“The nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy to get people actually to love their servitude.”
~ Aldous Huxley
The Parable of Two Brothers
Imagine, if you will, two brothers.
Born at the very dawn of the 20th century, into a dynasty of scientific titans, the intellectual elite of a civilization awakening to the raw power of science and technology.
They shared the same elite education, the same inherited social status, the same genetic code. But when the two brothers looked to the future of the human race, they saw two entirely divergent timelines.
Created by the very same technology.
The elder brother looked at the tragedy of the human condition – the bodies that age and decay, the minds that fade into dementia, the agonizing, inescapable ticking clock of mortality – and decided it was nothing more than a biological flaw.
Nature made man to die. But man could remake man to live.
Humanity’s ultimate destiny, our moral imperative, was to seize control of our own biology. The elder brother dreamed of a world where we could engineer away disease, upgrade our fragile flesh, and consciously direct our own evolution. He pursued the prize that has ensnared men since time began: the end of human suffering.
The younger brother looked at that same dream… and saw a meatgrinder for the human soul.
He understood the trap. He saw that all human fear was the fear of our own suffering. Instead of facing our fear, humanity would obey any authority that promised to eradicate suffering. The authoritarian cage would not be built with iron bars or enforced by a jackboot stamping on a human face. It would be built of test-tubes, genetic engineering, and the lure of eternal youth. And humanity would be so desperate for a place in this prison that we would abandon our art, our rebellion, our grief, and our profound capacity for love. We would eradicate the messy, chaotic beauty of being human, for a little less pain.
The elder brother dedicated his life to building the global scientific utopia he envisioned. Julian Huxley shaped the sciences of evolutionary biology and genetic engineering. In his manifestos he named his scientific and political mission to remake humanity: Transhumanism.
The younger brother wrote books. Novels. Aldous Huxley was a writer and, later, mystic, who told stories that warned against the future world transhumanism would create.
That Brave New World.
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Transhumanism : the inevitable ideology of the 21st century
Anyone who has watched a scifi movie or played video games in the 21st century will know transhumanism.
Without necessarily knowing it’s name.
The genetically engineered human has become the warrior of the future. Halo’s Masterchief or the Astartes of Warhammer 40k mean that every twelve year old has dreamed of having an extra heart or a armoured carapace…even if it is at the cost of a missing…well…you know what.
Millions of video game players strolling the open world of Cyberpunk 2077 have had the “virtual” experience of having an arm lopped off and replaced with a chrome limb, or having their eyeballs swapped for a pair of Nikons. How many of these passive consumers understand they are trapped in the fetishized transhuman nightmare William Gibson was warning them about is anyone’s guess.
And while no human has yet, that we know of, been uploaded to the cloud, the idea that human consciousness is a software layer running on the wetware of the brain is a stunningly common belief.
According to a 2020 PhilPapers survey conducted by David Bourget and David Chalmers, over 27% of academic philosophers asked the question “Mind uploading (brain replaced by digital emulation): death or survival?” answered: Survival.
And when asked if future AI systems could possess actual consciousness, nearly 40% said yes. Only a quarter of them strictly rejected the idea.
Many of us already believe the Altered Carbon nightmare where humans hop between biological sleeves is a real potential future.
Because the intellectual vanguard of our civilization, the people whose entire job it is to understand the nature of reality, increasingly don’t question the underlying premise. We already believe the mind is an algorithm, just waiting for a hardware upgrade.
And we believe it because we fear death.
Psychological studies have demonstrated the link. If we view death as a meaningless, terminal void rather than some kind of spiritual transition, we are vastly more likely to see mind uploading as a moral good. We want to digitise our brains because we are afraid of the dark.
And this might be the most important thing to understand about TESCREAL beliefs.
Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism are a set of interlinked ideas that have been widely observed to be held by the same people. Because they answer the same fears of suffering and death.
Transhumanism and TESCREAL have a long history of scientific and academic thinking. George M Martin’s 1971 paper: Brief Proposal on Immortality: an interim solution, that proposed freezing brains until future supercomputers could decode their consciousness. JBS Haldane’s seminal 1923 Daedalus: Science and the Future, that introduced the concept of Ectogenesis, the growth of human beings in test-tubes.
A century ago nobody had ever thought of engineering super soldiers or uploading minds. Today, billions of people know transhuman ideas, and hundreds of millions, concentrated in the Western world, believe in transhumanism as firmly as anyone believes any religion.
