The ImmorTalist Manifesto: Stay Young & Save the World
by Richard Elixxir
1stBooks, 2001

A review

First, an apology, both to Elixxir (to whom I promised to get a review
out immediately upon publicatin -- which I now see to my horror was 2
MONTHS ago...) and to those awaiting promised megaposts which were put
on hold for this one. The review is an earlier commitment; I hope it
will be found useful enough to allay any irritation at delays.

When Richard Elixxir began his brief posting career on CRSociety, I was
interested enough in a possible new boook on life extension, with a CR
bent, to slide over to the sample material at the website of his online
publishers ( http://www.1stbooks.com/ ).

I was immediately taken with it -- at the time, in fact, ensorceled,
enmeshed. I confess that I often find myself attracted to things on the
basis of the sheer, uncompromising, ferocious absolutism of their
wording: my involvement, years back, in certain radical political
movements, and my choice of religious path for many years, were both
doubtless in large part products of the polemical force of their
exponents. While -- looking back at it now -- the text available doesnt
burn me with the same Luciferian fire which it kindled in me at the time
(I seem, at that time, to have been unusually vulnerable in this sense:
I even had some rather potent hankerings back to my religious
addiction), and the work even seems less successful stylistically than I
had originally found it to be, I am still struck forcefully by the
sheer, apocalyptic force of its demands:

No More Aging, No More Dying

1 Old Age and Death are no longer necessary or acceptable.

We are either the last to grow old and die, or the first to stay young
and live forever.

We choose to be the first to stay young and live forever.

2 Our goal is simple: kill Old Age and Death!

6 The Death Ideology, which worships changeable biological reality as
ontological essence, must be overthrown. Mortalism, which makes us
submit and grovel to Old Age and Death, must fall like the walls of
Jericho.

7 To "accept" Old Age and Death would be a perversion of our
natural instinct for self-preservation. The only ones who
are not afraid of Old Age and Death are the clinically
depressed -- the Haters of Life.

8 We indict Old Age and Death as the root cause of all
human misery, neurosis, and depression.

We expose Evil as the dance of mortals playing god.

We convict Old Age and Death for crimes against humanity.

9 In the beginning was The Dream.
The conquest of aging and death.
The attainment of the elixir of youth.
The Advent of physical immortality.

The Dream is about to come true.

11 Humanitys epic struggle against Mortality is about to
end with a decisive victory. We will use diet,
stem cells, cloning, molecular biology, genetic engineering,
artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, regenerative science
and medicine ... whatever it takes.

14 The First Breakthrough in anti-aging and life-extension
research has already happened. Yet most people do not
know it.

13 The Bible foretold of its advent. Behold, I show you a
mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be
changed....in the twinkling of an eye...this corruption shall
put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on
immortality..." (I Corinthians 15: 51-55)

And so on. I love this shit. It could have been written a LITTLE bit
better (in fact, I've made what I hope are extremely minor changes,
above, as in punctuation, capitalization, & order of appearance, to make
it a bit more hard-hitting (to me)). Indeed, this section is, if
anything, stylistically the strongest of the entire book, & it still IMO
needed some editing to polish the rough to mirror-brightness.

But what's said in the opening section -- &, of course, repeated both
explicityl & implicitly thru'out the book -- has largely been said
before (see, in particular, Alan Harrison's _The Immortalist_, to wich
Elixxir owes an acknowledged debt). What is truly new about _The
Immortalist Manifesto_ is its vision of a society transformed to
actually achieve physical immortality. Most of the many discussions on
the sociological implications of Immortalist Medicine (as Elixxir terms
it) essentially assume that no changes in our social order are necessary
to bring about the Immortalist Revolution, and that changes which the
Revolution will bring about will be relatively superficial, being
confined to technical matters such as the administration of Social
Security or dealing with the potential for a population explosion.

