Episode 59: Transhumanism in Captain America: Civil War & Iron Man 3

"Transhumanism is the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints." -Science Direct

The Winter Soldiers are given a serum to take them from an elite death squad to an uncontrollable killing juggernaut. In Iron Man 3, combat veterans are experimented on with a program called EXTREMIS that can regrow limbs . . . but at a terrible price.

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead!

Links:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3498820/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300854/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/transhumanism

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/14605498

https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Soldier_Serum#Winter_Soldier_Program

https://consaracytheories.com/f/marvels-project-insight-made-real

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz3HKkVrJE4


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Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Transhumanism, Captain America, Iron Man, Winter Soldier, Manchurian Candidate, technology enhancement, biological constraints, Hydra, Extremis program, AI, human DNA, informed consent, predictive programming, Marvel films, conspiracy theories.

Music. Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about transhumanism in Captain America: Civil War and Iron Man 3. This continues my walk through some of the Marvel films I talked about Captain America, the Winter Soldier, in conjunction with the Manchurian Candidate, because I feel that you don't wind up with a film like the Winter Soldier, or even a character like the Winter Soldier without first having a novel like The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon. Spoilers abound. There's no way for me to talk about this theme without getting into some spoilers in these films. So if you have not seen them, but you plan to bookmark this episode, download it and come back to it. I don't want to spoil anything for anybody. If you continue on, I assume that spoilers are fine with you. Let's saddle up and take this ride. Let's start out with some kind of working definition of what is transhumanism anyway, if we go to sciencedirect.com we find this abstract that I think has a pretty good working definition for us. Transhumanism is the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints. Transhumanism is characterized by a set of core values, emphasizing positive experience and recognizing the limitations of human cognition and embodiment in achieving maximally positive experience, a set of non necessary but common secondary values and positions associated with transhumanism include individualism, libertarianism, pragmatism and physicalism, influenced by Enlightenment ideals, transhumanism has been criticized from a variety of perspectives, including those religious and secular and those socially conservative and socially liberal. End quote. So for our purposes, the first part of that, I think, is the most relevant Transhumanism is the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints, as I talked about in my episode regarding the Manchurian Candidate and Captain America The Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier is a character Bucky Barnes. He had been friends with Steve Rogers, aka Captain America. He is lost in battle, presumed dead, but an homage to Operation paper clip scientist Arnhem Zola takes him and performs experiments on him, biological enhancements. He gives him a metal arm, for example, and all kinds of brainwashing to turn him into a sort of Manchurian Candidate. Captain America. Civil War opens up in 1991 The Winter Soldier has been cryogenically frozen, or something similar, and is awakened. He is programmed by a series of random Russian words. He murders someone on the side of the road and steals a briefcase. We don't yet know who he killed or why, in an attempt to keep criminals from stealing a biological weapon. So at this point, we leave 1991 and we flash forward to a more contemporary time, Captain America, Civil War, came out in 2016 so round about there in an attempt to keep criminals from stealing a biological weapon, one of them tells Captain America that Bucky remembered him and got all weepy about it. But this is a trap to try to kill Captain America. Another part of the plot is whether the Avengers should be regulated, and this is one of the things that really touches off the theme of the Civil War. They have caused too much destruction and would have to answer to a UN panel. Now I'm not going to go into all of the details of the plot, because for our purposes here, I really just want to focus on transhumanism. In Cleveland, a man in his house is bothered by another man who caused a fender bender, car accident. This man is a Soviet who commanded the Winter Soldier in the 1991 murder. The other man is Baron Zemo, who is, you know, in the Marvel canon, a comic book villain, Zemo kills this Soviet who exclaims, Hail Hydra as he's dying. And I have in my notes, is this a reference to Осоавиахим? Because when you think about it, okay, Hydra was, for all intents and purposes, a Nazi. Organization. So why would a Soviet, someone who's supposed to be diametrically opposed to Nazi ideology, fighting against the Nazis in World War Two? Why would a Soviet exclaim Hail Hydra? I mean, this is an obvious reference, like heiling Hitler, Hail Hydra. Why would a Soviet do that? So in my notes