Biohacking

Opportunity or Madness?

Recently, I flew from Munich to Toronto for a business appointment. To shorten the time, I watched the Hollywood movie "Morbius". It is about a terminally ill scientist who wants to defeat his disease and therefore extends his genes with bat genes. It comes as it must: His experiment goes wrong. Although he conquers his disease and partially gains superpowers, he has to accept that he becomes more and more a deadly danger.

In the process, I again became aware of how many - especially US films - deal with this kind of "self-improvement". Whether unintentionally (Spider-Man - Bite of a Spider) or intentionally (Batman) - it is ultimately always about creating a perfect creature out of a limited being. In the X-Men film series, this is pushed even further. Here, the next logical stage of evolution is the creation of super-powered humans through natural mutations, who are then in turn seen as a threat by the "normals," fellow humans not blessed with supernatural powers. The development to a super being corresponds in principle to the classical American dream of the "dishwasher to the millionaire", which says that everyone with sufficient willpower and sufficient skill can determine its fate and drive it to the optimum.

The big illusion

Perhaps that may have been the case in the past. In our present time of globalization and perfidious manipulation, this is only an illusion, which interestingly enough is not yet perceived by many. The dream factory "Hollywood" ensures, at least in the western nations, a perpetuation of the deception. Social critics call this - in reference to the film of the same name - "the matrix". We are not aware that we are limited by our society, its structures and its leaders, and thus by our ultimately self-established limits, and so we willingly allow ourselves to be manipulated into eagerly believing that only the sky is our limit. Our naivety is only surpassed by our self-deception.

They trigger us to want to constantly improve ourselves without realizing that we are just right the way we are

This gives rise to a paradox: social media like Instagram, which perfidiously ensure that we compare ourselves with posed, artificial and thus unachievable ideals and thus set ourselves goals that are not real, but - and this is the diabolical thing about it - seem real to us. It is in the nature of things that we can never reach these non-real goals. They trigger us to want to constantly improve ourselves without realizing that we are just right the way we are.

A beautiful literary example from the 19th century is the short story "The Birthmark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Here, the obsession of a husband is described, who does not want to accept a birthmark on the cheek of his beautiful wife and visibly sees it as a "flaw". Although she enchanted him at the beginning with her beauty, he focuses more and more on this one "flaw" which also leads to the fact that his wife herself no longer sees the mark as something "magical" and natural, but as a symbol of decay and death and wants nothing more than to be freed from it and thus ultimately also from the critical looks of her husband. The liberation from it, however, is at the same time her death sentence, because it makes her too perfect to be a living creature. The song by Nick Cage and the Bad Seeds in the duet with Kylie Minogue "Where the wild roses grow" goes in a similar direction, in which a man slays a woman who is too beautiful to fit into this life ("all beauty must die"). Death as ultimate perfection, as punishment for striving for divine purity.

With it the irrational is exhausted to the utmost. We desire total perfection, which we cannot actually achieve and which, should we nevertheless succeed, would turn us into something God-like and thus inevitably lead to death.

We don't want to admit how much the society we have built limits our ability to evolve

But it is precisely this desire to strive for improvement, which is part of human evolution, that Hollywood reinforces so that the awareness of our own insignificance in today's society does not become too painful.

We don't want to admit how much the society we have built limits our ability to evolve. How creativity and uniqueness are no longer desired and the siren of ubiquitous narratives strictly dictates our direction of march. "Swarm intelligence" as the ultima ratio. Something in us, however, intuitively resists this. But instead of changing our society and with it our reality, we doctor on ourselves and try to tread the new path of "biohacking". What we can't do with our own intellect and our inability to break out of social patterns is to be fixed by manipulating our genes. There is no question that there are scientifically fascinating technologies for this purpose, which have their justification in the healing of rare diseases. But humans want more and a mere niche application for new procedures is too little for them. However, it is completely forgotten or simply suppressed that we have by no means reached the end of our natural evolution. How could we? People are constantly changing beings who can never stay still and who are always adapting and reinventing themselves in response to their environment.

The fast track

Instead, we want a "fast track" that leads away from the arduous path of self-knowledge and self-development and towards the "superbeing" - a path that the Nazis and eugenicists had already seen as a tempting possibility. The "process" is to be skipped and the goal is to be reached directly.

Analogous to computer science, "biohacking" allows us to gain direct access to happiness, health and prosperity through a "hack". The ultimate goal is a god-like being, Homo Deus, as the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari unapologetically proposes.

