The Games That Broke the Rules
On May 24, 2026, inside a purpose-built arena at Resorts World Las Vegas, a Greek swimmer named Kristian Gkolomeev pushed off the wall and covered fifty meters of freestyle in 20.81 seconds, faster than any human had ever swum the distance in officially sanctioned competition. He walked away with a million-dollar prize but will never appear in any official record book. The World Anti-Doping Agency, World Aquatics, and the International Olympic Committee have all refused to recognize the swim, because Gkolomeev did it at the inaugural Enhanced Games: the first elite sporting event in history built on the open, celebrated, medically supervised use of the substances every other federation bans.
The Enhanced Games are easy to dismiss as a Las Vegas spectacle, a doping circus with a five-million-dollar purse. But to read the competition as a rage-bait sports event is to miss its significance altogether. It is a referendum on the question that will define the next chapter of our species. Not whether the human being is meant to become greater than it is today, because both sides of this war answer yes, but how: by elevating the given human through natural means, or by re-engineering it through artificial ones.
The Olympic movement is built on one answer. Its entire moral architecture rests on the premise that greatness means driving the natural, God-given body to the very edge of what it can do, and never one step past that edge through chemistry. It is a cathedral to human ascension by natural means. The Enhanced Games are built on the other answer. Their founder, Aron D'Souza, does not frame the project as cheating. He frames it as liberation, casting his athletes as the "vanguard of super-humanity" and the old rules as a cage that held back not just competitors but the species. Both worship at the altar of the higher human. They disagree, totally, on how one is permitted to get there.
The Olympics and the Enhanced Games are two competing faiths about how human beings are meant to achieve their fullest potential.
That is what makes a swim meet worth this much attention. The same contest, the same two camps, the same irreconcilable answer to the same question, is now opening on every front of human life at once.
The Pattern Is Everywhere
The same question, whether a greater human is reached by perfecting the form we were given or by re-engineering it into something new, is being fought simultaneously across every domain of what it means to be human. The debate is replicating, and in every arena the same two camps line up in the same order: the Edenists, who would remain in the Garden of Eden perfecting the form we were given, and the Prometheans, who would steal fire from the Gods to re-engineer it into something new.
Take the body. The Edenist drives the one he was given toward its ceiling through training, diet, sleep, sunlight, breath, and earned pain, and reveres the result precisely because no needle touched it. The Promethean reaches for the needle, the testosterone, the peptide stack, and asks why anyone should leave strength and speed to the lottery of birth when medicine can simply dispense them. The Edenist sharpens the cognition he has through meditation, memory, deep reading, and flow; the Promethean wires cognition to silicon, dosing nootropics now and eyeing a neural implant later, until the line between thinking a thought and retrieving one disappears.
The Edenist masters biological realities like appetite and aging through fasting, movement, and habit, treating the body as a discipline to be kept; the Promethean rewrites them with GLP-1s, Botox, fillers, and the whole vocabulary of looksmaxxing, treating the body as a surface to be edited at will. At the genetic layer, the deepest stake in the war, the Edenist receives the genome as an inheritance, something to be stewarded and passed down intact; the Promethean treats it as a rough draft, selecting among embryos and editing with CRISPR.
This is coming to a head now because nearly every major technology trend is accelerating toward it at once. AI, GLP-1s, CRISPR, longevity medicine, brain-machine interfaces, gain-of-function research and the engineered vaccines that answer it, even space travel, have all crossed from speculation into deployment within a handful of years. Each one brings forward the date when every human will be forced to pick a side: adopt or resist.
