And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Transhumanism and the Denial of Death

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

This one is about the tech-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s much-publicized designs on biological immortality and the Don’t Die movement of which he is the founder and leader. With the help of the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 book The Denial of Death has influenced a generation of readers from diverse disciplines, I interpret this new form of death-denial as a manifestation of modern mainstream cultural assumptions.

If you are interested in learning more about Becker’s ideas, I highly recommend a recent documentary called All Illusions Must Be Broken, which is a contemporization of Becker’s work for the technologically-mediated world of today.

As always, thank you for reading. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing this essay around within your circles.

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Jan Davidszoon de Heem, A Vanitas Still Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses, c.1630 .

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“Unhappier are they to whom a higher instinct has been given; who struggle to be persons, not machines; to whom the Universe is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy-bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom.” Thomas Carlyle, “Characteristics”

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Part I: This Inconstant Stay

It has often been remarked that the first word in Western literature is “anger”, “wrath”, or “rage”—various translations of the Greek word mēnin which begins the opening line of The Iliad. But older than Homer, older even than the war between the Greeks and the Trojans of which his Muse sang, the first major theme to disclose itself in that long tradition was the human endeavor to conquer death. The Epic of Gilgamesh, whose telling had been etched on stone tablets a millennium before the face of Helen launched those thousand ships, but which would not enter the literary canon until their rediscovery by British archaeologists in the early 1850s, recounts its titular character’s journey to the ends of the earth in a quest to transcend the god-given condition of mortality.

Gilgamesh, whose closest friend, Enkidu, has just gone down to death—“the house”, as the dying Enkidu calls it, “from which none who enters ever returns”—travels to plead his case for eternal life before Utnapishtim, “the faraway”, and the only mortal to whom the gods have granted the boon of life everlasting.¹ Like Achilles, Gilgamesh is a hero fashioned in an archaic mode, part human and part god, for whom life and death and undying renown won in the performance of epic deeds, have become the central dramatic issue which will play out over the course of his narrative.

This earliest account of a hero’s struggle against death would be followed in its mortuary theme by some of the most well-known lines Western literature has ever produced. The early chapters of Genesis tell of death’s burden as one in a bevy of punishments for human disobedience: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return”; “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer familiarly intones; “I had not thought death had undone so many”, Dante will marvel as he watches the hoards crowding the entrance to hell, providing a line which T. S. Eliot would borrow in his searing indictment of modernity.² And Shakespeare’s Hamlet will seem to echo Enkidu’s lament as he broods over “[t]he undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.”

Hans Holbein, “Adam Tills the Soil“, from The Dance of Death (1523–26).

Throughout this series, the quality which is so often emphasized is death’s inevitability—“death and taxes”, as the modern idiom has it. But the existential sting inflicted by the inconstancy of the body has been alleviated, if only partially, by one or another of what we might call immortality projects: the quasi-deathlessness conferred by heredity and cultural memory. “[H]e died”, Genesis concludes its brief biographies of the antediluvian patriarchs, after having “other sons and daughters.” Similarly, we hear Achilles, foreseeing death as the consequence of his re-entry into battle, deciding that “[i]f I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, / my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.”³

And so, solace has often been sought in these mechanisms, however deficient, which seek to circumvent the body’s impermanence and death’s finality by means of symbolic appeals to the relative persistence afforded by heredity and cultural legacy. But it was Woody Allen who once astutely highlighted the meagerness of these consolations when he quipped that “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

These are, of course, pale surrogates for the solace that belongs to the immortal soul’s survival on the far side of death’s irrevocable threshold. “Whoever here on earth laments that we must die / to find our life above”, Dante reflects in the Paradiso, “knows not the fresh relief / found there in these eternal showers.”⁴ With this promise, supernatural immortality—Classical in origin, and only later becoming the final hope of Christian salvation—is more adequate than these more mundane immortality strategies.

