Or perhaps as an alternate take, I'm thinking to what Francis Fukuyama said about his opposition to transhumanism-that he opposes it because transhumanism, the idea of going beyond human capabilities and modifying or removing human weakness-is fundamentally opposed to humanism, which needs to embrace human diversity and, yes, flaws. What if Mesa is seeing things in the opposite way? What if Mesa sees Sharpton as the enemy because they're explicitly transhumanist, and Mesans are, instead, posthumanist in their philosophy? What if the very reason Sharpton is an enemy rather than a fellow traveler is that Sharpton wishes to use genetic modification, surgical augmentation, and cybernetic interfacing to round off human weaknesses-to make humans 'more human' as it were, while Mesa thinks that doing so is building a skyscraper on shaky foundations?
I would oppose the term
posthumanist here because for me it primarily refers to a trend in contemporary humanities (hehe) that seeks to decenter them from focusing so much on the human as the crown of creation (so it is also called postanhropocentrism). But overall, I think I agree, with the caveat that I feel like it is way too easy to buy into Mesan propaganda, the propaganda they not only spread to others, but also to themselves.
If the Alignment meeting reminds me of anything, it is of the stories of Jeffrey Epstein's throng of brains-for-hire cultivating his deeply held belief that he is, indeed, the very specialest human being on the planet. The Alignment has the Best Genes, Folded Over Ten Hundred Generations. They are the prettiest, the smartest! Hell, they even genetically removed their ability to be conformist, which is why they are all in agreement over the plan to make their Most Rational Understanding of What Life Is mandatory for everyone in the galaxy. Their head honcho is a guy who intellectually masturbates himself while having sex with his wife, because his throbbing brain-erection cannot be sated by meme pleasures of the flesh, when compared to the real pleasure organ of his body that is his perfectly-cloned brain.
They are, in short, completely and utterly pathetic. They are the people who, under any other circumstances, and if they were alive today, would make creepy YouTube vidoes with skulls in the background, or demand to see your manager, or write screed to the Quilette about how biological determinism is just biological realism and the stupid feminists don't know about that. But the fact that they are utterly pathetic makes them no less scary, because they have so much power.
Their movement passes itself as visionary, but at the absolute bottom it is a bunch of people who are not just convinced of their own perfection, but also criminally insecure about it. They don't just want to be recognised as the bestest humans, they want to Objectively Biologically Made It So that they are on the top of the human pyramid, where they obviously belong. The scary thing about them is not the power of their ideology, is not their intellect, not even their looks, but the fact that they have enough raw, material resources to wreck the world in the process of trying to make it into their own image.
But that doesn't make them any impressive.
