Humanas Emeritus

Transhumanist Manifesto [in progress]

Intro­duc­tion

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman–a rope over an abyss. A dan­ger­ous across, a dan­ger­ous on-the-way, a dan­ger­ous looking-back, a dan­ger­ous shud­der­ing and stop­ping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an over­ture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, for they are those who cross over.
–Thus Spake Zarathustra

The basic prin­ci­ples of Tran­shu­man­ism can be sum­ma­rized in the above Niet­zsche quote, how­ever sum­maries are not what are most needed in the phi­los­o­phy of tran­shu­man­ism but rather fur­ther elab­o­ra­tions. The idea of tran­shu­man­ism sup­poses three dis­tinct states of being which are pos­si­ble for the Human: the beast (a degen­er­a­tion, a mad­ness, and a going-under), the human (a becom­ing, a learn­ing, a cre­ation), and the Over­hu­man (an unbe­com­ing, an uncre­ation, and an unknow­ing). Many who are fond of the philoso­phies of Niet­zsche, or are con­sumed with their own Will to Power often fail to real­ize the com­pletely tran­scen­den­tal nature of the Over­hu­man. To mis­take any one of these dis­tinct cat­e­gories is to fall into a great confusion.

The path to the Over­hu­man is in fact through the human, as a great force of lib­er­a­tion. How­ever, the path to the human is barred by the beast, our inner bes­tial nature, our most base instincts and hid­den psy­cho­log­i­cal aggre­gates. The truth is that so very few of us are human in the least sense of the word, and most cer­tainly not the great­est. Our “great” men of our his­tory, all the great­est thinkers, doers, and cre­ators have in fact only reached their own inner nature, which is the human, and have seen that the path to the Over­hu­man lies in and through the human.

“Help your­self, then every­one will help you. Prin­ci­ple of broth­erly love.”

Every enlight­ened being, all the bud­dhas, bod­hisattvas, teach­ers, gurus, and com­pas­sion­ate peo­ple of this world have not ded­i­cated them­selves to the human out of a self­less­ness but rather out of an incred­i­ble over­flow­ing of pure self­ish­ness. To work for the good of human­ity is to work for the good of your­self, to over­come your own bes­tial nature, which has a prim­i­tive self­ish nature but which is not evo­lu­tion­ary strate­gic any­more. That is to say, human evo­lu­tion, our Great Becom­ing, can not rely on our basic instincts. Reduc­ing our­selves to bar­bar­ians accom­plishes noth­ing, it is not a step for­ward in the right direc­tion, and nei­ther is it a step back­wards. It is a stag­na­tion and a still­ness of unclean waters not fit for drink­ing, not a foun­tain of life but rather of destruction.

Before any claims of pro­gres­sion can be made one must be able to say that they have passed beyond their own lower nature. This is no longer an out­ward evo­lu­tion that I am refer­ring to, but rather that of an inner rev­o­lu­tion, of a new begin­ning that shall never end. When human­ity has even­tu­ally left behind the shells and rem­nants of its past and moved beyond the blind forces of Nature then we shall all fly freely upon golden wings. One can never fly into fly­ing unless one first learns to jump, hop, and grow wings. Of what man­ner of wings shall we have? That is one of the essen­tial ques­tions of Tran­shu­man­ism which need be answered unless we wish for our wings to fail us in mid-flight.

“No sen­si­ble deci­sion can be made any longer with­out tak­ing into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be….This, in turn, means that our states­men, our busi­ness­men, our every­man must take on a sci­ence fic­tional way of think­ing” –Isaac Asimov

We arrive now at the time in which each per­son for them­selves must decide which val­ues they them­selves value, to eval­u­ate in an impar­tial man­ner that which ben­e­fits them the most, and to dis­card the rest. This eval­u­a­tion is not the moral­ity or ethics of yes­ter­year, but rather a weigh­ing and a scal­ing of moun­tain and river. As of yet, most sup­pos­edly human val­ues in fact have noth­ing to do with our humane­ness but rather with our bes­tial nature. To force ideas, morals, rules, or restric­tions on other peo­ple for their own good is to com­pletely miss true under­stand­ing; there­fore there can be no ideal gov­ern­ments, reli­gions, or any sort of institution.

The End of Blind Evolution

All beings so far have cre­ated some­thing beyond them­selves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than over­come man? What is the ape to man? A laugh­ing­stock or a painful embar­rass­ment. And man shall be just that for the over­man: a laugh­ing­stock or a painful embarrassment…

–Thus Spake Zarathustra

The most impor­tant fact to under­stand at this junc­tion in time is that no mat­ter which view you hold, basic obser­va­tion will lead any­one with a clear view to see that if human­ity con­tin­ues on its present course, it is entirely doomed. How­ever, this does not have to hap­pen. To cor­rect our path we must first see where each of us has erred indi­vid­u­ally, for we are each as cells in a gigan­tic organ­ism, and we can not deny this fact. None of us exist alone, iso­lated in a bub­ble exempt from the col­lec­tion of causes and con­di­tions which all of nature is sub­ject to. This is a basic fact, our exis­tence is both depen­dent and inde­pen­dent of oth­ers; that is to say, we live a life of interdependence.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of oth­ers’ actions. We sur­vive here in depen­dence on oth­ers. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not ben­e­fit from oth­ers’ activ­i­ties. For this rea­son it is hardly sur­pris­ing that most of our hap­pi­ness arises in the con­text of our rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. –Dali Lama

The sim­ple fact of exis­tence as we now know it on this planet, in this age, is that we are sim­ply not look­ing for­ward towards our lives with the view of what will be, and of how it may become. Rather, there are two gen­eral camps of thinkers:

1. Those hyp­no­tized by moral­ity & the slave con­scious­ness.
   
2. Those that have seen past Good & Evil and yet still choose “evil”.
   

There is a third group, but they are silent and I am not allowed to speak for them, only to mea­gerly point out their exis­tence. Let us first then exam­ine these two groups and dis­sect them before any dis­cus­sion on the fail­ings and short-comings of human­ity in gen­eral are made; else-wise those of you who read these words will apply the afore­men­tioned sys­tems of thought to these dire warnings.

