The Extropy Stopgap
Establishing Government Imperils Human Transcendence
“Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insisted upon”
— Terence McKenna
The extropy stopgap is the irrational resistance to human liberation that would otherwise lead to the political and technological transcendence of the species. In loftier language, the singularity as popularized by Ray Kurzweil or the Eschaton as promoted by Terence Mckenna, represents a departure from our Darwinian heritage.
This departure denotes the human merger or fusion with machine that guarantees our place in the future and universe as transcended entities. For the sake of clarity, I will define “extropy” and “extropian” prior to discussing the stopgap-related kerfuffle.
Extropy is the opposite of entropy; where entropy denotes movement toward chaos and disorder, extropy is the tendency toward order, emergence, and equilibrium. An extropian is a transhumanist who believes people should use technology and science to enhance human form and function for the purpose of increasing lifespan, upgrading the self synthetically, defying death, and promoting radical freedom based on an ethics of individuality. To wit, Extropians promote order instead of chaos as a prima facie value.
Importantly, extropians vie for open societies, voluntary interaction, and civilizing organizational structures. They seek to put the “civil” into civilization to more rapidly institute lasting improvements to the human condition.
In this article, I’ll explore the concept of the extropy stopgap and how we might overcome it to better the species…if not radically transform our physical, meat-substantiated death traps called bodies into something that can withstand entropic heat decay. First, a bit about the human history and its condition.
Human Prehistory and the Battle Against Entropy
”Humanity” is an enterprise of biological life seeking to continuously optimize survival while increasing each individual’s opportunity to breed and spread genetic material. Homo sapiens have so far triumphed over tumultuous living conditions on a hostile, or at least indifferent, planet; a stellar orb teeming with a panoply of natural threats.
In the earliest days, the canopied jungles of Africa jettisoned the first ancestors of humans from their paradisical Eden and laid them down on bloodstained grasslands, where they became meal tickets for large, predatory cats.
It is at this juncture in prehistory when humans had no choice but to hone their survival instinct. They were launched into a matrix of evolutionary maturation that included a necessary process of technological invention and innovation. They had to adapt or be eaten.
Humans began to slowly — and then rapidly — modernize to dominate the natural world. They created tools, weapons, cooking, language, religion, and a constant outpour of versatile technologies that culminated in the agricultural revolution and the eventual rise of nation states. Ever since the fateful expulsion from their earthly heaven, the human creature has mostly sought not only to better itself, but to stave off entropy — the chaos that results in the breakdown of order that leads to disequilibrium and demise of the flesh.
At its heart, the human endeavor is about exploiting the internal world of mind and the external world of matter to overcome entropy; it is about the drive to sustain its genetic lineage through transformation. Humankind is necessarily anti-entropic, because the species represents a higher degree of order and novelty produced by nature…if only every person would embrace their essence as an extropy-amplifying being.
The Extropian Animal and Break from Nature
The survival instinct of an animal that learns to manipulate nature, deploy toolmaking, and command the power of rational thought, is effectively a deus ex machina: a god crafted from the machine.
Terrence McKenna in one of his many poetically, if not mind-bendingly charged lectures, said “nature is a novelty producing engine.” He suggested nature is a creative force that is geared to — through the enginelike procession of mutation and natural selection — generate as many differentiated lifeforms imaginable. The result of this unstoppable proliferation of forms results in many new species and a plethora of emergent systems and properties.
McKenna undoubtedly took a metaphysical and “New Mysterian” view of nature through the eccentric lens of an Aristotelian Prime Mover, which intended for the human animal to depart from nature and merge with the logos. This gnarly apocalyptic prophecy represents his belief about the coming “eschaton,” or the divine event at the end of time where humanity sloughs off its animal skin and meets with the strange attractor (his version of a mathematico-linguistic-informational God) at the end of history.
Similarly — though from a more secular and technological perspective — futurist and visionary Ray Kurzweil suggested we are hurtling toward a singularity event. The singularity is a point in time when humanity fully merges with machine and makes itself unrecognizable and estranged from its carbon-based origins. In the same vein as McKenna, Kurzweil views history as a “cumulative process of revelation.”
Regardless of the specifics of this final event, singularly, or eschaton, both McKenna and Kurzweil emphasize the role in technology as the catalyst. Both thinkers view this ecstatic finale as a great and glorious achievement; a moment when humans become one with the godhead, or at very least become machinelike and immortal. It is a form of transcendence that mitigates suffering and allows the species to embrace its birthright as the extropic stuff of stars.
Government: The Stopgap to Transcendence
The state of the world and universe is naturally entropic, though. Things decay into a gooey sputum of chaos and death and swirling atomic Skittles. The problem is so many people have embraced anti-extropic philosophies, as a result of fear, Luddism, propaganda, and primal attitudes toward advancement. They have maneuvered to block and erode the pathways to transcendence.
Humanity, however, possesses the wherewithal and the creative vitality to hurry the singularity along and save everyone from the terminal nature of mortal life…if only they would understand the gravity of the current situation, and that there is a singularly problematic obstacle to transcendence: government.
Government is the idea that entropy must be codified as rules and laws that should be enforced by raw aggression. Put another way, government is entropy encapsulated, celebrated, and meted out on the unwitting masses. Having politically-oriented government, then, is a lowest-common-denominator view that suggests humans believe they are merely biological clocks ticking down to a definite and irreversible fatality. In this sense, their modus operandi is to control, kill, maim, maintain, and sustain their power for the little time they exist. Politicking and the human-centric urgency to control each other then actively spins up more and more entropy, keeping all peoples relegated to the realm of animal barbarism.
If everyone were to ally to invalidate the extropy stopgap, we would unleash a veritable tidal wave of creativity, experimentation, and superabundance. We already know the evolution from tribal gangster to hacker capitalist has provided a fertile ground for technological proliferation and growth toward the singularity event. We simply need to widen the net of innovation by abolishing government to deploy all of our combined extropian gusto.
In his “Extropian Principles,” Max More summed up his perspective of widening the net of innovation through freedom of expression. He said:
Extropians value open societies that protect the free exchange of ideas, the freedom to criticize, and the liberty to experiment. More dangerous than bad ideas is the coercive suppression of bad ideas. Better ideas must be allowed to emerge in our institutions through an evolutionary process of creation, mutation, and critical selection. The freedom of expression of an open society is best protected by a social order characterized by voluntary relationships and exchanges. We oppose self-proclaimed and involuntarily imposed "authorities", and we are skeptical of coercive political solutions, unquestioning obedience to leaders, and inflexible hierarchies that smother initiative and intelligence.
Conclusion
This initiative and intelligence Max mentions undergirds the truth about humankind. Though flawed and prone to habituated aggression, we are all extropy-amplifying creatures. In the current state of affairs, most people embrace entropic doomsaying and wallowing in misery. They see life as a vat of existential woe without a guiding light or intrinsic meaning.
In this regard, the species has been hesitant to break fully from its animalistic nature and shed its entropic husk. Yet, if we can eliminate government to pave the path toward greater extropy — and eventual departure from the body — the meaning of humanity will be spelled out under the light of transcendental, everlasting transformation. We just need to cleanse the stopgap; create open societies, and allow full ingenuity to flower in its most effervescent fashion.
The singularity, or the eschaton, may indeed be near.
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Perhaps it's appropriate that I be the first person to comment on your blog. Thanks for referring to my stuff. We're building something of an extropic coalition here on Substack.