Is there a globalist eugenic conspiracy?

This book was born in March 2020, the month when the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic. I had been researching Aldous Huxley for a year or so, and was curious about his support for eugenics. I noticed other New Age thinkers also promoted eugenics in some form or another. I kept on following the thread, and ended up writing this project on ‘spiritual eugenics’. I had no intention to write on the topic, nor any desire to criticize New Age culture. I was just curious, and no one else had properly covered the topic. Indeed, my New Age friends and fellow historians of spirituality expressed surprise that there was any overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics.

There was one group, however, whose footprints I encountered on the trail: conspiracy theorists. They were uncovering some of the same facts and personalities as me, but they were stitching them into lurid fantasies of an all-powerful Satanic cabal who controlled the world. We sometimes wrote about the same figures, but where I saw comically over-inflated hippies, they saw sinister and well-connected masterminds planning a worldwide culling of the human race.

Take Barbara Marx Hubbard, a leading New Age prophet of the 1980s-2010s. Barbara was part of the California transhumanist scene of the 1970s and 80s, then became a leading figure in the ‘conscious evolution’ movement of the 1990s and 2000s, which included figures like Deepak Chopra and Andrew Cohen. She called herself a futurist, but she didn’t know much about technology, and was more of a medieval-style mystic. She claimed to be channeling the spirit of Evolution itself. She called herself ‘the Mother of Conscious Evolution’ and joked that she was 13.6 million years old. She had a very inflated and somewhat cracked conception of herself.

Old Mother Hubbard had a burning sense that humanity was about to be born into superhumanity, and she had a crucial role in its birth. We would become homo universalis, immortal intergalactic superbeings. She imagined evolution as a mountain — most would fail to reach the peak, but a few special ones would, including her, obviously.

At the top we meet everyone who has also kept growing…Transformation to life ever evolving as a universal species in a universe full of other beings who have also had the courage to rise to the tops of their mountains, on their own planets in galaxies everywhere

Yes, the genetic elite of the universe will meet in the Singularity and network in a sort of cosmic Davos. She prophesied:

Our time is coming. We who survive the transition will have crossed the abyss from creature to co-creator, by virtue of our creative genius. We shall identify increasingly with the perspective of God as we build new worlds, create new microorganisms and redesign our bodies for cosmic time and space.

Barbara warned that not everyone will make the evolutionary Leap.

Those who attempt to maintain the old separatist stance…will be removed from the growing edge of the human community. They will harden, calcify and eventually die of separation. Only love can advance the next stage of evolution. Those remaining in self-centered consciousness will be either extinct on Earth like all past earlier humans, or so different that they seem to be a different species.

The elite will bifurcate, in other words, into a whole other species.

Individually we can choose to embrace options for evolutionary choices such as longevity, space migration and evolved consciousness. Those who choose these paths will evolve differently from those who choose to remain in the terrestrial/mammalian life cycle… Just as Neanderthal man passed away, so too will self-centered Homo sapiens retire once it has finished the work of preparing the way for Homo universalis.

The current environmental crisis is a sort of apocalyptic sorting of the fit from the unfit: ‘During this crisis we will weed out the unworkable from the workable’. The future humans need to be steely in their acceptance of the passing away of the unfit.

Evolution is compassionate, but not nice. It cannot afford to be nice at the expense of the whole of life. Those who do not follow the Way of Love will not be able to handle the powers of co-creation…There are missions of mercy to nurse the sick…There is also the new mission of the future: a mission to the strong, the whole, the builders, the scientists, the artists — the conceivers who will co-create new worlds…The New Order of the Future consists of self-selected souls attracted to the future of the world

You can see that there is something unpleasant in Hubbard’s self-regard, her certainty she is part of the evolutionary immortal elite while others will pass away. What had she actually contributed to humanity, besides being born the spoiled daughter of a millionaire who thought she could talk to Evolution? She was a rich white American woman who could afford better healthcare than most of the human race, so she starts thinking she’s immortal, and everyone who lives less long has somehow failed the evolutionary test: ‘Those who choose longevity will evolve differently from those who choose to remain in the terrestrial/mammalian life cycle’, she says blithely. Her evolutionary elitism is unmerited and offensive, in other words. But it’s no more offensive than Christians or Muslims thinking only they will go to heaven (at least she doesn’t condemn most of humanity to eternal torment).

