Show notes and Transcript
Joe Allen has just written a book that is a warning to humanity. In Dark Aeon he has unpacked the uber complex issue of Transhumanism and shown how this move towards merging human with machine is the biggest threat humankind now faces. Joe returns to Hearts of Oak to show how this is about control and not simply technology. He points to the main actors in this frightening plan who now operate in plain sight. And he ends, as he does in the book, by looking at the spiritual side of this. Not only numerous end time warnings from the bible but also how personal faith and trust in God can guide us through this assault on our very soul.
Joe Allen is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees!
He has written for Chronicles, The Federalist, Human Events, The National Pulse, Parabola, Salvo, and Protocol: The Journal of the Entertainment Technology Industry. He holds a master’s degree from Boston University, where he studied cognitive science and human evolution as they pertain to religion. As an arena rigger, he’s toured the world for rock n’ roll, country, rap, classical, and cage-fighting productions. Joe now serves as the transhumanism editor for Bannon’s WarRoom.
Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity with foreword by Stephen K Bannon available from Amazon...https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Aeon-Transhumanism-Against-Humanity/dp/1648210104/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Connect with Joe ....
Substack: https://joebot.substack.com/
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/JOEBOTxyz
X: https://twitter.com/JOEBOTxyz?s=20
War Room: http://warroom.org/
Interview recorded 11.9.23
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20
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Transcript(Hearts of Oak)
Joe Allen, it is wonderful to have you with us here at Hearts of Oak. Thanks so much for joining us today.
(Joe Allen)
Good to be here, Peter. Thank you very much.
And we're obviously going to go into your, book, which is just out, which is Dark Aeon, Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity.
We will delve through that, and I have read most of it. It is a book you can dip in and out of chapter by chapter. We will go through that and it's always good to have a book that's, different than the norm. It doesn't fit into the normal books I think often we come across on the conservative side. It's a completely different subject and subject that most people are probably afraid to even engage with but we'll get into that. Obviously follow Joe @JoeBotXYZ on Twitter, joebot.xyzonline. He is Transhumanism Editor War Room Pandemic. And maybe Joe, we can first jump in. We've had John before to talk about this and this book obviously 400 plus pages goes really into depth on this subject from different angles. But Joe, your background was in the entertainment industry. As a rigger, you worked behind the scenes piecing venues together literally.
How did you get from music concerts in the entertainment industry to be a technology journalist?
Well, you know, I think journalist might be pushing it. Journalist might be pushing it, but I've been a writer ever since I was a child and I began writing professionally.
2007 was my first published article. And so as a writer, the goal has always been just describe reality in as smart-ass of tone as I could possibly muster.
As I've gotten older, it's gotten a bit more serious, a little less smart-ass.
Not entirely. If you've read the book, you can see that there's plenty of smart-ass left in me.
But well, I spent most of my adult life between the arena and academia.
So when I did my undergrad, I needed a job. I went down to the arena at my school, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and began working as a stagehand.
Quickly noticed the guys climbing both in the rafters in the arena and also on the stages.
Thought that might be a preferable gig to lugging boxes around.
So very early on, I pushed my way into the climber, the stage climber and then rigger world.
And that was where I stayed for about 15 years, give or take.
And I would dip back into academia, that lifestyle, that job gives you a lot of time off.
And so I would audit courses, I audited courses in Asheville, North Carolina, audited courses in Portland, Oregon, and then eventually took my master's degree at Boston University.
So in many ways, the rigging gig was a way to accumulate money that I could waste on a useless education.
So that was really my entire life until the pandemic was between those two worlds.
And once the pandemic hit, not only could you not just simply walk onto a campus to ask questions of a professor or visit a library, obviously the work of stagecraft was completely destroyed.
And even when it came back, it came back with masks and vaccine mandates and all that stuff.
But, you know, once the hammer fell in regard to the COVID pandemic, I knew that I would also have to change in order to stay sane.
I packed up a survival bunker on wheels.
I began traveling cross country.
I watched the race riots and I watched the the mask holes versus the naked faces.
And spent a lot of time out in nature. And at that time you could spend a lot of time in nature by yourself. There weren't hordes of people everywhere for the most part.
So, it was during that time that Bannon discovered my work at The Federalist, and once I went on The War Room, he hired me almost immediately.
I've been there for two and a half years.
So, for two and a half years, my brain has been completely saturated with transhuman doom.
It's quite interesting, because in the book you mention, I think in the introduction, that you weren't really interested in politics that much, and you end up being on one of the most political shows online, one of the most popular political shows online.