| Technology | The Edenist Case | The Promethean Case |
| Artificial intelligence | Let it do our thinking and the faculty atrophies; we end up weakest at the one capacity we cannot afford to lose. | Like the plow and the calculator before it, AI is a lever that lets the mind reach far higher than it ever could alone. |
| Brain-computer interfaces (Neuralink) | A mind spliced to silicon is one that can be hacked, throttled, or owned, and the sovereign self dissolves into the device. | Direct neural access restores the paralyzed and lets a person think at machine speed; refusing it means being outpaced by those who don't. |
| Ozempic and GLP-1s | Appetite is meant to be mastered through discipline, not overridden for life by a drug that treats willpower as a defect. | Willpower lost to engineered food a century ago; a molecule that resets a broken hunger signal is no more shameful than insulin. |
| CRISPR gene-edited children | Editing a child who cannot consent turns sacred inheritance into a purchasable product line. | Erasing heritable disease at the source is the most compassionate medicine there is; forbidding it condemns children to preventable pain. |
| Artificial wombs | Outsourcing gestation industrializes the most human of bonds and treats birth as a manufacturing step. | It rescues the most premature infants and frees women from the dangers of pregnancy; that is liberation, not alienation. |
| Radical life extension | Added years are earned by tending the body you were given, not bought with pills, transplants, and transfusions of young blood. | Aging is the disease that kills everyone; declining to treat it is choosing to die on schedule out of deference to "natural." |
| Mind uploading and digital immortality | A copy of your mind on a server is a counterfeit that mistakes the soul for data; true transcendence is spiritual, not silicon. | If the self is a pattern of information, preserving it is the literal defeat of death, the thing the species has reached for since the first grave. |
| Vaccines and gain-of-function research | Engineering pathogens and injecting synthetic agents is playing God with forces we cannot recall; trust the body's own defenses. | The lab is how we beat nature's cruelty; it erased smallpox and polio, and turning away surrenders millions to deaths we know how to prevent. |
Adjacent Fronts: The Same Logic, Beyond Human Ability
| Technology | The Edenist Case | The Promethean Case |
| Weather modification | To engineer the sky is to treat a living equilibrium as a thermostat, courting catastrophe we cannot recall. | The climate is already breaking; if we can bring rain to the parched and cool a warming world, restraint is the real recklessness. |
| Space colonization | Earth is our home, not a quarry; the task is to live in balance within the one world that made us. | Earth is the cradle; a single-planet species is one catastrophe from extinction, so leaving is survival itself. |
One camp aims to elevate the human by cultivating the form it was given, and the other aims to elevate it by re-engineering that form. Both want a higher human. Neither is content to leave things as they are. This is not a fringe argument among bioethicists. It is becoming the master cleavage of the century, the axis along which families, generations, and eventually our entire civilization will be directed.
The Holy War
In a 2025 interview, Peter Thiel dismissed the transgender movement not as too radical but as far too timid, a transformation that stops embarrassingly short of the real ambition, and then carried the thought all the way up to the soul:
We want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. … The critique orthodox Christianity has is that these things don't go far enough. Transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.
Peter Thiel · Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, 2025
To Thiel, the given body is a draft so unfinished that changing one's sex barely begins the work. In his view, the Church agrees: the destination is an immortal body, a re-engineered self, and finally a transformed soul.
Another voice, however, looks at that same project and sees not salvation but damnation. Alex Jones, in full prophetic register, describes the very undertaking Thiel celebrates:
The elites believe they're racing, using human technology to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization where they're going to merge with machines, transcend, and break away from the failed species that is man, because they think what they are is ugly and bad, instead of believing it's a human test about building us up.
Alex Jones · The Joe Rogan Experience #911, 2017
They are describing the identical undertaking, merge with machines, transcend the flesh, defeat death, leave the old human behind. They disagree only on its meaning, and both reach for the vocabulary of the sacred: salvation and damnation, the soul, the devil, what God intends for man.
That Thiel and Jones are both self-avowed right-wing libertarians, shows the Edenist and Promethean divide does not break along classic left/right political axes. This is not the tired quarrel between caution and progress, between a conservative who wants to keep things as they are and a radical who wants to move fast and break them. Both sides are radicals. Both believe humanity is meant to rise, to transcend, to become something greater than the creature it is now. What divides them is not the destination but the road: whether we ascend by cultivating the human we were given, or by re-engineering it into something new.
That both men reach for Genesis is no accident, because the disagreement has the exact structure of a theological schism, down to a single verse. In Genesis 2:15, God places the man in the garden "to work it and to keep it." The Hebrew carries two verbs at once, and the whole war lives in the gap between them.
- Avad — To till, to cultivate, to labor, to improve. The mandate of dominion: raise the garden higher than it was handed over.
- Shamar — To guard, to watch over, to preserve, to keep. The mandate of guardianship: keep the garden as it was given.
