Thanks for sharing this. I am reading your book from Chile, Southamerica, which has been the lab for all transhumanist policies, as this part of the world is the perfect set up: absolute inequality, social injustice, sexism, poverty, and a massive resentment towards the northern hemisphere. The colonialism issue is big here, even I once accused a botanist from the RBGE of managing plant research in our continent as a kind of nagging parent, which is “kind of” true.
Latin America is super divided and occupied by the narcs. It’s s fertile territory for transhumanism and it’s religious structure.
Young people need meaning and purpose in a life where meaning is gone. I used to be from the left, but now I’m nowhere. I’m glad I found thinkers like you, Louise Perry and some Spanish women philosophers that are uncovering this.
My continent is often forgotten. But transhumanists don’t forget anyone.
The Tories are simply lost; they don't even know what they want to do, let alone have any idea how to accomplish it.
However many American conservatives are so entrenched in a limited government ideology that they are refusing to use govt (even in states which they already control) to push back on this -- Kristi Noem in SD, Spencer Cox in UT, Eric Holcomb in IN, among others. They're so enamored with personal autonomy and so afraid of government that they veto bills to make the slicing off of teenagers private parts illegal. And they call that "conservative".
The Left controls every other institution in America and is using those institutions to push this agenda. -- they are mutilating children. The only institution the Right can gain control of is government (via the ballot box). Conservatives who refuse to use that power out of some misguided fealty to limited-government pipe dreams are shooting themselves in the foot and consigning America to further descent into this postmodernist and increasingly totalitarian rabbit hole.
The new proposed WHO regulations bear what you are saying out Mary.
But I think there is another strand to what you are saying that goes hand in hand with bio libertarianism which is sexual libertarianism. Side by side with pushing consent to the pill to minors without parents knowledge is pushing consent to sex to the same group . Gender ideology is not just about changing the body but also about carrying your sexual fetish on your back. It is the meeting point of both these two developments.
My theory is that body mutilation would not have solicited so much social consent if it weren’t for the promise of open sexual expression to a large number of men (how many we don’t know) of sexual perversions.
Beautiful, brilliant -- as always, Mary! A tiny thought: Even farther back, Basil of Caesarea said "Man is an animal with a vocation to become God" -- which encapsulates the Eastern Christian view of theosis in startling words that aren't too very atypical. So, farther back, and deeper down, than the static image of man as imago Dei, is the view of man blossoming into God...I'm no historian, but perhaps a case could be made for this dynamic view underpinning some of the political orders we've left behind, but are still somewhere there in our bones -- Byzantium, for example: which wasn't so thirsty for technological innovation as it was for liturgical beauty. In any case, I see transhumanism as rooted in a much more ancient perversion, and subversion, of the human body as something that, like a seed, is meant to naturally unfold into God.
Its a topsy turvy world for sure. In the past, conservatives stood for the aristocracy, the land, the empire and finance. The liberals stood for business, the existing and aspiring middle class.
The "left" then gained expression through the trade unions and the Labour Party which were collectivist. The male working class barely had the vote. Women's suffrage is only a century or so old.
The modern current of narcissism is neither left nor right in this older sense. The focus on self regard arises from the breakdown of older class identities but is fostered across the political spectrum.
One driver of this has been a cultural decoupling of men and women. Men and women going their own way is a minority pursuit but its novelty means that it still dominates the media. If men and womens' destinies are not seen as progressing together, the boundaries of male and female will inevitably be blurred. This movement has support both on the libertarian right and the Foucault influenced left, but also amongst the successful and independent career people and especially women, sceptical of the value of anything like a traditional relationship in their life. This is not a left / right issue.
What people at large who do perceive an issue are missing is any sense of collective action, of community, of solidarity, of shared values and the sense that government is for them - some relief from the pervasive sense that we are wholly on our own. This is in fact the heart of the traditional left message. Many of who voted for Brexit seem to have been seeking this renaissance of lost community but were in my view wholly conned, not seeing the deregulatory "more of the same" libertarian capitalist motivations of its main backers.