It's weird how COVID has taken us and dropped you in that environment.
You know, Steve has always had an interest in transhumanism.
He's always been a bit freaked out by it, and I think anyone who understands the full implications should be.
Even if you're excited about it, you should be freaked out about it.
So it was always something that was bracketed from the rest of the show.
Now, arguably, conservatism is all about preserving that which was handed down traditionally, and to some extent, that which was handed down familially.
And so there's really nothing more conservative than wanting to conserve Homo sapiens.
You know, the title of the book has a double meaning in both the title and the subtitle.
The title Dark Aeon is a reference to a period of time, but Eon, actually, this has been a war between, this is the real war between me and Steve, is it Eon or Aeon?
It looks like he's winning, but Dark Aeon is a reference to a period of time.
It's also a reference to Gnostic entities, which we can go into in more depth if you would like, but there is definitely the element of Gnosticism is very, very important in the book.
The idea though of transhumanism and the war against humanity, that also has a double meaning.
On the one hand, it's the war against what it means to be human.
The very identity of human being, that the notion of transhumanism is that the human being is something to be surpassed, something to be ultimately transcended by way of technology.
On the other hand, there are strains of transhumanism which predict that the technologies we are developing right now are in fact developing a life of their own.
They will eventually, through evolutionary processes, that they will eventually come to dominate and replace us, if not destroy us outright.
And so, whether it's the gentle version of transhumanism, which seeks to transform the human being irrevocably, or whether it's the harsh post-human world, which is envisioned as one in which humanity goes extinct or is completely destroyed, just like that, and is celebrated, it is undoubtedly a war against humanity.
So the notion of conservatism, to conserve, to preserve what we have, it does really fit with any sort of resistance to, or conflict with the transhumanist worldview.
It would be very difficult to do so from a liberal point of view, I think, if you are a true liberal, because a true liberal is all about freedom.
And it's all, you know, the true liberal does not want the constraints of tradition.
The true liberal does not want the constraints of even the body in many ways, right?
You can see it in the trans movement. You can see it in many of the sorts of sexual and transracial and crossracial sorts of culture.
So, yet, at the same time, and I know that this is probably going on too long and getting too complicated, at the same time, there are a lot of left-wing arguments against transhumanism, but primarily they revolve around the idea that billionaires are in charge of human evolution at this point, that billionaires are directing the very fate of the species.
So it's a complex landscape, and I hope that the book captures that.
Well, I just want to take two, one quote which is on the back of the book, but the few lines I think certainly on Amazon says, like a thief in the night, artificial intelligence has inserted itself into our lives. It makes important decisions for us every day, often we barely notice. As Joe Allen writes in his groundbreaking book, Transhuman is the great merger of humankind with the machine. And then there is a Naomi Wolf writing on the back, which is high praise and makes me very jealous. And she says, Joe Allen's Dark Aeon is the first comprehensive critical analysis of the planned post-human future. It will give you great clarity as well as nightmares. Allen has long been our most thoughtful authority on this ill-understood catastrophe and no one who wants humanity to survive should ignore his warnings here. I feel like we should just finish the interview at that point. I mean that's enough. When you're people saying that, you must realize, and you do realize I guess, the importance of this topic and the importance of getting this information into people's hands to ready them for what's coming.
Yeah a lot of people I think even in the War Room crowd, they see a topic like transhumanism is very abstract.
It's very much in the future for them, right? Like it's not something that's relevant for today and therefore it's not worth paying attention to.
I think that misses a lot of the ways in which the transhumanist ideology is poking through into our reality already by way of various technologies, not least of which would be say the MRNA vaccine or the chat bots, which have rapidly begun to flood educational systems, corporate environments, and of course the internet itself.
People don't necessarily link that to the transhumanist view, either because they're not familiar with it or because those don't seem as dramatic as the predictions and the prescriptions of the transhumanists.
But I don't see it as being necessarily the most important issue, it just depends on how these technologies pan out and of course how people accept them and use them.
But without a doubt, if you look at the various problems that face the West, as a series of layers, whether it be demographic integrity, whether it be sexual and gender propriety, whether it be the preservation of religious tradition or familial traditions, with clan traditions, for you Irishmen out there.
I think all of these, basically what we see in the 20th century is an invasion of every border, just ramping up, ramping up, ramping up, whether they be national borders, whether they be the borders of the body, the borders between genders, the borders between races, the borders between language groups, and of course the borders between religious groups.
All of these have been shred in an attempt to create some sort of multi-culti homogeneous, just grade out Borg.