These books -- which include W's corpus, _Reversing Human Aging_ by
Fossel, Ben Bova's _Immortality_, and even de Grey's _The MiFRA_ --
asume a view of history in which technology drives society, but not
vice-versa. Like Marx -- and Newt Gingrich, and _Wired_ magazine, and
most mainstream "thinkers" on the particular form of economic
globalization which has managed to monopolize the term as its exclusive
title -- assert (explicitly or otherwise)that technological change is
essentially inevitable, that sociological consequences are (with
suffficient knowledge) perfectly predictable therefrom, and that we have
no choice but to accept the technology and the sociological adjustments
it makes necessary. "Resistance is futile," and all that.

There are, of course, cases where this really is so in a sense: certain
kinds of technological invention almost MUST happen. But to say that
they MUST also become widely available on a commercial basis is quite
unreasonable, as is the belief that the social consequences thereof are
equally inevitable (not to mention predictable!). You really can't STOP
cocaine trade (at least, not by fiat), but an early gov't ban on the VCR
or the Internet would certainly have made them a profound rarity and
irrelevant to the grand scheme of social development. And, as
Prohibition of alcohol and (later) the War on Some Drugs has shown, the
social consequences of the availability of a technology can be wildly
different depending on voluntarily chosen sociopolitical circumstances.

The _Manifesto_ TENDS to take another POV implicitly. Despite explicit
statements of the inevitabilty, within a relatively short time, of the
dawn of Immortalist Medicine, there is a crucial cavat: it may not
necessarily arrive within our lifetimes, & esp not within that of baby
boomers. It assumes that the development of the "Elixxir Technology"
(as he calls the "Immortality Pill" or what have you -- under the
circumstances, the name is a doubtless intentional conceit, which is
none the less an excellent, alchemical choice of terminology) is far
from inevitable (or, at least, far from inevitable in a reasonably
foreseeable time period) .

As Elixxir rightly notes, human society is universally geared towards
death apologism, quietism, and even a positive deification of Death, not
seeing acceptance of mortality as defeatest, nor something which occurs
just thru' learned helplessness & cognitive dissonance, but as a
positive virtue.

Elixxir -- again following largely in the footsteps of Harrington --
outlines some aspects of this phenomenon, altho' Harrington's analysis
is more remarkable in depth and sweep. He proposes that, for reasons
both technological and sociological, the Immortalist Revolution requires
the culture at large to undergo a paradigm shift, to create the kind of
society in which the Technology can be realized. A massive outpouring of
funds is required to first radically increase life expectancy and -span,
and then to achieve first an indefinite LS and ultimately physical
immortality. This, alone, requires a drastic change in the orientation
of the state, the culture, and the individual, as the spending of
billions on Stealth Bombers vs. the paltry funding of biomedical
gerontology suggests. It won't just HAPPEN, argues the Manifesto: it
must be MADE to happen.

And making it happen involves changes which reach far beyond a vote in
Cngress to authorize the pouring of dollars into biomedical researc
into aging. For instance, Elixxir is clearly seeding readers with the
idea of CR -- without, as far as I recall, ever actually describing or
naming it at any time. Part of this is his calls fo a new aesthetic, an
idealized body type of the archetypal razor-thin CRONie. He pours out
disgust at those forces in society which press for the acceptance of
obesity, from efforts to encourage an acceptance of body type among
overweight (the "Fat Lobby") to what he terms "Anorexia Hysteria"
(asserting absurd claims as to both the extent of, and the damage caused
by, anorexia in women in the US, eg).

Another key difference between Elixxir's program and much common
thinking amongst life extensionists is his politics. It's a source of
some puzzlement to me why so many life extensionists seem to be
Randian-type right-wing libertarians -- and even corporate
"libertarians," ie the sort who view the restraint of the actions of
corporations (collectivist legal fictions, after all) as equivalent to
infringement on the civil rights of individuals (a view incorporated
into American -- and, by osmosis, Canadian -- jurisprudence by the
absurd declaration that a corporation is a "natural persons" under the
law in the 1886 Santa Clara County vs. Pacific Railroad decision:

http://www.wou.edu/las/socsci/faculty/geier/SantaClara.htm ). By
contrast, Elixxir is clearly a leftist -- and his progressive politics
are fused seamlessly into his program for the achievement of the Elixir
and of an Immortalist Society.

