It doesn’t take a prophet or a philosopher to see that technological progress isn’t leading us into some futuristic utopia. Quite the opposite: it’s amplifying and instrumentalizing the worst aspects of human nature — for domination, for power, for the indulgence of our appetites, above all for mastery over the created order, including over death itself.
The desire for immortality is of course what’s behind the transhumanist movement. For as much as our cultural discourse these days focuses on transgenderism, that’s a relatively minor aspect of the larger ideology of transhumanism, to which many of our tech elites in Silicon Valley, the people who are building out artificial intelligence, openly subscribe.
That being the case, one of the things we need to wrap our heads around as we march further into the era of AI and mass digital technology, is that everything that can be done with technology will be done.
That doesn’t just mean we might find a cure for cancer, or invent a source of renewable clean energy. It also means the transhumanist dream of immortality will turn into a demonic, inhuman nightmare. Forget about transgender medical mutilation, as evil as that is. I’m talking about things like the development of artificial wombs, human-animal chimeras, and clones grown in a lab for the purpose of harvesting organs and blood.
These aren’t things that might happen in some sci-fi future, they’re beginning to happen now. Bryan Johnson, the Silicon Valley tycoon who believes he can reverse the aging process through technology — and is experimenting on himself, in a very public way, to prove it — announced this week that he has cloned himself for the purpose of growing replacement organs and harvesting blood.
“I just cloned myself… as a newborn,” Johnson wrote on X. “This baby-bryan lives in a petri dish for now. This may be scary to some people … a dystopian future. But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.”
While Johnson might not have a full-grown body double he’s keeping in a lab somewhere, what he’s done looks forward to a future where that might be possible — indeed, is likely inevitable (note that he says his clone is in a petri dish “for now”). Johnson had his blood drawn, cells extracted, and then reprogrammed as stem cells. With these cells, he can in theory grow spare body parts, organs for transplantation, inject “young cells,” and, as Johnson puts it, “become my own blood boy.”
He intends to do all of that, and possibly more. Johnson, who often appears in public wearing a “don’t die” T-shirt, believes these technologies can reduce what he calls his “biological age.” This will be accomplished, he believes, in part by turning over all his choices to specially-created AIs that dictate what he eats, when he sleeps, what he does. Almost every aspect of his life is determined by what this technology tells him to do. It is, for him, a kind of god that he serves.
Johnson first became widely known a few years ago when TIME Magazine featured him in a puff profile. I wrote about him in my book, Pagan America, as an example of how the transhumanist movement is a form of neopaganism that will treat AI like a new form of deity, veritably worshipping it in exchange for powers and abilities that would otherwise be out of reach — like prolonged life.
The desire for prolonged or eternal life is of course a perennial aspect of the human condition. In ages past, a witch or a pagan priest might consume the blood of a sacrificial victim for this purpose. Not much has changed in our time. In Johnson’s case, early on in his experiment he injected himself with the blood plasma of his 18-year-old son in hopes it would reverse his own aging process. He abandoned the practice only because it didn’t produce results.
Unfortunately for Johnson, all pagan systems rely on some form of human sacrifice. In the emerging neopagan future, amid the decline of Christian civilization, human sacrifice will return in new forms. Indeed, new technologies have already inaugurated new forms of human sacrifice, like the creation of clones by the ultrawealthy for the purpose of harvesting organs and blood.
Make no mistake: what we have here is a form of paganism and human sacrifice, enhanced and to some extent hidden by the wonders of modern technology. But the basic worldview is unmistakably pagan: in exchange for fealty and sacrifice to a god, a person will be given power. That’s the bargain Johnson is making, whether he fully realizes it or not.
Critics will dismiss this argument as irrational fearmongering, the objections of Luddites and fundamentalists. The benefits that come with the progress of science and technology, they’ll say, cannot be denied.
But there is no point in counting the benefits without counting the cost. The cost, in this case, is our humanity—and the lives of countless sacrificial victims. We see this is the practice of abortion, IVF, and euthanasia. In each of these cases, the dignity of the unborn child or the elderly or the infirm is violated. In countries like Canada, euthanasia is quickly becoming mainstream, offered to the sick and dependent by a medical establishment that would rather administer death than cure disease. These things are always euphemistically presented as a form of “health care,” which is exactly what Johnson does, calling his clone-harvesting scheme “the future of health.”
It’s important, then, to call these things by their true names. In the case of technology that allows us to create clones for the purpose of harvesting organs and blood, it’s a form of slavery and human sacrifice. As such, it’s also a great crime, a wicked and demonic practice that should, in a civilized society, be outlawed. All the tech jargon in the world won’t change that.
https://thefederalist.com/2026/07/23/our-transhumanist-sci-fi-future-has-arrived-but-youre-not-going-to-like-it/
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