Like almost everyone currently running for the American Presidency, Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan isn’t getting anywhere near the White House. The difference is, he knows it. The novice politician is campaigning to force cutting-edge biotech and such into the discussion. 

A lot of the issues Istvan is discussing are really interesting to me, though the aggressiveness of Transhumanist predictions often give me pause, and the discourse on genetic engineering can be troubling. At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour conducted what is probably the best interview yet with Istvan. An excerpt about federal religious subsidies and global warming: 

Question:

What do you think of religious subsidies—the approximately $80 billion a year that the American government spends on religious institutions through reduced income, property, and investment taxes?

Zoltan Istvan:

We would remove every single one of those deductions. Of course, I say that knowing that that would be an impossibility. But that would be the goal, to remove those types of incentives [and create] a much more fair playing field for the secular-minded folks out there who also have projects that may not be getting the same types of benefits. I actually don’t want to give benefits to anyone doing these projects. I just think it should be a fair playing field. So the idea is we would try to take away those subsidies and put it back into the system.

Personally, I would put it directly into education. One of our main policies at the Transhumanist Party is we want to provide totally free education. And I’m actually also for mandating that everyone in the country goes to college. In the age of much longer life spans, it’s very likely that anyone under twenty will live to one hundred and fifty years old. So, as a nation, if we’re going to be living longer, we should also probably have longer legal educational periods. So I’m also advocating for making college mandatory, just like high school is mandatory. That way, we have a society that’s much more educated and hopefully better to itself.

Question:

What is your position on global warming, and what solutions would you explore as president?

Zoltan Istvan:

Our party, one hundred percent, believes in global warming. There’s no question about it, that it’s happening, and it’s a sad thing. However, there’s also no way to stop global warming at this point. We lost that battle thirty years ago. That was a mistake our species made and we’re now going to have to pay for it. So the Transhumanist Party doesn’t emphasize reducing the carbon footprint as much as it emphasizes the technologies we can use to overcome [its effects.]

What can we do to make it so that the human being can survive any kind of environmental catastrophe? Over the next ten or twenty years, many people are going to become more machine-like. I have a biochip in my hands, my father already has multiple heart [implants], a grandmother has an artificial hip. We are becoming cyborg-like and, when they start coming out with things like robotic hearts and kidneys, there’s no question that we’re going to start remaking our bodies to be much healthier. What would the human being need to survive?

These are the kinds of ways we want to attack the green problem. It is very unique and a bit radical, but unfortunately we blew it as a species and there’s no turning the ship of global warming around any more. It’s too late.•