What took Christianity and Islam centuries, Transhumanism achieved in a few decades. The idea that science and technology can transfer our consciousness to a new body, or upload to immortal life, has with other transhuman ideas spread worldwide. Because it offers the same dream as every religion before it. An end of suffering.
But with an upgrade. With religion you had to die first. Transhumanism offers the uninterrupted continuation of this life into eternity.
Today’s believers in transhumanism don’t believe because we read Haldane or Huxley. Or even because we watched Terminator 2 and The Matrix.
We believe transhumanism because it seems inevitable.
Transhumanism is the “Inevitable Ideology” of the 21st century. We don’t need to be convinced by academic studies or have it sold to us by priests. The scifi dream comes perfectly packaged for any and all of us who hold two fundamental axioms of the secular, capitalist worldview to be sacred.
The Material Universe is All There Is: There is no soul, no divine plan, no afterlife, and no karmic balance. Human consciousness is just a happy accident of meat and electricity.
Suffering and Death are the Ultimate Evils: Because there is no spiritual meaning to suffering, and no eternal reward after death, the cessation of your biological heartbeat is the absolute, terrifying end of your “self”.
If you truly hold those two assumptions – as almost the entire elites of Silicon Valley, our technocratic governments and capitalist class does – if the universe is just blind, dumb matter, and your body is a decaying meat-sack hurtling toward permanent oblivion, then upgrading the meat-sack is the only rational reaction to the horror of existence.
Now, some very disciplined souls will still dedicate their self to a higher cause. Socialism. Environmentalism. Most of us will simply give into pleasure seeking hedonism. A few will obsessively critique science fiction in youtube videos as a coping mechanism.
But the ambitious, the powerful, the strong… the bast*rds… will inevitably gravitate to the preservation at all costs of the meat.
That inevitability has made transhumanism the unnamed, unseen but utterly dominant ideology of the 21st century. The technocrats that govern us, the hyper-capitalist corporate elites who buy and sell us, are all whether they know it or not
transhuman bast*rds.
Let’s face it – literally. Your biological face is a depreciating asset. Every time you experience a human emotion – grief, joy, or the crushing existential dread of living through the 21st century – it leaves a micro-crease in your skin. And in today’s hyper-capitalist bio-market, aging isn’t just a tragedy – it’s bad branding.
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The Contradictions of Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel is man who, however much money he makes, can never not look like a villain from a late 1980s cop-thriller.
Or a very boring vampire.
I mean…if you have to tell people you’re not a vampire?
The rumours about the billionaire venture capitalist began after he stated an interest in parabiosis, the technique of transfusing young blood into old billionaires.
So let’s take Thiel at his word. And agree that Peter Thiel isn’t a vampire…yet.
Because Peter Thiel absolutely 100% wants to live forever. And he’s more than willing to curse his soul in the eyes of God to do it.
A Christian who disobeys God…Peter Thiel is a veritable walking, talking sack of contradictions. And if you unpack the sack, if you just gently unpick the seams of Peter Thiel, the whole transhumanist project just falls apart in your hands.
Like a cheap suit. Or a tech IPO.
Peter Thiel claims to be an orthodox Christian. He argues that Christianity is the foundational moral framework of Western civilization. He is fascinated with Christian eschatology. The end of times. Armageddon.
Now…I’m no theologian, I’m really not, but my understanding of the Christian faith, and stop me if I’m getting too literal here, is that you have to *die*… to go to Heaven. That’s the deal. That’s the central premise of the book.
But Peter doesn’t want to do that. He thinks death is an “ideology.” He wants to artificially engineer immortality in the flesh. He wants to build a Kingdom of Heaven using biotech and money, right here in our material reality.
Which is, by any orthodox theological standard, a profound heresy. In fact, if you read the literature, there is only one figure explicitly warned about in Christian eschatology who tries to build a fake, eternal heaven on Earth.
The Antichrist.
A topic Peter is obsessed with.
Just last year, he was running around giving secret lectures about the Antichrist. He says the “global world government” is the Antichrist system, and *he*, Peter Thiel, the man who wants to harvest the blood of the young, strongly implied that he is the mysterious, holy force holding back the apocalypse.
I mean…who else has the audacity to insinuate he might be Christ…who else but the Antichrist?
Peter Thiel is a fierce libertarian. He famously stated that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” He invested in Seasteading, and is a major backer of Network States, so he can escape the tyranny of the actual state. He hates the state.
Which is why he founded and runs Palantir. A data analytics behemoth literally named after the evil, all-seeing surveillance stones from Lord of the Rings. Just one of Thiel’s Tolkien themed companies.