Riding on top of all of that is technology.
And it would be crazy to say that transhumanism is driving all of this.
I don't think so. I think that it's more of the kind of thing that sits at the pinnacle of it.
The ultimate border between human beings and machines is being dissolved, first conceptually, and then in actual physical reality. It's very subtle, not unlike what amounted to a very rapid demographic transformation of America and more and more so the UK. It was something that wasn't noticed at first. It wasn't really noticed until it was too late, at least not by enough people.
I fear that the same is happening with technology. People are already melded to their smartphones.
Their personalities have become, like the most relevant aspects of their personalities are imprinted on the digital field.
And so as we move forward into whatever future lies ahead of us, I think that the alarm bells, they tend to go off momentarily.
Oh my God, there's nanobots in the vaccine.
And then when none of that pans out, the more slow, subtle role into the merger between man and machine takes place without really any sort of resistance or oftentimes without anyone noticing.
One thing I came across, transhumanism is, as you so often present it, has been about technology and the robot side.
But throughout reading your book and right at the beginning, you also bring out the side of power and control and certain individuals and it seems to be as much as that element of control as it is about that element of technology.
Absolutely. Various modes of control. So at its core, transhumanism is about the individual being able to control themselves by way of technology and technique, about being able to control nature, of course, be that clearing land for a new data centre, or be that controlling the weather itself directly by say seeding ice nuclei into the clouds.
It's also about controlling other people.
That rarely ends up being something voiced explicitly, but it's implicit, occasionally it is, but it's implicit.
The idea that one's will, one's will to power will be expressed through technology, well, that's also going to include the social sphere.
Whether or not that is the stated intention, undoubtedly the technological system that we live in right now.
If you think of the cyborg as a relationship between the animal or the organism and the machine, and the cyborg is a two-way control system so that the organism has control over the machine and therefore over nature, society, so on and so forth.
But the machine also has input into the organism.
And the ratio of control, whether or not the organism is the primary mover in the system or whether or not the machine, and that varies.
And what I see in the current technological landscape that we live in, there is an illusion that the average person has control over this technological system.
But nobody's telling you what to order from Uber Eats.
Nobody's telling you where to buy that plane ticket. Nobody's telling you who to friend on social media, nor are they telling you what to say on there.
Not necessarily, but what is happening, aside from the barriers, you are not going to do this, is that by and large, propaganda, both subtle and overt, has put the desires into people's minds as to what they want from these systems.
And so very often you see that people are chasing their desires within that technological structure, and these are desires that were put into them by the corporations or even the governments that these systems serve.
So as far as control goes, these systems, whether we're talking about social media itself, the tight relationship between the human mind and the internet, which has become just insane in the last two and a half decades, it's astonishing how much people just take it for granted that the internet really is a secondary piece of our cognition.
But the control system itself, what you see, again, whether it's the internet, whether it is the digital currencies that surveil everything that we do, and eventually will most likely be used to stop us from doing what we are not wanted to do, to the digital ID systems, all of it amounts to a control system in which the participant in the West has the illusion of control over the system, when in fact, it's corporate and government power exerting control over us en masse and individual by individual, then of course in China, it gives you a real good idea of where it could go in the West, where it's just simply overt.
You have the city brain data centers that gather all of the surveillance data, and it's just obvious that the entire purpose is for social control, a kind of cultural eugenics, or the smart eye system connected to it, so that everywhere in China there are surveillance systems that the common understanding is if you run afoul of the state, then the state can get you no matter what.
That's implicit in America, and I think anybody who's paying attention knows that's also the case.
But in America, maybe it's even more dangerous. There is the illusion that you have control over the system, that the system is going to respond to your desire.
But I see it very much as top-down.
There's more technocracy than transhumanism, but I see those as, as Patrick Wood so aptly said, you know, technocracy and transhumanism are really just two sides of the same coin, one being related to the social structure and the other being related to the worldview.
At the beginning you gave statements from two world leaders, Klaus Schwab, you say, our life in ten years from now will be completely different and who masters those technologies in some way will be the master of the world. That was a recent one. Then you also give Putin from 2017 and he says whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world. You mentioned China. I'm wondering in the West, have we come to the point where there's just simply too much faith and trust in our leaders?
Uh, yes and no. I think that, um...
There is a lot of cynicism in America, both left and right. So it's very interesting to see so many people that really don't believe in the system anymore and yet have become tools of that system, very much so.
In fact, I don't know how intentional or not it is, but the sort of dissident movements both left and right in America, and perhaps in Europe, you would perhaps be able to educate me on that.
