Why You Keep Hearing about Transhumanist Billionaires

Lack of a social script leads to an all consuming fear of death

What do Jefferey Epstein, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bryan Johnson all have in common? Despite diverging political and religious backgrounds, these men share a common interest in transhumanism, which they sometimes describe as “biohacking” or “longevity research”. All five have donated to or founded companies dedicated to researching new technologies that serve transhumanist aims, from Elon’s Neuralink, Bezos’s Altos Labs, to Epstein’s donations to The World Transhumanist Association.

On top of their interest in transhumanism, all five are or were extremely successful and wealthy individuals, with the lowest (Johnson) having a net worth of $400 million and Thiel, Musk, and Bezos being billionaires. Some of their wealth was a collaborative effort, with Musk and Thiel both being members of the PayPal Mafia, the hyper successful group of former Paypal founders that grew to develop important technology companies, including YouTube, LinkedIn, and Yelp. Epstein also collaborated with Thiel, with the majority of his remaining fortune invested in Thiel founded Valar Ventures.

For this article, I won’t be individually investigating each tycoon’s personal reasons for being interested in transhumanism. I’m not going to tell you why I’m against transhumanism, (we’ll save that for a later article). Instead, I’m going to dispassionately analyze why these men and others like them are so interested in transhumanism, and why this trend is likely to accelerate in the future.

First, a brief definition of transhumanism. With roots in Russian Cosmism, science fiction, and Posthumanist philosophy, transhumanism is best defined as an ideology that seeks to overcome humanity’s biological limitations to create a “new man” free from natural constraints like physical limitations, sexual reproduction, and mortality. Transhumanist’s interests run the gamut from artificial wombs to the Enhanced Games, a competition backed by Thiel that seeks to overcome the limits of human athletic performance by encouraging the use of performance enhancing drugs like steroids and human growth hormone. Even the ubiquitous birth control pill is sometimes cited as an example of nascent transhumanist technology.

So what made American billionaires so interested in an obscure ideology that’s more associated with science fiction than mainstream discourse? Believe it or not, the clue can be found in how Americans describe people like Thiel, Bezos, and Musk. We usually call them “elites”. If we feel especially negative about them, we call them “oligarchs”. Notably, we never call them aristocrats, which is no coincidence. American billionaires may be the most wealthy and powerful group the world has ever seen, but they lack important attributes that preclude them from being a modern redux of feudal aristocrats. While earlier Aristocrats occupied a hereditary role in society that was an integral part of national culture and supported by the national religion, anyone can become a billionare, and billionaire’s status gives them no special responsibilities. These differences cause them to invert the behaviors and outlooks of earlier aristocrats, eventually leading them to transhumanism.

A look at the etymology for “aristocrat” will show how their role differed from modern billionaires. Our English word “Aristocracy” derives from the Ancient Greek term “Aristokratia”, which “was first used in Athens with reference to young citizens (the men of the ruling class) who led armies at the front line.” In other words, the purpose of an aristocrat was to die fighting for his nation. This arrangement would roughly last from the dawn of organized civilization to the trenches of the Somme, where industrial warfare necessitated the mass mobilization of common people.

Further proof for the prior role of aristocrats lies in the three medieval estates, which you may remember as the three estates that were convened by and eventually overthrew the French Ancien Régime in 1790. What you might not know is the phrase “Oratores, Bellatores, Laboratores”, which was meant to delineate the role of each of the estates. The phrase translates to “Those Who Fight, Those Who Pray, Those Who Work”, with the Feudal Aristocracy being “those who fight.” This arrangement wasn’t just a French or medieval anachronism. We see it reach all the way into the 20th century in World War 1.

As the BBC Reports “The social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.” Just like the archaic Greek Aristokratia, the British Aristocrats led their men at the front line.

The toll the war took on the British upper class wasn’t just an anecdote.

“Some 12% of the British army’s ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded, and an uncle was captured.”

Could you imagine the sons of the current president dying in a trench? Could you imagine Herbert Asquith countenancing his sons to use his image to sell naked ponzi schemes to the public? You can’t, and that’s because modernity has ripped apart the old class relations and expectations and replaced them with new ones.