Palantir is the absolute gold standard for state surveillance. It tracks citizens, it predicts behavior, it consolidates data for military and intelligence agencies of the state worldwide. Who else would denounce the state as the Antichrist…whilst literally building the exact central nervous system a global World State would use to subjugate us all… who else but the Antichrist?
Or just any standard issue bast*rd.
Thiel desperately wants to be viewed as a dark, philosophical, world-historical force. A Nietzschean superman. A wannabe Antichrist orchestrating the end of days from a bespoke floating tax haven.
But Thiel is just a man like millions of other men who pursue money and power above all, and got luckier than most in getting it. And now aging out of his fifties all the money and power won’t save him from rotting in the ground with the rest of us.
But maybe. Maaaaaybe. The money can buy something that will.
The contradictions of Peter Thiel are the ultimate argument for the inevitability of transhumanism. Peter can claim to be orthodox Christian. He can wear a cross and grow a beard. But like most people today, especially most powerful people, whatever they claim to “believe”. Christianity. Islam. Scientology. Marxism. You can *claim* to be a fucking Jedi. But what you, and I, almost all of us, and Peter
actually “believe”
is the inevitable ideology of the 21st century.
To borrow a phrase… he’s not the Antichrist.
He’s a very naughty boy.
Well, no, he’s not a very naughty boy.
He’s a transhuman bast*rd.
”The modern conservative is not even especially conservatuve. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” JK Galbraith
The OG Transhumanist
Like many terrible men, Julian Huxley believed his ideas were for the good. And he had every reason to believe this.
How did the man who coined the term “Transhumanism” get it so wrong? Why couldn’t he see that his utopian vision of directed evolution would lead directly to hyper-capitalist vampires looking to build techno-feudalism?
To understand Julian, you have to understand his intellectual priors. Born in 1887, Julian’s intellect was shaped by one of the most titanic events in the history of science.
Just thirty years before in 1858, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of the Species and the theory of evolution burst into the public consciousness. Humans were not creations of some unknowable God. We were evolved animals. With some odd extras like opposable thumbs and language.
And Julian Huxley wasn’t just a casual observer of evolutionary theory, he was the grandson of T.H. Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his fierce defense of evolutionary theory. Julian was raised in the absolute pinnacle of the English, atheist, humanist, scientific tradition.
This put Julian at the cutting edge, the first generation born into understanding the evolutionary worldview, and its existential consequences.
Now, I want to be very clear here, I’m not trying to smuggle Creationism to you. I fully believe the theory of evolution is the truth. And it’s because it’s true, that it strips us humans of our comforting fantasies.
We’re not children of God. There is no immortal soul. We’re just talking monkeys, animate matter, biological machines, with the illusion of self-awareness that will be extinguished when the meat stops walking and talking.
So what’s essential to understanding Julian Huxley is that he dedicated his life to what he believed to be the only, rational, possible answer to this existential truth.
To transhumanism.
Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Julian became a famed evolutionary biologist, the Richard Dawkins of his day, pioneering research into the relationship between genetics and evolution. The research that convinced him of the necessity of eugenics.
Because, yes, Julian Huxley was perhaps the 20th century’s greatest proponent of selective breeding to “improve” the human race. And unlike other eugenicists, including HG Wells, Julian did not let go of the idea after the Nazis had done with it.
Instead, Julian Huxley, a committed progressive, wanting to “rescue” eugenics from fascism, proposed a “socialist” eugenics. A welfare state must equalise all men, only then could we know who had the “bad” genes.
I’m going to be hearing from Feral Historian about this.
Julian Huxley’s ideas would reach their full bloom when he became the founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 1946.
Today, UNESCO is known for its world heritage site work. But at its founding the UN agency had much, much, much bigger ambitions, as expressed by Julian when he wrote its founding manifesto.
UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy is one of the 20th century’s most astounding documents. Imagine Thanos, Adrian Veidt and EVERY Bond villain collaborated on a mission statement and you’ll get something of the vibe.
It was in this document that Julian first defined Evolutionary Humanism, as the belief that humanity’s current biological state was merely a transitional phase, and that our moral imperative was to use science and social engineering to actively direct and accelerate our own evolution.
The belief that he would, in 1957s New Bottles for Old Wine, rename as transhumanism.
It’s hard not to sympathise with the transhuman conspiracy theorists. Because there really *is* a plan to found a World State governed by a technocratic elite to genetically engineer a better humanity. It’s right there in serif font, and Julian Huxley wrote it.