To me, it's clearly crazy -- not to mention a clear refutation any
notion that democracy is more than something to which lip service is
rendered in the American political process -- that the overwhelming
majority of the US population favors a universal "socialized medicine"
system similar to Canada's or Western Europe's, and has for decades --
yet successive administrations, in fat times and lean, continue to fail
to imiplement such a program. Be that as it may, Elixxir asserts that
it's also incompatible with both Post-Mortalism and Immortalist Society
to which it will give birth. A society which will not even extend basic
medical coverage to its citizens is light years away from waging the the
all-out war on Aging and Death for which the Manifesto calls.

Elixxir extends this critique to the culture at large, seeing it as a
triumph of Death Ideology:

"Why do 43 million Americans without any health insurance put up with
this when they have enough votes to get health insurance? Why do they
consider it a natural state of things when in Europe universal health
care is the given, is considered a human right? This is the fatalism
which paralyzes us when The Death Ideology holds sway over our minds."

"Why do Americans accept the ridiculous notion that the U.S., the
worlds richest society, cannot afford to give them universal health
care? The U.S. can afford universal health care even in a depression! "

"And contrary to the incessant propaganda of The Death Society, the
facts are irrefutable: the best way to cut health care costs is to
provide universal health care. The United States spends 14% of its GNP
on health caremore than any other country in the world. Yet ... its
health care system is ranked 34th by the World Health Organization (WHO)."

"Countries which provide health care coverage to its entire population
end up spending less of its GNP on health care. The Swedish welfare
state spends only 8.6% of its GNP on health care. Canada 9.6%. France
which spends 9.7% of its GNP on health care has the worlds best health
care system, according to WHO."

"The irrefutable conclusion and fact: it is cheaper to provide universal
health care. (Note: Sweden, Canada, and France are all in the top 10
nations for ALE (average life expectancy). [Japan is arguably an even
better example -MR]. Applying the more-refined measure of Healthy Life
Expectancy, the U.S. ranks a sickly 24th while Sweden ranks a very
healthy 3rd. The Scandinavian countries are all in the top 10 for low
infant mortality, while the U.S. ranks 23rd!"

"Despite its pro-children rhetoric, the U.S. is one of the biggest
practitioners of systemic infanticide in the developed world. Lack of
universal health care equals more babies dying prematurely, needlessly,
outrageously." Cf, in an immortalist context, the standard observation
about the politicaal Right being "pro-life" but failing to support the
lives it "saves."

"Why do African-Americans passively accept that their Average Life
Expectancy (ALE) is up to 8 years less than whites [?] ... The gap in
life expectancy between Blacks and Whites is a direct result of the
disparity in income between Blacks and Whites. It is the result of lack
of access to adequate medical care, which is more lethal than lack of
access to good schools. It is testimony to the effectiveness of The
Death Ideology that this outrageous situation is accepted without any
murmuring."

Etc. Rather than relying upon isolated breakthroughs from private drug
firms to deliver the goods, Elixxir is calling for an Apollo Program, a
Manhattan Project, of awesome proportions to (as Harrington put it)
"Spend the money, mobilize the scientists, and hunt down Death like an
outlaw." It's simply inconceivable that biogerontology will get this
kind of priority in a society in which we accept, as a matter of public
policy, that the old and the poor may be left to choose between food,
rent, heating, and the drugs that keep them alive.

I think that this is a very important point -- of strategy, & not just
philosophically. Even if the FDA were to provide a category for drugs
that inhibited aging, I don't think that any private drug firm would
bite. There's simply not enough basic understanding of aging to work on
a drug to cure it, at present. Even if ALT-711, eg, were actually a
systemic AGE-breaker (it isn't: it's quite clear that it's ineffective
outside of the circulatory system), it still wouldn't "reverse aging" --
just a particular form of age-related damage. If what we really want is
the full monty, we're gonna need an unmitigated assault on aging,
involving a massive expenditure on basic research and the testing of
theoretically promising interventions.