But those dissident movements have, I am very much in awe of and appreciate the energy within them, but I really do wonder where we end up from here with this degree of just rampant cynicism and atomization and social discord.
You saw it explicitly during the pandemic.
Everybody who was a mask hole, everybody who was a vax maniac, they wanted to see the other side die.
Not everyone, okay, everyone's pushing it, but there was a very strong and oftentimes voiced desire that we are the smart ones, we are in line with the science.
We can't wait to watch you all rot in the streets like we're in Stephen King's The Stand.
Then it was quite interesting When the vaccine rolled out and you started seeing all the cases of myocarditis, you started seeing the heart attacks, the people who died suddenly and all this, and a lot of things that I think are hooey, but undoubtedly the damage done, that cannot be argued against in my mind.
You saw the same desire on the side of the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, right?
That all of these people, occasionally you would hear people trot theories out that everyone who got the vax would be dead within two years, and now that we're three years in, everyone will be dead of cancer in five years.
And then I suppose once we get to that point, those who keep pushing it along, this desire to see the other side disappear.
This desire to see the whole thing come down, come crumbling down, I don't know where it goes, but it's obvious that it's very strong.
And I fear oftentimes that we're being maneuvered into these psychological states, that perhaps both sides will get their wish. Perhaps both sides will get to see the other side disappear.
So, I don't know if that answers your question, but I think that those who cling to the normalcy of the Democratic leaders or any more, those who cling to the cult of personality around Trump in America, they're hanging on to anchors that I don't believe will hold.
The Democratic Party, obviously, that's a shit show. And Trump, I just simply, I want to believe that he'll be able to come in and make greater impacts than he did before.
I'm not holding my breath. As for all those who are completely disillusioned with those two, you know, very old white men, right?
I sense that we're seeing the beginnings of a crack up. And so where does technology sit in all of that?
I think one of the real ways in which technology will affect this, aside from being the medium through which these struggles take place, that if you end up in a point where your society is totally balkanized and where many of the people in the society are atomized, they become that much easier to control, especially to kind of craft digital realities around their minds.
And with the advent of artificial intelligence as it exists now, we really are facing an era where each individual mind or each sort of in-group can be easily manipulated.
They can be easily monitored, their sentiments, their thoughts, their opinions.
And then you can craft messages using AI or do it by, you know, in a sense manually, but such as say Obama's rhetoric that was built off of mass data mining.
You can, right now, GPT offers the ability that if you can lure people into a relationship with an AI, in the future, I believe, and not too distant future, they won't even know that it is an AI.
But at the moment, it's just, it's more of the kind of subtle crafting of rhetoric for any given group or any given person, made much more efficient by these technologies.
You can just crank out propaganda without really any limit.
And if you have any sort of access to the monitoring systems, if you pay a third-party company in order to monitor certain crowds online, to monitor certain communications, or if you are the corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, or if you are the federal government with back doors into these, You can monitor, and this has been true for two decades now, you can monitor groups, and it's much easier, like if I could sit and watch you in your house day in and day out, it'd be much easier for me to manipulate you.
And that is the future that we're facing, and the more balkanized we become, I think the easier it will be to create control systems, even as it looks like opposition.
100%. I was intrigued that right at the beginning of the book, I mean you don't hold back, you say early on humanity 2.1, 2.0 will be transnational, transcultural, transgender, transracial, transspecies, and at its extreme edge transhuman, the merger of man and machine, they're ready to create heaven on earth, digital currency will be life's blood. Hard-hitting, I'm wondering, how did you manage looking into this vast subject, which is rapidly changing and advancing, how did you manage to look for the truth and expose what was happening whilst at the same time, I guess, keeping you sane and the reader sane?
I hope the reader stays sane. I'm not sure that I've stayed sane.
Really, the two main projects of the book are to look at the ideas of what the future will be and to look at the ideas of what these technologies, how these technologies should be used and of course looking at where these technologies are right now, and imagining the possibilities. All transhumanism is in essence, is it's a response to a rapidly evolving technological society. You have all of these radical technologies and the question of how do you use them. So this has been true from the plough on, right? And if you've looked at comparative agriculture, different societies have done it very, very differently. And with the advent of trains, planes, automobiles, especially automobiles, if you look at the difference in how LA is set up compared to New York City or Mumbai, how these technologies are used are very, very, very different, both because of the quality of the technology and just the organization.
