Since I started promoting the end of aging and death five decades ago, I can’t tell you how many times people have tried to tone this movement down. Typically, they claim to love the idea, but just worry that it’s too radical for “other people”. After a while, it became abundantly clear to me that the problem wasn’t other people, it was these people themselves.
If you really love the idea of super longevity, you don’t want to tone it down, you want to pump it up. You want to speak it out. You want to embrace all that is bold, and transformational and revolutionary about fundamentally altering the human condition for the better. You want to reach out to this far brighter and more humane future and pull it to your heart with all your might.
This is the fundamental flaw with so-called “strategic conservatism”, the approach that seeks to promote the revolution against aging and death by disguising it as some sort of longevity wellness initiative. Instead of inspiring and promoting the revolutionaries in science and medicine it placates the reactionaries. This isn’t strategy at all, it’s simply capitulation to the status quo.
There’s a reason why the electronic vehicle revolution wasn’t brought about by Ford or Honda or Volkswagen. These old guard brands were too invested in old approaches to lead the new way. It took an outside force to transform the auto industry, Tesla. Now they are all falling into line.
The same is true of transforming the biomedical and healthcare industry – it will never happen from within. That system is too invested in deathcare financially, intellectually and even spiritually. This doesn’t mean there aren’t great people working in that system – there most certainly are. It simply means that the existing institutions are far to entrenched in the old paradigm to bring about the new. So why tone down the transformational impact of super longevity, and yes, immortality, to appeal to them?
What we should be following is a policy of a strategic radicalism. This means leveraging the full potential of age-reversal to extend life indefinitely and remove the leading cause of human suffering, death, to engage and energize the real change agents in our world. They aren’t afraid of big ideas and big visions, they are inspired by them.
Most people realize we live in a transformational era, they just don’t have a clear perspective of what that new world looks like. Now is the time to share our vision of a world without aging, and without all the loss and suffering that come with aging. If anything, we all need to feel and express this vision more intensely than ever, in order to generate such a bright future that no one can tamp it down.
Radical life extension is a whole different animal than life extension. Life extension can be defined as living a healthy life within the confines of the existing body of knowledge and belief systems that are considered normal today. Life extension practices will help a person live as healthy as possible until they die.
Radical life extension is about embracing radical innovations and applications that can take you way beyond the normal human life span and into immortality. Radical life extension advocates understand that without serious scientific innovations they will not live beyond normal human life spans. This is true no matter how well we may eat, exercise, take standard supplements, meditate, whatever.
The plain fact is that no one throughout recorded human history has lived beyond the limitation of approximately 120 years, no matter how healthy they lived. Anyone that wants to live beyond that barrier has got to get radical. We will need to get radical both physically and emotionally, and be willing to do the work it takes to get there. What we must keep uppermost is that the most important thing is to stay alive, so we have to be willing to put money, time, and effort into doing that. We cannot be satisfied with a simple life anymore that lulls us to sleep. We need to delve into doing whatever is necessary to stay alive and open ourselves up to the vast world of super longevity, including its complexity.
There are already many innovations that can impact our longevity. We have to keep our eyes on the prize and utilize now what’s available to stay vibrantly alive. When the times get tough, and they will, we don’t stop. We know there’s another innovation coming that will take us to the next level of being alive.
As radical life extension advocates, we can’t get stuck in one way of doing things, or get locked into one source for our radical life extension. We have to be able to look at all the sources that are available, no matter how unorthodox, to access what works best at any given time. We need to embrace the radical life to reap benefits that far outweigh what the traditional, simple life can offer.
By James Strole