• The Transhumanist Who Would Be President — re:form — Medium
    https://medium.com/re-form/the-transhumanist-who-would-be-president-8950069ca0a4

    to transhumanists, the idea of redesigning oneself is a literal — and imminent — proposition. For Zoltan Istvan, founder and 2016 presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party, it is also a political one.

    On the surface, Istvan doesn’t look radically different from most presidential candidates. He is white (Hungarian-American, to be precise), male, and Ivy League educated, having studied philosophy and religious studies at Columbia University

    (...) In the past month, I think another fifteen national transhumanist parties have started. The United Kingdom has one, we have one forming in Germany, we have one forming in India. We already have one in Slovakia, one’s developing in Australia. It’s incredible. Everyone is saying it’s time we moved the movement into politics. And there’s been a huge amount of media interest in what a transhumanist-minded president would do differently than a normal politician.

    (...) It’s very tough to say exactly how many transhumanists there are, but I’m guessing there are now about 150,000 in America. But I feel like our community is potentially a few million people.

    (...) it’s very likely that I’m going to be involved in some discussions at the higher ranks of politics as to, well, what is this guy really talking about? Should we be considering genetic engineering and talking about it in our political campaigns, for example? I’m hopefully going to have some contact with Hillary Clinton. Al Gore has been a closet transhumanist for literally a decade.

    (...) Why should we have a war in Afghanistan if we can have a war on cancer, or a war on heart disease? About a third of Americans die from heart disease. We should wipe that out! That’s where the war should be. And so that’s my elevator pitch: the Transhumanist Party is going to do everything in its power to shift the resources and the intellect of this country into fighting for the things that affect our health, and not for fighting far-off wars.

    (...) [the new Silicon Valley elite] they’re all very liberal-leaning — same thing with Google — so I think they’re going to make sure that as a policy, everything is as widespread and as cost-effective, basically as free as possible in the digital age. I have more confidence in the future than other people do, who remember the #barons of the 20th century — the steel people and stuff like that who were literally sort of #Darwinian. I don’t see the future being Darwinian like that.

    #transhumanisme #politique