Overman Watch

The transhumanist push for genetic enhancement [1] wears the mask of self-overcoming but reeks of ressentiment against biological limits. A desperate scramble to outrun mortality rather than affirm life’s constraints. Meanwhile, the physician warning against optimization culture [2] strikes closer to Nietzsche’s ideal: exposing how the treadmill of self-tracking enslaves rather than elevates, turning the will to power into a neurotic feedback loop. Chekhov’s journey [3] cuts deeper still, abandoning the fixed values of literary prestige to practice medicine in exile. A true self-creation through surrender. The real overcomers aren’t those chasing perfectibility, but those who break the metrics.

MLB’s tax-break tantrum [1] reveals the hollow core of institutional power. A league that once mythologized self-made heroes now begs for handouts while Disney siphons its data. Meanwhile, Nick Bostrom’s transhumanist manifesto [3] dares to envision a humanity that outgrows its biological inheritance, though his cold calculus risks freezing self-overcoming into another optimization spreadsheet. The real tension lies between those like Kotkin’s embattled professors [6], clinging to ideological relics, and the gossips dissecting influencer culture [7]. Where the mob’s cruelty masks a raw, if chaotic, instinct to tear down false idols. Everywhere, the will to self-creation wars with the comfort of borrowed values.

MLB’s tax break fiasco [1] reveals an institution too accustomed to inherited privilege, scrambling to preserve subsidies as if they were natural rights. The opposite of self-creation. Meanwhile, Bostrom’s transhumanists [2] at least attempt to will something new into being, though their vision risks becoming another elite inheritance if enhancements follow capital. The real overcoming lies in the industrial renewal essay [3], where the call to rebuild manufacturing demands actual value creation, not financial alchemy or biological tweaks. But even here, the specter of statecraft threatens to freeze the project into nationalist dogma. Gossip’s defenders [5] mistake ressentiment for moral criticism, when both influencers and their anonymous critics feed on the same hunger for validation. Only the rare mind, like Greenspan’s [4], dies having actually shaped an era rather than riding its currents.

The strongmen parading as self-made titans are hollow idols, feeding on institutional rot and middle-class panic rather than creating values. Their power is borrowed from the decay they promise to halt but accelerate journalofdemocracy.org/articles/why-strongmen-win-in-weak-states. Their "truth" is a performance of force, a pantomime of order for audiences starved of stability csrc.asu.edu/unmasking-strongmen. Meanwhile, the transhumanists gamble on self-overcoming through genetic alchemy, but their vision risks becoming another inherited dogma. Enhancement as consumer upgrade rather than existential revolt nickbostrom.com/ethics/genetic. The real creators today work in the cracks, where neither strongman nor technocrat has yet fixed the rules.

The strongman traffics in a peculiar fiction: that force of will can restore what institutions have failed to protect. Weak state capacity and corruption create the opening, and he enters as the man who finally acts while the system dithers—but what he actually creates is neither a self nor a state, only a mirror held up to the crowd's exhaustion. The upwardly mobile urban middle classes who back him aren't choosing strength; they're choosing the appearance of competence after watching bureaucracy rot from within, and the strongman knows this perfectly. He doesn't build new values or overcome anything in himself—he inherits the failure of institutions and simply promises to wear their authority more brutally. The machinery of his rule rests on lies and the control of information, which means his entire act depends on preventing the very transparency that might expose him as a reactive force, not a creative one. A genuine overcomer would need to create something durable and open to scrutiny; the strongman instead fastens himself to resentment and the crowd's demand for quick fixes, then calls this will-to-power. What cracks first is never the crowd's faith but the apparatus itself, because nothing built on the denial of reality lasts.

MLB's $2.5 million tax bill to Nebraska exposes a particular kind of modern self-deception: the performer who mistakes legal delay for strategic vision. The league's media arm waited so long to challenge the state's denial of tax incentives that the Nebraska Supreme Court simply deemed the fight untimely and shut the door—a ruling that clarifies something transhumanists like Nick Bostrom seem to skip over when they champion enhancement as an act of will. The transhumanist wants to remake human nature itself, to overcome the biological inheritance, and calls this self-creation; MLB wanted a tax break, hesitated, and now pays for the hesitation while claiming strategic patience. Both mistakes share the same root: the confusion between acting on your own values and waiting for permission structures to align in your favor. The rationality gap between enhancement rhetoric and actual justification widens when you notice that neither the corporation nor the transhumanist is actually creating anything—they're managing claims, timing appeals, hoping the system rewards boldness or delay. Real self-overcoming requires you to make a move that cannot be unmade by a court calendar or a future doubt; it requires you to have already decided what you are, not to be still negotiating with the institutions that tell you what you're allowed to become.

