Zoltan Istvan Quotes

The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

It's no use here anymore," Jethro said, "I'm utterly disillusioned with our progress in this klutzy, religion-addicted country.

What seems worst of all, though, is that even the leaders don't recognize this. The greatest danger of the whole mess is that all this Western-American conditioning has been on autopilot for centuries. Nobody is in control of it anymore. It's a mindless goliath wandering the Earth, devouring lives, erasing potential, and following its every whim—regardless of how irrational, obscene, uneducated, enslaving, or backwards its actions are. The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

The bold code of the transhumanist will rise. That's an inevitable, undeniable fact. It's embedded in the undemocratic nature of technology and our own teleological evolutionary advancment. It is the future. We are the future like it or not. And it needs to molded, guided, and handled correctly by the strength and wisdom of transhumanist scientists with their nations and resources standing behind them, facilitating them. It needs to be supported in a way that we can make a successful transition into it, and not sacrifice ourselves—either by its overwhelming power or by a fear of harnessing that power. You need to put your resources into the technology. Into our education system. Into our universities, industries, and ideas. Into the strongest of our society. Into the brightest of our society. Into the best of our society So that we can attain the future.

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone.

Anything that uses unbroken, infallible logic will, by its nature, attain pure evil.

Transhumanists have a unique definition: Death is a malfunction of the human experience.

Give every sane and rational person a big red button to push to achieve instantaneous omnipotence, and all of them would quickly jam their fingers down on it.

Jethro, be reasonable. I'm here by order of the President. Do you understand? The President of the United States—the most powerful man in the world.” “Anyone who swears on a Bible to get inaugurated into his job doesn't qualify as powerful to me.

This powerful psychological addiction of worrying about what others think of you, and about what is socially acceptable to others, has been systematically instilled in humans for thousands of years, perpetrated by every world religion, ethnicity, and government.

What prompts alarm in me is how you and your government want to ruin not only the potential of this of this country, but also the path of those who are going to transition into more advanced beings in search of immortality and omnipotence, and maybe even participate in a great singularity. These advances are going to pass, one way or another. And your current second-rate moral system—your weak, pretend-God-will-take-care-of-us bullshit—is a waste for our species' possibilities. You people want to pretend that democracy, religious inspiration, and unbridled consumerism are going to last forever and carry us all to bliss; that the American Dream is right around the next corner for everyone. you spend hundreds of billions of dollars on lazy welfare recipients, on mentally challenged people, on uneducated repeat criminals, on obese second-rate citizens bankrupting our medical system, on murderous war machines fighting for oil and your oligarchy's pet projects in far off places. All so you maintain your puny forms of power and sleep better at night.

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan. “Well, in a way,” he said, “it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?” “I do,” I said. “Although I’m guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind.” “That’s correct,” he confirmed. “It took a little while for her to come around to the idea.” “How did you break it to her?” “I left a note on the refrigerator,” he said, “and went out for a couple hours.

Currently, many transhuman scientists were secretly working at night on their projects in university labs. Or in their own garages with inferior scientific equipment bought secondhand off the Internet. Many used their own negligible funds and resources to try to accomplish their research. Some were Nobel Prize recipients who were all but outcasts in their own nation. It was an appalling, embarrassing way to move their immensely promising fields ahead. Perhaps, if we all go back to riding bicycles and living in teepees we’ll solve global warming too, thought Dr. Cohen, disheartened. He wondered whether the world was teetering on the brink of a second Dark Ages. His mind flashed to Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno—scientists who were chastised or burned at the stake for their revolutionary ideas that later propelled civilization forward. Why are people always so stupid and afraid? thought Dr. Cohen in dour frustration, running fingers through his mushroom hair.     Chapter

It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important than water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes? And that ‘In God We Trust’ is on every U.S. dollar in circulation? Or that ‘One nation under God’ is recited every day in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

The Three Laws:   1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.   2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.   3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

Jethro, however, rarely listened to people. Or noticed them at all. Even if he looked a person directly in the eye, he often failed to recognize anything of utility. Jethro perceived their presence, the space they took up, the resources they used on his planet. His brain interpreted the matter and energy they possessed, but unless there was potential for something useful to him, he may as well have been looking at a rock, or a weed, or a broken, outmoded piece of furniture in a junkyard. Jethro only took notice of values, not people.

I think the choice to love someone should be made every day, maybe every hour. That's what makes it special. That’s what makes it authentic. In general, anything that limits options—except the option to be stupid or wrong—is mistaken.

[US futurist and trans-humanism advocate Zoltan Istvan] argues libertarian cience advocates are needed in today's political environment, warning that technology-centric risk-takers are required as a reaction against the rise of ultra-conservative religious ideologies that threaten to stifle not just advances in AI, driverless cars, stem cell research, drones and genetic editing, but also immigration, women's rights and the environment. (p.112-3)

[US futurist and trans-humanism advocate Zoltan Istvan] argues libertarian science advocates are needed in today's political environment, warning that technology-centric risk-takers are required as a reaction against the rise of ultra-conservative religious ideologies that threaten to stifle not just advances in AI, driverless cars, stem cell research, drones and genetic editing, but also immigration, women's rights and the environment.

Is dealing with a tragic past easier when the future is infinite?

Life is essentially a choice between pursuing personal godhood or dust.

Understand that I will make mistakes but will accept them humbly, and not justify myself to them; instead, I will learn from them, and will make fewer and fewer mistakes as the years pass.

Talupa,