But the withering of belief in all things supernatural, its centuries-long erosion as a plausible source of comfort for a rationalistic age, has lent new urgency to naturalistic immortality projects, which are now expected to support the full spiritual and emotional burden which these lost assurances once bore. Indeed, the bodily resurrection promised by the New Testament has, in the last century, acquired a novel and wholly naturalistic interpretation, previously unthinkable: No resurrection shall be necessary, for the body need never die.⁵

Today, the timeless ache for eternal life—a human preoccupation seemingly endowed with an eternal life of its own—has turned its hopeful gaze from the ‘upward’ orientation of the supernatural and towards a technological alternative: biological immortality achieved by means of bio-medical interventions upon the human organism. Now, an ancient aspiration, once the singular obsession of explorers, alchemists, and court magicians, acquires scientific legitimacy. But unlike those abortive attempts to efficiently transmute base metals into gold through some alchemical incantation, this project has been granted the endorsement of at least some scientists and medical researchers, whose breakthroughs, or so they hope, promise to accelerate us into a post-human escape velocity sufficient to sever the earthward pull of mortality.

Death, be not proud.

Salvatore Rosa, Human Frailty, c. 1656.

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Part II: Don’t Die

Over the last few years, several strange books have appeared, penned under the cipheric pseudonym “Zero”, a perfunctory disguise of the author’s true identity: the centi-millionaire tech-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. One of these books, imperatively titled Don’t Die, explores what Johnson calls the “new frontiers of being human.” “What if we’re still just single cells”, he asks, “on a great road map of human progress?” If you know anything about Bryan Johnson, it is likely his much-publicized 2-million-dollar annual outlay on a personalized health regimen designed to slow—or, as he insists, actually to reverse—his rate of biological aging, and to vastly outperform the biblical allotment of threescore years and ten. In a characteristically audacious tweet from the start of this year, Johnson boasted that he is “by measurable standards, the healthiest person alive.”

Made wealthy by his years as founding CEO of the online payment company Braintree, which was later merged with Venmo and absorbed by PayPal, this would-be Methuselah has devoted his life and body, and foregone no expense, in pushing the boundaries of human longevity. He recently wrote on X that it is his goal to make “longevity into a global sport that gives people power + status”.⁶ And his claim that he is “the world’s most measured human” is hard to dispute. While the specifics have changed over time, Johnson’s health regimen, which he has detailed extensively on social media and his YouTube channel, involves the daily intake of over 100 pills, red light therapy for his skin, and a 19-hour fast (Johnson doesn’t eat between 11 a.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning), and the constant monitoring of hundreds of vital metrics—all before his 8:30 p.m. bedtime. He claims to employ 30 doctors who review his data and advise him on an ongoing basis.

Unlike Gilgamesh, Johnson’s pursuit of immortality has not often taken him to distant lands, but has for the most part kept him—much as Woody Allen had wished—right in his rather spare, multimillion-dollar home in Venice, California. Most of his videos feature his housebound exploits as he experiments enthusiastically with this or that medical test, supplement, routine, or workout, animated throughout by Johnson’s affable personality.⁷

In recent years, all this exposure on social media has helped to make Johnson the leader of the burgeoning Don’t Die movement, which he describes as a “political, economic, and social framework” for living through a pivotal period in history in which little is certain except for the need simply to survive it. “[W]e’re driving into this future with fog in all directions”, Johnson writes in one of his self-published manifestos from last year, and Don’t Die is “the operating system humanity needs for building superintelligence while saving ourselves”.⁸ Thus motivated by stakes so unimaginably high, Johnson recently announced that his goal is to make Don’t Die “the world’s most influential ideology by 2027”, to replace “Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.”, none of which are “built for this moment.”⁹ “Don’t Die”, Johnson proposes, “is the answer.”

Every political or cultural movement which hopes, as all such movements do, to amass purchase in the minds of the greatest number of potential adherents, must provide at least three things: a compelling narrative which offers a sweeping historical account and shows individuals how they fit into it; a means of attracting and organizing followers and offering practical ways for them to participate and connect with each other; and mechanisms by which to accept their money. And Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die movement has managed to do all three: a single thread runs from Johnson’s soaring vision for humanity’s incipient integration with technology, which he has expounded in his books and elaborated in countless podcast interviews, through the sold-out Don’t Die Summits which Johnson has hosted around the United States, all the way down to the quotidian labor of running a global nutritional supplement concern.

Johnson’s foray beginning in 2021 into the wellness industry evokes all the hallmarks of snake-oil salesmanship and medical hucksterism of the medicine shows of the old days on the American frontier, and more recently of the “One weird trick!” variety.¹⁰ Through his website, for instance, Johnson hawks what he calls “Longevity Mix”, a fruit-flavored cocktail purporting to contain “everything your body asked for”. Here, softgels, capsules, protein powders, olive oils, and nut butters have replaced the elixirs, unguents, lozenges, extracts, and tinctures, of old—but the business model remains the same, tailored now for the modern wellness market and folded into a larger contest to transcend altogether human biology.