The risk of this moment is overcompensation with a swing to an authoritarian nationalist collectivism. Left collectivism, in the form of a renewed social democracy, needs to assert itself. Otherwise the pendulum swing will have disastrous results.
Your talk was a very good one on the subject of to what extent state power should be exercised to rein in the gender-fetishism aspects of our Western culture of narcissism. And you're absolutely right too that many/most conservatives are hopelessly muddled...muddled about how to resist the antics of the leftist leviathan that now sits on us. So my comment is a tangential one: Conservatives make another big mistake in that they take the 'progressive' left's various agendas too much at face value.....gender fluidity is about gender; anti-racism is about race etc etc.....failing to give sufficient notice to the underlying Psychology of it all which is really primarily about something else. 'Wokeness' and all its 'social justice' forebears is really about members of an ever-expanding pseudo-intelligentsia wanting to adopt attitudes/behaviors that enable them to feel superior, holier, more sophisticated than those despised 'ordinary' men-and-women-on-the-street. The tragedy of it all is when those ordinary men, women - and children - naively start to copy them in adopting these 'luxury beliefs'.
This is no less an issue in the States than in the UK, and I am afraid that we are quite behind the curve on this issue here. COVID exposed the degree to which our supposedly democratically elected government - of both the Republican and Democratic forms - was willing to offload policy decision-making authority to NGO's, corporations, and other "expert class" entities. The state of Florida is leading the way in spearheading some kind of an effective response to the Federal Leviathan, but even here Desantis has been targeted for a fair amount of criticism from some in the allegedly conservative punditry who accuse him of being a kind of closet neo-New Deal, big government democrat for using the powers of the governorship and state legislature to strike against those intent on imposing their gender identity regime. Conservatives will have to abandon this rather narrow and manichean view of politics if it is to stand any chance of reversing the gaines already made the party of trans/post humanism.
Thank you Mary. Totally agree with the post humanist development from Pill onwards. I thing we are being groomed into playing as our virtual selves through games. My slight daughter playing as a middle aged warrior in The Witcher made me realise the extent of this trend. ....And the Virgin media app would not let me proceed until I chose an avatar to represent me. The only way through was to choose, consent and tap the gate keeper button ‘I am happy’ to move on. I refused to do this! So are you buying into this trans humanism, and virtual reality it not? For me a definite NO!!
This resonated so deeply for me, as I see these same tactics, ideologies and rationales (of the tran-humanists) reflected in the quiet, subsurface effort to normalize, mainstream and legalize Pedophilia.
Such an astute observation, where abortion is concerned. If the Imago Dei, is able to be sacrificed or destroyed, for the convenience, of the inconvenienced and omnipotent, then why can't children be used for the sexual relief and gratification, of those same evolved trans-humanists?
As you say, when the norm becomes a base line to be surpassed...the long held belief that children's mental and emotional innocence should be protected, becomes a threshold to trample underfoot and surpassed, on their way to the enlightened utopia - where children are sexual beings, capable of choosing their own sex/gender and sexual identifies and it is oppressive to deny them the joy, pleasure and understanding of their sexuality, through experience and practice.
While I am a small government conservative, I agree, when it comes to this utopian, trans-human autonomy, one devoid of any form of spirituality or moral limits, there needs to be legislative intervention. The rub is, who the people are, that are allowed to sit in seats of power, whether governmental or NGOs/bureaucracies. We are in the mess we are, because the same tran-humanists you so aptly describe, worked for decades and even centuries (as progressives) to place their activists, acolytes and shock troops in the halls of power and "justice".
More legislation, only works, if you have legislators who are at the very least, middle of the road. We do not and have not had that, for a very long while.
Thank you for the work and insights. They are vital in my cause to fight the most vile of the trans-humanist agendas....pedophilia.
The Right is just the same as the Left in all except agreement on welfare and taxes (and a few token "culture war" issues, the Right always ends up adopting after some protest anway), and has been increasingly that since the 19th century.