At the end of her life, Hubbard became caught up in the 2012 New Age prophecy, which predicted humanity would become superhuman that year. She even organized a live concert in Beverly Hills called The Birth of the New Humanity. Millions of people would tune in from around the world. Sting would sing, and then the Mother of Evolution would usher in the Singularity, live on TV. Guess what? It didn’t happen. Only a few thousand tuned in to the live broadcast. Sting didn’t turn up. Humanity didn’t obviously evolve into superhumanity. Something broke in Barbara’s fragile psyche. Her sister recalls:

She felt she was fulfilling her life purpose — telling the story of our birth. And then…not much happened afterwards. And the fact this magical transformation didn’t happen was very depressing. She lost her mission. And when Barbara doesn’t know what her mission is, there’s a tremendous pain…It was naïve and grandiose to think that that event would change the world.

Barbara died in 2019, having failed to become an immortal intergalactic butterfly. She is not much discussed any more. But to conspiracy theorists, Barbara lives on, not as a joke, but as a sinister and powerful figure in a transhumanist plot. They clocked, as I did, her talk of a coming ‘selection’ of the fit and the unfit, and of the ‘passing away’ of the sick and the defective, they also note how well-connected Barbara was, her links to the Rockefellers and the Salk Institute, and they think she was part of a secret New Age plan, a ‘new human agenda’, that stretched over centuries and involved many of the other figures in this book — Francis Galton, HG Wells, Julian Huxley, the transhumanists of Silicon Valley — to eugenically engineer themselves into a new god-like species while enslaving and culling the rest of humanity. Is this lunacy, or are the conspiracy theorists on to something?

The anti-New Age, anti-transhumanist conspiratorial backlash

The idea that New Age figures are engaged in a globalist eugenic conspiracy began in the 1980s. That was the decade that New Age culture went mainstream, thanks to two books — Shirley Maclaine’s Out on a Limb (1983), a wildly-popular book and TV movie that chronicled the actress’ discovery of New Age spirituality; and Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980 best-seller, The Aquarian Conspiracy.

Ferguson, a journalist in California, excitedly chronicled the spreading of a revolutionary new mind-set, which fused science and spirituality, and which believed in humanity’s spiritual potential to evolve into superhumans. Ferguson called the movement a ‘conspiracy’ because it was leaderless and churchless, and spread instead through friendships, mailing lists, conferences and festivals, as well as organisations like the Esalen Institute, the Institute of Noetic Science and the Lindisfarne Association. It was a loose network of conscious, awakened, turned-on people, who read Aldous Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin and Fritjof Capra, who practiced meditation, dropped LSD, and possibly attended car-key parties. These were not hippy drop-outs — these were affluent baby-boomers who were now in positions of power in schools, universities, corporations, even the government. And they had a plan for ‘the new human agenda’. It was time for humanity to wake up, turn on, and transcend to the next level of evolution.

The success of the book was alarming to evangelical Christians. A conspiracy? A secret plan to steer evolution and create a new species? LSD-taking swingers channeling spirits and pushing their ‘new human agenda’ in schools and businesses? Hell no! The first shot in the Christian conspiracy backlash came from an author called Constance Cumbey, in her 1983 book, The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: Awakening to the New Age Movement and our Coming Age of Barbarism. Cumbey noticed a certain type of liberal boomer who used the same odd terminology — ‘mind sciences’, ‘paradigm shift’, ‘planetary consciousness’. She started to investigate. Everything fell into place when she read Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy. She then traced the history of the New Age movement back to the 1880s and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. And she noticed what I noticed: the New Age’s predilection for spiritual evolution and spiritual eugenics. She wrote:

the New Agers claim they are a ‘new species’. They have ‘evolved’ into homo noeticus…Such talk is chillingly reminiscent of Hitler’s ‘master-race’ theories.

A year later, in 1984, a Christian evangelical film was released called Gods of the New Age. It revealed how many Americans were falling under the influence of Indian gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian god-man who moved to Oregon in 1981, started a commune, and then attempted to take over the local county government. As we’ve seen, Rajneesh declared that he and his followers were a Nietzschean master-race destined to conquer the world, beginning with the dumb Christian hicks in Antelope, Oregon. You can see how American Christians would see this as an ominous occult invasion.

Evangelical warnings about the New Age became increasingly apocalyptic, like Texe Marrs’ 1987 book, Dark Secrets of the New Age: Satan’s Plan for a One World Religion, or Cornelia Ferreira’s 1991 book, The New Age Movement: The Kingdom of Satan on Earth. As the authors of the 1987 book, The New Age Rage, put it:

Less than a decade ago, mention of the New Age movement would have drawn blank stares from non-Christian and Christian alike. But all that has changed. In the 1980s, the term New Age is common currency…In the Christian community, awareness of the new Age movement has been triggered by a few apocalyptic speculators who have singled it out as the primary catalyst for the ultimate end.

The anti-New Age Satanic panic got mixed up with a rising tide of apocalyptic prophecy on the Christian right, which became increasingly well-organized and alarmist in the 1980s and 1990s, and turned its focus from the demonic threat of Communism to the demonic threat of globalism, the United Nations and globalist organisations like the Trilateral Commission, the Bildeburg Group and the Council for Foreign Relations. Christian right preacher Pat Robertson stoked the apocalyptic paranoia of his audience in his 1991 book The New World Order:

it is my firm belief that the events of public policy are not the accidents and coincidences we are generally led to believe. They are planned. …They spring from the depth of something that is evil…

There was a secret plot to establish a New World Order, to control, enslave and murder the masses. And New Age religion was somehow a part of this plan, Robertson decided:

It is as if a giant plan is unfolding, everything perfectly on cue…Communism collapses… A new world order is announced. Christianity has been battered in the public arena and New Age religions are in place in the schools and corporations, and among the elite.

After all, wasn’t the United Nations somehow connected to New Age figures like Julian and Aldous Huxley and HG Wells, or Lucifer-worshipping Theosophists like Alice Bailey? And wasn’t a part of their plan for one-world government and one-world religion to dissolve the family and introduce population control and eugenics?

This far-right anti-globalist conspiracy theory also found adherents outside of the church, among libertarian free thinkers, preppers, gun rights activists and kooks — people like Alex Jones, a raging cable TV personality who built an audience of millions when he insisted the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job by the despotic federal government, who in turn were controlled by a secret cabal connected through the Bilderburg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Soros Foundation, the Rothschilds, and so on.

In his 2007 documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, Jones warned of the globalist elite’s evil eugenic plot, and pointed to the role of the Huxley brothers, Julian and Aldous. Hadn’t Julian preached eugenics from his position as first president of UNESCO? Hadn’t Aldous laid out a blueprint for global enslavement in his 1931 novel, Brave New World? In recent years, when not fulminating about Pizzagate / Qanon and Hillary Clinton’s Satanic propensity to murder and eat babies, Jones has railed against transhumanism, the religion of Big Tech, which is just eugenics in a shiny new suit. He has declared:

It’s all global government — accept nanotech. Accept wirehead. Accept interfaces, everything’s fine. All of our modern technologies — created by eugenicists. Or farmed out by scientists owned by scientists owned by eugenicists robber barons. The entire society, the whole technotronic plan; robotics, future not needing us, phasing out humanity, all of this, a hellish future, while they’ve been poisoning us and dumbing us down, so we can’t resist their takeover, and then saying we deserve it because all we want to do is watch Dancing with the Stars.

Finally, New Age culture has itself grown increasingly conspiracist and pessimistic since the 1990s. In some ways, there has long been a tendency to conspiracy thinking in the New Age occulture. Occultists tend to believe they are a superhuman elite who are leading humanity towards a new age of love. But when the age of love fails to occur (as it always does), New Age seekers can veer from euphoria to despair and paranoia. They can start to think perhaps there are dark forces blocking the liberation of humanity and conspiring against them, some ‘black lodge’ working against the ‘white lodge’, some occult group working for evil — perhaps the Jews, the Illuminati, Gnostic archons, or an alien species.

One sees this swing from ecstatic optimism to paranoid pessimism in the life and work of David Icke, the leading figure in modern ‘conspirituality’. Icke was a sports reporter for the BBC, who had a spiritual awakening and announced on British TV that he was the Messiah come to usher in a new age of love. The world did not respond to this good news as he expected. Suddenly the most ridiculed man in British public life, Icke retreated and developed an altogether darker worldview. The age of love was not dawning, because humanity was enslaved by a secret global elite, which included the Rothschilds, the Windsors, the Bushes and other powerful and inter-breeding families. This elite was actually a different species — extraterrestrial shape-shifting lizards! They control everything, from the war in Iraq to the death of Princess Diana. And for millennia they have plotted to enslave and murder the dumb human race, using inventions like public debt, the ‘mainstream media’, 5G technology, vaccines, and eugenic / genetic engineering. They want to be gods and us to be mindless drones. But a few heroic rebels have woken up to Their plot. We have done our research and we will write incredibly long articles on the internet exposing Their plot. That will show Them.

Icke, like Alex Jones, has also shifted his focus in recent years from the Federal Reserve / Rothschilds / Bilderberg Club to Big Tech and Transhumanism:

The idea of transhumanism [he said in 2016] is to connect people technologically to the Cloud, so the Cloud does their thinking for them. This AI runs the whole grid and becomes basically the Mind dictating the perceptions of the population. And behind the AI is this evil force [ie demons / aliens]. People become nothing more than biological computer terminals on the Cloud. They’re telling us we’ll become superhuman. But we won’t — we’ll become subhuman, that’s the whole idea. They will create the synthetic human. It’s exactly what Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World.

The people we’ve encountered in this book typically had a positive and optimistic view of technology and of the future. They believed ‘we are part of the evolutionary elite, we are at the centre of this spiritual-technological transformation, we will become immortal gods’. But most people outside of California did not share this optimism. They did not feel they were on the point of transforming into superbeings. They did not feel technology or globalization was empowering them — in fact, they were threatening their jobs and way of life. They felt enslaved to someone else’s plan, someone else’s agenda. They felt out of control, at the mercy of powerful forces in Wall Street, or Silicon Valley, or Washington, or Brussels. They felt all the power belonging to a smug metropolitan elite who looked down on them and thought they were superior, perhaps even a whole different species.

Seen through this paranoid and pessimistic perspective, every new technological invention was just another means for the lizard elite to enslave the masses. The solution was to reject technology, move to a hut in the woods, turn off Google and What’s App, don’t use a credit card, don’t drink the tap water, don’t go outside, just sit inside wearing your tinfoil hat, while feverishly watching videos about the New World Order. (The tin-foil hat meme, by the way, was invented by Julian Huxley. It’s all connected!)

You can imagine what happened to this online conspiracy culture during the pandemic, when everyone was alone, afraid and very online, while their governments told them to stay inside, wear a mask, and prepare to be jabbed. Conspiracy culture suddenly exploded, and hundreds of millions of people got sucked into paranoid belief-systems. Transhumanism became a particular bete noire — the globalist elite wants to cull the population with their RNA vaccines, they want to implant microchips into us and track us with drones, while making themselves immortal by feasting on adrenochrome harvested from tortured children…It was all part of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030. Wake up sheeple!

A rag-tag alliance of New Age hippies, anti-vaxxers, Christian nationalists, paranoid libertarians and white supremacists joined forces, urged on by Russian troll farms and conspiracy-promoting politicians around the world. Secular, liberal democracy was suddenly engulfed in a wave of demon-obsessed conspiracy-madness. Centrist liberals looked around in bewilderment. What had happened to rational discussion? When did we lose our minds? And yet, it also struck me that, in a funny sort of way, the conspiracy theories are not entirely wrong.

It’s true that the New Age / transhumanist worldview believes in steering evolution to create a new god-like species. And sometimes people who believe in this worldview support eugenics or genetic engineering, and believe they are the evolutionary elite and most of humanity are beneath them. The Christian critique of the New Age isn’t entirely wrong. Where, then, do the conspiracy theorists go wrong?

Firstly, this isn’t a secret conspiracy, it’s what HG Wells called an ‘open conspiracy’. Promoters of spiritual eugenics never hid their views. Julian Huxley published his plans to promote a new eugenic religion in his manifesto for UNESCO (thereby ruining his chances of a second term in the post).

Second, the figures in this book always thought of themselves as the evolutionary elite, but they were often very far from actual power. There were some exceptions — Julian Huxley enjoyed some power at UNESCO, the Society for Psychical Research had a very well-connected membership, and of course Nazi Germany was a unique moment when some crackpots managed to seize control of a major European state and steer it towards their murderous spiritual vision. But on the whole, the people in this book were far from actual political power. Barbara Marx Hubbard is a good example. She thought of herself as an ‘evolutionary leader’ and even dreamt of becoming vice-president, but despite her enthusiastic networking she was never more than a rather nutty figure on the fringes.

It’s true the worldview explored in this book — that’s to say, evolutionary spirituality and spiritual eugenics — is now held by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. For David Icke, this would be an example of some demonic or extraterrestrial power working behind the scenes and pushing ‘the new human agenda’. But, and this is the most important point, the ideas of spiritual evolution and spiritual eugenics mutate into thousands of different and sometimes directly antithetical forms and directions. There is no coordinated ‘agenda’, no one unified plan.

Conspiracy theorists would say ‘they all believe in one world government’. No. HG Wells and Julian Huxley were certainly promoters of the United Nations and one-world government. But other spiritual eugenicists were violent nationalists, or crypto-libertarians. ‘They were all white supremacists’ say left-wing conspiracists. No. Some spiritual eugenicists were anti-racist, or anti-colonialist, or dreamt of a mixed -race super-race. ‘They all believe in population control’. On the whole, yes, spiritual eugenicists worried about over-population. But some spiritual eugenicists believe in pro-natalist policies (like Theodore Roosevelt or Adolf Hitler), or in expanding the human population and populating the cosmos (like Nick Bostrom or Elon Musk).

Conspiracy theorists are monomaniacs. They try to connect all facts and figures into one simple narrative — it’s all One Plan, One Agenda, One Plot driven by One totally evil cabal. And all the cabal know each other, are related to each other and agree with each other. Everyone works together, as in Ian Fleming’s Spectre. It’s a comic book version of history. Conspiracy theorists can’t handle the messy complexity of reality, or the idea of multiple competing agendas and networks moving in a million different directions. Nor can they handle moral ambiguity, or the fact that people hold different positions at different times in their lives, and that sometimes people can hold awful opinions and yet still do good in other ways. Figures like Francis Galton, HG Wells, Alexis Carrel, Madison Grant or Jonas Salk said or did some terrible things, but they also arguably changed the world for the better in some of their ideas or inventions.

And then there are fantastical, apocalyptic or demon-obsessed aspects of conspiracy theories, in which the elite are child-murdering Satanists or lizard people from outer space. I suppose that’s a case of taking the elite at the world when they say they are evolving into a higher species. The poor look on them and think ‘you’re not like us…you’re lizards’.

The narcissistic ignorance, anti-scientific primitivism and demon-obsessed apocalypticism of conspiracy culture, and the risk it has posed to rational democracy and public health in the last few years, has put me off New Age spirituality and moved me closer to the techno-philosophy of someone like HG Wells. If it’s a choice between anti-vax shamanic drum-thumping faux-druids and Silicon Valley transhumanists, I’d choose the latter. But perhaps some sort of balance is possible. The conspiracy theorists are not entirely wrong — they just see through a glass darkly (very darkly). We can have respect for scientific expertise and technological innovation, while recognizing that sometimes scientists have done very bad things, and new inventions tend to have unexpected side effects. We can admire the New Age dream of expanding human potentialities, while recognizing that often the idea of spiritual evolution often leads to an unpleasant self-regard, that is just as toxic as Christians’ sense of themselves as the Elect.

Humans are religious and mythological animals, prone to ecstatic visions and apocalyptic prophesies. That can be just as true for ‘rationalists’ and scientists as for evangelicals. People get seized by a vision of a perfect world and a redeemed humanity, and are willing to sacrifice others to get to their vision of heaven. The rapture or apocalypse never happens. But sometimes things do change a little bit for the better. I don’t believe that humans are going to become immortal gods any time soon. But I do hope things get slowly better — that lives get longer, illnesses get cured, AI gets more powerful, space gets explored, the mind becomes better understood, perhaps we suffer less (though I’m sure we’ll invent new ways to suffer). Humans have, to my mind, always been transhumanist. We have always co-created with nature, steering evolution and shaping life into new forms. And life has got better through humans’ Promethean urge not to accept nature as it is, not to accept that, for example, one tenth of humans die of small pox (as they did before the invention of vaccines). The danger at the moment, it seems to me, is not so much that the elite impose their transhumanist dreams upon us, but rather that new medical breakthroughs are confined to the very rich, and our society becomes ever more two-tier. I am a democratic transhumanist, in this sense: socialize the Singularity.

But beware the dream of a too tidy and perfect nature, of standardized humans grown in orderly rows of edited embryos. We have to constantly remind ourselves of the moral and evolutionary value of the imperfect, the misfit, the mutant, that which doesn’t fit our model of reality. We will never completely edit out imperfection or suffering, and previous religions wisely taught us to accept and learn from the imperfect, the wounded and the broken. What the science-religion of transhumanism lacks, at the moment, is the old virtues of humility (reach for the stars, by all means, but keep your feet on the ground) and compassion, or what the Buddhists call bodhichitta, open-heartedness. To become human, and perhaps more than human, we must learn to open our hearts. That, rather than simply increasing intelligence, is where the greatest human potential lies.