Essays in Idleness

Perhaps I haven’t tried hard enough, to make my peace with Immanuel Kant, and a few others who were trying to restore human dignity in a world descending into “transhumanism” (the latest term for what comes after “humanism”) — back during “The Enlightenment,” there. I should at least acknowledge they were trying, to tack back onto the side of God; to aim for a safe port, as it were. Even while conceding “godless” to the default position.

Humans cannot be reduced to objects, as Kant proclaimed. Or, more exactly, they should not be. Still, as I approach the man, I slip on a patch of black ice, named David Hume.

A large part of the power tussle everywhere, might be captioned, “The victory of transhumanism.”

Or, to put it in more preposterous form: “The Final Solution of HR.”

For departments of human resources state the transhumanist position baldly. They declare that humans are resources, like oil and gas, or pork bellies. Or, robots. Humans can be used — or discarded — by a cost-benefit analysis. If a human can do something cheaper than a robot, then very well, we’ll continue to pay him. But if the robot can do it cheaper, then the human has to go.

There is a practical problem, getting rid of him, but they have a plan for that in Human Resources.

Trump, who won’t be president next week, struck me as human. He made mistakes. He had embarrassing emotions. He was instinctual, to a fault. He was also biased: pro-human, even fanatical at times. Well fair enough, he reached his sell-by date. (At birth?)

Though perhaps not in the best repair, Biden struck me as more of a robot. He has computer glitches. But he is easy to program. And has a cool, progressive team behind him. He is bringing in technocrats from all over, including quite a few from Big Tech. They cannot make mistakes, because they are the mistake, embodied.

We may come to think of Mister Trump, as the last human being to occupy the White House.

The machine seems undefeatable, today, because it is global. The well-trained progressive in any country — Communist China, for instance — can understand that progress requires organization; that it doesn’t just happen by itself. There must be centralization, for technocracy to work. We can’t just leave people to make their own decisions, for that would be messy. If we did, we might get another Trump. A good organization will make that quite impossible.

That transhumanism is essentially violent — not generally, but specifically towards the humans — is easily demonstrable, but hardly understood.

Consider a little city, like Minneapolis, and what’s left of its downtown; of all the little businesses burnt out, up and down its “opportunity zone.” The George Floyd riots, whatever else one can say about them, were a profitable real estate investment. There is now a strip of very cheap properties, to be bought up by multinational investors. They get mortgages at close to zero percent. And they buy at this distress sale from people who are wildly overdrawn, on credit cards, at 16 percent or more.

This is progress. Regardless of their politics, the humans have all lost. The transhuman abstraction has won.

Today’s little piece of Minnesota insight came from Catherine Austin Fitts. A credible senior bureaucrat in the old days, she was nevertheless one who saw the “housing bubble” swelling, and knew that it must pop. She continues to think and analyze things — even now that she has been “cancelled.” Big Tech has surmised that she is crazy-tunes now (human, all too human). It was time to shut her communicating down. People mustn’t be exposed to the shocking things she lays out — about who benefits, how and why; about who will be the designated losers. But no one can see anything anyway, while they are rolling their eyeballs. On top of everything else, she turns out to be a believing Christian. Case closed; as closed as a church, in Canada.

In every thing that fell out of the Batflu, and the summer riots for that matter, innumerable little guys were wiped out; and a very few big guys — pretty much Democrats to a man — marched around the Monopoly Board. A horrible human mess was created, while they were getting more fabulously rich.

But that’s where transhumanism comes in: to clean up. It is the Devil’s own HR department. For the problem of messy humans can be solved, by contraception and abortions, euthanasia and suicides.