With the rise of capitalism, which as Marx famously put “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”, the idea of hereditary castes and different class expectations fell by the wayside. Nowhere is this more true than in America, the frontier nation of individualistic “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. It’s no coincidence that American billionaires are at the forefront of this transhumanist wave, as it is in America and the broader “New World” where the social fabric of the old civilization feels the least relevant.

One might fairly ask why this collapse of old expectations necessarily leads to transhumanism. On its face, it should lead to the opposite. When the older social order was crippled, people turned to Dionysius and Bacchus (The Greek and Roman Gods of wine, intoxication, and general disorder). The most famous example of this is the Roman festival of Saturnalia, where slaves and nobles drank copious amounts of wine and sat together as temporary equals. Commoners were appointed as the Saturnalicius princeps (Ruler of Saturnalia), where they gave deliberately nonsensical commands that had to be obeyed by everyone. Many people died during Saturnalia, as they got carried away with the intoxicating festivities. The rules broke down so much that the nobles often had orgies with the slaves and begot illegitimate children.

This response to a lack of script for the powerful can be contrasted with the billionaires of today. First, a detail about Jefferey Epstein that is often missed in the lurid recounts of his private island and the sexual blackmail that occurred there. As the New York Times reported right after his death “Jefferey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA”.

This “seeding” was to be done in a secretive ranch in New Mexico, where Epstein had “ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies.”

The Times reported Mr Epstein “based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool.” Epstein was also “using dinner parties — where some guests were attractive women with impressive academic credentials — to screen candidates to bear children”.

Baby ranches and pregnancy candidate interviews don’t seem to be in the spirit of “free love” or liberatory intoxication to me. Neither does Peter Thiel expressing interest in “receiving blood transfusions from younger donors” to prolong his life or Bryan Johnson “wearing a device that monitors the quality of his nighttime erections”. They won’t be invited to any Saturnalia parties anytime soon.

This inversion takes us to the heart of the matter. While older aristocrats experienced dionysian events like Saturnalia or the Bacchanalia as a relief from their duties of maintaining the social hierarchy, modern elites shy away from them, as there is no formal hierarchy to maintain. Instead, what must always be maintained is their artificial and tenuous status, which proceeds from money, not birth. Because they’re status proceeds from money, they only have it for as long as they are alive to use their capital. This makes them more interested in transhumanism more than any prior group, because they fear death the most. They know that as soon as they pass, they’ll be buried as common citizens and quickly forgotten.

Why do I think this trend will accelerate in the future? Well, the pressures brought by material abundance and a postmodern culture continue to make status more uncertain. Access to luxury goods has been broadened, with luxury car brands and designer handbags increasingly brought by the hoi polli. Cultural status has also been democratized. The days of aspirational middle class Americans tuning into Buckley vs. Vidal and reading Norman Mailer are gone. Instead, they’re increasingly likely to listen to podcast hosts and internet streamers that come from nondescript backgrounds. Random people like Charli D’Amelio and Mr. Beast get famous on social media, earning lasting adulation from Americans.

What does this have to do with transhumanism? Well, if you can’t leverage your power into cultural status, as the old aristocrats did, or meaningful material superiority, as the Gilded Age barons did, the best option remaining is to leverage your power into infinite life.

I don’t comment on these trends lightly. I personally deplore the rise of transhumanism, and worry about the adverse effects that may arise from billionaires engaging in radical and desperate experiments on themselves and other people to try to stay alive. But that being said, as I’ve laid out in the article, transhumanism is the symptom, not the cause of the disease. The cause of the disease is our modern condition, which also happens to be undoable and has brought humanity many good things. Although those who suggest turning back the clock and bringing back the social mores of the Ancien régime in the 21st century are unserious, we must still endeavor to bring back some sort of stable, secure, and internally coherent social order or civic religion that is able to both promote wholesome behavior and acceptance of the human lot in life. If not, expect many more secret ranches in New Mexico.