Longtermism is communist or fake

Baruch Gottlieb
4 min readDec 21, 2022

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Longtermism is a pathological response to feelings of inadequacy and insignificance when faced with scientific information about the vast space and time scales of the universe. In other words it is a hypermodern form of alienation where a human lifetime and its possible importance is rendered infinitesimal by vast scales of material reality as revealed by the latest science. This dysphoria is exacerbated by the fact that the same science which revealed these realities is proven again and again in every nanosecond of chip level computer operations integrated into hyper-modern normality.

One might concede that longtermists are at least acknowledging the deeper implications of these scientific understandings of the universe. But their response is such abyssal despair and attendant mania, it renders their recognition farcical. And it would be a joke if they were not so petty and at the same time so deleteriously influential in real human politics today.

Human beings have for millennia contemplated the relative insignificance of their travails upon the earth below the starry sky, and this has rendered them even more caring and attentive of their fellow human beings. So why is todays techno-plutocracy so intent on propagating a philosophy of such crushing nihilism that it verges on psychopathic murder-suicide?

Longtermists are an extremist version of what used to be called transhumanists. These are people who at one point thought they could upload themselves into technical apparatus and live forever in some virtual form. With this highly unlikely possibility, involving a pathological reduction of human consciousness to brain-neuron signals, now seemingly never going to happen, the current fantasy involves impregnating many human women in order for their supposedly superior genetic material to eventually colonize the universe, and thus immortalize them. It is the nobility’s age-old self-delusion, the fundamental responsibility of rich dudes to propagate at the expense of everyone else, and if possible, killing everyone else in the process, to ensure that humanity survives. Eugenics.

Yes this is what they claim they believe. And the reasoning they use to justify their superiority is that their suprematist philosophy itself is the post hoc ergo propter hoc “proof” their particular genetic spew will survive all others. In other words, “because we will survive, we will have always been superior”. Lukacs identified this ahistorical self-justification as a key hallmark of fascism, besides being your average plutocrat gaslight to get laid.

So longterminators are fascists using bad science to try to fool people that we do not need to care about people on the earth alive right now, but rather that we should all die so that their progeny can multiply like a hypervirus across distant galaxies.

Survive is the operative word here, and it is not even sure you can call it that. The longterminators’ hyperutilitarian, financialized understanding of value reduces “the good life” to quantifiable pleasure. Their vision of high value is to be highly tittilated. Wannabe longterm head honcho Nick Bostrom, former transhumanist, sees some kind of desirable outcome in a future perpetually wired into computer environments, human potential can envisioned as “value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives’ in vast computer simulations” quoting Bostrom’s essay ‘Astronomical Waste’ (2003). Leaving aside that humanity has been Wired for decades, an extra-terrestrial life interminably fused into a bio-pod, like in the Matrix, perpetually scrolling through the metaverse for cheap thrills, cosplaying orientalised aniMe Wests in order to get each-other off in virtual worlds, in perpetuity, is a rather dim prospect, I don’t believe anyone seriously desires.

And if these virtualized lives are producing value, who recoups that value?The ingrained narcissism of these soi-disant altruists, their suprematist anti-communism doesn’t permit them to see that a far more likely route towards extra-planetary civilization could be achieved through far less “virtual” and much more actual intellectual enhancement through the unlocking of the genius of the proletariat. The proletariat, emancipated from existential urgency, freed to dedicate their vast sensitivities and talents to earnest collaborations on the projects that best serve their material improvement, and to attend to the threats that most menace them, will produce new technologies far more subtle and sophisticated than the clunky machinima imagined in the feeble and terrified psyches of the plutofash.

These, in paranoid delusion, with insignificance licking at the heels, jet around the Earth in psychotic fervour, claiming they must save “humanity’s potential” or kill the planet trying. Their narcissism, vanity and terror prevent them from seeing that the balm for what torments them is right before their eyes in the genius of the masses they loathe and fear. If they are really concerned about the longterm potential of humanity it is communism under the scientific dictatorship of the proletariat that they seek.

But I am not sure the longterminators even really believe their cyborg planetary colonialism narrative. Longtermism might actually be a cynical disingenuous head- fake intending to propagate a green mass-human-extinction process right here on earth, to stop climate change and environmental degradation, so that their progeny can recolonise this planet. Garden of Eden.

Just as how Elon Musk admitted that the Hyperloop was just a ploy to stop high-speed rail, Longtermism might be a ploy to try to get the mass of us off this planet so they can have it for themselves.

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