I've written, is this a reference to Осоавиахим and how the Soviets had their own version of paper clip. So for all of their propaganda about the родина and beating back the fascist threat, they imported evil as well. I just thought that was a little interesting theme of the movie. At a special UN conference to ratify a treaty for the oversight of the Avengers, King T’chaka, who's the leader of the fictional nation of Wakanda, is murdered by a bomb at this conference, and the suspect is the Winter Soldier. Steve wants to apprehend the Winter Soldier himself. He believes he can capture him without being killed. Meanwhile, Baron Zemo is in a hotel room with the code words practicing his Russian. It's clear he wants to activate the Winter Soldier, but we don't know why. Steve is convinced that something has broken in Barnes's programming and perhaps he can be saved. This is similar to Marco and Shaw in the Manchurian Candidate. Marco is convinced that if he can get a forced deck of cards and get inside Raymond Shaw's programming, he can undo the damage that's been done to him. So Steve tries to help Barnes escape authorities, but he isn't successful. The Winter Soldier winds up in custody in Berlin, and a van pulls up to a power plant. Baron Zimo claims to be a man sent by the UN to evaluate the Winter Soldier. Of course, we as the viewer know that's not true. The man at the power plant makes a delivery of a large wooden crate. Steve gets suspicious that Barnes was deliberately flushed out of hiding when his photo was splashed all over the media in record time after the UN bombing. This made me think of Fletcher Prouty story from JFK that supposedly he was in New Zealand and at an impossible time, the media there already had full biographical information and a studio shot of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it's like, how would they have possibly had all of this information together and ready to go at an impossible time? Things that make you go, hmm. So Steve has the suspicion that the Winter Soldier is being set up because the media had all of this information quickly and splashed it out everywhere so everyone would be able to find the Winter Soldier. Zemo continues to question Barnes the box at the power plant blows out the power grid in like an EMP style attack. Zemo triggers Barnes using his code words, and Barnes breaks out of his captivity. Zemo keeps asking Barnes about this mission from 1991 and Zemo is able to escape. Barnes escapes with Steve and Sam Zemo, and as Sam the Falcon, Zemo asked Barnes about Siberia, and Barnes reveals that he is not the only Winter Soldier. So now we flash back again to 1991 the briefcase he steals in the murder has some connection to the Winter Soldier program. Barnes tells Rogers that the group was a hydra elite death squad. They were dosed with some kind of serum that made them even deadlier and more aggressive. According to Barnes, these people are multilingual, and they could come in and take down a whole country in one night and then disappear and never be found again. Zemo makes it to a remote military installation in Siberia. He goes after a file on December 1991 he also finds other Winter Soldiers that have been cryogenically frozen. Steve and Barnes make it to Siberia, as does Tony. Stark Tony refers to barnes as the Manchurian Candidate, an obvious nod. We also see black panther in their shadows. Zemo has executed all of the other Winter Soldiers, which seems odd. Why break in at this facility unless he was planning to activate all of them. Zemo tells Captain America that he will lose everything. An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again, but an empire that crumbles from within is truly dead. Zemo shows a video of Barnes executing Tony Stark's parents in December of 1991 and Tony watches in horror. Steve admits to Tony that he knew Barnes killed Tony's parents. Black Panther finds Zemo outside. Zemo admits his goal was to get the Avengers to kill each other. He decides to let go a vengeance and prevents Zemo from killing himself. He. Zemo becomes a prisoner, but smiles a bit because he doesn't believe his plan failed. Barnes is taken to Wakanda, which is where the Black Panther is from, and he will be cryogenically frozen until he can be deprogrammed. So in a nutshell, that's the film, not getting into all the fight scenes and all the conflicts and some of the other ideological things that are brought up. In a nutshell, especially as it relates to transhumanism, that's the film The Winter Soldier has killed Howard Stark, Tony Stark's father and taken this briefcase that has these blue pouches in it, and presumably the contents of this pouch are identical to, or very similar to, the same serum that Dr Erskine develops in order to make Captain America. Captain America. I'm going to go now to Marvel Cinematic Universe and read a little bit from their blurb about the Winter Soldier program. By December 1991 Howard Stark managed to recreate the super soldier serum, prompting Hydra to send Winter Soldier to pop pop Stark and his wife Maria and retrieve the serum. This serum was injected intravenously without Vita radiation or a Vita Ray chamber, which that's what was used for Steve Rogers back in the day, and was used by Hydra to convert their most elite death squad into winter soldiers. The serum granted its user more strength than Hydras previous version as one subject, Joseph was shown to overpower and send Winter Soldier flying during a sparring match. However, this