THE RACE BEYOND MAN

Man has brought about his own downfall - through the Machine.

What began with the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe has gathered worldwide momentum as it accelerates towards its apotheosis in the Cyborg, not only robots and cybernetics, but the actual supersession of Man through cyborgistic self-overcoming and the eventual rule of the race destined to supplant the human race in the evolutionary chain.

Even now man is nothing to himself or to others; a mere means, as salesmen, to the end of the Machine or, for those with the latest technologies, a vehicle for their utilization and implementation, by which I mean the pleasure of using them on others or showing off their use or just being seen with them, with a view to enhancing one's prestige as somebody who, scarcely human any more, is nevertheless 'with it', if not exactly hip then at least trendy, and able to impress others with one's technological prowess or, as some might say, know-how.

With a dwindling number of exceptions, people are no longer interested in people for their own sake; only on account of the machines they possess or, failing that, their willingness to act as technological guinea pigs or to submit to inter-machine relationships. When, for instance, they communicate with one another (to the extent that they still do) via their mobile phones or their laptops or tablets or pocket PCs or what have you, most of them are actually communicating with their machines, with the person with whom they are in conversation as a kind of means to that end, an opportunity to use the cell phone or hand-held device or whatever.

Many if not most conversations could just as easily be carried on face-to-face, over dinner or in some public space, not to say in the privacy of one's home, but, although a degree of that necessarily still happens (doubtless after a desultory fashion), such a back-to-nature approach to human relations wouldn't suit those for whom other people are merely a voice, necessarily distorted and/or transmuted, coming out of their machines or perhaps even a photo or video which it has been the good fortune of somebody to send by way of proving their ability to do so and aptitude for the 'high life'.

Then they have contemporary value and can be accorded a degree of qualified respect. But as people in their own right, independently of the photos or text messages or calls, forget it! The age of humanism is dead or dying, and dying so fast that nothing but a faint echo of former times remains, times when it was still possible, despite the gradual encroachment of the Machine, to hold actual face-to-face conversations with somebody.

Oh well, what the hell. Man's overcoming will be all the easier for the race that lies beyond mankind, like an alien in his flying saucer or space ship, who is only interested in his final downfall, his last gasping breath and ultimate demise. That day is not so far off as some people may think; for man has paid a considerable price for his industrial and technological gains, a price akin to having sold his soul to the Devil in return for material wealth and so-called technological progress, and there is only one way that he can be redeemed and rescued, by a godly race enamoured of Heaven, from the sorry state of hollowness, or loss of soul, in which he now finds himself, and that is through the eventual filling of the void of that hollowness with artificial or synthetic substances that will return him to something approaching a state of grace, not, however, as a human being (which to all intents and purposes he ceased to be some time ago), but as a higher order of being akin to the Cyborg that, with the benefit of enhanced technology and new, altogether unprecedented applications of cybernetics to himself, will have the ability to handle the synthetic enhancements of self, and therefore of soulful being (coupled, subordinately, with pseudo-wilful pseudo-doing for pseudo-females), in a way and to a degree that would be impossible on any other basis, including the contemporary pro-superhuman basis that is in large part a revolt against the Machine and its materialistic culture but not, on that account, the final solution to the problem of what happens when the world becomes nothing more than the technological plaything of the Devil.