Before hanging himself in the cell where he was waiting to be tried for trafficking and sexual exploitation juvenile, Jeffrey Epstein believed in immortality. So much so that, for decades, he used his enormous wealth of money to finance “new theories of biology” that explored how to prolong life or perfect human race.
Epstein did not hide his fascination with transhumanisma controversial intellectual movement that advocates using technology and the science to improve the human being. This philosophy, with multiple currents, embraces everything from the use of contact lenses or exoskeletal prostheses to correct biological “errors”, to human-machine fusion using brain chips or even downloading the mind to the cloud. As its name indicates, this interrelation is temporary, since its mission is that the a wise man evolve towards posthumanisma hypothetical stage in which it is possible to avoid the death.
Critics denounce that transhumanism not only draws on unrealizable fantasies of Science fictionbut it represents a modern version of the eugenicsthe discredited belief that the human race can be perfected by controlling reproduction. This vision, deeply racist and ableist, has historically translated into the forced sterilization of people considered “inferior” such as black people, Jews, gypsies or those with disabilities. No regime has championed these practices more diabolically than the Germany coconut of Adolf Hitlerwho used these ideas to justify a genocide to purify the supposed Aryan race.
Hitler greets the crowd at a sporting event in 1935 / SWR Culture
“Fuck a lot”
The latest declassified documents in USA They shed more light on that dark obsession. Epstein was a supporter of genetic editing. In 2014, he participated in an exclusive “personalized study of longevity“who intended to use the ADN extracted from their saliva to create regenerative medicine and even stem cells, reports the CNN. The convicted pedophile spoke enthusiastically about the genetic differences between whites and blacks with the intellectual Noam Chomskywho rejected his positions, according to a 2016 email. In another, an unknown sender asks him if he has sequenced his genome, to which Epstein jokingly responds that he has “two recessive genes that cause a lot of fucking,” according to files analyzed by Mother Jones. Up to 1,000 women and girls were victims of his network of abuse.
Obsessed with intelligenceEpstein saw himself as the result of genetic superiority. Like a chosen one. Perhaps that is why he planned to impregnate 20 women at once to spread his ADN among humanity, as revealed in 2019 by an investigation by The New York Times. As far as is known, his vision never came to fruition.
Epstein planned to impregnate 20 women at once to spread his DNA among humanity, according to The New York Times
Links with Silicon Valley
The intersection between transhumanism and scientific racism They are not a thing of the past. Part of this pseudoscientific doctrine continues to permeate today, both among radical right parties that see in the immigrants a threat to white homogeneity —Donald Trump has said that they carry “a large number of defective genes”—as in Silicon Valleymecca of the American technology industry. Magnates like Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Peter Thiel (PayPal/Palantir) o Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX) are financing cell rejuvenation or life extension projects. Sometimes, both groups join hands: a technology millionaire financed a global network that promotes eugenics with the help of groups of extreme rightuncovered The Guardian.
Some of the transhumanist currents no longer divide humanity according to race, but rather class. Thus, as the movie predicted Gattaca (1997), imagine a future in which only rich They will be able to afford to use technology to alter their biology, improve and prolong their life. Everyone else will be second-class humans. In USA There are already start-ups that promise to predict the genes of embryos to have children with intelligence or “superior” physical traits, according to The Washington Post. His clients are billionaires like Musk. The richest man in the world shares that fixation on the alleged superiority of some humans over others. “He really wants smart people to have children,” he explained. Shivon Zilismother of four of his fourteen publicly known children. Like Epstein, his procreation is a genetic preservation strategy.
Elon Musk makes a gesture compared to the Nazi salute during one of Trump’s inauguration events on January 20. / ANGELA WEISS / AFP
Epstein reimagined Ancient Rome as that eugenic paradise. “It seems that Greece and Rome had a class society that allowed the upper classes to have more offspring than the lower classes, and greater social mobility based on IQ than our current system,” he explained in one of the emails declassified at the end of January. Roman empire It is another of the obsessions shared between the sexual predator and technological billionaires like Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.
“The highest peaks”
Epstein loved rubbing shoulders with scientific eminences such as Stephen Hawking o Marvin Minskyone of the fathers of the artificial intelligence. Although it was rejected by other prominent thinkers such as the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker or the pioneer of virtual reality Jaron Lanierhis money opened the door to an elite scientific community that allowed him to pursue his eugenic cause.
Unlike his former friend Bill GatesEpstein did not want to “eliminate the poverty” or “cure polio”, as he confessed in a derogatory tone to the magazine Science in a 2017 interview. The influential finance magnate was only interested in “the highest peaks,” emerging fields such as IA and the hypothetical ability to light thinking machines or alternative fields such as cryonics, which proposes freezing deceased humans in liquid nitrogen to, theoretically, revive them in the future.
Epstein belittled that Bill Gates wanted to “eliminate poverty” and assured that he was only interested in financing “the highest peaks”, fields such as AI or the cryogenization of humans.
Before and after being convicted of prostituting a minor, Epstein funded transhumanists like computer scientist Ben Goertzelwho popularized the term General Artificial Intelligence (AGI), a contested term that refers to a IA superior to humans. The work of the German philosopher also donated one million euros Joscha Bachcognitive scientist and AI researcher. In an email, he assures that the fascism is “probably the most efficient and rationally rigorous way of governing,” which the climate change could be “a good way to deal with overpopulation” and that the brains of black children “They are slower to learn high-level concepts” and better suited to a “more hunting and racing-oriented lifestyle,” he reports. MS NOW.
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