version of the serum had a mental side effect, giving the Winter Soldiers an increase in aggression and making them uncontrollable. They soon turned on Hydra, and thus were incapacitated and placed in cryostasis, deeming Stark's serum to be a failure. Hydra recruited Dr Wilfred Nagel to recreate the serum. Before Nagel could finish his work, Hydra had been disbanded in quote. So one of the things that Dr Erskine tells Steve Rogers before his experiment is that the serum will take whatever qualities a person has and amplify them. So a good person becomes a great person, a bad person becomes even worse. I'm going to read now from their blurb about World War Two in 1940 a prototype version of the serum was tested on Johan Schmidt, turning him into the Red Skull in the process. However, the formula wasn't ready for use at the time, and the serums effects affected Schmidt's personality drastically. Schmidt's transformation did not go as planned because his serum lacked radioactive exposure, causing the burning away of the skin and tissue surrounding his skull, as well as leaving an unpleasant red scab on his nasal cavity. After Abraham Erskine escaped to the United States of America, he joined the strategic scientific reserve and perfected the serum. As a result, the SSR started Project rebirth, an initiative to use the serum and transform Allied soldiers into super soldiers, using Stark Industries, injection tubes and vital radiation to unlock the serums potential. Erskine successfully used the serum on Steve Rogers, curing his ailments and increasing his physicality. Unfortunately, Erskine was killed by Heinz Krueger, who tried to steal the last vial of the serum, but was stopped by Rogers, knowing that the only hope to recreate Erskine's formula was locked in Rogers genetic code. The US government took blood from Rogers as the last remnants of the serum remained in Rogers DNA. In October 1943 Heydrich captured numerous American soldiers and sent them to work at the top secret weapons facility in the Austrian Alps when the prisoners were too weak to work, Arnim Zola used them as test subjects in his quest to recreate the serum. Bucky Barnes was injected with the serum and survived, although Zola abandoned his work and fled when Rogers stormed the facility, liberating Barnes during the first icy months of 1945 Rogers and Barnes led an attack on the Hydra train that was transporting Zola to another base. During the fight, Barnes fell from the train and fell seven, several 100 feet below. However, due to the serum, Barnes was able to survive the impact, albeit losing his left arm in the process. End Quote, so we have this serum. Again, I know that we're in the realm of, you know, sci fi, fantasy, superhero movies, super villain movies, etc, but we have this serum. The premise is we have this serum that will enhance someone. So as Erskine says, if you're good, it'll make you great. If you're bad, it'll make you worse. If you're already crazy and hell bent on violence, it's going to turn you into a killing machine. So let's file this to one side as we go now to Iron Man three. Iron Man three opens up in 1999 with Tony Stark meeting a nerdy guy named Aldrich Killian, who he brushes off he spends time instead with a woman named my hands. Person. She shows him a theory on how to access the part of a brain that controls repair. Tony says, essentially, you're hacking the genetic operating system of a living organism. She's experimented with plants so far, and calls the program Extremis. She talks about applications ranging from disease prevention to limb regrowth. One of her experimental plants explodes, which she calls a glitch, which, as glitches go, that's one hell of a glitch in the present time, which, let's see. Iron Man three was released in 2013 so thereabouts, when I say the present time thereabouts, 2013 Tony has turned into an insomniac who builds new suits relentlessly. This figure, a T word figure named the Mandarin, is tormenting the World War Machine gets rebranded as Iron Patriot by advanced idea mechanics, aka aim in 1999 this was the company Aldrich wanted to tell Tony about. The mandarin has performed nine bombings, but there's never any evidence left behind. Aldrich shows up to meet with Pepper Potts Stark Industries, and he looks completely different. He tells pepper that after years of dodging the President's ban on immoral and he's, you know, uses the air quotes there immoral biotech research, his Think Tank has come up with Extremis. He touches something behind his ear, and using a projector, he shows pepper, a 3d model that's alive feet of his brain. She pinches him, and the brain's Pain Center lights up. He argues that the mind, and in fact, all of human DNA, is destined to be upgraded. He asks her to imagine if you could hack into the hard drive of any living organism and recode its DNA. Potts argues that it sounds like something that could be weaponized. Yeah. Hello, no shit. Why do you think I'm recording this episode? And she declines to help him. Tony talks about his insomnia and tells pepper that his suits are part of him. So I feel like this is actually, in its own way, another reference to transhumanism, this molding of man and machine Tony feeling like he's inadequate without the suits. When Tony does sleep, he's played by nightmares. One of his suits threatens pepper and she freaks out. He doesn't understand what happened. Did he call for the suit in his sleep? And it answered happy, who had been Tony Stark's