The Particular Somatic-Cognitive Malady that is TESCREAL: Mapping the TESCREAL Ideology and Apparatus as a Multi-Layered Neurobiological Pathology
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper formulates a rigorous, non-polemical diagnostic framework to deconstruct the TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism) ideological bundle, evaluating it not as a conventional collection of philosophical movements, but as a systemic, self-replicating somatic-cognitive pathology running on compromised human hardware[Gebru and Torres, 2024; Cleaves, 2026b]. Moving past superficial sociopolitical or cultural analyses, this inquiry utilizes critical institutional economics, structural-functionalist sociology, and connectionist neuroscience to expose how this technocratic hegemony operates as a live, self-replicating cognitive contagion that infects human neural hardware, down-regulates prosocial mammalian wiring, and constructs technical infrastructure as an externalized neuromorphic proxy to perpetuate its own replication loop[Zuboff, 2019; Pasquale, 2015; Cleaves, 2026b]. On the metaphysical plane, the ideology induces Istighna—an epistemic illusion of absolute, self-contained autonomy wherein the manipulation of high-dimensional vector embeddings and statistical next-token prediction models is mistaken for objective cosmic sovereignty, systematically pathologizing human biological mortality and physical limitation as simple engineering bugs to be programmed away[Nasr, 1968; Bender et al., 2021; Cleaves, 2026c]. On the somatic plane, the paper isolates the "decency blind spot" inherent to longtermist mathematics, demonstrating an aggressive neurobiological down-regulation of the mammalian social engagement system and mirror neuron networks that actively normalizes the optimization of abstract proxy reward metrics over visceral empathy for contemporary biological suffering [Decety, 2011; Schubert and Caviola, 2024; Cleaves, 2026b]. Concurrently, it maps how platform infrastructure deploys an autophagous attention lasso, capturing pre-cognitive drives to enforce demographic contraction and turn individual biological decay into a metered consumer market[Illouz, 2019; Lesthaeghe, 2014; Cleaves, 2026a]. On the material plane, the paper tracks the physical footprint of the technocratic exit strategy, evaluating how the elite's drive to escape territorial Westphalian state jurisdiction through off-grid, air-gapped subterranean fortresses is fundamentally bottlenecked by the "Maintenance Paradox"[Sassen, 2014; Rushkoff, 2022; Cleaves, 2026a]. Because physical computing substrates cannot escape entropy, localized material friction, or deep-earth resource extraction dependencies, total isolation from the global human industrial manufacturing base guarantees absolute system failure[Sassen, 2014; Sadowski, 2020]. The paper concludes that the transhumanist superiority complex functions as an ideological alibi for a massive generational resource heist, transforming the ultimate survival plan into a closed-loop, automated tomb.[Winner, 1980; Sassen, 2014; Cleaves, 2026a].
Author: Cleaves, Simmon
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225794936
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