Alteon is struggling to keep itself afloat long enough to bring ALT-711
to market; the claim that the problem is high FDA-imposed costs is
largely bunk (as the bulk of the costs are safety & efficacy demands,
not bureaucratic costs). An anti-aging drug, by definition, is more
expensive to produce: you don't just do a couple of weeks on animal
models of diabetes, but LIFESPAN studies; and you don't just do a trial
for a couple of months on arterial compliance in diseased patients, but
a study of several years, to prove the safety of a drug which is going
to be chronically administered ad vitam, and to have SOME kind of basis
for asserting that aging has been retarded. I don't care how big you
think the market for such a drug is: no one is going to do it. The best
we'll see is what Alteon is (clearly) going to do: test it for some
limited purpose, and then broadly intimate (without in any way
demonstrating) that the pill will slow aging.

And it almost certainly won't, whatever it is.

Elixxir is right: piecemeal won't do it. Again, we need a new Manhattan
Project, to create a Bomb suitable to engage the Enemy on the very
plains of Har-meggido. Public policy must be radically transformed to do
this; we must make keeping people alive, healthy, and functional the
core value of the culture and the political system. This means an
awesome investment in anti-aging research -- and, until the big payoff,
the use of existing medicine, reoriented to an Immortalist agenda, to
soften the Enemy as much as we can.

I won't delve much further into this: the point is that Elixxir is
envisioning a complete overhaul of the culture toward a collective (&
unabashedly collectivist) assault on aging. One very interesting section
of the book is devoted to Post-Mortalist and Immortalist art, eg. Taking
up on themes in Harrington, but going well beond them, Elixxir note
that nearly all art in Mortalist societies is founded in Mortalist
philosophy. Much of what might fairly be called the best of it is Death
apologism: the Good Death, etc, or a happy ending still rooted in the
destruction of the Bad Guy and a premise of conflict fundamentally
rooted in the reality of our Mortalist condition. Elixxir (perhaps
excessively) castigates this, as does Harrington, but also goes beyond H
in not just proposing an "anti-Mortalist" art (which H really doesn't
develop as an idea beyond a relatively stupid deconstructionism &/or
artistic nihilism) into the idea of a genuinely Immortalist Art: not
just one that might encourage us in the struggle against Death (which
remains in the curious twilight of Post-Mortalism), but asking the
question: what would Art be like -- how could we even create stories, or
devise visual art -- in a world where we had no fear of Death? This is
a profound question, for which I cannot begin to venture an answer. It's
also one of the sort which is at once so self-evident that it oughtn't
to bear mention, but which has been so invisible that it appears no one
has to date gotten around to really asking it.

The discussion of Religion likewise begins with Harrington, taking
Religion to be a mixture of Death-apologism, an attempt to assuage our
fears to allow us to function with the knowledge of our mortality, and a
repressed rebellion against that very mortality. But again the
discussion goes beyond Harrington to propose a Post-Mortalist religion,
in keeping with the reorientation of the culture to the physical
conquest of Death. I was particularly taken with his vision of a
Post-Mortalist Christianity, and the position (which is quite sound, and
backed (whether Elixxir knows it or not) in much Biblical and Christian
Origins scholarship) that Early Christianity was very much founded on
the idea that the Savior's return was quite immanent, and that the
Kingdom had, in a very real sense, already come: that the Christian
community was already in posession of physical immortality. The
discussion of the Sacrament and some of the miracle stories is harder to
swallow as history, but excellent to adopt as personal mythology for
those thus inclined.

Yet there are serious problems here in his identification of values and
activities with the Post-Mortalist vs. Immortalist societies, which need
to be carefully dissected for a truly meaningful assessment
(philosophical & practical) of the Manifesto's program. Eg. there is a
relentless, anal/Second Circuit, goal-driven mentality he rightly
identifies with the process of attaining the Elixir (ie. post-Mortalist
society), but blurred into this is the Oceanic/Circuit V vision
(properly attributed to the Immortalist society, if at all) of a society
living for today because individuals do not fear for the future, because
of the elimination of the threat of Death & becauase of an ensuing
liberation from time constraints.

