Give Unto Death That Which Belongs To Death
by Boobie
The film Fight Club is perhaps the greatest addition to the Western canon of masterworks of the entire twentieth century. Themes of overcoming mental illness, the cost of suppressing masculinity, and the transformative potential of collective action spoke to the challenges presented by the late 20th/early 21st century more succinctly than any other film. However, the lesson that gets to the core of the human condition more than any other is this: “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
Despite the unprecedented rate of scientific advancement since the industrial revolution, this remains as true as it ever was. Everyone from the Egyptian Pharaoahs, to Voldemort, to the greatest minds of our generation like Peter Thiel have attempted to defeat death and live forever, but as yet none of their attempts have borne fruit. If Peter Thiel puts his mind to an endeavor and comes up short, it’s likely that the solution is meant to remain beyond the grasp of humanity.
Death is a greedy goddess. She expects payment immediately upon her demand; to deny it is not only a fool’s errand but potentially disastrous. Death takes many forms — a woman running a red light and causing an accident at an intersection, a woman forgetting to wash her hands and getting her co-workers sick, a woman smoking cigarettes and giving her neighbors cancer from secondhand smoke — but one form She does not take is that of a gracious loser. She and the free market are the only forces that we ought not to interfere with, lest we court their wrath. This fact makes the ridiculous “shelter in place” orders various states are implementing to combat COVID-19 even more offensive.
More than ever, in scary times such as these, it’s imperative that we not hoard the lives which belong to Her. Reasonable precautions such as beginning to wash our hands after we go to the bathroom and avoid sneezing directly onto other people are one thing, but the radical social distancing Americans have suffered under for tens of thousands of minutes and counting, at horrific expense to the stock market, is nothing less than an insulting dare to Death to take what is rightfully hers however she sees fit. Restrictive policies that force people to stay home from work would therefore bring about the destruction of humanity is two ways.
The first would of course be the impact to the economy. If workers are forced to stay at home, and employers are forced to remain closed and lay off employees, the market will continue crashing, devastating the portfolios of job creators, our nation’s most indispensable natural resource. Trickle-down economics doesn’t only work when times are good for these heroes; when their nets worth and profits take a hit, that hit trickles down to cogs their businesses allow to work as well. Individual worker bailouts like the ones being negotiated in Congress right now won’t help these businesses thrive again and return our nation to the beloved status quo, they’ll just keep people in their apartments and fed. Is saving a mere 0.002 billion lives — many of them unproductive and resource-draining, net-negatives for the country— worth the atrocious morale genocide of waking up every day and seeing that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped again? By any moral or practical calculus imaginable, it’s not.
The second form of destruction would be angering Death. Make no mistake, Her bloodlust will be quenched regardless of the free will or precautions of mortals. The Fight Club quote above demonstrates this logically; the Final Destination films — Gen X’s answer to the Godfather Trilogy — demonstrate it more viscerally. Anyone that Death has marked as Her own will be brought unto her bosom regardless of their arrogant attempts to avoid their fate. They will pay with their lives, and if they don’t die in a timely manner from COVID-19 as intended, they will pay with interest. Rather than dying in a hospital, selflessly helping doctors and scientists learn more about the disease and save the lives that are destined to be saved, they will die jumping up and down on their bed during a pillow fight, when a flying pillow turns the fan to full speed, decapitating them. They will die slipping on shampoo in the shower, flailing helplessly, falling out of the tub, with their heads landing in the toilet, drowning.
They will die unplugging the WiFi modem and plugging it back in again because the internet went down when they tried to post a meme to Facebook that said “Can Netflix suspend the ‘Are you still there?’ message until the coronavirus quarantine is over? YES, we’re still here, where else would we be?!” over a picture of Meredith from The Office drinking vodka, trying to plug the modem back in at just the wrong time, causing the power in the house to go out, using candles for light, but also leaving the gas stove on due to inexperience cooking, filling the house with gas, exploding once the candle’s flame ignites that gas. The point is, they will surely die despite their attempts to live. These outcomes are not better than simply giving Death what she asks for just because they can’t be directly attributed to one disease.
Now consider that we are being asked to remain inside, isolating ourselves from each other and nature, ruining the economy at the cost of billions or trillions of dollars worth of lost stock value, all in a vain attempt to save a relatively minuscule number of lives that will be taken by Death one way or another anyway. It’s insane. Only the virtue-signaling liberal cancel culture could convince itself that the right thing to do is ruin the lives of those who provide dignity to the working class just to save a handful of years of life here and there. Rather than fight the invisible hands of the market and of Death Herself, we must give unto Death that which belongs to Death, and give unto the market that which belongs to the market. It’s the only humane and logical thing to do.