The Right has only appeared to be conservative because for a good while it had to put on a face to sustain a coalition with older, pre-modern, structures and populations (and of course some of its politicians belonged to those and adhered to some of their tennets and traditions). But that was temporary and out of convenience.
As a project, the core project of the Right is the same as that of the Left. Capitalism was always about changing things, everything being an individual (ie consumer) choise, transhumanism endless "disruption" of past structures, and the Right was the party of the rising capitalist class, so that's what its program was.
As for the Left, those were accelerationists who wanted to go to the future where all the past traditions and customs was broken down, and get transhumanism even faster, and cheered when Capitalism threw down "antiquated" ways of life and institutions - their beef with Capitalism was just that they thought could do it faster, better, and with more equality. Marx even called Capitalism a neccessary step towards (his brand of) Communism.
Thatcher, for example, was no conservative in any actual sense of the word. She didn't want to conserve anything, she wanted everything to yield to the power of money and private interest. She was only thought to be so, because she belonged to a party that had to sustain a coalition with actual convervatives back in the day, but which nonetheless have been progressively shedding all signs of that.
Oh very well, I suppose that once I start identifying as a three-headed lesbian, I shall be entitled to Wokemon points galore, and also to three votes in national and local elections.
Who are you to deny me my rights? My right to my rights is my right!
Thank you for making the point about the birth control pill. I used to be a avid defender of the pill because I thought it liberated women and was one of the greatest symbols for freedom and feminism. Instead now I see it in a very different light: all it liberated us from was the female biology of our bodies (which I, as I realized now, saw as inferior). Plus it liberated men from having to think about birth control at all. Actually I think many women only take the pill to adjust to men’s demands: to have sex whenever the man wants, to have sex without a condom, to free the man from having to think about birth control. Essentially the pill just makes everything very comfortable for men.
I think the REAL feminist way forward would be to teach boys and men to respect a women’s cycle and to teach girls and women how to be in tune with their body (there are great technical gadgets out there for that, too).
All excellent points... yet somewhat dulled by all-out solemn delivery we all are so accustomed to, the kind gushing from official pulpits here & there & everywhere.
What if you dared to switch the language registers, and spoke in your bespoke vibrant voice gracing the UnHerd pages? 🔥 The effect might be stunning! And who knows, might even mark a start of wholesale departure from stale public speaking conventions we no longer question 🤔
Very wise and eloquent, thank you. I don’t see much cause for optimism except for you being able to speak and write and a few people being able to respond. If things are bad now, imagine what it will be like after a year or two of New Labour ...
Nikolas Rose’s paper (then developed into a book) The Politics of Life Itself might be of interest to you. He comes up with the term “ethopolitics” to ‘update’ Foucault’s biopolitics in light of the advancements in molecular biology, etc.
Thank you for your thorough and sensible reporting, Mary. As a man I supported earlier feminist waves but not the current "third wave" feminism which has turned so misandrist and now, with transhumanism, misanthropist. Even here in the boonies of Western Canada we're still repeatedly subjected to screenings of "documentaries" on "toxic masculinity," so the indoctrination proceeds apace. It is destroying what is left of the relationship between men and women. As Jordan Peterson explains, we have an entire generation of young men who are choosing to avoid marriage because the power imbalance is so heavily in favour of women that it just isn't worth the risks for men. This only worsens the global plunge in fertility and birth rates. A recent Substacker put it aptly: "Women at large control the culture while pretending to be under the thumb of the long extinct patriarchy." Reading your speech though makes me wonder if this too is part of the strategy of the transhumanists in their drive toward lab-grown humans (shades of Brave New World)—fully alienate the sexes from one another.
