What Does It Mean to Be Human? Humanism, Transhumanism, Posthumanism

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 6 May 2024

Emanuel E. Garcia, MD – TRANSCEND Media Service

2 May 2024 – What does it mean, essentially, to be human?

Reading Homer, one would gather than being human means being mortal.

The gods and goddesses of ancient Greece partook of immortality, and despite their vices and lusts and vagaries – all of which were eminently ‘human’ – their immortality set them apart from the lowlanders on the hills and plains far below Olympus.

I often wonder whether the roaming tribes which we presume to be our rustic and primitive forerunners were lesser beings – as we are seemingly taught – during their brief tumultuous lives of wandering, hunting, gathering, fighting, slaying, roaming and dying – or whether they felt within their breasts wonders every bit as majestic as we describe our own. Did they confer and experience great tenderness and love, or were they savagely literal? Was poetry part of their world, or was their world characterized by endless struggle for mere survival, for shelter from the elements, for the foraging of food, and for protection against predators?

I argue that technological advances, every one of them – the discovery and uses of fire and the wheel, the formulation and application of the laws of physics, and computing – have served to ‘overcome’ our humanity.

They provided mastery over our limitations.
They extended our reach.
They reduced our laborious sweat.

They moved in a trajectory that tended towards effortless immortality, wherein a mere wish meant the fulfillment of a desire.

And behind them all is the dream of eternal blissful youth, the dream of becoming gods or God, a dream where there is no suffering and no death.

Paradoxically enough, to be human means to seek transcendence of our very human state: to do more with less, until, I suppose, we can achieve everything with nothing. We reject, we rebel against the notion of death so powerfully that its fear – as we have all seen during the covid extravaganza – led ordinarily sensible people to indulge in the most ridiculous of illusions – masking, distancing, inoculation with the unnecessary and dangerous and inadequately tested gene-modifying agent masquerading as a panacea/vaccine.

The unquenchable quest for power – which made our species what it is and brought us into such masterful heights – is suffused by the gratification of destructive drives. With the magisterial scientific and technological achievements of modern humankind came an orgy of murder: ceaseless war, exhibitionistic annihilations, highly efficient modalities of extermination.

• And now that we have Artificial Intelligence;
• now that we have the means of ‘editing’ the human genome;
• now that we can alter and create changes of weather (not to be confused with the fraudulent climate scam);
• and now that computational abilities hold out the strange promise of merging fleshly consciousness with machine, the idea of defeating death as a hybrid creation is taken seriously.
• In this transhumanist vision there is … well, what exactly is there?

To me the architects of this movement are all for culling the human herd in their quest to create a world that is, for them, bereft of mortality and suffering.

To me it is a world that is bereft of anything worth feeling in pursuit of nothing worth experiencing. The ultimate dead end, in fact.

Musing upon human psychology and the capacity for reflection and understanding in the context of the globalist agenda, with its ferocious program of control and its extirpation of individual autonomy, led me to muse upon the capitulation of reasonable people to the irrationalities of the covid response. Leaving aside opportunism and short-sighted selfishness – always in abundant supply – I conclude that most people were, quite literally, scared out of their wits. But by what?

By the mere intimation of their own demise. They were, apparently, so afraid of dying that they turned into rabid attack dogs against the small but steadfast contingent of sceptics who challenged authoritarian mandates and questioned the extreme measures imposed in the name of a science that, unlike genuine science, brooked no critical dissent.

They, therefore, colluded, wittingly or unwittingly, with those forces that have caused an astonishing amount of needless physical, mental and emotional trauma and that have caused the death of millions – quietly, as it were, and disguised, and drawn out over time. These deaths are still in the making as I write.

Which leads me back to the twin pillars of Good and Evil, always present, and another essential attribute of humanity. We speak endlessly about magnificent human conquests over the natural order, but not so much about something residing within all of us, individually, as well as in the institutions that we form: evil, evils, Evil.

Unless we seek out and find and acknowledge that within ourselves resides the capacity to derive pleasure from killing, from inflicting gratuitous harm – and unless we, in so discovering, humble our aspirations for the nirvana of deathless life, computationally-melded or not – we will succeed only in the dubious achievement of extinction.

The minority group of ‘elites’ that wish to rule as Eternals in a posthuman realm have very cleverly played upon the frailties and vulnerabilities and the inherent evils residing within us. The key to stopping their assault is to recognize those dark arts and impulses within ourselves, head on, and to put them in their place.

The key is a very human Choice.

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Dr. Emanuel E. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born writer, theatrical director, physician (retired psychiatrist), and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He has resided in New Zealand since 2006 and his political essays and poetry have appeared widely on various websites and publications including TMS. His most recent novel, published in 2021, is the story of an Italian wayfarer entitled Olympia. Website: www.emanuelegarcia.com. Email: emanuelegarcia@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 6 May 2024.

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