The reason that more Transhumanists are not Reactionaries, in my view, is that they haven’t done their reading on molecular manufacturing, or they mistakenly think that Friendly AI or a Kurzweilian Singularity will come around in time to save the day. The writings describing the full picture of molecular manufacturing are rather long and technical, and most people — even Harvard graduates with beefy IQs — simply don’t have the time or inclination to read them. The standards of Transhumanism have fallen in the last decade as well. In the late 90s and the early 00s, when the primary transhumanist venues were the Extropians and SL4 mailing lists, the technical understanding of the average transhumanist was excellent. Today, it is quite poor. There’s an emergent brilliance produced when you put Spike Jones, Robin Hanson, Anders Sandberg, Chris Phoenix, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Robert Bradbury on the same mailing list, which simply has no modern-day analogue. This environment was the forge that crafted the most capable Transhumanist leaders of today. Second-generation students of transhumanism are simply not the same.

When people understand the true extent of the feasibility and power of molecular manufacturing, a grim attitude tends to set in due to all the palpable risks. I’m pleased that the 3D-printed gun exists, because this is the first visceral, public example of the phenomenon I’ve been writing about and fearing since 2001. Unrestrained technological power in the hands of the masses. It’s nearly impossible to grasp the full picture until you understand the likely production capabilities and relative technological feasibility of molecular manufacturing. Many of the original visionaries are beginning to get quite old, and are falling silent without passing on their knowledge in detail to many students, so I fear that the baton is not being handed off properly, and will be dropped along the way. Those who have the responsibility to pass off this knowledge know who they are.

My concern are individuals and small groups that asymmetrically empower themselves through emerging technologies and don’t have the public good in mind. Given the current predominant political sympathies, which are ultra-egalitarian, there would be few restrictions on the routes to this power. Adopting Traditional principles, however, which are strictly hierarchical, would restrict the power in the hands of a few, providing fewer points of failure. Would you rather take the risk of a thousand elite leaders exploiting powerful manufacturing technologies to do damage, or the guarantee that if the technologies are available to a billion, many of them will certainly do damage?

The benefit of conferring responsibility on a comparatively small set of elite individuals is that these individuals can be educated for their responsibilities far in advance, groomed and cultivated for their important roles. They can be instilled with good morals, broad understanding, supportive familial and organizational structures, and mutual expectations worthy of their station. Common people tend to think only for themselves, and have trouble seeing personal responsibility for affairs of the state. Handing someone a nanofactory automatically gives them the power to influence affairs on a worldwide scale. Is this a power we really want being handed to those educated by reality television?

Students of political correctness will cringe at the thought of conferring superlative powers on an elite, but the long-term survival of the human species is more important than historically contingent factors that are based on nothing more than the preoccupations of an unexpectedly influential cadre of Berkeley students in the 1960s. Prior to the 1960s, high-level political thought was still based heavily on Traditional principles of sacred responsibility among a few men of power. The notion that true power and control should be shattered into 300 million little pieces and distributed evenly among the populace is a very recent idea, one we would do well without. If UC Berkeley never existed, progressivism may have never even manifested in its current form and risen to become the dominant ideology of the nation’s elite.