To follow the money on transgenderism, follow investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek. Here are links to her articles showing the multi-billion-dollar corporations profiting from transgender surgeries, puberty blockers and hormones:
Disunited Posthuman Kingdom
Thanks for sharing this. I am reading your book from Chile, Southamerica, which has been the lab for all transhumanist policies, as this part of the world is the perfect set up: absolute inequality, social injustice, sexism, poverty, and a massive resentment towards the northern hemisphere. The colonialism issue is big here, even I once accused a botanist from the RBGE of managing plant research in our continent as a kind of nagging parent, which is “kind of” true.
Latin America is super divided and occupied by the narcs. It’s s fertile territory for transhumanism and it’s religious structure.
Young people need meaning and purpose in a life where meaning is gone. I used to be from the left, but now I’m nowhere. I’m glad I found thinkers like you, Louise Perry and some Spanish women philosophers that are uncovering this.
My continent is often forgotten. But transhumanists don’t forget anyone.
The Tories are simply lost; they don't even know what they want to do, let alone have any idea how to accomplish it.
However many American conservatives are so entrenched in a limited government ideology that they are refusing to use govt (even in states which they already control) to push back on this -- Kristi Noem in SD, Spencer Cox in UT, Eric Holcomb in IN, among others. They're so enamored with personal autonomy and so afraid of government that they veto bills to make the slicing off of teenagers private parts illegal. And they call that "conservative".
The Left controls every other institution in America and is using those institutions to push this agenda. -- they are mutilating children. The only institution the Right can gain control of is government (via the ballot box). Conservatives who refuse to use that power out of some misguided fealty to limited-government pipe dreams are shooting themselves in the foot and consigning America to further descent into this postmodernist and increasingly totalitarian rabbit hole.
The new proposed WHO regulations bear what you are saying out Mary.
But I think there is another strand to what you are saying that goes hand in hand with bio libertarianism which is sexual libertarianism. Side by side with pushing consent to the pill to minors without parents knowledge is pushing consent to sex to the same group . Gender ideology is not just about changing the body but also about carrying your sexual fetish on your back. It is the meeting point of both these two developments.
My theory is that body mutilation would not have solicited so much social consent if it weren’t for the promise of open sexual expression to a large number of men (how many we don’t know) of sexual perversions.
Beautiful, brilliant -- as always, Mary! A tiny thought: Even farther back, Basil of Caesarea said "Man is an animal with a vocation to become God" -- which encapsulates the Eastern Christian view of theosis in startling words that aren't too very atypical. So, farther back, and deeper down, than the static image of man as imago Dei, is the view of man blossoming into God...I'm no historian, but perhaps a case could be made for this dynamic view underpinning some of the political orders we've left behind, but are still somewhere there in our bones -- Byzantium, for example: which wasn't so thirsty for technological innovation as it was for liturgical beauty. In any case, I see transhumanism as rooted in a much more ancient perversion, and subversion, of the human body as something that, like a seed, is meant to naturally unfold into God.
Its a topsy turvy world for sure. In the past, conservatives stood for the aristocracy, the land, the empire and finance. The liberals stood for business, the existing and aspiring middle class.
The "left" then gained expression through the trade unions and the Labour Party which were collectivist. The male working class barely had the vote. Women's suffrage is only a century or so old.
The modern current of narcissism is neither left nor right in this older sense. The focus on self regard arises from the breakdown of older class identities but is fostered across the political spectrum.
One driver of this has been a cultural decoupling of men and women. Men and women going their own way is a minority pursuit but its novelty means that it still dominates the media. If men and womens' destinies are not seen as progressing together, the boundaries of male and female will inevitably be blurred. This movement has support both on the libertarian right and the Foucault influenced left, but also amongst the successful and independent career people and especially women, sceptical of the value of anything like a traditional relationship in their life. This is not a left / right issue.
What people at large who do perceive an issue are missing is any sense of collective action, of community, of solidarity, of shared values and the sense that government is for them - some relief from the pervasive sense that we are wholly on our own. This is in fact the heart of the traditional left message. Many of who voted for Brexit seem to have been seeking this renaissance of lost community but were in my view wholly conned, not seeing the deregulatory "more of the same" libertarian capitalist motivations of its main backers.