In many ways, Johnson fits the antique archetype of the eccentric aristocrat whose power and means have exceeded his capacity for practical wisdom, and, having cast off many of the usual constraints on zealotry, whose efforts have become directed towards insane ends. The old chestnut, oft-deployed at the expense of philosophers, is thus all the more true of many of the tech-moguls of our own time: there is no idea so absurd that one of them doesn’t believe it.¹¹ But Johnson sees himself as something of a misunderstood visionary: far-seeing and wise, yet derided and dismissed in his own time by the uncomprehending multitude, and eager to show the way to the few who are courageous enough to listen. Although he rarely supplies the attribution, Johnson often praises his own powers of discernment by paraphrasing Schopenhauer: “talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Johnson likes to say that the purpose behind his radical bid for self-preservation is his observation that the needs of his body are much better stewarded by an algorithm fed a perpetual stream of hundreds of biomarkers than his own in-the-moment decisions. And this idea is behind much more than Johnson’s approach to his own personal health: “I do not think that humanity, as we are configured today as a society”, Johnson writes, “can cooperate well enough and fast enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. I think we need to hand over the reins of power.”¹² In a time out of joint, Johnson argues, all of society should—or, rather, must—be consigned to the same kind of data-fueled algorithmic oversight to which he has entrusted the management of his own body; it is “a system for evolving ourselves so that we humans can roll with the changes that AI brings, no matter how the terrain shifts. The goal is to align ourselves toward harmony instead of our own demise.”¹³

But this acquiescence to the authoritarian demands of emerging technologies co-exists uncomfortably with what Johnson claims is the ultimate goal of Don’t Die: the value most central to modern liberalism, namely, freedom. “We are at war with death and its causes”, the official Don’t Die website announces at the top of the page:

We are building towards an infinite horizon.

We are fighting for the freedom to exist as long as one chooses.

Why? Because we have things to do tomorrow. And tomorrow’s tomorrow. Until we no longer want tomorrow.

Johnson tells a story that leads out of bondage and towards liberation—not from political oppression, nor even from the algorithmic despotism which is its necessary instrument, but from the limitations on human freedom which are imposed on human biology by nature itself. This is what Bryan Johnson and the Don’t Die movement are fundamentally about: protecting and maintaining one’s individual freedom in the long term within a technological and political context of upheaval and extreme uncertainty.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

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Part III: The Cradle Rocks Above an Abyss

Prior to the discovery by modern astronomers that the Earth constitutes only an infinitesimal share of an unimaginably vast and nonliving universe, it was not unreasonable to conclude that nature’s original condition is to teem with life, its myriad substances perpetually transforming themselves from death into life and back again in a ceaseless process of dynamic exchange between the living and the non-living. The radical expansion during the modern period of our sense of the sheer scale of the universe, together with the accompanying observation that only its most minuscule portion is endowed with biological life, leads inexorably to the conclusion that the universe is, by and large, a dead place. The life that does exist here on Earth is thus only the rarest and the most isolated of exceptions to the inanimate character of the universe as a whole.

The apparent rarity which is revealed by modern cosmology of any biological processes elsewhere than on the Earth elicits two conclusions simultaneously: first that life, and not death, is the great cosmic aberration, and second, that all life is afflicted with a profound frailty which runs deeper than we might formerly have supposed: life’s impermanence and transience have always been recognized, but it is now understood that its inclination to vanish back into the cold machinations of inert matter harbors no guarantee of its eventual reemergence. Even the very substances which make up each living body would prefer—in a manner of speaking—nothing more than to revert back to their accustomed, and, in a sense, more natural mode of inanimate existence. When taken on the whole, this general predilection for inanimacy suggests that the universe isn’t trying very hard to come alive.