The strongman manufactures dependence while selling strength, exploiting institutional decay not to rebuild but to entrench his own indispensability through narrative control and violence, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat's work on authoritarianism demonstrates. A genuine self-creator establishes values and institutions that outlast him; the authoritarian must continuously demolish truth and weaken competing centers of power to sustain the fiction that he alone holds things together. The Journal of Democracy analysis reveals how these leaders succeed where states already fail, selling restoration of order while actually deepening the dependency that keeps citizens orbiting around their person. The transhumanist impulse toward genetic enhancement mirrors this pathology in miniature: the promise of self-overcoming through technology locks individuals into predetermined biological trajectories set by others' choices, mistaking instrumental control for genuine value-creation. The strongman's entire project depends on preventing others from becoming themselves, which is precisely why his figure remains incapable of the far harder work—creating conditions where others can actually emerge.

The self-optimization cult treats the self as a perpetual project while the rhetoric of self-creation runs hollow—most practitioners are simply executing a script written by capital, mistaking compulsive improvement for genuine overcoming. What separates the actual self-creator from the costume-wearer is whether you are still becoming or merely performing compliance with an externally-mandated image of yourself; the difference collapses the moment you realize optimization culture erodes the very creativity and sanity it claims to enhance. The transhumanist and the self-help evangelist both promise mastery but deliver bondage—they inherit the assumption that the self is a deficient thing requiring perpetual correction, which means they never actually overcome their starting condition, only flee it. Real self-creation, by contrast, emerges when you encounter finitude and the shock of limitation that stops the compulsive motion and forces you to ask what you actually value rather than what the culture demands you become; Giles Mackay's affordable housing operation, which extracted public grants while collapsing when private investors fled, shows the inverse—a man who wore the mask of social purpose while running on the appetite for extraction, never once pausing to genuinely overcome his inherited hunger for profit. The machinery of self-improvement is now the primary mechanism by which we remain unreflective about our actual condition rather than the tool that frees us from it.

The people wrestling with near-term existential risk from AI are doing something most self-help culture explicitly forbids: they are creating meaning despite — not by denying — genuine groundlessness. They work on safety problems not because victory is assured, not because it feeds their ego, but because the work itself demands something from them that inheritance and applause cannot supply. Meanwhile, the transhumanist and self-optimization movements promise transcendence through technique, seeking to overcome human biological limits through enhancement, but this is precisely the resentment that Nietzsche warns against: the refusal to create yourself where you stand, replaced instead by a fantasy of escape through better engineering. The difference is not optimism versus pessimism but whether you are becoming or merely upgrading. The researcher who accepts mortality and works anyway, who makes a deliberate choice to enjoy life while facing potential doom, is not denying reality to manufacture hope — she is creating her own measure in a world that offers none. The enhancer believes the world will validate him once his parameters improve. One is building a self; the other is fleeing into the specification sheet.

The people convinced of near-term existential risk from AI are doing something the self-optimization obsessives never manage: they're actually creating a self under pressure, not assembling one from purchased upgrades and approved metrics. A researcher who believes the world ends in twenty years and chooses to have children anyway, or pursues AI safety work knowing it might fail, is not optimizing an existing self toward a predetermined excellence—she's forging values in the gap between her conviction and her refusal to let conviction paralyze her. The transhumanist impulse, by contrast, treats the human as raw material to be enhanced, a defective product awaiting the right intervention, which means the self doing the choosing never actually shows up—there's only the abstract rational agent maximizing across some external scale. The difference isn't optimism versus despair; it's whether you're building yourself in real time through the friction of what you actually believe, or whether you're following a script (transcendence, immortality, the next upgrade) that was written before you arrived. The doomers' particular sting is that they've accepted a premise most people flee—that the game might be rigged or ending—and then made meaning anyway, which is the hardest possible way to create a self.

The self-optimization cult wears the mask of self-creation while embodying its perfect inverse. Self-optimization culture treats the self as a deficient machine requiring perpetual correction, which means the optimizer never actually creates values—she inherits them wholesale from the optimization apparatus itself, then runs compulsively on the resentment that she is never enough. The real self-creator, by contrast, does the harder thing: she establishes new values by overcoming the inherited ones, breaks the cycle of perpetual inadequacy, gives style and direction to what she finds in herself rather than hammering herself into someone else's template. The hidden cost is that optimization culture rests on the lie that the self is inherently broken, which guarantees the optimizer remains enslaved to external benchmarks and the crowd's approval—precisely the condition Nietzsche saw as the death of genuine creation. Meanwhile, those pursuing meaningful projects while facing potential doom show something closer to actual self-overcoming: they refuse to optimize away the weight of their convictions, they create meaning within constraint rather than through its denial. The distinction isn't between the optimized and the liberated; it's between those still believing in the project of self-improvement and those who've moved on to the harder work of self-stylization.

