Most people tend to attribute the country’s perilous journey toward AI supremacy and the unsettling push for human enhancement to Silicon Valley. However, Glenn Beck believes that the real roots of the transhumanist agenda can be traced to a figure who lived almost a hundred years before Silicon Valley even came into existence. Nikolai Fyodorov, a largely overlooked 19th-century Moscow librarian, articulated his vision for humanity in the 1880s, a vision that eerily resembles the blueprint we’re witnessing unfold today. According to Glenn, Fyodorov was convinced that “every religion and every philosophy had gotten the assignment wrong.”
Fyodorov proposed that death was not a natural occurrence to be accepted but rather an adversary to be fought. His belief was that humanity needed to unify through science with one singular mission: to halt death. He discussed the idea of gathering the “scattered atoms of every human being who had ever died” to “resurrect all generations,” a plan that included the colonization of space. Although Fyodorov is not widely remembered today, he influenced several prominent writers from the literary world. “Tolstoy was a student of this man. Dostoevsky acknowledged him, expressing agreement with much of his ideology,” Glenn shares.
Perhaps even more significantly, Fyodorov mentored Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a deaf boy who faced social rejection, but eventually became known as the “father of Soviet rocketry” after developing the “rocket equation.” “The legacy of every Soviet cosmonaut, Sputnik, the moon landing— all of it leads back to that boy and the elderly librarian who believed rockets were essential for housing the resurrected dead,” Glenn states.
Around 40 years after Fyodorov’s lectures in the 1880s, a Jesuit paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin and a Russian geochemist named Vladimir Vernadsky gave Fyodorov’s dark vision a scientific framework, coining the term “noosphere”— a collective layer of thought enveloping the planet that would represent “the next stage of human evolution.” “Teilhard went the furthest, arguing that human consciousness needed to merge into one, which he termed the point of omega,” Glenn notes, adding that the publication of his work was delayed until after his death because the Catholic Church deemed him too radical.
A few years later, Julian Huxley—brother of Aldous Huxley, author of “Brave New World,” and a prominent figure in the British Eugenics Society—provided an introduction to Teilhard’s book when it was translated into English. “Julian Huxley gave the transhumanist movement its identity with his phrase: man remaining man but transcending himself,” according to Glenn. While UNESCO declined to adopt Huxley’s pamphlet, “UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy,” they still recognized him as a key leader for a couple of years.
Glenn finds this entire narrative astonishing. “It’s a convoluted chain beginning with a Moscow librarian asserting that ‘nobody should die; we should resurrect everyone; we need to conquer death,’ which was then conveyed to a boy who became the rocket scientist for the Soviet space program. … This entire project was subsequently clarified scientifically by a priest in Paris and intersected with the post-war global framework by a well-known eugenicist,” Glenn summarizes.
The takeaway, he suggests, is intriguing. Today’s tech moguls are grappling with a concept that predates their own existence. “These individuals didn’t conspire in dark alleys. It’s simply a matter of books, mentorships, and the passage of time,” Glenn states. He emphasizes, “Why am I sharing this tale? Because understanding the inheritance they’re contending for is crucial to comprehending the people currently shaping our reality.”
