BY ALEX STORY
The recent decision by the British Rowing Association to ban men from competing against women is evidently a victory for old school common sense.
How did we get to a situation where something that has been settled since the Garden of Eden has become a subject of doubt?
The answer might well be found in metaphysics, which the 13th Century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas took to mean the “study of the most fundamental aspects of being that constitute a being”, and belief.
Elon Musk, the South African California based entrepreneur, perhaps inadvertently pointed in that direction during a long form interview with Tucker Carlson, an American journalist, a few months ago.
The pleasingly meandering conversation covered many topics, including politics, space, business, his acquisition of Twitter, the self-defined “public town square” and AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Of the latter, he said the dangers it presents mankind are “non-trivial”, adding “it has the potential of civilisational destruction”.
He alleviated the mood by pointing to “movies like Terminator” and reassuring the audience that it would probably not quite happen like in the film “because the intelligence would be in the data centres. The robot is just the end effector”.
With that much of the audience breathed a sigh of relief.
As a result, he added some government oversight might be needed given that an out-of-control AI could be much more damaging to Man than “a mismanaged aircraft design” or “bad car production”.
So far so good.
But then he brought Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, into the discussion.
As Elon Musk said, “Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house”.
But “Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough”.
Rather than opt for an “Open Source” type of programme, enabling the coders of the world to see, understand, follow and intervene in AI generated developments, thereby allowing Man to ride the AI Kraken, however uncomfortably, and stay in control of our combined future, Larry Page and Google seemed more interested in a closed for profit AI black-box.
It is therefore the emphasis on humanity and our future on the one hand and the lack of concern for it on the other that broke the friendship between the two characters.
It is therefore not trivial – Quite the contrary.
It points to very different world views and potential futures – only one of which is pro-human.
It is also this chasm which took a crucial and obscure concept out of the dark recesses of Billionaire Geekdom into the light for all to see and try to understand.
When Elon Musk showed concern for mankind, asking “we’re going to make sure humanity is ok, aren’t we?”, Larry Page attacked him for being “a speciesist”.
“A what?” you say.
Tucker Carlson, having never heard of the word, asked to confirm: “Did he use that term?”
“Yes”, Elon Musk replied, “there were witnesses”.
To which he answered Larry Page: “I am a speciesist. Okay you got me. Busted”.
Elon Musk then followed on by asking of the Google co-founder: “What are you?”
Speciesist, however inelegant a term, points to a battleground that is increasingly understood by many but is difficult to grasp.
It is now all becoming much clearer.
A Speciesist in the mind of Larry Page and his like is a person who discriminates in favour of mankind against digital beings.
A term of condemnation no less aggressive than that of “Racist” often used to smear respectful interlocutors to stop them from being able to express themselves freely and to be used as a similar rhetorical battering-ram in a very fast approaching future.
That is why Elon Musk added “that was the last straw”, breaking the bonds of friendship with his erstwhile comrade , turning it instead into a rivalry – perhaps, in hindsight, for the benefit of mankind as a whole.
It points to a quasi-religious explanation and therefore the misunderstood vehemence of the Transgender movement.
For the likes of Larry Page, Artificial intelligence is the creation of a digital superintelligence, “a digital god” in the words of Elon Musk, which in turn will allow a hybrid man, part digital, part flesh, to attain immortality.
Indeed, a major decades-long backer of Gender ideology is transgender Rothblatt. He launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist school of thought promoting technological immortality via mind uploading.
The body in this new religion, like a snake’s skin, can be cast off while the soul, digitalised, can live on for ever and choose, presumably, its host, however temporarily – a digitally enhanced version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”.
In short, the body is the hardware; the soul the software.
However, a Digital Soul animated by Artificial Intelligence is very likely to be as clumsy as plastic surgery is at enhancing beauty.
As comedian Bill Burr reminds us: “can’t you look at other facelifts and realize they haven’t worked all the bugs out yet?”
And to women still interested in undergoing surgery he adds: “would you rather be 52 and look 52 or be 52 and look like a 28 year old lizard?”, reminding the audience that these are the only options available in this world.
The allure of an eternal life is not new. It is as old as Man’s life on the planet.
However, our hyper-rich plutocrats, the new Alchemists of life, are working day and night and financing all manner of organisations, from Universities to Supranational bodies such as the World Health Organisation to transform their transient and short stay on earth into an eternal digital life. Seduced, as Eve was, by the Serpent’s whispers in Genesis: “Ye shall not surely die… and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”.