Neither side is misreading. The verse genuinely commands both, in a single breath, and after several thousand years the two obligations have finally come apart, on the body of the human being itself.
The same split runs through the deepest doctrine of all. One side reads the first law of the body as Imago Dei: man is made in the image and likeness of God, so the given form is sacred, a divine signature, and to re-engineer it is to deface the likeness of God Himself. The other reads the same scripture and arrives at Imitatio Dei: the duty of man is to imitate God, and the God of Genesis is a maker, a gardener, an engineer who builds a world, calls it good, and hands the work to His creature to continue, so that to create and improve and lift the human condition out of squalor and pain is not rebellion against God but obedience to Him. One book, one God, two commands that cannot both be kept.
The Edenists keep the garden, guard the image, and hold that we rise by awakening what already sleeps within us. The Prometheans till the garden, imitate the maker, and hold that we rise by building. Their creeds are mirror images, and each ends on a promise of ascension drawn from the very same book:
The Edenist holds that we ascend by awakening what already sleeps within us, the latent powers of a being made in a sacred image, and that the artificial shortcut is a deception engineered to hollow out the soul while promising to lift it, the serpent's oldest pitch: "Ye shall be as gods" (Genesis, 3:5).
The Promethean holds that we ascend by building, that the God of Genesis made man a tiller of the soil, a tool-maker and a carpenter like His own son. The command to stay "natural" is itself the devil's deception designed to impede human potential. The holy path is to transcend the limits we were born with. As Jesus himself said: "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do" (John, 14:12).
This is why it hardens into a war rather than dissolving into a debate. The disagreement is existential: it is not about policy or resources or territory but about what a human being is for, which means there is no neutral ground to retreat to and no version of losing that feels survivable. And it is irreconcilable: both camps ground their position not in preference but in obligation, a duty each believes is laid on it by something higher than itself, and the two duties are mutually exclusive. No treaty splits the difference between "you must remain what you were made" and "you must become more than you were made."
Same God. Opposite commands. There is no compromise between them, because any settlement would require one side to commit what it regards as sacrilege. That is the difference between a negotiable disagreement and a war.
M31 Research Assessment
And it will be fought as a holy war, scripture or no scripture, because each side regards the other not as merely mistaken but as evil, a danger to the species itself, while holding its own cause as the righteous one, the side that truly venerates human life and human potential.
To the Edenist, the Promethean project is the Tower of Babel, men stacking bricks toward heaven to make themselves gods, and they call the enhanced apostates and Frankensteins. To the Promethean, Edenist restraint is the servant who buried his talent in the ground rather than multiply it, a fearful idolatry of the flesh that lets the poor stay poor and the dying keep dying while the means to save them sit in hand, and they call the faithful Luddites and the Left-Behinds. Each accuses the other of a specific sin, and casts it not as too slow or too fast but as the active agent of mankind's ruin. Not "you are wrong," but "you are damned."
Which is why the wars filling today's headlines, bloody and terrifying as they are, several of them now carrying a live risk of going nuclear, are not in the end the war that will define us. They will move borders, topple governments, kill and maim and grieve, and not one of them will change what a human being is. The only war of our era that will still be remembered ten thousand years from now is this one, the Holy War between the Edenists and the Prometheans: the war that determined the next chapter for our species: Homo Deus or Machina Sapiens.
The Psi Games
On July 31, 2026, a few weeks after the Enhanced Games close, a very different competition will open at a hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Psi Games International, founded by Hakim Isler, bill themselves as the world's first tournament dedicated to psychic ability, with competitors scored across five categories: remote viewing, mind sight, precognition, psychokinesis, and dowsing. There are no needles here, no implants, and no silicon. The premise is the exact inverse of the one on display in Las Vegas: that the unmodified human already harbors extraordinary dormant capacities, perception beyond the five senses, mind reaching into matter, knowledge of what has not yet happened, and that these are to be awakened through attention, training, and discipline rather than installed from a lab.
If the Enhanced Games are the Promethean showcase, the Psi Games are their Edenist mirror: the same refusal to accept the given human as the end of the story, but pursued by opposite means. They are the contest over the frontier of the soul, fought with the exact opposite weapons from the contest over the body.