Yet it is nothing more than a red carrot that is held up to our mouths like a hungry donkey. We are supposed to become blind to the social circumstances that make the optimal development of each individual so difficult. Instead, we are supposed to focus on the supposed shortcut and seek our well-being in it.

His dreams of creating new life are an expression of his helplessness to exist in the here and now

We see that this perfidious deception works in the DIY (do it yourself) biohacking groups that are emerging around the world, mostly consisting of non-professionals seeking their salvation in the manipulation of biology. Such is the case with Keoni Gandall, a young man who undertook his first cloning experiments at age 12.

"I dream of a day when we can design life from scratch," he explained. "I want to sit down at a computer and be able to design a life form completely unknown to this world and be able to bring it alive from chemicals within a matter of days/weeks." In his naivety, Keith doesn't even realize that he wants to be a modern Frankenstein.

His dreams of creating new life are an expression of his helplessness to exist in the here and now. Like a junkie, he seeks ultimate satisfaction in biohacking, improving existing life and creating new life. Homo Deus, the highest stage of evolution.

Yet we haven't even begun to realize the full potential of our lives and experience true happiness and satisfaction. Caught up in materialism, which makes us believe nothing that is not measurable, and on the leap to molecularism, which is supposed to create at the molecular level what we have failed to create at the macro level, we forget our roots in spirituality and allow a deviant transhumanism to be imposed on us almost without resistance, which is supposed to further "improve" us all. This transhumanism is an evil fantasy of an alliance of the World Economic Forum (WEF), its young leaders in our governments, and the major technology companies of our time.

It is forgotten that exactly this immune system is the guarantee that we as mankind could develop so far at all

Biohacking is to become a natural part of us. The mRNA injection, which uses our protein biosynthesis apparatus to have genetically modified viral components produced directly in our bodies by modified mRNA strands, supposedly making us even ( immune ) stronger, is only a first step on this false biohacking path. We do not want to realize that the companies are primarily concerned with a drastic reduction in manufacturing costs, which they successfully sell to us as a fast and innovative method of adapting to new pathogens at the expense of safety.

The exhausting path of self-discipline, which combines the right diet with sufficient exercise and optimal regeneration and thus leads to an - one almost does not want to believe it today - extremely strong immune system, is to be replaced by a simple injection. It is forgotten that exactly this immune system is the guarantee that we as mankind could develop so far at all. Instead, transhumanism is supposed to be the "accelerator" that brings us salvation from diseases and epidemics. A threatening dystopia is being built up, from which we can only escape through new biohacking methods.

The decline of our microbiome

Our microbiome, i.e. the totality of all microorganisms in our body, is a perfect indicator of our misguided path. In the last centuries, due to external environmental and nutritional influences, its diversity has drastically decreased. Yet it has been the basis of our evolution. Without the ever-increasing genetic diversity of bacteria and viruses within us, we would not have been able to survive. But this enrichment has been stopped by our way of life, by pharmaceuticals and by the poisons we produce.

Now we are literally degenerating along with our microbiome. Physically and psychologically. Treatment for depression and prescriptions for psychiatric drugs have reached an all-time high worldwide. Our pruned microbiome can no longer serve us in the way it has for the last several ten thousand years.

So wouldn't it be appropriate to consider what has caused the decline in diversity and how we might powerfully address it? Instead, we try to further develop our body with technical means without realizing that we only accelerate its regression.

Wouldn't it finally be appropriate to dare to break out of the matrix?

But we should finally ask ourselves if our obvious mental and physical decay does not have a cause. We should finally ask ourselves if the path our society has taken is not perhaps leading us to a dead end. We should finally ask ourselves whether we should not question much more, if not everything. Wouldn't it finally be appropriate to dare to break out of the matrix?

Instead, we blindly follow the red carrot.

But there is a way out of this situation. When we finally accept without compromise that materialism, molecularism and transhumanism, which is already on the rise, have turned us into beings far too far from our true roots. What we have become is not the best of human evolution, but an aberration, a turn into a dead end.

Only when this painful self-realization has relentlessly matured within us, only then is the path of healing possible.

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Sources and further reading:

Karl Gruber; Biohackers - A growing number of amateurs join the do-it-yourself molecular biology movement outside academic laboratories; DOI 10.15252/embr.201948397 | EMBO Reports (2019) 20: e48397

Mirjam Grewe-Salfeld; Biohacking, Bodies and Do-It-Yourself; The Cultural Politics of Hacking Life Itself

Credit Photo:

Giovanni Cancemi - Fotolia