“Life carries death in itself”, the twentieth-century philosopher Hans Jonas writes, as its “basic self-contradiction”: there is only life because first there was nonliving matter out of which biological processes might come to be organized.¹⁴ The hand-wringing vacillations of a Hamlet are not, therefore, idiosyncrasies peculiar to Danish princes; they are an existential feature of the living being as such, which has removed itself from the blind commerce which characterizes the rest of nature. To be alive, then, is to have been granted a degree of freedom which has not been extended to all matter, and which has been offered “on condition and revocable”: the life which any organism has is thus limited and permanently subject to recall without appeal.¹⁵ To live is to be confronted with this fact, obligated by nature to obsess perpetually—whether consciously or by instinct—over the imminent possibility of death, and to be required forever to orient one’s endeavors to forestall this outcome. “So constitutive for life is the possibility of not-being”, Jonas writes, “that its very being is essentially a hovering over this abyss, a skirting of its brink”:¹⁶

But this is not a success story. The privilege of freedom carries the burden of need and means precarious being. For the ultimate condition for the privilege lies in the paradoxical fact that living substance by some original act of segregation has taken itself out of the general integration of things in the physical context, set itself over against the world, and introduced the tension of “to be or not to be” into the neutral assuredness of existence.¹⁷

“Don’t die” is just the basic instruction given by nature to everything that is alive, and all that lives—from the humblest amoeba to the proudest tech-entrepreneur—forever enacts the resulting drama. It is the very stuff of life in the most elemental sense: the pang of hunger and the thirst for drink, the uneasy suspicion that a predator lurks at the periphery, the reflexive withdrawal of the hand from the flame, vertigo at the cliff’s edge. Bryan Johnson’s fight for the freedom to exist as long as he chooses is a fight for the freedom not to exist in this sort of relationship to externality, to transcend all relations of need, dependency, and vulnerability; it is a program for final and complete dis-association of one’s individual being from the inert totality out of which one’s life has been removed.

Now, I am no doctor—although neither, for that matter, is Johnson—but I will put down the following prognosis: Bryan Johnson will one day die. The condition from which he suffers—life itself—is, in a manner of speaking, a sickness unto death. I take no pleasure in pointing this out, and I should make clear that I wish him the longest and most fulfilling life which biological reality can afford. I also concede that I admire the upbeat tone of his public persona, and I suspect that his longevity regimen—eating well, getting enough sleep, exercising—probably will add to the number of vigorous years ahead of him. May we all hold up our glasses of longevity tonic to that.

But what makes Johnson a far-seeing radical and the charismatic leader of a swelling social and political movement is not, of course, his advocacy of common-sense health measures; it is his optimistic argument that bio-medical progress will soon deliver a solution to the problem of morality itself—that we will “solve death”, as he often puts it. Johnson usually portrays his detractors as doom-saying killjoys who lack the imagination necessary to recognize what is obvious to those with eyes to see the hidden target, and who simply want to quash the solace and celebration that others have found in the hope and community which the Don’t Die movement provides; to Johnson, their skepticism comes across as a form of puritanism per H. L. Mencken’s famous definition: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

But the truth is that if you take its most extravagant claims seriously, the ambitious aspirations of Don’t Die rest on a denial of the facts of life according to the terms on which it has been offered—it is a rejection of the predicament which constitutes the essence of life itself, amounting, in words once employed by Wendell Berry in an altogether different context, to “a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition”.¹⁸ And this peculiar brand of freedom which is sought by Bryan Johnson and his followers is won largely in vain. I won’t be the first to observe, notwithstanding Johnson’s happy-warrior persona, that these sorts of projects aimed at death’s defeat often seem to be motivated more from a fear of death than for love of the world. Everything he does is calculated to help him live forever: his intake of meals and supplements, his sleep schedule, his daily regimen of treatments. Death has become the leitmotif underscoring every interview he now gives, and to precisely the degree to which his longevity protocol is successful in prolonging his life, the vicissitudes of fortune and of accident become all the more menacing: One wrong move, and forever could be over in an instant.

Detail of Yama, the Lord of Death, holding the Wheel of Life.

