Extreme Makeover: Humanity Edition

Where else but here would you go for a post that combines Tony Fauci, Thomas Malthus, transhumanism, Anti-natalism, Karl Marx, God, Satan, and reality TV in one exposition?

Believe it or not, Rand Paul’s release of Anthony Fauci’s “Dear Diary” moments, cast against his actions of the Covid years, triggered this line of thought.

We can forget debating social, economic, or political systems for now.

What we call them is relatively unimportant, perhaps even a distraction. Economic systems certainly matter, and some are better suited than others to the competing visions currently battling for dominance, but the true impetus behind today’s chaos cannot be adequately explained in economic terms. It is something much older, much deeper, and ultimately much more dangerous than a disagreement over markets, taxes, or the proper role of government.

Being a Christian, it comes as no surprise that I see through the lens of Judeo-Christian religious tradition and characterize the conflict as the battle between God and Satan, the struggle between good and evil for the human soul.

What modern societies across the globe face, regardless of how much individual liberty they presently enjoy, is a megalomaniacal form of utopianism. It is the conviction, held by elites and ordinary citizens alike, that humanity itself is fundamentally flawed, that the existing social order is beyond repair, and that an entirely new model of civilization must be constructed. Every utopian architect eventually encounters the same problem. A new civilization cannot be built from old material. If the blueprint demands a different kind of society, it necessarily demands a different kind of human being.

Those impulses manifest in different ways. It appears in transhumanism’s desire to transcend the limitations of biology, in the neo-Malthusian conviction that humanity is primarily a burden upon the planet, in antinatalism and its more radical cousin, efilism, which argue that bringing new people into existence is morally questionable because sentient life inevitably produces suffering.

These philosophies differ in their methods and their ultimate goals, but they share a common assumption that humanity, at least in its present form, is not something to be celebrated but something to be overcome.

Once that premise is accepted, every characteristic that has traditionally defined the essence of human existence becomes an obstacle. Biology becomes oppressive because it imposes limits, history becomes oppressive because it preserves memory. Family becomes oppressive because it competes with ideological loyalty. Religion becomes oppressive because it recognizes an authority beyond the state or the collective. Nationhood becomes oppressive because it creates specific loyalties rather than universal ones. Even language itself becomes suspect because words preserve distinctions that utopian thinkers would prefer to erase.

If you are recognizing commonalities between Uncle Karl’s Marxist thoughts and its current fuzzy puppy iteration, the Democratic Socialists of America, you are getting where this is going.

The inevitable conclusion is that people themselves must be reconstructed. Every inherited identity, natural distinction, cultural tradition, moral intuition and every objective reality must be questioned until nothing remains that was not consciously chosen or socially manufactured. If individuals resist that reconstruction, they are encouraged to doubt themselves rather than the ideology. Eventually the assault becomes so relentless that uncertainty ceases to be healthy skepticism and becomes something approaching delusion, where objective reality is subordinated to subjective assertion and disagreement is interpreted as intolerance.

This is not remodeling your kitchen. It is demolishing the entire house because you dislike the hall closet.

Healthy civilizations constantly reform institutions. Laws are amended, constitutions refined, policies adjusted and injustices corrected. That is the normal process of a free society learning from experience. What we are witnessing today is something altogether different. It is an effort to remake human nature itself, a recurring ambition found throughout history’s great revolutionary movements.

The Jacobins sought to create a new republican citizen. The Soviet Union pursued the “New Soviet Man.” Mao’s Cultural Revolution attempted to erase thousands of years of Chinese civilization to produce a purified revolutionary consciousness. The Khmer Rouge carried that logic to its horrifying conclusion by attempting to destroy virtually every institution that connected people to their past. The details changed from one regime to another, but the underlying ambition remained remarkably consistent.

The existing human being was judged inadequate for the world the revolutionaries wished to build.

That same impulse is visible today, although it often wears softer language. It is presented as progress, inclusion, liberation or equity. The vocabulary changes with the times, but the underlying assumption remains remarkably familiar. Human nature is no longer something to understand or govern wisely. It is raw material awaiting reconstruction by those convinced they possess superior moral insight.

This conflict therefore does not seek dominion over territory, natural resources or even political institutions. It seeks dominion over the human mind. Every successful civilization has been built upon the assumption that human beings possess intrinsic dignity because they are made in the image of God or, at the very least, possess inherent worth simply by virtue of being human. The new utopianism quietly inverts that hierarchy. Humanity is no longer the steward of creation but its primary contaminant. The individual is no longer viewed principally as a bearer of rights and responsibilities but as a collection of defects requiring correction. Man’s search for meaning becomes irrelevant because man himself is increasingly portrayed as the problem to be solved.

That is why this moment is so dangerous. It is not merely another contest between Left and Right or capitalism and socialism. Those are secondary battles. The primary struggle is over whether civilization exists to elevate imperfect human beings or whether imperfect human beings must first be dismantled so they can fit someone else’s vision of a perfect civilization.

There once was a reality TV show called Extreme Makeover that depicted ordinary men and women undergoing “extreme makeovers” involving plastic surgery, exercise regimens, hairdressing, and wardrobing.

This isn’t a revival of Extreme Makeover. Forces aren’t competing to change human appearance; they are after the soul of humanity.

History has repeatedly shown that any Faustian bargain to surrender control over our own self for managed “freedom” is a bad deal.