That changed everything about the human social structure. What we're facing right now, just as over the last two or three centuries, industrialized Nations have been able to terraform the earth around them to just completely alter the habitat in which human beings live not only within the cities But even without right literally moving mountains without the faith of the mustard seed, What we're facing now is a moment in which you have technologies that can be turned inward that can begin to terraform the human being itself So, the transgender movement is oftentimes pointed to as an example of this.
I think that it is one aspect of it, without a doubt, sometimes explicitly declared by various transhumanists, in some ways, maybe even just symbolically, kind of a canary in the coal mine, but you see this radical and oftentimes very disturbing use of technology to completely alter the human.
I fear though, Peter, that again, as people focus on these extreme cases, they don't realize that their minds are already being terraformed by the digital environment.
Whether it's something good, whether it is Jesus Christ coming to you through your preacher in the screen, or whether it is the devil himself coming through the various sorts of satanic entertainments that have, for decades now, enamoured the youth, it really ultimately boils down to the human being creating a relationship with the machine so that whether you are left or right, whether you are a Christian or atheist, whether you are fascist or communist, I think that the pre-technological way of life, the pre-technological state of mind, say, from let's just pick a random date, the 20s, okay?
You've barely got movie theaters at this point. Automobiles are kind of a novelty puttering around. They're not common. The first planes have gotten off the ground. It is very low tech. You're just now starting to understand at that point where these technologies are going to go, but the human being has been left basically intact.
Whether you have the kind of proto-fascist or the fierce nationalist movements or whether the communists, yes, the ideologies make a big difference as to the social structure and the direction of the nation, but insofar as the actual quality of the human being, the way in which the human being lives, the type of human being we're talking about, I think that people of that period, just to pick one, you could pick any one of them, people that period have more in common with each other.
And we have more in common with each other by virtue of this new technological way of life than we do across, right? So that the fascist of 1930 is really more similar in the ultimate way in which the human being is expressed, more similar to the communist of that era than he is is to the fascist of our era, or whatever.
Just pick any ideology, any sort of Christian, Hindu, Muslim, whatever, any mode of being.
I think this is really, really important because what we're talking about is a civilizational transformation by way of technology.
And conservatives are oftentimes pushing these technologies saying that this is going to empower us, this is going to allow us to win, we'll finally be able to win, we'll use AI, we'll be able to send out messaging and we'll be able to analyze the landscape, we'll be able to create war bots, we'll be able to do all these things.
Yeah, that's probably true. But ultimately, when you look at the transhuman vision, the vision that human beings are intended just by virtue of the laws of nature herself are intended to create and merge with and perhaps to give up their own existence to machines that whether it comes from the left, whether it comes from the right, whether it's libertarians, whether it's the communist, capitalist hybrid in China, it really doesn't matter.
All of these different facets are just ratcheting it up and ratcheting it up.
And conservatives, oftentimes I think that they have some sort of delusion that we'll be able to go just this far and no further.
But that's never happened.
And I don't see any reason for it to now. I'm actually, insofar as staying sane, I don't think that, one thing that reassures me, it's you've never seen a global transformation that was equally impactful across the board.
So, you have certain centers of power, certain centers of influence, you have certain areas that are gonna be transformed more than others, that have been transformed more than others.
Silicon Valley versus a farm in Kansas.
So, I don't think, like, when people talk about the future, they oftentimes talk about, like, they talk about it as if every single human being will experience the same thing all at once.
I think it'll be very, very different.
It'll be very different in rural America than it will be in urban America, just as it is now.
It'll be very different in present-day First World nations than it is in Third World nations, just as it is now.
But at the same time, at the bleeding edge of that, you are going to see just the same transformation we've seen both socially, psychologically, spiritually, culturally over the last, pick, three decades.
That transformation, barring an EMP or barring technical difficulties that no one could have foresaw, we are going to see an even more rapid transformation.
The question is, do you belong to that transformation? Do you go along with that?
Do you resist it? And if so, what the hell are you going to do?
How are you going to live?
How do you live outside a system that is completely digitized?
If everybody uses digital currency and you say no, how do you buy things?
If everyone uses digital IDs and you say no, how do you get the goods of society?
How do you be, how are you a person in that society?
And of course, you're thinking of the radical technologies such as artificial intelligence, or even the more minor noninvasive brain computer interfaces which undoubtedly do confer certain advantages.
If your competitors are making use of these tools and you're saying, no, I'm a Luddite, I'm not going to do it.
How do you compete?
These are very, very difficult questions. And I can't say that I offer any definite answers, but I hope to at least give some hint that it doesn't have to be the same for everyone all the time.