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Part IV: The Denial of Death

In 1973, the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published his now-classic work, The Denial of Death. The book won a Pulitzer Prize the following year, two months after its author’s own death from cancer, and has never gone out of print since. For Becker, only a resolute encounter with the limitations inscribed by nature upon the human creature opens the possibility of a fulfilling life in which an authentic human freedom may reveal itself. “This is the terror”, Becker suggests at one point, pronouncing the existential predicament which lies at the bottom of the uniquely human mode of conscious existence: “to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.”¹⁹

The Denial of Death is long and digressive, and too preoccupied with the history and personalities behind psychoanalytic theory in the twentieth century to maintain the interest of the casual reader through to the end. But at its heart lies an observation which has now resonated with readers for more than five decades: the universal specter of mortality is the pulsating source of our loftiest ambitions. “[M]an’s tragic destiny”, Becker writes in the introduction, is that:

he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.²⁰

This is the central predicament which, one way or another, every culture must address: how to manage the reality that our words and our accomplishments—indeed, our very lives—are under the perennial threat of total erasure by the inexorable and unforgiving forces of nature which seek to mend the rupture in the inorganic background of things which our very life has opened. Becker calls these ‘causa-sui projects’: the self-willed expressions of energy and creativity which provide “a pretense that one is invulnerable because protected by the power of others and of culture, that one is important in nature and can do something about the world.”²¹ All the lapidary monuments and marble edifices, the stories and poems, the great religions, social movements, and ideologies—that is, all works having cultural significance—are, in Becker’s radical view, elaborate mechanisms through which human beings have responded to the cruel realities which haunt the imagination of the symbolic animal.

Vanity of vanities!

Drawing broadly from the countercultural ferment of its late twentieth-century intellectual milieu, The Denial of Death employs a hermeneutic of suspicion of the sort which is oriented towards seeing through and unmasking the false conceits of power and ideology, and which aims to clear the way for liberatory pedagogies that might reveal new possibilities for human freedom and potential by means of the purifying waters of disillusionment. But while Becker exposes and rebukes “a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project”, he also acknowledges “the necessity of this project.”²² And this is Becker’s core provocation, and the central paradox which he challenges us to confront: On the one hand, the truly mature individual has broken the cultural illusions in which so many have become unwittingly ensnared: mindless consumerism and material acquisition, social conformity and susceptibility to popular trends, ideological and reflexively partisan thinking. On the other hand, as Becker puts it, “[m]an needs a “second” world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in.”²³

“Illusion” means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die […].²⁴

Don’t Die is just such a cultural illusion, through which flow the life-enabling currents of cultural belief and human meaning. For its acolytes, the logic behind Don’t Die is thus effective in its endeavor to defeat death twice over: in the literal sense, of course, it confronts and negates the presumed fact of mortality, promising that the ineluctable forces which have imposed their capital sentence upon everything that lives may be defeated at the hands of progress in bio-medical science and technology administered by data-driven algorithms. But it also turns the very enterprise of working to achieve their vague, utopian vision of posthuman deathlessness into an ideological causa-sui project of its own, thoroughly modern in its methods, yet ancient in its aspirations: to overcome one’s own biological limitations is to accomplish more in the timeless crusade against death than simply to extend indefinitely one’s own mortal life; it is also to justify it, and to give it purpose by slaying the ultimate enemy.

Bryan Johnson seems to have found meaning in life precisely because he has not, in fact, defeated death; indeed, nobody defeats death once and for all, because death approaches us only from the future. The fact that the project always remains ongoing gives him something to continue striving for. The heroic immortality project which produces meaning for the modern transhumanist is thus not opposed to the biological reality of death at all—it is integral to it; striving to defeat death is a heroic gambit which offers both a symbolic immortality, and—or so they believe—a literal and altogether naturalistic immortality as the reward of its own success.

“A free person”, Spinoza famously deduced, “thinks of nothing less than of death”.²⁵ But for Ernest Becker, it is only through such an encounter that human meaning is constructed. “[T]aking life seriously means something such as this”, Becker concludes:

that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.²⁶

This is what today’s bio-hacking solutionists would deny. The unhappy fact of human morality—what William James called “the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight”—is suppressed and replaced with an ideology which stands between ourselves and the uncomfortable realities which we have convinced ourselves that we are too clever and too powerful ever to have to face. For Becker, the self-defeating irony of this kind of cultural illusion is that it renders us less attuned to the world as it really is—which is just to say that our very denial renders us, in a meaningful sense, less alive. “We run heedlessly into the abyss”, Pascal had declared in his Pensées, “after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.”²⁷ Precisely so.

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Part V: Ah, My Friend—the Enemy

It is hardly an original observation to point out that, more than any other that has come before, modern societies forge meaning through their participation in the unfolding of progress as manifested in techno-scientific endeavors which are measured in terms of innovation and discovery. And this narrative constitutes a cultural causa-sui project in Becker’s sense, justifying our place within a vast, non-living universe otherwise unconcerned with human fate, and without which the life of the culture would amount to little more than what Becker called “a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones”.²⁸ Instead, we create meaning through the progressive replacement of nature with technology in the pursuit of a particular interpretation of human freedom in which, among other things, technology serves to fortify the thresholds which define the boundaries shielding life from the perilous embrace of nature.²⁹

More than half a century after The Denial of Death first appeared, the shape of the contemporary counterculture has largely become inverted. As dissident as the Don’t Die movement appears, its radicalism derives from the fact that it pushes mainstream cultural assumptions to extremes rather than from any genuine reversal of those assumptions. Today, those who consider themselves to stand opposed to the orthodoxies of the surrounding culture are less distrustful of the traditional sources of authority which were once the targets of contrarian social critique, and have instead set their sights on the very standards which were erected by more recent generations to correct their injustices: the once-countercultural movements which questioned traditional authority and promoted personal authenticity have receded into the placid backdrop of the cultural mainstream, ceding their adversarial standpoint to newly-radical programs of rootedness, restraint, and fidelity—the very opposite of Bryan Johnson’s embrace of the upheavals which he foresees as the inevitable outcome of our present techno-social trajectory.

In the end of his epic, Gilgamesh, for all his heroic deeds, is not granted everlasting life. “You will never find that life for which you are looking”, Šiduri, “the woman of the vine, the maker of wine”, advises him once he reaches the garden of the gods beyond the horizon. “When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.” But she continues, delivering a lesson which will resonate with today’s skeptics of the modern techno-social imaginary:

As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.³⁰

There is surely something poignant in this sentiment, articuted in some of the world’s oldest recorded literature. If it will be anything other than mere illusion, meaning must arise from an encounter with and dramatization of reality, and not from its denial. Any path towards freedom which asks that we push away the world rather than embrace it can only be one which cannot conceive of the possibility that to live is already to find oneself inside a larger, inscrutable totality which it is the task of an authentic culture to interpret and to contend with, but never altogether to deny.

It was ever thus.

Unbekannter Künstler, The Shield of Achilles. Hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration. Undated.

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin edition. Tr. N. K. Sandars. Pg. 92.

2. The reference is to The Waste Land, ln. 63. This is Eliot’s translation of Inferno, III, 55-7.

3. Homer, The Iliad. Book IX, line 501. Tr. Robert Fagles.

4. Dante, Paridoso, XIV. 25-27. Tr. Robert and Jean Hollander.

5. Cf. John 5:28, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52, and Romans 8:11.

6. Here.

7. In one popular video, Johnson, exchanges blood plasma with his son and his father.

8. The first quote is from Zeroism, pg. 29. The second is from here.

9. Read the tweet here.

10. In one revealing hint of Johnson’s self-awareness in this regard, Blueprint offers a line of extra virgin olive oil which it sells under the playful name “Snake Oil”.

11. Perhaps the best example of this is the “simulation hypothesis”, the truth of which seems to have become uncontroversial within some tech circles.

12. Johnson, Zerosim, pg. 18-19.

13. Zeroism, pg. 29-30. Johnson recently tweeted that “[i]t seems like the right time to build a don’t die nation state. To create and provide what society can’t and won’t on any relevant timescale.”

14. Hans Jonas, “On the Subjects of a Philosophy of Life” in The Phenomenon of Life, pg. 5.

15. Ibid., pg. 4 (italics mine).

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., (italics mine).

18. Wendell Berry, “Nature as Measure” (1989), in The World-Ending Fire, Pg. 61.

19. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, pg. 87. For more about the thought of Ernest Becker, see the recent documentary by the filmmakers Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell, called “All Illusions Must Be Broken”.

20. Ibid., pg. 4.

21. Ibid., 188.

22. Ibid., pg. 189.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Spinoza, Ethics. IV. 67.

26. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, pg. 283-4.

27. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, II.183.

28. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, pg. 187.

29. This formulation is indebted to

Paul Kingsnorth

, who concluded his series of essays on the Machine observing that its central task is “the replacement of nature with technology in the name of justice.”

30. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin edition. Translated by N. K. Sandars. Pg. 102.

Cf. Ecclesiastes 9:7-9: “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God hath already accepted thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let not thy head lack oil. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy life of vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all thy days of vanity: for that is thy portion in life, and in thy labor wherein thou laborest under the sun.”