P. A. Ritzer, Volume 32
Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”
Another extension of the culture of death into human sexuality and fertility is in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has taken its place in the news lately, in a most disappointing way, with President Trump’s support of it. In vitro means in glass. In glass. Fertilization, conception of human beings, in glass. How does that comport with the Christian understanding that every child has the right to be conceived in a loving act between a man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony? Instead we have scientists harvesting ova and sperm from two people; brewing up a batch of embryos (each of which upon fertilization has an immortal human soul); evaluating the embryos for suitability in their little project; choosing the most suitable; then implanting, freezing, or discarding their siblings. And if too many of them “take” upon implanting, they can always be clinically murdered by “selective reduction.” These are all human beings being treated like the products of a science experiment if not a baking class. No one has the right to play the false god and devalue human life like that.
And there are a whole host of other contingencies involved in IVF that are beyond the scope of this article. It is diabolical. There are humane alternatives for the infertile, like treatments developed at the St. Paul VI Institute and adoption. In yet another Tucker Carlson interview in Rosenberg, Texas on 18 September 2024, Nicole Shanahan, running mate of Robert Kennedy, Jr., said of IVF:
Being a mother turned out to be a very convoluted experience, it turns out in this country right now. And, if you’re a liberal woman, you’re told, “Go harvest your eggs and freeze them.” They tell you that now really early on. . . . I walked away with an understanding that science is also not what they’re telling us today. That there’s this corporate world that, in the case of IVF, runs the IVF clinics. And the science of IVF is actually not based in well-researched, well-documented foundational science. Um, it works—it was discovered out of cancer-research dollars—but if you actually look at the investment in women’s health, it’s, it’s not there. And ovarian function, it’s the least studied organ in the body, arguably the most important. . . .
And so I started to fund the science, and, and that’s when I, I first came across transhumanism. And transhumanism is very real. It’s this idea that technology can replace human function. Um, and so I put $100 million into understand how to make and keep healthy women healthy, but all these transhumanists, all these transhumanists—right, what a novel idea, let’s keep women healthy so that we can have healthy babies, the most important thing in the world. Um, but the transhumanists wanted to build artificial wombs with these grants. They wanted to study IVG, um, which is creating gametes, eggs, out of the human stem cells just from your skin. And there’s a company, uh, called Conception, that actually just had mice give birth to five pups, um, with two male, uh, donors. And, and so, you know, I, it’s very real, transhuman. I’m, I’m in Silicon Valley, I’m in tech, I, I see all this stuff daily. Um, and it made me question, you know, if we are at a time in human history where we have to pause to really think about where this is all going. And I was slowly being labeled anti-science as a result of that.1
Outdated! The world view that is continually pushed on us as science-based by every aspect—not just scientific and medical, but political, social, educational, broadcast—of our culture is “outdated.”
Instead, Ms. Shanahan’s concern about transhumanism—which is in effect de-humanism—and “where this is all going” and her questioning if “we have to pause,” far from being “anti-science,” may in reality be an awakening from the mechanistic, technical “science,” that has held sway since the Enlightenment, to the real, authentic science into which quantum mechanics, complex and dynamic systems theory, and chaos theory give us a glimpse. According to Mattias Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, transhumanism “is a contemporary iteration of the mechanistic ideology that considers it desirable, even necessary, that future humans merge physically and mentally with machines.” He further writes: “The fourth industrial revolution, in which man is expected to physically merge with technology—the tranhumanist ideal—is increasingly seen as an unavoidable necessity. . . . Anyone who refuses to go along with the technological solution is naive and ‘unscientific.’”2
Professor Desmet elaborates:
The greater the impact of mechanistic science on the world, the more it becomes clear that we’re creating problems for which we can hardly find a solution. . . .
It is here that we, together with Hannah Arendt, situate the undercurrent of totalitarianism: a naive belief that a flawless, humanoid being and a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge.(26) The Nazi idea of creating a purebred superman based on eugenics and social Darwinism, and the Stalinist ideal of a proletarian society based on historical-materialism are prototypical examples, as is the current rise of transhumanism. . . .
As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise: “Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.(28)”3
And Desmet exposes not only what the mechanistic ideology has done to people and culture but how it is, in fact, obsolete:
The mechanistic ideology has put more and more individuals into a state of social isolation, unsettled by a lack of meaning, free-floating anxiety and uneasiness, as well as latent frustration and aggression. These conditions led to large-scale and long-lasting mass formation, and this mass formation in turn led to the emergence of totalitarian state systems.
Therefore, mass formation and totalitarianism are in fact symptoms of the mechanistic ideology. . . .