bodyguard. But then he gets promoted to a different security role, because it's not like Iron Man really needs a bodyguard. Happy gets into a scuffle with Aldrich, his bodyguard, and the man is able to heal injuries on the spot. Happy also sees something like fire under his skin. Another man ingests an unknown substance and explodes like spontaneous combustion. Tony threatens on national television to kill the Mandarin and announces his home address. Maya Hansen shows up unexpectedly before she can state the purpose of her visit, a missile tears through the house. Tony gives a suit to pepper to save her life. They escape the attack, and Tony winds up in Tennessee because he had programmed the suit to take him there before the attack. The suit is out of power, and Tony is on his own. He breaks into a garage where he befriends a child. The boy shows him a newspaper announcing that Tony is presumed dead. Maya tells pepper that she thinks her boss, Aldrich Killian, is working for the Mandarin. In actuality he is Tony meets the mother of the man who killed himself in Tennessee as a human bomb. Tony is arrested by a woman who claims to be from Homeland Security, but like the man happy saw, she has fire under her skin. Tony finds video of AIM experimenting on injured combat veterans. He figures that Aldrich sold his technology to the Mandarin who is using it for T word purposes. Maya, meanwhile, tells pepper about Wernher von Braun, and she says before he built rockets for the Nazis, he dreamed of space travel. The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet, which was supposedly his remark to a colleague after the first v2 rocket hit London. Maya says all scientists start out wide eyed and pure, but the ego steps in. She also points out that Aldrich built his think tank on military contracts. Hmm, doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that sound a bit like Lord Elon? I'm just freaking saying. I'll drop a link to the article I wrote about how Lord Elon, along with his defense contracts, have made Project Insight real. There's another Marvel reference for you. Although Maya is pretending to be innocent, she's still involved with Aldrich and has kidnapped pepper to manipulate Tony war machine has also been taken by aim. The big plot twist is that the Mandarin is merely an actor Aldrich. Tells Tony that he realized anonymity is the key use a fake villain like the Mandarin so you can rule from behind the scenes. This also sounds familiar, doesn't it? I mean, I'm convinced that that's how the fat cats really do it. The President is really just a sock puppet, like Jim Garrison said. He's a business agent, a figurehead. He goes out to the public and tells people that peace is the goal, economic stability, harmony, peace. But then, in reality, he goes around and pimps himself out for the military intelligence and military industrial complexes. Yeah, we want peace. Sure, we do. Of course we do. Aldrich has stolen the Iron Patriot suit, which he intends to use for nefarious purposes. He says he wants to create. He wants to own the war on terror and then create the supply and demand for it. Doesn't that also sound familiar. Sounds a lot like September one one doesn't it. Tony suit finally recharges and makes its way from Tennessee to Florida. He and Colonel roads rendezvous at the compound where the fake Mandarin has been housed. The fake Mandarin tells them of a plot to involve the US Vice President. Stark calls to warn him that this may be a pop, pop plot against the US president using a false Iron Patriot as a Trojan horse. The VP pretends to be concerned, but does nothing. Hmm, kind of also sounds familiar. I wonder who that refers to. I wonder aldridge's plan is to murder the president on live television and attribute the crime to the Mandarin. Then the VP will take over as a president in Aldrich his pocket. There's a final showdown, and pepper survives, not because of Tony, but because of the extremist program that's inside of her interesting stuff. So you have this kind of blue serum that's going into Steve Rogers, the Winter Soldier, and then other Winter Soldiers that were created by Hydra. And then you have this weird, fiery program called extremists, and it's being used, just so disgustingly on these combat veterans, these people that have served their country, that may have a missing limb, and they're being told by Aldrich that if you just take this experimental program, you can have limb regrowth. Now I'm not going to tell you about all the other side effects. You might spontaneously combust. You might die. You're gonna have fire under your skin. But hey, go ahead, this is for the better, and that's one of the other things that I wanted to say in this episode, is that that's always how this technology is sold to us. That's like with Lord Elon and his brain chips. Nobody is going to sit and say, I don't want somebody who's a quadriplegic or a paraplegic or someone who has some other type of disease to be able to use their limbs again. I wouldn't sit here and say that, as I've told you before, from a from a libertarian type of perspective, what consenting adults do is not my business. And if an adult of sound mind has informed consent, they know the risks fully. They haven't been deceived or lied to. They fully know what the risks are, and they say, I green like this. I consent. I want to do this. It's not my place to say otherwise. I would never tell somebody I don't want you to have some type of neurological assistance that