There are simple conceptual problems with the division, to begin with.
CR, eg, is clearly a Post-Mortalist phenomenon, whereas in an
Immortalist society we will presumably eat AL unless we have some
non-longevist motivation for controlling our food intake: religious
fasting, eg, or a personality driven to control of food intake. Such
goals would relate more to self-actualization (at best) and
reinforcement of personal neuroticism (at worst), but would (by
definition) be unnecessary as a life-extension strategy in a society
with universal access to the Elixir.

Yet Elixxir not only slides between CR as strategy and CR as an integral
part of the genuinely, fully Immortalist lifestyle & society, but seems
to be making a similar blur in a full societal revaluation of ideas of
body image, food-related social norms (think of the angst over Xmas
dinner...), etc. Again, this doesn't make any sense and must be better
dissected; it's not clear to me that the initial changeover can be made,
or what the implications are for a genuinely Immortal society.
Similarly, many of the issues surrounding health care only make sense in
a Post-Mortalist environment; and there are curious paradoxes to be
worked out re: things like food distribution, etc.

Another point: Elixxir & nearly all Immortalist-tending thinkers, from
Fossel to Ben Bova rightly note that the Elixir could, if not
universally available, create whole new kind of disparity between the
elites and the masses, both within developed countries and even more
profoundly between even 'average' N americans and the average Indian,
eg: not just those who have reliable food supply and those who don't, or
those who live a life of almost absurd affluence and those who are
"pooor" by Western standards, but a new global super-elite: the
Immortals in their gated Olympuses and the masses of mortals, living
with the reality of Aging and Death. So far, so good: an injustice of
enormous proportions which a sane civilization would not allow.

But Immortalit-leaning thinkers -- and Elixxir, consistently with his
leftist leanings, most explicitly & vigorously -- then go on to assert
that the magnitude of this disparity is so enormous, and its
implications for human psychology (granted a fundamental drive for "Life
against Death," which E takes to be the very core of human neurosis and
the fundamental force behind all present human endeavor, the basis of
daily struggle for both physical and psychological survival, whether as
revolt or apologism), so profound, that the masses would not tolerate
it: there would inevitably be a global revolution.

I don't buy it. Simply put, there are untold millions around the world
who struggle with survival DAY TO DAY. Yet a revlution against the
super-rich, or even against the middle class of the "West." doesn't
happen. Whether you will eat today is IMO a much more immediate,
pressing reality than the more abstract fact that, even if you eat (&
thus avoid death) today, you will die of SOMTHING or other, sooner or
later. People who fail to organize themselves & take up arms to claim
access to food, clothing, and shelter will surely not do so over the
eventual, ultimate reality of Mortality.

An IMO profound mistake underlying this, and other ideas in the book, is
the assumption that the conscious, iintellectual awwareness of Mortality
is what drives us, and that a new, conscious, intellectual awareness of
Immortality (even were Immortality per se truly feasible, which IMO it
most definitely is not: indefinite LS, perhaps, but certainly not a
literally endless life) would somehow make a complete break with
Mortalist human psychology. I submit that the former is NOT the major
motivator of our behavior, and the latter will not profoundly alter it.
Rather, I submit, it is the UNCONSCIOUS, HARDWIRED biological drives
which create our insanity, and which will not be more than mollified by
changes in conscious understanding -- by new software. A full
intellectual assent to the proposition that one need not fear death will
not take away anything from fear of falling to the tendency to hoard or
the desire of males to spread their seed wide and of females to obtain
powerful mates. Sociobiological realities created by our GENES will not
be altered by epigenetic interventions.