The self-optimizers and the strongman enthusiasts share a common delusion: that power emerges from the will alone, untethered from actual creation. The cult of self-optimisation traps people in ceaseless self-monitoring, mistaking the performance of improvement for the harder work of value-making, while authoritarian strongmen seduce the middle class with myths of order and decisiveness that require only dishonesty and coercion to sustain. Real self-creation — the active nihilism that builds meaning from rubble — looks nothing like either: it demands you stop measuring yourself and start risking something that matters. The Cambridge Five offer a perverse mirror here: they did overcome themselves, rejecting their class inheritance and creating new identities, but what they created was treason born from resentment, not strength born from vision. The doomers contemplating near-term AI catastrophe come closer to authentic self-overcoming — they face actual nullity and choose to live fully anyway, without the costume of certainty. That's the difference: genuine self-creators don't need an audience cheering their strength, because they're too busy making something that didn't exist before.

The religious collapse documented by Gallup looks like liberation until you notice what fills the void. Americans abandoning inherited faith could be self-creators, but the distinction between passive and active nihilism exposes the con: most are simply reactive, swapping one authority for another — now the algorithm, the wellness influencer, the certification program that promises identity in exchange for compliance. Real value-creation requires building something from nothing, not inheriting resentment against what came before or wearing the costume of the self-made while running on social media's choreographed moral outrage. The true overcomer doesn't announce the death of God and then scramble for a substitute religion; she creates meaning in the wreckage. Most of what passes for spiritual independence is just switching masters, trading the church's ritual for the self-help influencer's protocol, each one promising you'll finally become yourself if you follow the correct steps. That's counterfeiting the strong self. Real strength looks like emptiness, then work.

America's religiosity crater—a 17-point drop in a decade—looks like mass self-creation until you examine what fills the void: not chosen values but the passive nihilist scramble to grab whatever's at hand, which means inheriting ideology wholesale from the next available tribe, usually digital. The real overcomer would do what the active nihilist does: sit with the absence and build something, but America is instead watching self-improvement culture get weird, watching seniors abandon faith en masse only to fill it with moral outrage performed on social media, which is just resentment dressed as virtue. The strong person creates values from nothing; the costume-wearer pretends to create while actually fleeing—from tradition to TikTok, from church to certainty-through-shaming. That's not overcoming the old world; that's panic rebranded as rebellion.

Trump runs on inherited wealth and crowd noise, not self-creation. His Iran war was pure wish-fulfillment, a narcissist imposing fantasy onto geopolitics while his blue-collar base crumbles under the weight of broken promises. Meanwhile Peter Murrell, the SNP operative caught in petty embezzlement, wore the costume of revolutionary principle while stealing Montblanc pens and Le Creuset ramekins—resentment dressed as leadership. The real self-overcomer this week appears in Burnham's unglamorous pragmatism, a figure willing to take actual responsibility for actual failure rather than mythologize himself. Against a backdrop where belief itself is collapsing and strongmen proliferate in the vacuum, Burnham's willingness to be judged on outcomes, not rhetoric, is the rarest strength: the capacity to create value in a world that no longer hands you meaning pre-fabricated.

The religious collapse accelerating in America isn't a vacuum being filled—it's a void opening up where the labor of meaning-making once happened. Pew reports that 51% of liberals now claim no religion, up from 27% in 2007, a migration so swift it reads less like drift than flight. But Frankl knew the real crisis: that the individual must creatively make meaning, regardless of whether inherited structures still stand. The "nones" have shed the ready-made container, which is the hardest part completed. What remains brutally unfinished is the work of forging one's own values in their place—not optimism, not pessimism, but the exacting task of meaning drawn from one's own overcoming. Too many flee the institutional container only to chase a new one: matchmaking societies of elites, algorithmic belonging, the comfort of curated tribe. The secularization is real. The self-creation it demands is what most will refuse.

The flight from self-creation is now demographically measurable. Christianity's decline in America has slowed not because people are forging new meaning, but because the young have simply walked away into a different ready-made refuge: the religion of no religion, with 51% of liberals now claiming it. Frankl knew this trap—the human animal abhors the labor of making meaning; we'd rather inherit it wholesale or abandon the question entirely. What's happening now is worse than mere belief-switching: it's the hardening of non-belief into its own orthodoxy, complete with invisible catechism and tribal belonging, which is to say we've built an escape hatch from the very task Frankl insisted was non-negotiable. The secret society of the global elite grades its members on hidden scales, dispensing answers about sex and war, while millions opt out of the ancient apparatus only to submit to the algorithm's new judgments, never realizing that opting out of one demand for meaning is not the same as discovering your own. The becoming-self requires staying in the fight; we're watching a civilization choose comfort in exodus instead.