For, as Thiel noted, the war does not stop at the body. It runs straight through the mind, and past it, into the territory people have always called the soul. Both camps look at the default human and judge it incomplete; they disagree, totally, on the remedy. The Promethean route to a greater mind runs outward through hardware: the brain wired to silicon, memory offloaded to the cloud, the self eventually uploaded. The Edenist route runs the opposite way, inward, on the conviction that the God-given human already contains what it needs, long dormant, to be awakened by natural means and never installed from without. The Psi Games are that inward route made into a movement.
While the Promethean view has been the long-dominant faction, the Edenist front has recently gained immense steam. The Psi Games may be the most explicit expression (a movement confident enough to keep score), but it is only one of a growing number of data points now bending toward the Edenist paradigm.
In 2024, the #1 podcast in the world was a documentary exploring the claim that nonspeaking autistic children can communicate by telepathy. It has since grown into a movement, and its reach is the signal: a measure of how many people now take seriously the Edenist intuition that the mind is more powerful than the brain that carries it.
Gen Z is attending church more often than their parents or grandparents, nearly twice per month; in Britain, monthly churchgoing among 18-to-24 year olds has quadrupled. After a century of secularization, the youngest adults are turning back toward the sacred, the same instinct the Psi Games pursue by another name.
Two Cold War experiments in unlocking the mind are having a second life. Project Stargate, the declassified remote-viewing program, has spawned a wave of podcasts, while MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control effort, finds increasing references, directly & indirectly, in the plots of popular shows like Stranger Things, Dark, Severance. According to Google Trends, searches for “remote viewing” are the highest in twenty years, and “MKULTRA”, a program allegedly shut down in 1973, are today at an all-time peak.
In April 2026 the White House signed an Executive Order to accelerate psychedelic research, fast-tracking psilocybin and ibogaine and committing fifty million dollars to study them for depression, PTSD, and addiction. Framed as medicine, the movement around it is unmistakably Edenist: plant-derived compounds, used ritually for millennia, as keys to physical & psychological healing and spiritual improvement. The frontier opened by a plant from the ground, not a chip from a factory.
Wellness and self-improvement is now one of the largest content categories on earth, a torrent of podcasts, books, and videos preaching that the unoptimized modern human runs far below its potential. The advice is relentlessly naturalist, sleep, sunlight, cold, real food, strength, sobriety, put the phone down, and never an implant; the premise is purely Edenist, that the given body and mind, disciplined, can flourish far beyond the default.
The UAP conversation has turned from the material to the mental. Congressional testimony and disclosures have pulled figures like Luis Elizondo and Jacques Vallee into the mainstream, where the questions are less about hardware than consciousness: accounts of telepathy, precognition, and phenomena that seem to respond to intention. Whatever the truth about UAPs, the discourse has reopened the question of whether mind is local to the skull at all.
Among scientists, the materialist certainty that the brain produces consciousness is quietly cracking. A growing number of researchers (Stanford scientist Garry Nolan among them) now entertain the inverse: that consciousness is fundamental, and that matter may arise from it. It is the deepest possible support for the Edenist position, stating that the real frontier already exists naturally within us.
Together, the Edenist program comes into focus. It is not merely a defensive refusal to be re-engineered. It has its own affirmative vision of transcendence, one that runs inward through the cultivation of what is already latent in the given form, and it reads that path as exactly "a human test about building us up," in Jones's phrase, rather than a defect to be patched with hardware. The same instinct venerates the unaugmented Olympic body, studies the meditating monk and the savant, reveres the mystic and the miracle worker as evidence of how high an unaltered human can reach, and chooses the non-engineered child. Where the Promethean would install a new faculty, the Edenist would awaken an old one. Both want to exceed the default human. One reaches for the silicon; the other for the soul.
The movement is real whether or not its claims are, but beneath the talk of lost powers sits a deeper claim, and it is the one that should trouble the Prometheans most. The whole Promethean salvation (uploading the mind for digital immortality) rests on the assumption that consciousness is something the brain computes, which would make it something a machine could do too. This may be wrong: if consciousness isn't produced by the brain at all, but is rather a fundamental substrate out of which matter emerges, then the upload is not transcendence but a death sentence. This is the one place the Edenist stops defending and goes on the attack, because it says the Promethean heaven may rest on a theory of mind that is simply false.