To doubters the European Parliament reminds us: “The World Health Organization (WHO) is now 80% financed by private donors and 20% by Member State contributions” – in other words fully beyond democratic accountability.
Supranational institutions, fuelled by the proceeds of mega-corporates, are morphing into conduits for the propagation of this new cult and are in position to force the implementation of their worldview on increasingly impotent governments worldwide.
This singular pursuit of eternal life is the removal of the final constraint – that of death of the body and, in turn, of the soul.
It is in effect the end station of the Roussean view of the world which demands the constant removal of restraints because, as the French polemicist wrote in “The Social Contract” written in 1762: “We were born free and need to break our chains to be free.”
Indeed, to make the connection even clearer, Rothblatt argues that biological sex is now merely an accident of “birth status”.
Progress means unchaining individuals from the nature of bodily sex in the name of “the full cultural liberation of all people”.
On offer now is the dismantling of all constraints, whether moral, sexual, legal, constitutional, territorial, religious or natural and their corollary, responsibility.
The rapid removal of these, stimulated by the mesmerised, focused and relentlessly convinced hyper rich Californian oligarchs, is threatening to turn the rest of the world into an American style, donor-based polity, rapidly disintegrating into Dante’s inferno, in which, as in pre-Christian Rome, “Might is Right”.
In part, it also explains the increasing dissemination of “Collective guilt” for perceived past wrongs as an educational pillar of our new western world. It allows our new masters to deflect from theirs at the human devastation their ambitions have wrought.
The allure of life eternal also promises to be very profitable.
As Jennifer Bilek , an environmental activist, remarked in her article “Billionaires funding Transgender Movement for Profit”: “They are shaping the narrative about transgenderism and normalising it within the culture using their funding methods.” Adding “this can hardly be a coincidence when the very thing absolutely essential to those transitioning are pharmaceuticals and technology.”
Mary Harrington, author of “Feminism Against Progress”, pointed to the size of the gender medicine market worth over $200 billion a year in the United States alone, quoting Alyssa Wright, a contributor to Forbes Magazine, who tells her readers that “Our estimates place the average cost of transition at $150,000 per person. Multiply that by an estimated population of 1.4 million transgender people, we’re taking about a market in excess of $200B. That is significant. That’s larger than the entire film industry.”
In other words, once a transitioner, a forever and docile consumer of Care.
It is an industry that promises to keep on giving to corporates feeding off the misery of millions.
The gender medical infrastructure includes phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, urethral procedures, facial feminisation surgery and much more.
Bilek reminds us that “transgenderism sits square in the middle of the medical industrial complex, which is by some estimates even bigger than the military industrial complex.”
The end game though is as depressing at it is nihilistic.
To those unthinking Billionaire wannabe Wizards, the cost of dismantling all constraints also means eternal adolescence and perpetual misery – for themselves.
The soul, unconstrained, has no need to fix itself on anything or anyone. It is commitment free and as such free from achievements.
Further, and more directly, the pursuit of eternal life and the removal of all constraints has been responsible for a great deal of collateral damage in the present.
Our societies are witnessing the unrelenting removal of their once cherished foundation stones. And in the mix, our children have become the main and accepted Guinea Pigs in this demented experiment.
The paradox is that it is our physical and mental constraints and our acceptance of them as individuals, societies and countries that make life on Earth a challenge and therefore worth living.
It is the rules of life and its relative fragility that demand that mankind accepts natural limitations and spur us on to excel, like an Olympian, in a given time and context.
In addition, it is the moral constraints, inherited in the Western World from our rich Judeo-Christian intellectual hinterland, that have created what were hitherto arguably the most pleasantly liveable societies on earth, based on the notion that each and all were equal before their Creator.
Ironically, it is the acceptance of our natural constraints that sets us free because they force us to seek Truth and, as much as possible, shun falsehoods.
While rapid technological change might give the quest a certain plausibility, the probability is that it will become a Quixotic, and destructive, tilting at digital windmills exercise that will keep going until the funds run out and sanity returns.
In the meantime, let us celebrate small victories, such as British Rowing’s decision to stop men from competing against women. It is only a small battle in a much larger conflict on which our humanity depends. However, it shows what can be done when we successfully put constraints on bad ideas.
As Elon says, we are Speciesists.
Busted.
Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.