In the first case, we have the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion; or rather, it would be more proper to say that we have the major­ity of peo­ple who are still fit to call “peo­ple”. The tragic fact of our lives now is that many human-like organ­isms have got­ten rid of Goods and Evils and of eval­u­at­ing alto­gether. We have no peo­ples, tribes, or great city & nation-states any­more; rather there is an over­abun­dance of domes­ti­cated ani­mals who are being shame­lessly milked for every last drop of spare energy that they pro­duce.  How­ever, we should speak no more of those peo­ple, for they shall either per­ish by process of nat­ural selec­tion (or the Hell-Fire and Avatar Swords of so many texts) or be used as instru­ments for those gov­ern­ing the course. One does not look down on a pig for its pig­ness, but like­wise one should not con­sider a pig a human, by the least degree.

Ani­mals are reli­able, many full of love, true in their affec­tions, pre­dictable in their actions, grate­ful and loyal. Dif­fi­cult stan­dards for peo­ple to live up to. –Alfred A. Montapert

Ah, truly the words of one still a slave to his own lower nature! To be reli­able, to be pre­dictable, grate­ful, loyal – are these val­ues which one should have? Few peo­ple today are ask­ing these ques­tions, which one could sur­mise is a result of the almost absolute gov­er­nance of the lower-mammalian brain. Those who fol­low their rep­til­ian brain in this age we gen­er­ally call the deca­dents and crim­i­nals; those of the lower-mammalian we might call the super­flu­ous; per­haps the third we can only call philoso­phers.

It has been said that there are no “Great Men” any­more, and although I hold my breath in await­ing the knowl­edge that there are Cham­pi­ons of the spirit among us, I must agree in part. You will find no Great Men in any var­i­ous forms of media, Nay, only clowns or Cham­pi­ons of the Adver­sary. Dare not look behind the iron cur­tain of those who con­trol, con­tribute, and dis­trib­ute media, either! The lot of them are a sickly bunch, mostly tied up in pet­ti­ness, false ideas regard­ing sub­jec­tiv­ity and objec­tiv­ity, and gen­er­ally they are being bribed…if not with money, then metaphysically.

There­fore if you look around you, look­ing may­haps not for any Great Men, but merely a Good Man, then you will see few var­i­ous sorts of people.

The Good Peo­ple of Today:

• The self-righteous per­son who strongly upholds whichever phi­los­o­phy, law, pol­i­tics, and reli­gion is favored at the time. Within this cat­e­gory one will find con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians as well as deca­dent bour­geois  & those who are forced by con­di­tion of liv­ing in a ter­ri­bly repres­sive coun­try to do as “the man” says. These peo­ple lie all the time, and yet they are com­pletely inno­cent in that they have lied for so long it must seem to them to be true.
• The self-righteous per­son who weakly upholds those philoso­phies & reli­gions which are ter­ri­bly for­eign to him. This is another ter­ri­ble symp­tom of deca­dence; not in that explor­ing the cul­tures and ideas of other peo­ples is inher­ently wrong, but rather because they do so with the limp wrists of female­ness. In this cat­e­gory all man­ner of New-Agers, Bud­dhists, Daoists, etc etc are found. All the pseudo-occultists, magi­cians, and what have you stag­nate ter­ri­bly here and often times their smell gives them away for what they truly are. When con­fronted directly with the Unknown they revert instantly back to their Judeo-Christian roots.
• The self-righteous ratio­nal­ist, of whom not enough has been said, for at the root of such ratio­nal­ity lies a great and ter­ri­ble evil, a bit­ing and poi­so­nous con­scious which is inflamed with the bit­ter­ness of repres­sion. These are the Phar­isees of today, those who wor­ship at the Altar of sci­ence and yet as soon as they leave their Lab­o­ra­tory they revert instantly into irra­tional­ity. Hyp­ocrites! Slan­ders of the spirit! Igno­rance abounds in the pages of text-books and Wis­dom has been sac­ri­ficed on the stake of Profit.
• The myr­iad of false teach­ers, gurus, and so-called mas­ters who parade about in all their self-importance, sell­ing var­i­ous elixirs of for­get­ful­ness to their pupils.
• The outer-revolutionaries, the rebels who have not seen their own “Sys­tem” and have not become “The Man” so as to see that their out­ward vio­lence is only symp­to­matic of an inner well­spring of vio­lence bot­tled up within them. These are the so-called “anar­chists” and “nihilists” of today that go about parad­ing their anti-status and gen­er­ally damn­ing the status-quo as much as pos­si­ble with­out lift­ing a hand to make or imple­ment plans.

There are, of course, fur­ther cat­e­gories and sub-categories but to go on end­lessly judg­ing peo­ple would be a waste of time. To the sec­ond group of thinkers of whom I mentioned…you lot, you will even­tu­ally real­ize your mis­take. It is purely intel­lec­tual, and it will even­tu­ally be swal­lowed up by the void…until then, though, you are not but a hin­drance to the rest of us.