Stand up for unlimited life by Joe Bardin, James Strole and Bernadeane.
The Coalition for Radical Life Extension is rallying like-minded people to come together to stand up for unlimited life. We have different views on what that looks like, and even what to call it. People Unlimited calls it physical immortality.Pioneer telomere researcher Dr. Bill Andrews calls it curing aging. Transhumanist Max More prefers super longevity. But what we all agree on is that the deathist paradigm has to go; it’s time to look beyond the past of dying to a future of unlimited living.
Vigorous debate is a feature of most revolutions, and undoubtedly has its place in ours. But it’s vital that we don’t allow disagreements on the details to stop us from uniting on our fundamental purpose. While passionate revolutionaries dissipate their energy over the dispute of ideological fine points, the dictatorship of death continues. Separation has always played into the hands of old guard, reactionary forces. We have to be sure we come together and stay together to keep our eyes on the prize. We are overthrowing the reign of death, and when that is achieved, it’s difficult to imagine how any of us will care what we called “it” along the way.
We have all been conditioned by an often disinterested, and at time highly critical general public to parse every syllable we express, searching for what is so objectionable about ending death. Like any minority group, we have sought to minimize our distinction, and translate ourselves into terms more readily acceptable, even at the expense of our true spirit and ambitions. We’ve been driven underground in plain sight. And even so, little real headway has been made towards mainstream acceptability.
Now the Coalition is calling for an end to this self-censorship. We will no longer define ourselves by our critics, and will speak out for who we are. We are not pursuing controversy for its own sake, and will be thoughtful and purposeful in our communications. At the same time, we are not concerned with disturbing or alienating a mainstream audience that isn’t ready for us anyway. And may never be. As we progress, we may well find that in fact we are not changing the world; we are initiating a new one. Time will tell.
Our purpose is neither to confront nor to appease a death oriented society. We are putting out a call to all those who are already interested in unlimited life to come together. If death could have been ended by individuals on their own, it would have happened a long time ago. A new society is needed to support a new way of life. In this new deathless society, our differences are secondary to our primary agreement that unlimited life is our true destiny and that the time to live it is now.
Our first major initiative will be our festival, to be held in 2016. We’re excited about the festival, and have a strategy for making it a significant success. However, we won’t be stopped by lower than expected results. Our mission to end death is the ultimate long-term commitment. In this way, we’ve taken failure out of the equation. We are all-in for as long as it takes, whatever it takes.