Now, of course, the Elixir will doubtless involve changing our genes,
which might be taken to be a refutation of the above. And indeed, I
expect gene therapy may very well bring with it shifts in psychology,
some of them in what we might consider to be fundamental aspects of our
spychology as individuals or as a species. My experience in going from
having sex on the brain 24/7 to barely giving it a thought on CR demands
that I accept the reality of such phenomena: it's not just a question of
where I spend my Friday night, but what I think about moment to moment,
how persuasive I find certain social theories, how I interact with --
and think about -- women (as individuals and as a class), etc etc. But I
do not believe that it's likely that any intervention is likely to make
such radical shifts in human nature as to make us behave the same a
entities which were utterly naive to the notion of their mortality --
not just consciously, but at the level of the drives built into us by
untol eons of evolution. I cannot even begin to think what it would mean
to be both human and such a creature; and I am not sure that, even were
such a creature creatable out of me, that the resulting creature would
be "me" in any recognizable sense. Depressingly (perhaps -- again, my
lack of ability to fathom what an Immortal would truly be like), I
expect that we will ever have a Mortalist core psychology, whatever our
consciously-chosen and -held values may be.

As an analogy: individuals hve their own self-interest at heart, and
arguments can (soundly or not I leave aside for the moment) be made for
the position that all evidently altruistic behaviors are ultimately
intended as a form of self-interest (even if the "self" in questin is
the DNA and not the soma). I think it's absur to hold, as some Leftitst
do, that humans do not have self-interest as a very primal,
unconditioned basis for their behavior. It's equally silly to assert, so
many on the libertarian Right do, that this means that all collectivist
projects are ipso facto inefficient and doomed to failure: the Tragedy
of the Commnos results, not because EVERYONE MUST behave in their own
(short-term, NB!!) self-interest, ALL the time, but because MOST people
do about MOST things, MOST of the time. Collectivist endeavors can and
do succeed because people make choices to put collective, long-term
interest above individual, short-term interests (again, fully admitting
the possibility that this is ultimately just a very shrewd form of
self-interest); but it's IMO ridiculous to posit the creation of a
person who would simply lack a certain level of fundamental fuck-you
self interestedness. People can choose; but the CHOICE cannot be
escaped.

Even Bill Gates experiences -- and is motivated by -- economic
insecurity, however irrational; no amount of wealth will cure him of it.
Likewise, the fact of physical Immortality -- even if accomplishable --
will not move us beyond motivations, behaviors, and orientations forged
in our radically mortal biology.

Is that depressing? Again, I'm not sure, because I'm not sure what being
liberated from these constraints would mean. Will we always exhibit
some form of madness, of internal conflict, of desire for greater power
over ourselves and our environment? Yes. Is this necessarily a bad
thing? I'm not sure.

I do not accept a complete transformation of humanity; yet a
transformation from a Mortal toeven an "emortal" (a person with an
indefinite lifespan) must inevitably change more than our antioxidant
enzymes. Clearly, our psychology would change in ways we cannot guess --
and in ways I take to be fundamentally positive, both for our individual
psychological health & happiness, and for our interpersonal interactions
and the culture at large.

"So also is the Ressurection of the Dead. It is sown in corruption; it
is raised in incorruption; ... it is sown a natural body; it is raised a
spiritual body. ... and so it is writte, The first Adam was made a
living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. ... And as we
have borne the image of the earthly, so we shall also bear the image of
the heavenly."

"Behold, I shew you a Mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all
be changed: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump:
for the Trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed."

"For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this moral must put
on immortality. ... Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is
written, Death is swallowed up in victory."

The study guide at the end is little more than leading questions; ignore
it. But read the book, and grapple with the issues. I think it
contributes to the Quest in more ways than one, and that much of its
vision is correct and/or appropriate. Take your pills, skip the KFC,
write your elected representatives, talk to your friends. The stakes are
enormous, for you and for everyone you know.

"S/He that overcometh, the same will be clothed in a white raiment: and
I will not blot out hir name out of the Book of Life, but I will confess
hir name before my Father, and before his Angels."

"And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let hir that heareth say,
Come. And let hir that is athirst, come."

"And whosoever will, let hir take of the Water of Life freely."

-Michael
--