The risk of this moment is overcompensation with a swing to an authoritarian nationalist collectivism. Left collectivism, in the form of a renewed social democracy, needs to assert itself. Otherwise the pendulum swing will have disastrous results.
Your talk was a very good one on the subject of to what extent state power should be exercised to rein in the gender-fetishism aspects of our Western culture of narcissism. And you're absolutely right too that many/most conservatives are hopelessly muddled...muddled about how to resist the antics of the leftist leviathan that now sits on us. So my comment is a tangential one: Conservatives make another big mistake in that they take the 'progressive' left's various agendas too much at face value.....gender fluidity is about gender; anti-racism is about race etc etc.....failing to give sufficient notice to the underlying Psychology of it all which is really primarily about something else. 'Wokeness' and all its 'social justice' forebears is really about members of an ever-expanding pseudo-intelligentsia wanting to adopt attitudes/behaviors that enable them to feel superior, holier, more sophisticated than those despised 'ordinary' men-and-women-on-the-street. The tragedy of it all is when those ordinary men, women - and children - naively start to copy them in adopting these 'luxury beliefs'.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
This is no less an issue in the States than in the UK, and I am afraid that we are quite behind the curve on this issue here. COVID exposed the degree to which our supposedly democratically elected government - of both the Republican and Democratic forms - was willing to offload policy decision-making authority to NGO's, corporations, and other "expert class" entities. The state of Florida is leading the way in spearheading some kind of an effective response to the Federal Leviathan, but even here Desantis has been targeted for a fair amount of criticism from some in the allegedly conservative punditry who accuse him of being a kind of closet neo-New Deal, big government democrat for using the powers of the governorship and state legislature to strike against those intent on imposing their gender identity regime. Conservatives will have to abandon this rather narrow and manichean view of politics if it is to stand any chance of reversing the gaines already made the party of trans/post humanism.
Thank you Mary. Totally agree with the post humanist development from Pill onwards. I thing we are being groomed into playing as our virtual selves through games. My slight daughter playing as a middle aged warrior in The Witcher made me realise the extent of this trend. ....And the Virgin media app would not let me proceed until I chose an avatar to represent me. The only way through was to choose, consent and tap the gate keeper button ‘I am happy’ to move on. I refused to do this! So are you buying into this trans humanism, and virtual reality it not? For me a definite NO!!
Excellent piece Mary.
This resonated so deeply for me, as I see these same tactics, ideologies and rationales (of the tran-humanists) reflected in the quiet, subsurface effort to normalize, mainstream and legalize Pedophilia.
Such an astute observation, where abortion is concerned. If the Imago Dei, is able to be sacrificed or destroyed, for the convenience, of the inconvenienced and omnipotent, then why can't children be used for the sexual relief and gratification, of those same evolved trans-humanists?
As you say, when the norm becomes a base line to be surpassed...the long held belief that children's mental and emotional innocence should be protected, becomes a threshold to trample underfoot and surpassed, on their way to the enlightened utopia - where children are sexual beings, capable of choosing their own sex/gender and sexual identifies and it is oppressive to deny them the joy, pleasure and understanding of their sexuality, through experience and practice.
While I am a small government conservative, I agree, when it comes to this utopian, trans-human autonomy, one devoid of any form of spirituality or moral limits, there needs to be legislative intervention. The rub is, who the people are, that are allowed to sit in seats of power, whether governmental or NGOs/bureaucracies. We are in the mess we are, because the same tran-humanists you so aptly describe, worked for decades and even centuries (as progressives) to place their activists, acolytes and shock troops in the halls of power and "justice".
More legislation, only works, if you have legislators who are at the very least, middle of the road. We do not and have not had that, for a very long while.
Thank you for the work and insights. They are vital in my cause to fight the most vile of the trans-humanist agendas....pedophilia.
The Right is just the same as the Left in all except agreement on welfare and taxes (and a few token "culture war" issues, the Right always ends up adopting after some protest anway), and has been increasingly that since the 19th century.