But if you are going to drop out of the system, If you indeed are put off by the notion of merging humankind with machines, you had better figure out some fucking way to live in this world.
And as you say, conservative thinking go certain point and no further and this is not about a just about a possible dystopian future, it is about what is happening today and with Amazon and palm payments with Alexa listening to all we say to make our lives easier, with tesla discussing self-driving cars would not have the bother of driving, WorldCoin from open AI.
It's all a kind of a vision of the Jetsons, a golden age made possible by technology to make our lives easier.
There is a great PR campaign going on that this is all about, we can sit back and just do little and technology will live our lives for us. And many people are happily on that travelator.
Yeah, that dream is, again, that's the central thrust of the book is what are these dreams?
What do they dream of?
And not just the intellectuals, but also people like Elon Musk, people like Larry Page, people like Jeff Bezos, what are their dreams? Because their dreams are going to guide and shape the course of human history.
They already have.
That's going to continue. Money, wealth, power, political pull, that is always going to shape the world.
But you are never going to actually see the full realization of those dreams, right?
They're always going to be half of what was dreamt. Material reality will always drag it down to some extent.
There's always some sort of glitch.
But some version of them are already coming to pass. And as you just mentioned.
You've already got the rampant use of digital currency. Most people, most of their purchases are done via digital purchases now.
So you don't need a chip in your palm. You don't need a palm scanner.
You don't have to be completely plugged into the system biologically in order for all of the desired effects of using digital currency to be realized. They track everything that you're doing, that you're spending, and of course it leaves the option to shut you off, to debank you, and we've seen just a few instances of that.
I imagine that since nobody has really stood up and done much of fucking anything to stop it.
That will continue. The political enemies will be punished in this way, and I suspect that if our side returns to power in any meaningful way, those same methods will be used on the other end. So when you think about the ultimate trajectory of all these, though, you just mentioned the classic list, it's really like people do not realize where this is going unless they see the mentality behind what kind of person would put in place a system in which you would pay with your palm.
Clearly someone who has no respect or caution about the prophecies contained at the end of the Bible, because it's so on the nose. It's crazy. You'd almost think that they're doing it just to mess with the Christian mentality. It is so clearly resonant with the mark of the beast. That includes also the sort of, you'd mentioned world coin, the biometric system that scans the iris and gives you cryptocurrency and allows you to prove that you're human on the internet, and then of course you have Clear, the company that is set up in every airport in America for the most part and across the world I believe, but you've got Clear that you're tying your biometric, your body to your digital identity.
It's obvious that it allows for convenience for you. It's also obvious that it allows for total control from the top.
One last example that you just mentioned, and it's a really, really critical one.
Autonomous vehicles. People have oftentimes said, kind of like with flying cars, which have yet to manifest, well, if AI is so great, why don't they have self-driving cars? Whatever happened to that?
A lot of people who aren't paying attention are going to be very, very surprised at how rapidly those will roll out. Already, Tesla and Google and various other self-driving companies, their cars, even though it's a smaller sample size, their cars are actually safer than human beings driving.
So that statistically, there are fewer accidents and certainly fewer fatal accidents with these machines.
The problem is that when they do happen, like when one of them freaks out and starts running somebody over, or when you hear a story about the car swerving off and hitting a bicyclist or something like that, there is this instinctive reaction to the idea of a machine doing it rather than a human, there's nobody to be responsible for it, there's nobody who could control it, that is really the barrier to these things being rolled out. It's really not a matter of the technology improving, although they will continue to try to improve them, it's really a matter of public acceptance and how do you craft the policy to prove liability in the case of an accident. And once you end up in a system in which you have, let's say you have a dramatic shift in the same way that nobody wore a fucking mask in America until 2020.
You you get this dramatic shift in which people suddenly think okay. Well, these autonomous vehicles are much much safer and I don't have to worry some crazy redneck in a truck trying to run me off the road or some ghetto mama, you know, menacing me with her who ride. You just simply turn the entire infrastructure or at least some vast portion of the infrastructure into an autonomous system. And at that point the trucker convoys are a very very good example if you just imagine forward to a world in which everything is autonomous or at least most vehicles are autonomous and the trucks would probably be among the first to convert in that direction.
You don't have trucker convoys in that world because it's just a matter of flipping the switch and it's done. There is no individual choice in that if they decide that you no longer have that choice. And it's very, very important going forward that people realize that even if old tech, the rather inconvenient tech, or the older, more traditional arrangements do have their disadvantages competitively, that is really where a lot of our freedom comes from. The organic provides for much more freedom than the digital, at least ultimately, Because the organic cannot be controlled directly, the digital can.