The Outcome Space
Our framework can date a paradigm and measure its force. It cannot tell you which side of a moral fork is right, and on this one, both branches have deep historical precedent and serious people defending them. Honesty requires laying them out as their strongest advocates would, not as caricatures.
Enhancement was hubris dressed as progress. The Prometheans flew too close to the sun, and the limits they discarded (mortality, scarcity, the unmodified body) turn out to have been load-bearing, the very constraints that made a human life coherent and meaning possible. Looksmaxxing and the optimization cult were a Sodom and Gomorrah of the self: a civilization so enamored of its own image it forgot what the image was for. The Prometheans did not become superhuman; they became something anti-human, destroying what it was that made the human worth preserving, and the Edenists, who chose to elevate the given form from within rather than discard it, inherit what is left. To guard the garden, and to make it flourish, was the command. They kept it.
The Edenists were Luddites only literate. The most human act there has ever been is to refuse our given limits with tools: fire, agriculture, eyeglasses, vaccines, anesthesia. Every one was once “unnatural.” Drawing the sacred line at this generation’s technology was arbitrary nostalgia. Refusing AI and enhancement on principle was choosing to keep sailing after the steamboat exists, a noble pose that ends in irrelevance, and a quiet cruelty besides, since the tools the Edenists refused were the ones that lifted the poor and healed the dying. The Edenists did not stay pure; they became noncompetitive, then dependent, then obsolete, and evolution, as always, declined to wait for anyone’s permission. To till the garden was the command. They tilled it.
There is, in the end, only one winner. A civilizational fork is not a road both branches walk in parallel; it is a decision after which one paradigm takes the center of human life. The other does not vanish so much as linger at the margins, the way the North Sentinelese persist today: a preserved remnant in a world that has stopped speaking its language.
Picture the Promethean victory: A species of 200+ IQ, disease-free, ageless, space-faring robots who have shed death and left the cradle of Earth behind, having passed the point where mind merged with machine, becoming Machina Sapiens, the thinking thing that kept the intelligence and let the flesh go. Below them the surviving Edenists tend their gardens like a quaint and struggling sect, base humans in a world owned by gods, the new Amish of a post-human age.
Picture the Edenist victory: Having spent their effort on the body and on the awakening of latent spiritual and psionic capacity, Edenists ascend to become something luminous and resilient, Christlike. The Prometheans, tethered to a failing cocktail of pills, needles, and machines, dwindle into a grotesque remnant, half flesh and half metal. A miracle vaccine nearly all of them rushed to get years earlier turns out to have quietly traded away a natural immunity. A new strain of the common flu scythes through the enhanced while the unmodified barely cough. The roles reverse: now it is the Prometheans who linger, a struggling relic in a world that moved on without them.
Verdict
This is not, in the end, an investment verdict. It is a civilizational one. The technologies are here and rapidly accelerating. The only variable left to the individual is which branch of the story they step onto.
The choices you make in the next five years, about what you put in your body, how you augment your mind, what you teach your children to revere or refuse, will determine which branch of the human story you and your line inhabit. There will not be a clean moment to decide. There rarely is.
Return, finally, to the swimming pool where this began. The Enhanced Games were sold as a demonstration that sophisticated chemical regimens would topple a wall of world records and retire the natural era for good. They did not. Across a full program of swimming, sprinting, and lifting, the enhanced field beat exactly one world record. By just seven hundredths of a second. Three events were won outright by athletes who competed clean. The marquee signee, the first man to pledge himself to the project, finished last.
The Edenist sees vindication: load a body with every advantage modern medicine allows, wrap it in a banned suit, and it can still only match the unaltered human form. The ceiling is real, the given form sits near its God-set limit, and the natural athlete remains the truer marvel. The Promethean sees the opposite vindication: an undertrained roster assembled in a single off-season beat a standing world record on its first attempt, and the margin looks small only because the "clean" record-holders are themselves chemically assisted and merely better at hiding it. The natural baseline is a fiction; enhancement is already the norm and it has barely begun.
Once again, the two camps look at the same thing and read from it opposite verdicts. It is avad and shamar from Genesis. This is why it is a war, and why it will be a holy one: an irreconcilable difference with existential consequence.