omniharmonicTranshumanism
Transhumanism is a philosophical and cultural movement that advocates for the use of technology to transcend the biological limitations of the human condition — including aging, cognitive constraint, suffering, and death itself. Its proponents envision a future in which mind uploading, genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial superintelligence liberate consciousness from what one advocate calls “the muddy, bloody contingency of biological existence.” Transhumanism has been described by scholars as “a secularist faith” that secularizes traditional religious themes while endowing technology with religious significance, promising eternal life minus the Cross, Judgment Day without repentance, and ascension via silicon. Ray Kurzweil’s famous assertion that God does “not yet” exist — but will, once the Singularity infuses the universe with spirit — captures the eschatological ambition at its core.
In Benjamin Life’s essay “Transhumanism, Wetiko, and the Parasites Consuming Our Future,” transhumanism is diagnosed not merely as a misguided ideology but as the latest expression of a spiritual sickness that Indigenous peoples identified centuries ago: wetiko, the cannibal spirit. The essay traces a philosophical genealogy from Nick Land’s accelerationism through Peter Thiel’s apocalyptic theology to Elon Musk’s declaration that humanity is a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” identifying a shared pattern: the devaluation of embodiment, the desire to escape the cycle of life and death, and the elevation of the self above the web of relationships that sustains it. The essay positions transhumanism within a two-thousand-year arc of Western dualism — from axial-age vertical transcendence through Christian body/spirit splits to colonial terra nullius to the contemporary drive to upload consciousness and colonize Mars. In each iteration, the same logic operates: matter is prison, escape is salvation, and whatever stands between the self and its transcendence is resource to be consumed.
Transhumanism connects to wetiko as its most technologically sophisticated expression — the cannibal spirit wearing the mask of liberation. It relates to the story-of-separation as the ultimate consequence of an ontology that treats the self as fundamentally disconnected from the living world. It implicates the meta-crisis by accelerating the very dynamics of extraction and disconnection that produce civilizational risk. And it stands in direct opposition to interbeing, which recognizes that the cycle of birth, death, and interdependence is not a trap to escape but a dance to participate in. The essay’s alternative is not the rejection of technology but its development from within a different paradigm entirely — technology in service of life rather than escape from it, innovation that regenerates rather than extracts, intelligence that augments relationship rather than replaces it.