The End Of Desire

The immortal goddess and her thunder and lightening ⎮ her howling wind madness and wrath ⎮ break with a deafening clap, “Am done!”. A door is slammed shut somewhere high up in the heavens and the Earth rattles and trembles below. But the connection came from another place. Unknown to irate foot stamping deities, those driven by delusions of their power and the rest of us scrambling around beneath their feet. Untouchable.

And hey the goddess is not immortal I just took poetic licence. But that connection between her and the subject of her errrr affection and wrath may be. Inaccessibility and inexplicability is often eternal. Transhumanists ⎮ those part of a movement concerned with enhancing the human species with technology ⎮are interested in eternity. But not in mystery. They hope for “certainty and a fixedness” ¹. Their issue with an indeterminate amount of time is that it “gives rise to randomness and an associated anxiety and disquiet” ² And whilst there is a grand sense of freedom to be found and experienced in such states – the transhumanists recoil at the thought of being immersed in such variables. They just “want to kill death”^2. And they will leverage technology to do so ⎮ at any price.

Their insatiable chase for immortality is not only absurd, it’s barbaric². A chase for connection⎮s that could mysteriously exist forever however, is not. If the transhumanists succeed it will spell the end of desire – the raw seething animalistic and erotic nature of humankind that has allowed it to grow.² Desire exists only “because it escalates with time” ². We know we do not have forever to resolve the tension. The “reasons for feeling the lack of another” ² are unable to be reconciled with immortality. We should hold onto that. Immunity to death is immunity to life³.

The transhumanists have no explanations for love or desire and the messy complexities it forces us to dwell in. For them death is much easier to rationalise. And deal with. For the transhumanist death is nothing more than a technical problem to solve². And they will happily do away with it if it means they can avoid being entangled in the essence of life itself. They simply ache for existence. And lots of it. Before anything else.

Sean Wiebe and Pauline Sameshima write in, ‘Reframing and Reflaming Social Justice Through Poetry’ that , “Love is dangerous because it enlivens us, gets inside us, re-orientates us towards experience”^1. The tranhumanists see no appeal in such an enlivened state. They seem petrified of it. They are not interested in life’s or love’s mystery or madness. Or the madness it evokes in them.

Transhumanists do not love life.

They have no desire for the Goddess.

They just want to be Gods.

References

1. Wiebe S. & Sameshima, P. 2020. Reframing and Reflaming Social Justice Through Poetry. In Poetic Inquiry As Social Justice And Political Response. Vernon Press.

2. Alexandre, L. & Besnier, JM. 2018. Do Robots Make Love? From AI to Immortality. Octopus Publishing Group.

3. Scolaro, N. 2020. Bayo Akomolafe Seeks Bewilderment. Dumbo Feather. Issue 64, p34-45.