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Indeed I think our disagreement here may see its source in our different approaches of morality as a philosophical object.
It seems fair to characterize your view as accepting some visceral, objective, absolute, perhaps divine, morality. My own soul offers me no such luxuries and I am unfortunately bound to the perhaps cynical Nietzschean skepticism: morality is a subjective and instrumental construct of power. Tradition and natural law, though the elect of my own prejudices, I can't resign myself to call universal.
That said, we can perhaps mend the gap a bit.
The thrill of transgression you point to is real, that "meddling with the primal forces of nature" does indeed have something exciting about it.
I submit that this excitement is nothing else that will to power. That self-same transcendent impulse that is enabled by technics. The essence of modernity, and the bending of nature to one's will. There is something of this in trans-anything. It is undeniable to anyone who is intimately familiar with the matter. The power to decide that one of the most immutable components of one's condition is now subject to one's own control is awesome.
And in a sense, this is also what motivates the Canadian bureaucrat. But his isn't a thrill of bending nature to will, or at least not through so direct a mean. So I will still insist that, though both impulses can be arranged in the same rubric, be it of modernity or of hubris, they are still meaningfully different.
And this difference is I think extremely relevant to our current moment and key to understand no less than the present and future of politics. The current battle lines of elite and counter elite in the west are once again drawn on a precise difference between two modes of dealing with modernity. And that difference is quite exactly the one we are talking about here, between an individual desire of transcendence, escape and a collective desire of management, control.
Management and control by what agency and to what end?
To no end. This is whence the conflict comes. There is no end. It's very postmodern, which scorns the still-modernist futurists.
People always seem to speculate that the managerial class is motivated by money, power, ideology. They are all individually moved by such base human ends, but as a class these are immaterial. Adam Curtis describes this very well in Hypernormalization. The only identifiable goal is the maintenance of the current order, not of the principles of it, not of some fixed idea of it, just pure maintenance and management, with no vision, no goal, no real fundamental spirit.
This is how they are able to hold contradictory ideas and policies and turn on a dime whenever fashionable (as Covid made most conspicuous). Because the system in itself doesn't believe in anything. Not even the Promethean impulse that built it and which is embodied by this rival faction.
Then I have no idea what you are trying to say. Which side of the struggle corresponds to (A) individual desire of transcendence, escape, and which corresponds to (B) collective desire of management, control ?
It's all of course more complicated and blurry than this one simple cut but broadly:
A is the Paypal Mafia, accelerationists at large, the dissident right, class reductionist Marxists, private capitalists and generally people at the top and bottom of company org charts.
B is the professional managerial class, neoliberals, the DEI complex, state administrations, NGOs, various social clubs the likes of Davos, public fund managers and generally people in the middle of company org charts.
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Power is an end in itself, as Orwell noted.
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