But transhumanism isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an inevitability. You don’t need the Illuminati to coordinate a transhuman conspiracy. Because transhumanism is the inevitable end point for everyone who believes what Julian Huxley believed.
That the universe is a vast machine, and that humanity are just little survival machines, made by the Blind Watchmaker of evolution.
For Julian Huxley that belief left only one moral course of action. Humanity must take control of our evolution, and grasp the steering wheel of the machine.
And if fulfilling that absolute moral vision meant eliminating the ‘weaker” genes, then, so be it.
The essence of the bast*rd isn’t just that they are a bast*rd. It’s that they believe ideas which justify being a bast*rd. And demand you believe them too.
Which is why bast*rds love transhumanism.
The Aldous Answer
Aldous Huxley was born seven years after Julian in 1894, into the same high-culture of science and reason.
But, for reasons we can only speculate on, Aldous would arrive at a completely different answer from his elder brother to the same existential horror.
The Huxleys were part of what historian Noel Annan would label the British “Intellectual Aristocracy”, a tight-knit set of intermarried families including the Darwins, the Wedgwoods and the Trevelyans who reshaped the culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.
So Aldous Huxley easily won entry to Oxford and then, even after being cut off from his allowance for debts owed to his father, was able to begin a career as a journalist and novelist.
And quickly became known for writing harsh, critical satires of the exact bohemian, intellectual aristocracy he came from, in novels like Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point.
So then the essential thing to understand about young Aldous is that he was formed in opposition to the values and ideas of his culture and class.
Especially the ideas of his elder brother Julian.
Brave New World then is a work of science fiction about a dystopian future. But that future is best understood as a satire of the 1930s present it was written in. And the transhumanist ideas taking root there.
Put simply, younger brother Aldous is taking the piss / ripping the shit out of everything elder brother Julian believes.
The scientists we see in the book’s early pages touring the London Hatchery where new humans are produced, the men who are building this brave new world, are satires of grandfather TH Huxley, of Julian Huxley and of JBS Haldane, who introduced the scientific concept of artificial human birth.
In this Brave New World, humanity has achieved the exact end of suffering that transhumanism promises. But the cost is the total commodification of life. Humans are no longer born, they are decanted in hatcheries, genetically engineered into rigid caste systems. Alphas to rule, Epsilons to do the grunt work. They are kept young and beautiful right up until their engineered expiration date, and they are pacified by a steady diet of meaningless entertainment and the state-mandated drug, Soma.
It’s not exactly like metropolitan life in 2026 but it’s close enough. In fact the greatest testament to Aldous Huxley’s satire is that any discussion of Brave New World will have many people stating how they think it sounds pretty good, actually, “at least healthcare is free” they say.
Because transhumanism is the inevitable ideology of our materialist, consumerist culture. We call Brave New World a dystopia, when if we’re to be perfectly honest, it’s more like a middle management vision statement for our liberal centrist, technocratic society. Even today’s Leftists are less about revolution to tear down this brave new world, than loudly demanding to be given a place in it.
Here in 2026 whether we are capitalist or communist, liberal or conservative, whatever we claim to believe, what we really believe in is the inevitable ideology of our time.
Brave New World began the critique of that inevitable ideology in science fiction. Fifty years later William Gibson wrote the ultimate transhuman nightmare, Neuromancer, and cyberpunk was born.
(Yes, if you want to feel old, we’re almost as far now from Neuromancer as Neuromancer was from Brave New World)
There’s a case to be made for Brave New World as the primary ancestor of cyberpunk. Aldous didn’t see cyberspace coming, the computer hadn’t even been invented yet. But he grasped the fundamental premise of cyberpunk.
That the technologies of transhumanism, from human cloning to the consensual hallucination of cyberspace, would entrench forever the same old human injustices.
In the world of Neuromancer the social elite have literally climbed up the gravity well to live in low Earth orbit and used cloning techniques to become semi-immortal.
Richard K Morgan’s Altered Carbon takes this cyberpunk conceit to its logical Marxist conclusion as the capitalist elite live forever in “sleeves” newly purchased from the poor.
And nothing hammers home the brutal injustice of our transhuman future than the Astartes of Warhammer 40k.
Science fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, has very little good to say about the possibilities of transhumanism. It is in almost all cases the Torment Nexus that scifi tells us not to build.
The one major exception is The Culture of Iain M Banks, which presents a far future where a human-like civilization casually messes around with swapping bodies or becoming a dirigible behemothaur for a bit of a lark.