I want to just end off on, you mentioned about the biblical side, and that's kind of part three of the book, Reflected Inversion.
But just the book itself, it's what, 450, 460 pages, and that might put off people on a topic like this.
And yet, I certainly found it that the 13 chapters read like maybe 13 different essays, 13 ways of maybe looking at the problem we face.
Is that kind of what you wanted to bring out in the book, that kind of style to present to the viewers so they could dip in and out?
Absolutely. You know, there's an arc from beginning to end. You can see the clear progression, but let's say that you are curious about the origins of this movement, say Ray Kurzweil.
There's chapter two for you. Let's say that you want to understand the evolutionary paradigm and how it bleeds over into the technological.
That's chapter four. The people who have, the more astute observers who have noticed the ways in which the great reset or just the entire pandemic phenomena shifted people towards a more digital existence.
There's chapter five for you, you know, so on and so forth, the satanic elements.
Chapter seven is a comparison of Yuval Noah Harari with Elon Musk.
Probably my favorite chapter to write is the eighth chapter, in praise of mad prophets. The real thesis of that is that being insane and being correct are not mutually exclusive. It's pretty astounding how spot on in a symbolic way.
People who are schizophrenic or acid casualties, that they were really able to tune into the kind of technological nightmare that was coming towards us, even as far back as the 1700s.
So, every chapter is its own little world, but each one bleeds into the other.
And for those who are really interested in the religious side of it, the third part is entirely focused on the religious side.
The first, the ninth chapter, Images of Jesus is looking at these technological developments in light of what we can glean from the Bible.
And virtual gnosis, on the other hand, is looking at that Gnostic element, that Gnosticism being an inversion of the Christian mythos, but then transhumanism being a subsequent inversion of the Gnostic mythos.
It's really, I don't think you can understand the deep impulse behind transhumanism, the deep impulse to overcome the body, to transcend the biological by way of technology, without understanding Gnosticism.
And I don't think that they're one in the same. I'm not an everything's narcissism kind of person, but the connection is very obvious. It is, in fact, like I say, it's yet another inversion.
So my hope is that any reader could pick it up and browse through at their leisure or start from the beginning.
I mean, you'd be a better judge than I, but I hope that I used colloquial language and enough fart jokes to keep you moving along.
But yeah, and just so that people aren't too intimidated, it's 400 pages minus the meticulous citation.
I did, there is a lot of citation at the end, mainly because I don't want anyone to be able to accuse me of making any of this stuff up.
Everything in the book is me trying to channel the possible futures that these people are dreaming up.
And by the end, I hope that you understand how they connect to the actual technological system that we live in.
And I hope that you have the wherewithal to come up with something better, because there's not really any way for me to tell people how to live their lives in the face of this, but I do have hope that plenty of people will be able to chart their own courses through this future.
And I have every hope that barring some planet-wide extinction-level event, that human beings, that traditional humanity, that religious humanity will in fact endure, Although
I'm fairly certain that we're facing a dark eon, so to speak.
Oh, yeah. Just for the viewer, I read it with one of these, going through and marking it.
I often wish that when I have guests on, that the book would be just, you kind of switch your mind off and you can read it.
And it usually isn't like that. It's usually wow, wow.
And certainly, this is a book, and I think the viewers and listeners will find it when they get hold of it.
As it is one that that makes you think. But let me just touch on that last third part before making sure people know where and when they can get it. That third part, I mean as a Christian I found it intriguing, the third part, and you said you start off part three, reflected inversion, the book of humanity has an unshakable herd instinct. Fall on the wrong side of the race debate and you risk being condemned. Fall on the wrong side of the tech debate and you'll be accused of controlled opposition, fall on the wrong side of a religious debate, and you'll be mocked as superstitious. And yet, Joe, you bring not only the Bible and end-time theology into it, into the last part, but you also refer numerous times to your own personal faith and struggles in accepting who Jesus says he is, what the Bible teaches. And I find that intriguing, that you personalized it. Was that a thought at the beginning on how you fit that in to the book, or did that come out as you begun to write the book?
It came out fairly early. My main motivation was that I'm writing about all of these different religious ideas, and I thought that I wouldn't want someone to think that I believed those ideas, but I also wouldn't want to convey the impression that I believe exactly what they believe.
