Demons, Angels, Mitochondria, and Genes
I highly recommend reading two books at a time. Usually something fiction and something non-fiction.
Not only will it satisfy a bit of your appetite for novelty, but it will also really stimulate your ability to synthesize big ideas.
This week I started Head Strong by Dave Asprey, you probably already know all about Head Strong, it’s Dave’s manifesto on hacking Mitochondria for a limitless mind.
And I just finished the third novel in a historical fiction series, by Graham Hancock, about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The “War God” series in beautiful language and seductive storytelling captures probably one of the most violent episodes in human history. When one of the most ambitious men in the world, Hernán Cortés, with a technologically superior force of several hundred conquistadors took on an empire of possibly as many as 30 million Aztecs and ultimately prevailed.
Two books that you might think could not be more dissimilar, yet here’s the intersection…
At the beginning of Head Strong, Dave provides a much-needed reframing: Our personal failings are often misconstrued as moral failings when they are actually the fault of our misfiring neurobiology.
- We fail to complete a project on deadline and are fired.
- We cheat on our partner.
- We relapse on a vice that we trying to quit.
We regard these as moral failings yet they are often the result of cognitive dysfunction. When we fix our brains using smart drugs, diet, or meditation our decision-making improves drastically, and our capacity for discipline with what we know we should be doing multiplies. Without going to church or studying a bunch of philosophy we automatically become more moral as a result of Biohacking.
Whenever I failed badly at something my reaction has almost categorically been to chastise and beat myself up. You’re probably the same.
When I was 20 years old, like a lot of 20-year-olds, I intended that by the time I was 30 I would be a millionaire, which I failed to accomplish. I condemned myself harshly for this…
- I did not work hard enough.
- I wasn’t disciplined enough.
- I bet on the wrong business partnerships.
- I wasted too much time chasing girls.
But perhaps my real failure was that I aimed for such a challenging goal without first fixing my mind.
Cortes and Montezuma, the two most powerful men in the Northern hemisphere, were simultaneously friends and geopolitical rivals that presided over and in some cases carried out with their own hands utterly psychopathic violence and destruction.
One of the themes of the fiction series is that there is a murderous demon stalking humanity behind the scenes of history demanding ever greater and bloodier human sacrifices. Priests, philosophers, and conspiracy theorists disagree as to whether there is actually just such a demon or whether it’s merely an archetype for a dark recess of our evolutionary biology BUT we can’t deny its influence on the world.
History is a factory operated by and producing traumatized human beings.
There’s a book that I DO NOT recommend called The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which is pretty self-explanatory and self-evident. The idea is that history has just been this nasty cycle of children being badly abused and then growing up to participate in and start wars. You don’t have to look far back in your own lineage and familial history to find events where your own ancestors were subjected to genocide, warfare, or large-scale violence. It’s not so hyperbolic to say that the demon, the war god to whom Montezuma sacrificed so many virgins, still lurks in your own genes, waiting like Golem in that cave.
We’ve had religion and systems of morality for quite a while and they do seem to do us some good. The Better Angels of Our Nature talks about how for the past half-century large-scale wars and industrial human slaughter has declined to a historically minimum. We are quite lucky to have been born into an extraordinarily safe time.
But I’ll argue that it’s too little too slowly, the world is still plenty chaotic. And with the weapons we have now we are, as a species, just a few bad decisions away from annihilation.
Biohacking is the only way to exorcise the demon from the future.
If you’re reading this, studying Biohacking and personal development, you’re probably in the top 5% or top 10% of most moral, empathetic people in society. If you read the biographies of the villains of history, very few of them were people that did any personal development. As Dr. Jordan Peterson said…
“The well-developed man is the antidote to tyranny in society”
So I’m not worried about you becoming the next Montezuma, Cortes, or Caligula but what about our offspring? What about our children’s children?
Perhaps, in a chaotic and dystopian future world, after we’re long gone and food for worms, from amongst our own offspring will arise someone terrible. The good news is we actually have the power to prevent that…
- If you’re a woman don’t procreate with someone who has violent tendencies. In fact, don’t even date them!
- The same goes for men, don’t entangle yourself with shoddy, deranged women with sordid sexual histories. Don’t stick your dick in a blender, gents.
- Biohack your gene expression for stress response.
