This chapter explores transhumanist attempts to live “happily ever after.” As British philosopher and transhumanist Dave Pearce expounds in The Hedonistic Imperative, “nanotechnology and genetic engineering will “eliminate aversive experience from the living world” and usher in “a sublime and all-pervasive happiness”(Pearce 1995). This chapter thus asks, how exactly do transhumanists conceive of the good life? By what means do they seek to usher it in? How do transhumanist conceptions of the good life compare and contrast with the way peope in other societies have understood and pursued the good life? This chapter seeks to further our understanding of “the hedonistic imperative” and in so doing, further illuminate some of the values transhumanists hold dear.

Comparison in anthropology often entails a hermeneutic confrontation between two systems of thought. Starting from an implicit grounding in a home culture, the anthropologist “encounters” a different culture, tries to understand it in its own terms, and then uses those terms to critique home-style thinking. Rather than compare differences, this chapter compares two things understood to be “the same.” I begin with a comparison of two jazz renditions of the song, “Tangerine.” Comparing an amateurish version to a classic recording taught me more about the song’s structure than either version could have done alone. Using this example of a “better-worse” comparison, I turn to anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who wrote a series of essays contrasting what she saw as a “good” individualism, that of American Indian peoples, to the “bad” individualism of the contemporary United States. In Lee’s work, it was not a nonindividualist social formation that became the comparative touchstone for rethinking US culture as in de Tocqueville’s hierarchical-egalitarian contrast. Instead, Native American ways of living provided a model truer to the spirit of an ideal individualism than that celebrated in the United States.