DEATH: THE LAST ENEMY.
There is a new book out: The survival of the Riches. I read a review of it in Civis Mundi, a highbrow Dutch monthly magazine, a free electronic periodical of Social Philosophy and Culture, which my brother Drewes in the Hague faithfully sends me.
Before the author, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff, a professor in New York City, dealt with “The Rich”, he, 10 years ago, wrote the Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a non-fiction work.
That book caught the attention of a certain segment of society, and earned him an invitation to speak at a conference, which came with special privileges: first-class airfare, a chauffeured limousine, a remuneration that equaled one-third of his professorial pay, staying in a super deluxe resort somewhere in the desert.
In Present Shock, Rushkoff describes our Western predicament, a state of anxiety in which we try to keep up with the ever-increasing speed and immediacy of time, because our temporal pressures are so great and our confidence in our own ability to solve the world’s problems so weak that apocalyptic finality has an unshakable appeal.
This ‘end-time’ state of mind, makes Rushkoff write that, rather than focusing on building a better future, society is primarily concerned with building a worthwhile present, and failing on that score.
Actually, he says that there no longer is a future: the future is here!
An unusual request.
Rushkoff’s extravagant trip, accommodation and renumeration were not the only surprises: when he was ushered in to the auditorium there was not the customary overflowing audience but only five (5) persons, all super rich, none of them interested in his prepared speech.
They had invited him because they feared for their future: their wealth had given them everything they could wish for, yachts, private planes, trophy wives, except life without death.So, these 5 multi-billionaires had a few questions: how to escape the consequences of what they themselves had caused to happen: the coming collapse of society. These unnamed men also wanted to discuss such pressing questions as how to maintain authority over their private security, after that dreaded “event”.
By the way: Don’t ever think that the ultra-rich are a balanced lot. The richer people are, the more insecure they feel: Can they really depend on their ‘hired men’? Maybe the guards could wear some sort of disciplinary collars? Better yet, what about using robots as guards? Are friends, real friends? Do their wives really love them?
But especially they wonder about their own mortality. They all knew about Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, also a billionaire, who died at the age of 65. He also had all the toys, including a luxury yacht, but he died anyway. Is death really inevitable?
These were the questions Dr. Rushkoff faced. Would there be a cure for death? They saw ‘death’ as the greatest evil, the scourge of humanity, a moral scandal. These superrich were outraged over their own mortality, regarded it as a personal affront. Yes, they saw DEATH as the ultimate enemy, now that death lurks everywhere.
Take the Arctic.
The danger there will sooner than later affects us all. Arctic News reports that the ICE is disappearing! Without the buffer constituted by thicker sea ice, an influx of ocean heat threatens to destabilize hydrates contained in sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane, a gas 100 times more deadly than our very own tail-pipe variety.
Then, too, there is the growing nuclear threat. There too we are beset with universal elimination. Is there a cure? Can we escape death? Can we bypass both global and personal death?
The rich are different.
More terrifying than a Hollywood-derived nightmare is their naive and profoundly antisocial response: They’d rather build their bunkers than work to avert the apocalypse. Rushkoff describes their attitude as a “faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”
No wonder: Many people now seem fixated on stockpiling enough resources to protect themselves from the rest of the world.
Conclusion.
The world is scared. It sees dangers everywhere. GOLD is soaring, as if possession of it will assure survival. I remember from the war 1940-45 golden wedding rings were offered in payment for a loaf of bread, and refused. Only Christ can offer eternal life: as Paul writes in 1Corinthians 15: 26, The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Christ came to bring us LIFE, and that to the full, (John 10:10), life without super-yachts and private aircrafts and trophy wives, but having all of God’s Holy Creation as our inheritance, the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit every month!