This ideology sees the universe as a logically knowable, predictable, controllable, and undirected mechanical process. And above all, it sees the universe as a dead and meaningless given, as the blind, mechanistic interaction between dead, elementary particles. While such a view of the world and matter imposes itself as the only scientifically valid view, a thorough examination teaches us that, from a scientific point of view, this world view is actually outdated.4
Under the influence of mechanistic ideology, the step from progressivism to the Animal Farm is a short one.
Outdated! The world view that is continually pushed on us as science-based by every aspect—not just scientific and medical, but political, social, educational, broadcast—of our culture is “outdated.” Outdated. Reflect on that. And the totalitarianism that results from it is ubiquitous and insidious:
However, it would be a capital mistake to identify the phenomenon of totalitarianism only in totalitarian regimes. There is an ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge. Technocratic thinking always walks on two legs. On the one hand, it appeals to people by intimating a positive image of an artificial paradise with which it claims we can be delivered from all adversity and suffering. On the other hand, it imposes itself based on anxiety, as a necessity to solve problems. With every “object of anxiety” that has emerged in our society in recent decades—terrorism, the climate problem, the coronavirus—this process has leapt forward.5
But Professor Desmet makes it clear that we need no longer fall under this totalitarianism. He asks the question: “Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?”6 He writes that, within the complex and dynamic systems theory and the chaos theory, “perhaps a person’s greatest task” is:
To discover the timeless principles of life, in and through all the complexity of existence. The better we can sense those principles, the more we feel that we start to understand some of the essence of life and that we are connected with the majestic, ordering principle that speaks to us from across the universe. And the more we stick to our principles, . . . the more real these principles become and the more we develop, as human beings, a real sense of existence and fortitude.7
“Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?” —Mattias Desmet
The discovery and commitment to principles is not limited to individuals alone but also to societies:
A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to “the collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity. The belief in the mechanistic nature of the universe and the associated overestimation of the powers of human intellect, typical of the Enlightenment, were accompanied by a tendency to lead society in a less and less principled manner. . . . In the final analysis, it was no longer a question for Enlightenment people to adhere to commandments or prohibitions or ethical and moral principles, but to move through this struggle for survival in the most efficient way possible based on “objective knowledge” of the world. This culminated in totalitarian and technocratic forms of government, where decisions are not made on the basis of generally applicable laws and principles but on the basis of the analysis of “experts.” For this reason, totalitarianism always chooses to abolish laws, or fails to implement them, and prefers to rule “by decree.” This means that, each new situation will require the formulation of new rules on the basis of a (pseudo)rational assessment of such situation. History abundantly illustrates that this leads to erratic, absurd, and ever-changing rules, which ultimately destroy all humanity in society.8
Under the influence of mechanistic ideology, the step from progressivism to Animal Farm is a short one.
But quantum mechanics, complex and dynamic systems theory, and chaos theory liberate us from the mechanistic ideology of the Enlightenment to again seek an authentic humanism in light of “consciousness” and “the Other.” Professor Desmet articulates a hopeful future: “Chaos theory heralds, maybe even more than quantum mechanics, the era that historically and logically follows the Enlightenment; an era when the universe is once again pregnant with meaning.”9
A universe “pregnant with meaning.” How much does that intuitively resonate with each one of us? True science has moved beyond the barren atheism of mechanistic ideology. Professor Desmet quotes Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated the quantum theory, “Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.”10 And Desmet makes clear that, “Great scientists have left the logical-factual discourse of science behind and returned in an enlightened way to the type of discourse that during the Enlightenment was initially deemed subordinate: a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind.”11 Please do not gloss over that. Consider it again and what it could mean for the culture and world in which we live: “a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind.”
And that is where we will wrap up Part Nine. Part Ten should follow shortly.
Thank you,
P. A. Ritzer
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©2025 P. A. Ritzer
Nicole Shanahan, “Jesse Kelly & Nicole Shanahan: Transhumanism, Kamala’s Plan to Take Your Guns, and How to Save Texas, The Tucker Carlson Show: Speeches (18 September 2024), 0:28:27 ff., TCN, accessed 31 December 2024, https://tuckercarlson.com/jesse-kelly-tour.
Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2022), 45, 176.
Ibid., 46, 47, 48 (including endnotes 26 and 28 in original):
“26 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: 507.”
“28 Eric Voegelin, ‘The Origins of Scientism,’ Social Research: An International Quarterly15, no. 4 (December 1948): 462-94, cited in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: 453.”
Ibid., 147, 148.
Ibid., 176.
Ibid., 61.
Ibid., 157.
Ibid., 157-58.
Ibid., 150, 160.
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. Frank Gaynor (New York Philosophical Library: 1949; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971): 184, cited in Desmet, Psychology, 179.
Desmet, Psychology, 180.
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