The Right has only appeared to be conservative because for a good while it had to put on a face to sustain a coalition with older, pre-modern, structures and populations (and of course some of its politicians belonged to those and adhered to some of their tennets and traditions). But that was temporary and out of convenience.
As a project, the core project of the Right is the same as that of the Left. Capitalism was always about changing things, everything being an individual (ie consumer) choise, transhumanism endless "disruption" of past structures, and the Right was the party of the rising capitalist class, so that's what its program was.
As for the Left, those were accelerationists who wanted to go to the future where all the past traditions and customs was broken down, and get transhumanism even faster, and cheered when Capitalism threw down "antiquated" ways of life and institutions - their beef with Capitalism was just that they thought could do it faster, better, and with more equality. Marx even called Capitalism a neccessary step towards (his brand of) Communism.
Thatcher, for example, was no conservative in any actual sense of the word. She didn't want to conserve anything, she wanted everything to yield to the power of money and private interest. She was only thought to be so, because she belonged to a party that had to sustain a coalition with actual convervatives back in the day, but which nonetheless have been progressively shedding all signs of that.
Oh very well, I suppose that once I start identifying as a three-headed lesbian, I shall be entitled to Wokemon points galore, and also to three votes in national and local elections.
Who are you to deny me my rights? My right to my rights is my right!
Thank you for making the point about the birth control pill. I used to be a avid defender of the pill because I thought it liberated women and was one of the greatest symbols for freedom and feminism. Instead now I see it in a very different light: all it liberated us from was the female biology of our bodies (which I, as I realized now, saw as inferior). Plus it liberated men from having to think about birth control at all. Actually I think many women only take the pill to adjust to men’s demands: to have sex whenever the man wants, to have sex without a condom, to free the man from having to think about birth control. Essentially the pill just makes everything very comfortable for men.
I think the REAL feminist way forward would be to teach boys and men to respect a women’s cycle and to teach girls and women how to be in tune with their body (there are great technical gadgets out there for that, too).
A remark on form not substance 😊
All excellent points... yet somewhat dulled by all-out solemn delivery we all are so accustomed to, the kind gushing from official pulpits here & there & everywhere.
What if you dared to switch the language registers, and spoke in your bespoke vibrant voice gracing the UnHerd pages? 🔥 The effect might be stunning! And who knows, might even mark a start of wholesale departure from stale public speaking conventions we no longer question 🤔
Very wise and eloquent, thank you. I don’t see much cause for optimism except for you being able to speak and write and a few people being able to respond. If things are bad now, imagine what it will be like after a year or two of New Labour ...
Nikolas Rose’s paper (then developed into a book) The Politics of Life Itself might be of interest to you. He comes up with the term “ethopolitics” to ‘update’ Foucault’s biopolitics in light of the advancements in molecular biology, etc.
Thank you for your thorough and sensible reporting, Mary. As a man I supported earlier feminist waves but not the current "third wave" feminism which has turned so misandrist and now, with transhumanism, misanthropist. Even here in the boonies of Western Canada we're still repeatedly subjected to screenings of "documentaries" on "toxic masculinity," so the indoctrination proceeds apace. It is destroying what is left of the relationship between men and women. As Jordan Peterson explains, we have an entire generation of young men who are choosing to avoid marriage because the power imbalance is so heavily in favour of women that it just isn't worth the risks for men. This only worsens the global plunge in fertility and birth rates. A recent Substacker put it aptly: "Women at large control the culture while pretending to be under the thumb of the long extinct patriarchy." Reading your speech though makes me wonder if this too is part of the strategy of the transhumanists in their drive toward lab-grown humans (shades of Brave New World)—fully alienate the sexes from one another.
To follow the money on transgenderism, follow investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek. Here are links to her articles showing the multi-billion-dollar corporations profiting from transgender surgeries, puberty blockers and hormones:
https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/stryker-corporation-and-the-global-drive-for-medical-identities
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers