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Transhumanism- No Longer Just For Cyborgs
“Man is a beautiful machine, that works very badly.
– H.L. Mencken”
Of late, I’ve noticed that people seem immensely preoccupied, at least on the internet, with comparing their “achievements” in the gym with those of others. Numerous benchmarks have been bandied about as indicators of a particular level of strength, all of which I’ve found to range between laughably low and downright embarrassing. It would seem that this is because everyone appears to be very preoccupied with comparing themselves to an average, which is never a good way to determine excellence, and it’s either a salve to the ego of someone who sucks at lifting or completely inconsequential to someone who doesn’t. In either case, they’re pointless. For those of you who are blissfully unaware of the existence of these charts, here they are (ladies, the misogynist who made this chart apparently felt that you are undeserving of a chart… of which you should probably be glad):
I find this one particularly funny, because according to it, I was a pro level lifter before I’d even had a sip of protein powder as a 134 lb wrestler. I was that strong not because I’m a freak, but because I trained 6 days a week with people a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than myself… and I actually put some effort into lifting.
These seem to make sense if you’re the type of person who needs a benchmark against which to gauge your success, but if you get validation out of a chart you’re probably one rainy day away from throwing yourself off a fucking bridge anyway. Thus, anyone who falls into that category should start working on their jump squats so they can do it right.
This chart would be more aptly called “If This Means You’re Strong, The Apocalypse Is Nigh”.
Now we’re starting to enter the land of funny. If you bench less than 225 at any bodyweight as a male over the age of 15 who has two working arms, your name should not exist anywhere in conjunction with the word “strong”, let alone “very strong”. This category should be called “Bitch Mode”.
This shouldn’t even be a chart, and if you’re on it, you’re not a person.
Weirdly, for the pre-internet generations, the only benchmarks in the gym were beating gym records, beating your friends’ best lifts, and adding another 45lb plate to any lift. Those were cool milestones in retrospect, but hardly our overarching goal- we just liked lifting and knew strength would result naturally out of training. Our milestones arose out of having fun in the gym, and trying to be better than everyone else, rather than simply trying to reassure ourselves that we didn’t suck. If you’re looking to the internet for validation that you don’t suck, here’s a newsflash- you suck harder than any other person whose lifetime predated the internet.
There might have been a healthy serving of this from time to time. We didn’t give a shit- we were trying to fucking move weight. The only way you avoid failing hilariously in the gym is if you never fucking try.
For instance, I started out with a sub-135 lb bench as a freshman in high school. During my sophomore year, I took a weightlifting class and began competing on bench and weighted dips with another guy about my weight. We benched 3 to 5 times a week, using ever angle on the bench, rep range, volume, and chest exercise permutation of which we could think. By the end of that year, we were both benching 255 with regularity, and by the time Thanksgiving of my junior year rolled around, he hit 300 on the bench and I hit 285.
The upper body weakness of the members of Reddit’s /r/fitness amuses her greatly.
We’re not the only people I’ve seen make those jumps, either. My girlfriend Krista, who grew up chubby as hell and totally unathletic, took up Olympic weightlifting her junior year in high school and continued through last year. During that time, she never benched. When she started benching in August of last year, she maxed out with a bounced touch-and-go 85lbs at a bodyweight of about 140. She’s now “strong” by the standards of the dumbass charts above for men because she’s been training her ass off at the lift for 6 months and is now hitting paused singles at 155 at a bodyweight of 130. That’s right, she got leaner and much stronger in 6 months by busting her ass in the gym and dieting hard.
In college, my 150 lb rock climber roommate went from a 225 lb shitfest of a deadlift to 405 for ten in one year, and he never even took a protein supplement. He just deadlifted and did pullups four or five days a week for a year. He and I even got a kid we hated to squat 225 for a double after 6 months of training when he’d never squatted before in his life, and literally folded up like an accordion under 135 the first time he squatted. Another guy in the gym at the time did an unassisted liftoff and touch and go bench of 495 at a bodyweight of around 250 and wouldn’t even let anyone stand nearby to spot… just because it was badass. This is how people get fucking strong.
I guarantee Mike Matarazzo never guaged his arm size against that of the average man for inspiration.
Your goal in life should never be to do “as well”, be “as good”, or work “as hard” as any other person. Instead, you should be striving to overachieve at all times- this is how humanity has lurched forward even while monomaniacal assholes, religious zealots, and harbingers of economic doom wrought havoc on society at large. Measurement by a standard set by the average person leads only to mediocrity, socialism, venereal disease, and eventual burial in an unmarked grave. Transcendence of the human condition, however, leads to every extreme of which you could think- fame, infamy, riches, poverty, brilliance, insanity, super strength, and crippledness, but no matter what the goal, those people will be remembered for their efforts. It’s hardly a matter of what other people are doing that drives you forward, as other people are inconsequential nothings, motes of dust, and a possible minor irritation in the quest to achieve greatness, whether that greatness come in the form of intellectual or physical pursuits.
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
– H. L. Mencken
Since time immemorial, man has striven to transcend the human condition. Ancient people revered those who did so as gods, and they then became immortalized in the writings of the time. Thus, the ancient warriors who served as the Michael Jordans of the battlefield are still remembered today, as Achilles and Ajax, Gilgamesh and Herecles. Even at that time, humans looked for ways to vastly outdistance the performance of their peers, as we are a naturally competitive species, and codified systems of weight training emerged with specialized diets and concomitant performance enhancing drugs. Herecles purportedly trained with weights under the tutelage of his patron Chiron (History of Weight Training), and Greek Olympians took everything from opium to bull testicles to improve their performance, all while eating a meat-heavy diet unlike anything eaten by the average Greek (History of PEDs in Sports) and using systems of weight training nearly as old as the written word. This was not done in an effort to “cheat” as there was no draconian prohibition on the substances one could consume in order to exceed the performance of the average person, but rather simply to be better than the simpering, weak, ignorant troglodytes these great men found themselves surrounded by. In short, they wanted to transcend the human condition through their own actions and self-improvement.
Fast forward to the modern era- Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra ushers in a new era of transhumanism, a field of study that grew directly from Nietzsche’s concept of the “Übermensch”. Amusingly, Nietzsche’s work inspired the hero Superman, the goody-two-shoes alien superhero who taught generations of little boys to mind their p’s a nd q’s and do what they’re told. This was about as like the intent of Nietzsche’s work as it was the creators of Silly Putty to have created a toy out of plastic explosives, and yet, just as the toy, Superman became a G-rated joke of what he was originally intended. Nietzsche’s original intent was that the übermensch (overman / superhuman) should transcend all of the trappings of humanity and exceed the intellectual, physical, and moral performances of their human underlings… most of which were embodied in Superman. Superman, however, became a joke version of Nietzsche’s theories because his superhuman strength and intellect were still bound to humanity by his laughable adherence to Judeo-Christian morality, which is neither logical nor laudable in the eyes of an übermensch.
“Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Driving the übermensch, and man in general, is the “will to power”, a concept Nietzsche championed throughout his works and also serves as the basis for my interpretation of transhumanism. For those who are unaware of the concept, transhumanism is generally the purview of people who want to become the Borg from Star Trek. Instead of simply improving upon nature’s design through force of will, these people seek to remove and replace parts they feel are weak, ugly, or ill-designed with technological constructs that serve the same, or better, purpose. This concept, however, is at odds with what I believe to have been Nietzsche’s intent, in addition to just being weirdly distasteful, if for no other reason than the fact that electing to allow someone to hack bits off your body and replace them with man-made parts is fucking strange. Thus, instead of improving themselves by force of will, they are willing to pay for improvements to themselves that aren’t really “theirs”- they’re foreign objects where their parts used to be.
Not ideal.
The driving force behind the two sides of transhumanism, and many training protocols bandied about on the internet, is an age old question- “is it nature or nurture that makes us who we are?” Philosophers have argued for centuries about this issue, and in spite of lengthy discourses written by men like Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and Grotius, philosophers still cannot come to a consensus on the subject. luckily, however, I exist to finally put an end to the debate. It is nurture, not nature, that makes man who he is. At his essence, man is a brutish, violent, greedy, physical creature with the requisite mental acuity to wreak havoc on the world wholesale. It is nurture that has forced man to become a simpering, cowering, weak-willed and -bodied version of his prototype, and it is nurture that can bring forth the best that prototype has to offer. This process is neither pleasant, nor is it quick, but enduring it will allow you to regain the physical and intellectual superiority of our ancestors.
Perhaps not entirely accurate, but a far closer to the appearance of a Cro-Magnon man than your average salaryman is.
For those of you, and I’m sure you are legion, who will contend that genetics play a large role in your current level of suckitude, allow me to pre-emptively retort- there has been no long-standing eugenics program of which I am aware that has created a race of subhumans. The body somatotypes that are bandied about in bodybuilding magazine are well-recognized as psuedoscience by everyone but Joe Wieder and Reddit. Your physical stature is a direct result of the food your parents fed you growing up and your level of physical activity. That’s called nurture, motherfuckers, not nature. If you suck, it’s because your parents trained you to do so and you decided to continue on the path they chose for you. those people you think of when you think “genetic freak” are actually just people raised in an environment that made them what they are. To wit:
- Nikola Tesla, one of the most prolific inventors and intelligent people of all time, was constantly forced to do memory exercises and study as a child. Because of this rigorous training, Tesla was able to do calculus in his head as a youth, and he retained most of what he learned through his father’s rigourous mental exercises. As for his inventive side, his mother was an inventor who created a number of devices to aid her in housework, which Tesla credited with inspiring his inventive side (PBS).
- Alexander Karelin, who was nicknamed “The Experiment”, grew up in Siberia, the son of a truck driver and an office worker. As he lived in Siberia, Karelin’s life was far from cushy, and he grew incredibly strong from skiing everywhere and dragging trees he felled by hand through the tundra to their house for firewood. This lifestyle inured him to hard and heavy training, which he initially conducted by rowing boats through ice-filled rivers and running for hours through waist deep snow. He continued his brutal training throughout his career, eventually amassing a record in Greco-Roman wrestling of twelve European Championships, nine World Championships, and three Olympic gold medals, winning every match he entered for thirteen years, and going ten years without giving up a single point (Karelin).
- Jerry Rice, widely considered to be the greatest wide receiver in NFL history, credits his brutal training regime with his success. Rice had very average speed, but was able to set records that surpassed those of the second place receivers in total reception yards, total touchdowns, and total receptions by over 50%. Rice busted his ass in training to get the skills necessary to achieve these accomplishments, training twice a day, 6 days a week in the offseason. Rice’s workouts were so brutal that his trainer won’t release them to the general public for fear someone would gravely injure themselves trying to replicate Rice’s feats (Colvin).
There are plenty of other examples, but you get the point- greatness is earned by a will to power; a will to surpass one’s humanity; a will to become the übermensch. No fancy program is necessary, no incremental progression will lead to greatness, and no amount of conversation about it will do a motherfucking thing.
Stop talking and start doing. Will yourself to power.
Sources:
Alexander Karelin Biography – Siberian Childhood, A Terrifying Maneuver, A Political Career, A Brilliant Career Ends, Chronology. Russia, Olympic, Ancient, and Gold – JRank Articles. Web. 20 Mar 2013. http://sports.jrank.org/pages/2441/Karelin-Alexander.html#ixzz2O8eH2IpT
Colvin, Geoff. Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.
. London: Penguin Books, 2008.
Historical Timeline: History of Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports. Sports and Drugs- ProCon.Org. Web. 17 Feb 2013. http://sportsanddrugs.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002366
Tesla: Life and Legacy. PBS. Web. 20 March 2013. http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_early.html
The History of Weight Training. Personal Power Training. Web. 17 Feb 2013. http://www.personalpowertraining.net/Articles/the_history_of_weight_training.htm
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75 responses to “Transhumanism- No Longer Just For Cyborgs”
Another awesome article Jamie, this one really pumped me up.
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When I started working out, I was told I would never be big or strong. I don't remember any of us ever using the word genetics back then but the general consensus was that I was naturally predisposed to be another weight room failure. Granted, I was a scrawny little fuck whose athletic background outside of phys ed class in school consisted of very little more than karate lessons at the local rec centre. I wasn't even allowed to play sports as a kid. Mom claimed it was because I would inevitably get hurt but it was really because she just didn't want to deal with the hassle of buying uniforms and transporting me to and from games. She hated karate too, actually. It was my grandpa who insisted on it because
1. I'd been getting beat up by a black kid on the way to school.
2. He was part of that World War II generation that saw karate as something magical.
On top of that, my diet growing up revolved around whatever I could find and prepare for myself. So I lived on cereal and sandwiches for about a decade and a half. In any case, I didn't look destined to ever become much of a strongman. But now I get told at least once a month that I obviously have a genetic advantage. They like asking me what "special diet" I'm on too.
Nerds are evidentally notorious for not being able to make up their minds. Must be because of how much they all seem to FUCKING LOVE science.
Who asked you?!
That's all you've got? I gave you gold up there.
I think you probably do have some good athletic genes. It's actually crazy that your body developed as well as it has considering how poor your nutrition was during your growing years. Most people in those conditions would have ended up as weak degenerates. Also, didn't you say you were sprinter in high school?
Good article. But wasn't Karelin around 15 lbs at birth? I'd say he was genetically predisposed to kicking ass.
Neil it looks like you missed the point of this article completely.
No, I got the point of the article buddy. Just mentioning the fact that Karelin, while being a beast his whole life, was a physical monster from day 1.
Because he was born fat?
Where is that badass picture with the blonde and the bear from?
Something I'd like to know aswell
some gay anime warhammer shit for children
Guild Wars. Norns turn into bears and shit.
http://defenestrador.tumblr.com/post/5023881844/barbarian-woman-and-werebear
Thanks for the link. Seen some of Frank Frazettas art in earlier posts, are there any other artists you know about that you could recommend that make the same type of art as Frank.
HA! "Less Talk, More Do"! I'm getting t-shirts made. Seriously.
I'll buy one.
Sorry, only adult sizes.
As a friend of mine puts it, "Don't talk about it. BE about it."
Measurement by a standard set by the average person leads to venereal disease?
Is this a real thing or just hyperbole?
That would be hyperbole.
You know what else is fucking strange? Fucking another guy because you think it's disgusting. So there: you probably find cyborg-people sexy.
I needed this today.
What, sex with a guy? You've come to the right blog, as long as you're into midget sex.
This blog is great.
Awesome post
Great post again,i read about the ideal of the Ubermensch many years ago and its inspired me to get up and lift on occasions,for example, when i'm lacking in sleep at 6a.m.,its -10 in the unheated garage gym and its the only chance ive had to squat or deadlift due to work pressures etc….hardly ideal circumstances but doing this and making progress despite these disadvantages make me completely intolerant of excuses and lack of effort made by people with far easier lifestyles.Its impossible for me to respect these people,they seem like a different species to us.
In my own mind i always imagined Arnold Schwarzenegger as the original bodybuilding Uberman.If you look at what he's achieved,its the only way to describe him.
Get over yourself, fucking prick.
I thought i told you to fuck off and die?….NOW FUCK OFF AND DIE!!
I'll dye your moms pubes first.
You'd have a job,she's been dead 10 years
I know, I kept the pubes as a trophy.
It can't have been my mom,she'd never let a spastic any where near her pubes.
Your so right it's like the riddle of steel iron is strong but flesh is stonger and I've got to get fucking stronger
I'm on board with the sentiment that aspiring to anything merely attainable is a waste of time.
However, I wonder if, paradoxically, your individualism is at odds with your desire for greatness. A "me-against-the-world" mentality perhaps forces a sharper divide between you and not-you than actually exists, in principle restricting your advancement.
Transhumanism isn't about grafting metal bits onto yourself, the integration of human and non-human is much subtler. It's about blurring the lines between the man and the machine, not crudely grafting one onto the other. Just as the incremental improvements to Google's search algorithms don't look like "AI" because they become seemlessly integrated into our lives, the current crop of "transhumans" looks more like the Barbarian Bros than the Borg.
Uncomfortable attitudes toward steroid use exemplify the uncertainty some people feel about the first transhuman advances; are geared gains truly yours, or somehow foreign? Much of this blog is devoted to reasserting that the pursuit of outstanding physical strength is ultimately a matter of individual will, a fact few would have even questioned in the pre-steroid era. If you think the steroid controversy is bad, wait until we figure out how to genetically engineer people's myostatin levels.
Just as some feel that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is "distasteful" and contrary to their ideal of physical progress through effort alone, you feel that more extreme technological augmentations are contrary to that ideal. Drastic body modification challenges the discreteness of the organism, so critical to individuality. How can you identify with "your" body that "you" have built, in defiance of the outside world, if you can't be sure where it begins and ends?
Individuality is threatened not only by the blurring of boundaries between body and non-body, but by the replacement of "natural" body components, built by "you" alone, with "artificial" technological components. These components are the products of science, of cumulative human ingenuity, and the user can hardly claim them as deriving from his own individual will.
What I'm getting at here is that in attaching so strongly to individuality, you're implicitly drawing a line between the human and the machine, and between the achievements of one person and the achievements of the species, that may ultimately prove as arbitrary and elusive as that between "natty" and "non-natty".
No matter how much weight you will yourself to lift, only the application of that will to the development of technology will enable you to fly to the moon, and even then you'll have to collaborate if you want to actually build the rocket.
Truly transcending your limits entails questioning the physical boundaries of your own organism.
Fucking Excelsior.
Basically, what you're saying is 'steroids are cheating'. Ok, like that!
No, not at all. I don't give a damn about "cheating". I'm saying why not go full out–genetic engineering, cyborg limbs, artificial blood cells, whatever. Real superman shit isn't a matter of just one person willing himself to power, its a matter of our collectively bending evolution itself to our will by doing the science to redesign ourselves, without getting hung up on ethical bullshit or qualms about what's "natural."
I'm all for people using steroids if they want to, I think it's funny that we're hung up on something so minor. We're going to see stuff in our lifetime that will make steroid use seem quaint.
http://xkcd.com/1173/
The difference between PEDs and cybernetic augmentations is vast, I would say. For instance, if you're using the strict definition of the term, nearly anything you consume to fuel your training is a PED, and the USADA has banned every goddamned thing from Sudafed to GH. To Rant and his dickless friends at the USADA, three cups of coffee prior to training is just as evil as GH. No one really cares, however, because they're pussies.
PEDs allow a person to improve themselves from the inside out, rather than externally. that's where the difference lies. Genemods to allow less mystatin inhibition would be similar, I suppose, though outright replacement with cybernetic constructs would not- those would be an external replacement, rather than an internal improvement. I.e., it would take no more effort than some short-term pain endurance to improve one's self through cybernetic replacement, rather than long-term dieting and training.
Rant's not really hung up on steroids- he and his non-lifter friends at the real Rant's shitty blog are weirdly obsessed with me. Though they don't lift, diet, or do anything that one would think a reader of this blog would be involved in, they all apparently follow my blog religiously.
Yeah, rant sounds a right penis!! I'd just delete his posts, that way you wont have to try and outwit him, and lose.
I delete your spam. If I couldn't outwit a parrot I'd fucking kill myself.
Jamie, you seen any of CT Fletcher's video on YouTube? You might find him entertaining. Another great post man.
He is pretty fucking funny. I enjoyed his rant about the Hodge twins.
This is the best thing I've read in a long time.
Oh, and does your girl friend have a sister?
She does, but she's an accountant and doesn't lift, haha. Unfortunately, there's only one tiny brown death machine of Whitechapel-fueled powerlifting in that family.
Holy shit…what a bunch of bullshit comments.
Great job, Jamie. This area of philosophy is pretty well known….as is the nature vs. nurture argument….me, I always look to Darwin and think about evolution in isolated circumstances. Nurture can influence genes, just as nature can. I think if you make the CHOICE to be awesome, not only will you be forcing your body and mind (genes) to change, but you will also influence your offspring (as well as your mate). So, I think it's a bit of both.
I agree. That's one bullshit comment.
Great post. Check this out http://www.lift.net/2013/02/22/jesse-norris-interview/ .It's an interview with the new 19 year old 198 total & squat WR holder (open& drug free).
"If I train more then once a day its simply because I’m bored! The gym is my home and basically I don’t follow any strict program. I go in and do what I feel my body needs work on and lay off muscle groups that are fatigued."
Please answer. If you must, be harsh. Or even if you just want too. Does height impact how much you can lift? Is it more impressive for someone especially tall to lift as much as someone much shorter assuming they both are at the same weight?
Thanks.
Are you fucking kidding me?
lol. hahahaha.
Not sure if trolling….
Short people get a rebound out of the squat hole by utilizing their cock as a pogo stick. It is fact. Google that shit.
Maybe he is actually trying to ask about how arm length and leg length has an effect on lifts. Something that I believe you have covered before, a lot of dead lifters seem to have long arms for their torso length no?
No troll. Or no homo. I just assumed part of your lifting prowess was the result of your short stature.
Of course it is: How much do you think a 160lb 6'6'' man can squat?
Jamie,I think you would be interested in this guy. You may have already heard of him but when I hear him talk about training I can't help but think about your ramblings on the same issue!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NP7YodXpTM
Great article man. Made me go back to the garage and put on some more plates.
A photo on this post inspired me to visit /r/fitness, which I had never done before.
I thought you were exaggerating for comedic effect.
You were not.
The one time I could not be hyperbolic enough to out-suck the subject of my herperbole.
Alexander Karelin = holy f.
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/karelin.html
^ Hyperbole-filled Karelin article
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