Elon Musk loves the Culture because he doesn’t understand it.
And I seriously question whether he has even read it.
Because the Culture conquered social injustice BEFORE transcending humanity.
Which might be the best answer to our billionaire boys and their transhumanist toddler tantrums. Fine, ok. You can have immortality. But only after you end poverty and achieve peace on Earth.
The Island of Perception
For all of their profound philosophical and ideological disagreements, the two brothers genuinely, deeply loved each other.
When Aldous died, Julian was devastated. The elder brother, the great rationalist, the transhumanist who viewed death as a biological glitch to be engineered away, was left behind to experience the human grief of losing his younger brother.
Julian immediately took it upon himself to curate and edit a tribute book, published in 1965 as Aldous Huxley, 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume.
In his writings about his brother’s passing, Julian’s reaction perfectly encapsulates their ideological divide. Julian praised Aldous as an absolute genius, calling him the greatest mind he had ever known. But even in mourning, Julian couldn’t help but express his frustration with his brother’s worldview.
Julian lamented that in his final decades, Aldous had turned his back on the “rigor of science”. But what Aldous had turned towards is, perhaps, the best, or only, answer to the inevitable ideology of transhumanism.
Aldous Huxley’s final novel, Island, was published the year before his death. Brave New World was an angry, caustic satire of transhumanism. Island is Aldous Huxley thirty years on, reshaped by life, a master novelist, writing his final answer to his brother’s ideology.
The island of Pala where the novel is located is likely based on the island of Bali where I live and make these videos.
Instead of the transhumanist World State, Pala is a localized, decentralized utopia. Instead of the technocratic machine world of transhumanism, the people of Pala use technology very selectively. Industrialisation is forbidden. Instead of humans popped out of test-tubes and into a genetic caste system, Palanese children are raised by Mutual Adoption Clubs so they aren’t exposed only to the neuroses of their parents. And instead of numbing their suffering with mindless entertainments, the Palanese learn to pay attention to suffering and face their pain.
I suspect the people who think Brave New World sounds ok would NOT want to live on the Island.
The utopia of Pala is possible because the Palanese do not believe what we in the West believe.
They do not believe that the universe is a vast machine. They do not believe the axioms that the material is all there is, or that death is the ultimate end. They do not believe we are meatsacks hurtling towards the void.
The Palanese believe, instead of the void, that reality is infinite. A human life is bounded by our capacity to comprehend that infinity. And death is simply a return to the infinite. You don’t stop being, you just … be… more.
In the decades between Brave New World and Island, Aldous Huxley wrote the work for which he became perhaps most famous, The Doors of Perception, which described his experiences using LSD. And the accompanying essay Heaven and Hell, an attempt to understand the experience as an encounter with the infinite.
In Island the Soma of Brave New World is replaced with an imagined drug, Moksha. The Palanese use Moksha to dissolve the ego and live communally. The story of Island turns on an experience of Moksha use which opens the mind of the book’s central character to a reality beyond the materialist Western world he came from.
Aldous Huxley’s answer then to transhumanism is what would come to be called the “psychedelic experience”. And its power to open the Western mind to the infinite reality of… reality.
This will all, I suspect, be a tough pill to swallow for many of you. The psychedelic age seems long ago. Its hippie counter culture advocates fucked a lot of things up. But it’s the answer Aldous Huxley gave us. To really understand that answer we have to follow Aldous into death.
In 1963 Aldous Huxley was dying a slow painful death from throat cancer. His final request to his wife was to inject him with a dose of LSD. “100 micrograms, intramuscular.” Which she did, then gave him a second 100 microgram dose two hours later, soon after which Aldous Huxley died.
Not from the LSD. 100 micrograms is a single standard dose, 200 micrograms is in no way harmful. This was not a Heroic Dose to obliterate or escape death. Quite the opposite, the psychedelic was used by Huxley to sharpen his attention to his own death.
I won’t spoil the book but Island ends with the utopia of Pala facing a final conflict with capitalism. Bulldozers arrive on Pala, and as they begin to level the jungle, the Mynah birds which have featured through the book scream Attention! Attention! Attention!
Two brothers. One who worshipped the inevitable ideology of transhumanism. The other the perennial philosophy of attention.
And this I believe is Aldous Huxley’s lesson for us. Transhumanism is an ideology of escape. Escape from pain. Hiding from suffering. Terror of death. Rejection of being human.
We must face our suffering. Accept our pain. Pay attention even to our death. We must reject the machine, and embrace our humanity.
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