could help you. It's not my place to do that. I feel like pepper. All of this is weaponizable. It's always trotted out in the media and even in movies. I mean, we could think about these scenes as being predictive programming. Now, as I mentioned, we're talking about films that came out in 2016 and 2013 can this be a means of getting the public ready for these types of enhancements? Just long pause there. I mean, could that be it the fusion of man and machine, the idea that a person's DNA, a person's brain, they were just meant to be upgraded. They were meant to be hacked and changed. You could be so much more. You could be like a superhero, if you just take this stuff. I mean, I feel like that's a valid question. In September of 2023 you had Yuval Noah Harari telling the economist AI is the end of human dominated history. He says, This is the end of human history, the end of human dominated history. History will continue with somebody else in control. In five years, there will be a technology that can make decisions independently and that can create new ideas independently. Maybe they'll be nice, maybe they'll solve cancer and climate change, but we are not sure. I'm tending to think of it more in terms of really an alien invasion. Have an alien fleet of spaceships coming from Planet zircon, or whatever, with highly intelligent beings. This is what we are facing, except that the aliens are not coming in spaceships from Planet zircon. They are coming from the laboratory. If the humans are divided among themselves and are in an arms race, then it becomes almost impossible to contain this alien intelligence. And what he's saying there is okay, it's not going to be little green Martian men in spaceships coming from outer space. It's going to be AI. So you already have him saying, in September of 2023 we're at the end of human dominated history. Now, people can say, oh, that's just conspiracy theory. I mean, you check out the video, drop a link to it. You can watch it for yourself. And he's been predicting this sort of thing about the useless class, people disappearing into VR he's been predicting these things for years. This is not just something that he dreamed up one night and started making the publicity circuit on he's been talking about this for years. So part of me is like, I enjoy these movies, and I think that there are a lot of interesting tidbits of information that coincide with real history. If you know what you're looking for, like paperclip and also of the ahim, the connection between Hydra and shield, I think, is a pretty How would I want to say this? I think it's a it to me, it's a clear reference between how Nazi ideology informs our own intelligence agencies. Even today, RFK Jr has written about this in his book about the Wuhan cover up. Could these films be, in their own way, priming the pump, getting people ready, getting people to feel like this is a normal, natural thing. I can be a superhero. This technology is great. We should embrace it. We shouldn't be afraid of it. It's outmoded. It's outdated. It's silly to be afraid of this kind of transhumanist technology. If I want to put a chip in my brain, I'll do it. If I want to take a serum, if I want to try to hack my DNA, well, we should do this. It's natural to us now. It might have seemed foreign. It might have seemed scary to people 100 years ago, but my God, look at how much technology has changed even since then. So many 100 years ago, would never have dreamed of a cell phone and all the things we can do with a simple cell phone. So why be afraid of transhumanism? Why not take a serum and change your DNA? Why not give yourself extra power? Why not take a serum that can cause you to regrow a limb. I know I have a lot of long pauses, but I mean, for me, this is a this is tricky water to navigate, because, as I said, I'm not going to sit here and tell somebody with a chronic illness, I want to take away your right to try. It's not my place to do that. Again. I come back to what pepper said. All of this sounds great, but it also sounds weaponizable. Somebody can put a brain chip in your head. What else can they do? They can give you a serum and tell you it's going to regrow a limb. Well, what else is it going to do? I I've just feel like it would be foolish to blindly put trust in these companies. Science is God now, just trust it. Don't ask what's in it. Just do it. Just do it. I find that line of thinking scary. I think you should be asking a lot of questions. For me, I always refer back to the idea of informed consent, really having all the facts, all the risks, the true risks, the known risks in front of you, and then being able to make the decision. But what if those risks are obscured? What if they're what if they lie to you? Tell you it's perfectly safe when it's not? Points to Ponder. We will revisit these types of topics again. I intend to do another episode about like, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and the big spy apparatus that we see in Avengers Age of Ultron, because it has all of that and more. So. As I said, I feel like these Marvel movies have a lot of interesting tidbits of information if you know where to look, and they're not just Hollywood schlock filmmaking, there's some real stuff. There some real substance. Now are they priming the pump to get people ready for some of the advancements that are yet to come? Judge for yourself, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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