Immortality

I remember that in the movie "Saw II" (which I maintain was a B-grade indulgence of blood and gore and I only mention here because of an interesting quote), the disciple of John aka Jigsaw the "serial killer" told one of the main characters this; "What is the cure for Cancer, Eric? The cure for death itself. The answer is immortality. By creating a legacy, by living a life worth remembering, you become immortal."

The self-awareness of the homo sapien species is a boon and curse at the same time. A boon because it allows us to live our lives above the 4Fs (Feed, Flight, Fornication and Fight) that pretty much direct the lives of most animals (I say "most" because some species like dolphins and selected members of the Great Apes also exhibit some level of self-awareness). At the same time, it is a curse because we alone of so many animals can foresee our own deaths. And that death is inevitable. The gazelle that flees from a cheetah is aware of death at the instinctual level but unlike us humans, it does not realise the inevitability of death. The gazelle probably does not truly know that no matter how many cheetahs that it manages to escape that the day would come when its body would simply fail it and its heart would stop and it would breathe its last. Only us, humans have the privilege of foreseeing that.

Though there is no way for an individual living being to forever escapes death, nature does offer a way out, and that is through our genes. In a certain sense, our genes passed on to our descendants are our passports to immortality. Though humans are similarly driven by this instinct to procreate and pass down our genes, such immortality is not enough for our ego. And therefore our inventive minds have come up with other ways to give the illusion of immortality. The first of course is religion. I do not think it too far wrong to hypothesize that religion is born from fear of death. Thus far, all the religions, from archiac polytheism to the the dominant monotheistic faiths like Christianity and Islam make some claims of the existence of a kind of life after death. If this is not a consolation to our ego, I do not know what that is.

The other way that people have strove to achieve "immortality" is through the creation of a lasting legacy. Mostly this is done through "great deeds" to leave one's mark in history so that even ages after the person has died, people would still remember and mention his/her name. This might be the same motivation for certain self-sacrificing heroic acts - the people who knowingly committed such acts which led to their own deaths did so with the solace that others would sing their praises and their heroic deeds long after they were gone.

Genghis Khan is a very successful example of one who has managed to achieve immortality on two counts - the spread of his genes and a fame that would last as long as civilization last. According to a documentary on Discovery Channel, for every two hundred persons that now exist on earth, one of them can trace his/her ancestry to Genghis Khan! This is most remarkable and of course it also testified to the fact that Genghis Khan screwed a great number of women when he was alive - not exactly surprising given that he himself said that there was great satisfaction in "taking the land of his enemies, riding their horses and bedding their women" (or something along that line). As a world conqueror (the Mongol Empire carved out by him was the single biggest empire ever founded, exceeding the Roman Empire at its peak, the Third Reich of Hitler and Alexander the Great's empire), he naturally would have no lack of women been offered even if he did not make it a joy to bed the women of his enemies. In evolutionary terms, Genghis Khan was probably one of the most successful individual human that existed.

He did not score badly by the other measure, which is everlasting fame after death either. Millions of people have died in the wars of conquest and vengeance that Genghis Khan waged. In terms of destruction of human lives, Genghis Khan was surely not too far behind Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. But Genghis Khan was fortunate to be born like 700 years earlier when it was relatively alright to butcher entire populations as long as you did something truly impressive and remarkable like demonstrating that you were one of the greatest military geniuses and greatest conqueror that existed. Alas, poor Adolf Hitler had to be born in the 20th century where it was already considered not very polite to systematically butcher people even if you were trying to do something really impressive like creating a pure Aryan empire. Tough luck Hitler! The difference in their legacy could not be more pronounced. Genghis Khan is remembered as a great conqueror and even a hero figure among ethnic Mongols and while Hitler is regarded as some psychopath who by some twist of fate survived a bullet in the First World War and unfortunately ended up as Fuhrer of Germany twenty years later.

But of course not everyone tried to immortalize himself/herself through the achievement of "great deeds"; afterall, "great deeds" are reserved for "great men" like Napoleon, Alexander, Qin Shi Huang, Leonardo, Gandhi, etc right (or for those madmen born in the wrong era, like Hitler)? So what about ordinary people like us? Interestingly, even ordinary people can leave behind an everlasting legacy too. Take the example of a guy called Herostratus who lived in Greece more than 2000 years ago. Never heard of him? That's fine. Just google "Temple of Artemis" which was one of the original and ancient Seven Wonders of the World and his name would come out. Why? Because the joker burnt down this Wonder in order to achieve fame. No kidding.

Some well-meaning locals then were so outraged that they decreed that Herostratus' name never to be recorded to foil his grand plan of achieving "immortality". But of course, somewhere someone could not resist the temptation and so we know do know of this joker and we have to admit that Herostratus had succeeded in making a name for himself.

I wonder what is worse; for one to be forgotten just like how a scratch mark on a desert is destined to be covered over by sand sooner or later and therefore leaving no mark on this world as if you have never ever existed before or to be infamous and remembered. Hey, even Hitler, hated and despised he is, has his fan club too. These include some modern Neo-Nazi punks and skinheads and even some world and religious leaders who support the idea that Jews should be wiped off the face of the earth. Who knows? There may just come a time in the future when the present villians would be revered as "great men".