?’ (p. 91) For Kingsley, this means being grounded and rooted in ourselves, ‘with an anchoring of inner gravity.’

James shares the same concerns and is well grounded in key thinkers from earlier in the 20^th century. For him, transhumanism (defined on p. 33) eliminates the human and deconstructs the person so that we become colonised by technology. We are already subject to ‘a continual assault on our perception’ using techniques effectively amounting to secular black magic (pp. 93-95): ‘having taken spirit out, some want to delete humanity, free will, individuality, personhood, selfhood and consciousness’ in ways anticipated by Steiner 100 years ago. James sees the key elements of total tech-worldview as materialism, machine, information-processing, control, metrics, governance, power concentration, post-biology and progress by prosthesis. (p.168) Techbondage describes the likely development towards living in bondage to technology and those who control the networks. Technical progress may provide more convenience but potentially leads to existential colonisation where we will be required to participate in digital networks within a tightening tech-straitjacket. James may well be right that ‘the big pharma, medical model of health will be foisted on us without any effective restraint’ requiring compliance and ultimately compulsion whereby we will have ‘outsourced our sovereignty, mind, free will, choice, immune system and ultimately our spirit’ as anticipated in the work of Hannah Arendt and her husband Gunther Anders.

By this time, you must be asking what we can do, a question addressed by both authors at a time when technology is ‘amplifying the societal impulse to conform.’ As Jung anticipated 60 years ago, the answer lies in the strength of the individual self, in inner identity and in the ‘being’ of the individual. Kingsley draws on the work of Erich Fromm, one of whose books was entitled The Fear of Freedom, while his last was To Have or to Be, where being takes priority and we are authentically grounded in a higher reality, which James call the animasphere to contrast it with the technosphere. He is surely correct in stating that ‘spiritual evolution is the necessary antidote to the evident evil of exclusive reliance on a materialist, controlling and colonial enterprise that seeks dominion over us as slaves.’ (p. 140) Liberty demands individual responsibility, and the fundamental question is: ‘do you have a spirit?’ – to which the materialist answers no. It is only this spiritual consciousness that is capable of resisting totalitarian tech-consciousness at a time when nothing less than our genuine humanity is at stake and where ‘the imperative of love is the only force that will override the imperial power of scientism’ from which it is entirely absent. Hence the importance of our work in upholding a spiritual understanding of life, such as our Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities.