Transhumanist Wager vs. Bronze Age Mindset
The Polar Extremes of the Future of Humanity
by
In 2020, I made a no-budget movie with a few friends called Human Gauntlet. The story revolves around two characters who are both small-time workout gurus. One of them is obsessed with working out to feel good and improve the body. The other is driven to evolve beyond his human form through a biohacking regimen.
The tension between their objectives (improve the body naturally vs. move beyond the body with science) eventually leads to their falling out.
This is a real tension that is seen throughout our society. Do we want genetically modified food or non-GMO? Do we want traditional families or polycules? Do we want vaccines or do we fear them?
This is all different from asking, “Do we want to be liberal or conservative.” It’s more like, “Do we want to move backwards in time or forwards into the future?”
Each of these views is epitomized by two real characters alive today: Zoltan Istvan and Bronze Age Pervert (BAP).
Zoltan is an advocate for looking forward. This means thinking big. It means taking seriously the idea that humans will—very likely!—someday have the power to radically alter our DNA, merge with machines, live forever, and populate the stars. In practical terms, it means advocating for technological solutions to today’s problems.
Solve the abortion debate with artificial wombs. Solve law-enforcement problems with drones and robots. Etc.
Zoltan’s philosophy is represented in his novel The Transhumanist Wager, which lays out Three Laws of Transhumanism:
A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.
A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.
A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.
In real life, Zoltan Istvan is not a sci-fi nerd, as his writings might suggest. He’s a world traveler and a thrill-seeker. After high school, he purchased a sailboat and, despite no experience in sailing, set off on a multi-year journey exploring the world, contacting indigenous tribes, working as a diver hunting for treasure, and even founding the sport of volcano surfing.
Hunter S. Thompson once wrote:
"Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"
Zoltan Istvan is clearly on the side of the man who braved the storm of life.
Bronze Age Pervert, similarly, feels it is paramount to live a real life of adventure. Much like Zoltan, BAP glorifies physical prowess and the male urge to defeat nature. But BAP’s ideal version of male prowess is found in the past—specifically in the ancient Greeks—rather than in the future. In fact, BAP argues that the modern world—with pesky things like women’s rights and tech bros—inhibits everyone’s ability to live as we were truly meant to live.
BAP is most famous for his book Bronze Age Mindset. The style of the book gives the impression that the narrator is a sort of caveman philosopher (“Chimp in state of nature never jerks off, but in captivity he does, wat does this mean? In state of nature he’s too busy, to put plainly.”). But BAP is no dummy. The person behind the BAP persona is Costin Vlad Alamariu, a graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. in political science.
Of the ancient Greeks, he writes:
You know about their great art, science, and literature, or think you do. But these were men of conquest, exploration and adventure first. Aeschylus had on his tombstone engraved that he fought at Marathon, not that he wrote his plays. The free man is a warrior, and only a man of war is a real man.
I can see why some people in the modern world would be attractive to BAP’s point of view. Even though we live in a time of relative peace and overwhelming abundance, moment to moment, people in wealthy countries are anxious, stressed, and unfulfilled. Sitting all day in a cubicle staring at a screen hardly gives one a sense of having done anything real, let alone anything meaningful.
I can also see why people are drawn to Zoltan’s fantasy of the post-human space traveler. As a species, we have already been-there-done-that with BAP’s ideal, and we weren’t exactly fully satisfied with it. Even in today’s strange era of screen-based everything, the door is always open to go outside and experience nature. It’s not like Apple or Google erased the world’s forests, mountains, lakes, or open fields. And more to the point: the human mind is too incredible to be stuck playing pedestrian war games and barely scraping by with sullen wheat crops and perpetually diseased cattle. We should be out conquering the stars, not beating each other over the head with clubs!
To put this back into the terms of Human Gauntlet: think of Zoltan and BAP as workout gurus. One of them (BAP) is obsessed with working out to feel good, improve the physical body, and reconnect with the animal in the human. The other (Zoltan) is obsessed with working out as part of the larger project of evolving beyond the human form.
Both Zoltan and BAP are considered highly controversial by mainstream society. As they should be. Both of their viewpoints pose extraordinary threats to the status quo. And at this moment in history, the status quo is a precarious thing.
In Human Gauntlet, the BAP-like character ultimately concedes that he’s burnt out and doesn’t have much to show for it. “If I ever have to do another pushup in my life, I’m going to kill myself,” he says. He admits that he, too, wants to live for something beyond the constraints of his biological body. “Whatever you’re on,” he says, “I want some. I’m ready.”
While I doubt the real-life BAP will become a transhumanist anytime soon, I do suspect that people like him who fight against the coming technological advancements will eventually, begrudgingly, adopt most of what’s coming at us. That, after all, is the story of humanity.
Brilliant, even more than usual.