Will the Epstein Transhumanists "Factory Reset" the Rest of Us?

Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a Mossad sexual blackmailer. That was only his day job. Thanks to the release of some (but far from all) of the files, in limited compliance (i.e. noncompliance) with the Epstein Transparency Act, we now know that Epstein moonlighted across a spectrum of influence operations, many of them targeting scientists whose cutting-edge work Epstein’s handlers wanted to spy on.

More than a few of those scientists worked on projects affiliated with transhumanism, an intellectual movement seeking to replace the old-fashioned human being with some sort of upgraded successor. Epstein reportedly wanted to “develop a super-race of humans with his DNA.” He funded “regenerative medicine” research along the lines of what today’s New York Times tells us is achieving life-extension breakthroughs. And he funded consciousness research aimed at imposing “altered states” on the masses and obliterating humanity’s traditional self-perception. The latter project is the subject of an interesting new critique by Courtenay Turner entitled “The Factory Reset: Gino Yu, Jeffrey Epstein, and the fifty-year project to replace the human being — from SRI’s Changing Images of Man to the Oval Office.”

Turner situates Epstein’s projects, and transhumanism in general, as one aspect of an age-old philosophical battle between followers of “all is flux” Heraclitus and her own camp, which sides with “being is stable” Parmenides. She argues for an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition positing a fixed human nature with God-given inalienable rights forming the basis of natural law, as embodied in the American founding documents in general, and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in particular. She offers a “short version”":

“a human being has a fixed nature, a private soul, and an intrinsic telos. What he is, is not negotiable. What he is ordered toward, is not malleable. The dignity of the person is therefore inviolable, and no project — scientific, political, or spiritual — has the standing to engineer him into something else.”

For Turner this position is quintessentially American and “Judeo-Christian.” According to her framing, Epstein and transhumanism are outsiders at war with the traditional Western/American self-concept. We should resist them by returning to our traditional Western/American roots. The Epstein class wants to annihilate our traditional identity, so our response should be to double down on it.

Though sympathetic to her position, and sharing her revulsion for Epstein and transhumanism, I don’t think her Heraclitus-vs.-Parmenides philosophical framework offers the best way to understand the Epstein and transhumanism problems. The problem with the Epstein class is not that they are too eager to blow off their egos and embrace Heraclitean flux, but that they are supremacists with colossal egos that both they and the world would be better off without.

The “Judeo-Christian” tradition has long been running roughshod over the world, violating everyone else’s rights while hypocritically proclaiming doctrines like natural law and universal morality, whose privileges it reserves for itself, specifically the wealthy members of its upper classes. Ordinary folks, brown people, and other savages need not apply. Ideologically, the source of this problem lies more in Judaism than Christianity. Judaism reads the Old Testament as a tribal legend that justifies the Chosen tribe’s supremacy over all others—including its right to commit genocide. Christianity, by accepting the flawed OT as inerrant scripture, has been contaminated by that supremacism.

The Epstein class consists mainly of zombie Jews and zombie Judeo-Christians who lost their religious belief but retained their supremacism. They think they are better than the rest of us “goys”—a pejorative term for non-Jews that is splattered all over the Epstein files. That’s why they feel free to rape and traffic and exploit lesser beings.

As for transhumanism, its ideological roots are not in Heraclitus, but in messianic-millenarian Jews who want to become even more privileged and supremacist than they already are. They don’t seek to annihilate their colossal egos. On the contrary, they want to aggrandize them even further, to the point that the Chosenites will rule the world from a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, and every “Jew” (i.e. Epstein class member) will own 2800 “goyim slaves” (i.e. the girls Epstein trafficked, all of whom were non-Jewish).

People with huge egos, like self-styled “chosen people” and more than a few cutting-edge scientists, not to mention the current US president, are often stunningly incapable of grasping other people’s points of view, much less acknowledging them as equals and applying the Golden Rule. If transhumanist scientists aren’t particularly disturbed by the possibility that their work will destroy the livelihoods and maybe even the lives of ordinary folks, it isn’t because those scientists have followed Heraclitus and the mystics and annihilated their egos through meditation or psychedelics or what-have-you, but more likely because they haven’t.

And if Epstein-class supremacists want to re-tool the minds of the masses for malleability, as evidenced by Epstein’s collaboration with Gino Yu, that isn’t because Heraclitus made them do it. The Epstein class is just the latest example of what the Qur’an calls a mala’, a rich, egotistical, corrupt ruling elite made up of people who think they’re better than the rest of us. All of the thousands of prophets, not just from Moses to Jesus to Muhammad, but also in other cultures, have been sent by God to oppose the mala’ of their times and places, by speaking truth to corrupt power and rousing people to rise up against the tyranny of their corrupt and unjust mufsidun rulers.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that the Epstein class rules the Judeo-Christian world almost unopposed, while the global revolt against the Epstein class is led by Islamic Iran. After all, we object to Epstein and the transhumanists not because they embrace the wrong ancient Greek philosopher, but because they violate the same time-tested basic morality taught by all of the prophets and wisdom teachers—and most of the philosophers, with a few notable exceptions among the Straussian “teachers of evil” and their ilk. And the last and best preserved prophetic revelation, Islam, provides the basis for the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance to wage its global war on the Epstein class.

So Turner is overthinking things. The crimes of Epstein and transhumanism are simple moral issues. Anyone with a functioning moral compass, whether they are Heracliteans like the process philosophers or Aristotelians like Turner—and whether they are “Judeo-Christians” (a contradiction in terms) or Muslims or Taoists or what-have-you—should be able to understand that trafficking and raping girls, and plotting the destruction of humanity, is wrong.