Despite whatever ambitious terminology is employed to rebrand the age-old scientific-ization of racism and elitist supremacy, the philosophical underpinnings of eugenics remain the same. Whether one seeks to eradicate undesirable traits within a population through top-down arrangement or transhumanistic alterations, each strategy breaks down individuals into measurable parts — rejecting the sanctity of human life. Both confuse seemingly “optimal” traits with inherently valuable ones, and cling to the material world in such a way that reduces the complexity of the universe into an algorithmic, “scientific” system. The spontaneity found in a forest becomes replaced by the structural organization of a corporation or a state. Most simply, the material world becomes the answer to everything –– to evolution, death and life itself.
But Epstein’s eugenics fantasies are not the mad thoughts of a singularly strange individual isolated from the rest of society. Quite to the contrary, they represent a way of thinking endemic to the Big Tech oligarchs that have come to dominate the American political sphere in the 21st century. Indeed, as the new Bloomberg cache reveals, Epstein’s eugenicist ambitions tie him to some of the most prestigious figures and institutions in academia, Big Tech, and science. Furthermore, they express the convergence of these sectors, and the deluded, self-serving ideologies to which they are tied.
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While Lumin’s Cold Harbor is most akin to the CIA’s secretive Cold- War-era mass torture/mind control program MKULTRA, it also parallels the underlying philosophy of eugenics; the belief that human beings are not whole, but rather, comprised of measurable and manipulatable parts, parts that with enough care and precision can be extracted, studied, changed and exploited to produce superior outcomes. Going back to early 20th century eugenics, before biotechnology was being produced by Big Pharma en masse, this belief was embedded in the field, with eugenicists believing that with the correct arrangement of society, society’s leaders could make “desirable” traits proliferate, and wipe “undesirable” ones from existence.
With transhumanism, however, made possible through mass surveillance-reliant biotechnology, the idea of the measurable, divided human becomes even more clear. Inherent to transhumanism is a near-religious deference to data — for in the minds of transhumanists, it is data that extrapolates the divided parts of humanity into a form that is applicable and manipulatable.