I sense a lot of times in religious writers, popular religious writers, an attempt to, use the cross as a selling point. They kind of use the cross as a billboard for the value of their work, and so I myself am a Christian, but certainly, one reason I entitled that chapter, Images of Jesus, a Confession, is to give the reader an idea of where I'm coming from on this, whether they find any value in it or reject that perspective entirely, just so that there was, I don't want people to
be under the impression that I'm coming from coming at this from a place that I'm not.
And the hardest thing to me in Christianity is the demand for a certain magnanimity, a certain peaceableness, for forgiveness and charity. These things are very easy to put aside when we are amped up in tribal warfare, which we are. But that is in fact, as I see it, the core, not only of Jesus's message, but of many other religious figures across the planet. And it's a mystery to me as to why, but there's one thing I believe, it is that the message of Jesus in the gospel, that you cannot serve two masters, God or mammon, in the message that one must turn the other cheek.
I know there's like a million different ways you can wiggle out of that using various linguistic turns, but it's pretty clear as a whole that what Jesus was talking about was a kingdom not of this world and therefore a kingdom whose tactics are not involved with this world.
And because that's so difficult, I'm oftentimes averse to calling myself a Christian because I am an asshole.
And so the idea of running around waving a cross while continuing to be my manimal self, this is more than I can bear.
But yes, the religious element, transhumanism is a techno religion and you can't understand it's religious contours without understanding traditional religion.
And so again, my hope is that there is at least enough in there to give you a sense to contrast the two and hopefully, you know, it just either validates or inspires you to explore these things more on your own.
I truly do believe that traditional religion, that the spiritual impulse and humanity really is the only thing that will save us.
And so it would be impossible for me to leave that out.
I think the Apostle Paul, I'm sure one of his verses in some translation was, I am an asshole, but Jesus. I'm sure that is a translation.
Let me bring up, for those watching US, probably 25% of our audience, the book is available now.
For those in Europe, UK, it's coming out 9th of November. Is that correct, Joe?
Yes. Unfortunately, at least with Amazon, maybe you could get it from Skyhorse Publishing.
I'm not sure. Right now, it's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookshop.org and skyhorse.com among other places.
So it's possible you could get it from there, but yes, unfortunately the Amazon UK will not have any until November.
I've been blown away by realising the back catalogue that Skyhorse have.
I hadn't come across Skyhorse until a year ago.
Of course, this is jointly done with Skyhorse and War Room. Just final thought, Joe, what do you want to leave with the viewer when they get the book?
What did you thought, did you want to leave with them as they read through it?
At the risk of repeating myself, I really think that you have to understand the contours of this transformation that we're under. It's not a conspiracy, or at least as far as I can tell.
There are too many parties and there's too much inter-infighting and opposition between them in competition. It's worse than a conspiracy.
You just have a tendency in humanity, ambition, the lust for power, the lust for control, that is present across the human race and technology empowers that.
When we're talking about transhumanism, the development of artificial intelligence, the development of robotic systems to replace human beings and devalue them, the introduction of brain-computer interfaces or genetic engineering, all of these are about power.
If you were to destroy the World Economic Forum today, it would continue in Silicon Valley. If you were to destroy both, it would continue in Shenzhen in China or Beijing.
These are mushrooms growing up from mycelium that is pervasive in humanity.
In that sense, as this civilizational transformation takes place, I don't think that you're going to do well going forward, if everything is hitting you in the face like a wet fish and you're completely knocked off guard, I think that it offers an opportunity to feel out the future that they are dreaming and that has already been partially realized and hopefully allow you to dream up your own world.
What world do you want your children to inhabit and how do you want them to approach the new world that we're facing. That's the key. It is a religious transformation. It is a technological transformation and I think that the only two elements that we have at our disposal are the affirmation of the deepest spiritual qualities that we have access to, and also the, steadfast and just obstinate to insist on saying no.
Because more and more these systems of compliance are going to impose themselves on us.
You've got a lot of practice during the pandemic and when to say no and how to say no.
I think that skill will be very useful going forward because more impositions are on the way.
Joe, thank you so much for joining us. I'll just leave the viewer and listener once again with Dr. Naomi Wolf's recommendation. Joe Allen's Dark Aeon is the first comprehensive critical analysis of the planned post-human future.
It will give you great clarity as well as nightmares. Allen has long been our most thoughtful authority on this ill-understood catastrophe, and no one who wants humanity to survive should ignore his warnings here. And people can get it everywhere. The links are on the description. Joe, I appreciate you coming along and sharing the book, which is, congratulations, it is a fantastic book and certainly should be read by everyone. So thanks for coming on and sharing insights from the book.
Peter, I really appreciate it, man. Thank you very much.
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