The Democracy of Death
By 
GLOUCESTER O, let me kiss that hand!
LEAR Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
This (gift link) is an interesting and disturbing essay about the increasingly pharaonic obsessions of the authoritarian/plutocrat/Silicon Valley of the Kings class in our midst:
The man perhaps most associated with this desire is Peter Thiel, who once outlined his interest in blood plasma transfusions from the young as a means of extending life. But more practically, and less vampirically, he has also invested many millions of venture capital dollars in various biotech concerns, seed-funding a flourishing Silicon Valley longevity ecosystem. “There are all these people,” as he put it to Business Insider in 2012, “who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth.”
The OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has invested $180 million of his own fortune in Retro Biosciences, a Bay Area biotech concern aimed at stalling and potentially reversing human aging. Jeff Bezos is reportedly among the major funders of Altos Labs, a company that hopes to find stem cell therapies to extend human life spans. The treatments pursued by such initiatives exist somewhere on the spectrum of plausibility; you could even imagine a scenario in which some of them eventually become accessible to ordinary people. Yet it also seems obvious that the tech moguls’ obsession with longevity most specifically applies to their own. Thiel has signed himself up to be cryogenically preserved. Altman has said he takes the diabetes medication metformin as part of an anti-aging regimen, despite somewhat shaky evidence of its efficacy.
And then there is Bryan Johnson, who has devoted his online-payments fortune to the monomaniacal pursuit of eternal life through a bewildering array of approaches: prodigious consumption of supplements, gene therapy, immunosuppressants, transfusions of plasma from his son and the taking of detailed measurements as to the quality and durability of nocturnal erections. A lot of Johnson’s endeavors are, at best, long shots — or less charitably, symptomatic of some deep pathology — but his naked yearning to escape the human condition itself exposes the half-sublimated desire at the heart of the more scientifically reputable life-extension projects.
The goal of this enterprise, of Johnson’s sacramental observances in a monotheism of the self, is to slow and eventually reverse the processes of aging, and to thereby become (and remain) biologically indistinguishable from an 18-year-old. Johnson’s motto, and the tagline of his proprietary longevity regimen, Project Blueprint, is “Don’t die.” In its reduction of multiple disparate imperatives — of the pharmaceutical industry, of the Christian faith, of American individualism — to a single command, it must be admitted that this formulation has about it the simple-minded genius of a classic advertising slogan. Don’t die is the precise message audible in your heart’s every finite beat, encoded in your troubled dreams and futile anxieties.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged obsession with his ballroom is of a piece with this general trend, but Jamelle Bouie makes the connection, which is all too plausible. The point of the ballroom is to create a kind of living tomb, so that Trump never leaves it, at least as a sort of ghost, but with the more concrete goal shared with his fellow autocrats of simply not dying. (The “ballroom” is actually more of a massive bunker complex, which will become Trump’s very own private residence, complete with state of the art medical facilities etc.)
All this in turn reminded me of how the democracy of death has always filled the great and powerful with rage against the sheer unfairness of how biology and/or the universe treats them as really no different in the end than the lowliest peasant.
Once property had been officially deified, it became the measure of all things. Even human life was weighed in the scales of wealth and status: ‘the execution of a needy decrepit assassin,’ wrote Blackstone, ‘is a poor satisfaction for the murder of a nobleman in the bloom of his youth, and full enjoyment of his friends, his honours, and his fortune.’ Again and again the voices of money and power declared the sacredness of property in terms hitherto reserved for human life.
Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law”
It was Tar-Atanamir who first spoke openly against the Ban and declared that the life of the Eldar was his by right. Thus the shadow deepened, and the thought of death darkened the hearts of the people. . . The power and wealth of the Numenoreans nonetheless continued to increase; but their years lessened as their fear of death grew, and their joy departed. . . . And Sauron lied to the King, declaring that everlasting life would be his who possessed the Undying Lands, and that the Ban was imposed only to prevent the Kings of Men from surpassing the Valar. ‘But great Kings take what is their right,’ he said.
At length Ar-Pharazon listened to this counsel, for he felt the waning of his days and was besotted by the fear of Death. . .
Lord of the Rings, Appendix A
With my own eyes I saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a bottle and, when the attendants asked her what she wanted, she replied, “I want to die.’
Petronius, Satyricon
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”