Solving the Anti-Life Equation (1st Permutation)
The Darkseid of Safety
Life is not safe.
On this point, most of us agree, though we may vary in how we respond to this knowledge.
The Pious may accept the precariousness of life with a sense of appreciation for each fleeting moment that they draw breath in this miraculous existence.
The Adventurous may meet the perilous unknown with excitement and wonder at what surprises await them beyond the horizon.
The Cautious may find a sense of purpose as they set out to chart a pragmatic course for themselves in a world that is dangerous, but navigable.
Varied as they may be, these are all coherent responses that can be grouped together on one side of the cultural landscape, unified by their healthy acceptance of—and engagement with—the vicissitudinous, kaleidoscopic phenomenon of life.
Then, there is the other side. The Dark Side.
On the Dark Side today, people find no gratitude, no thrill, no hope. They find only the basilisk stare of thanatophobic secular materialism, emasculated nanny-state totalitarianism, and the evanescent promise of sterile “soma holidays.” They find only a cold, Coleridgean Life-in-Death, a fate far worse than even the death they dread.
The world’s ever-increasing, ever-authoritarian spiral into obsessive “Safetyism” quickly descends past a threshold where it transmogrifies from a perhaps well-intentioned attempt at measured preservation of life against obvious, catastrophic, and unnecessary peril (the domain of The Cautious) into a complete denial of Life-as-Experience in its panicked retreat into Life-as-Mere-Perpetuated-Existence. It is monstrous, Medusan, the very antithesis of life itself.
It is aptly analogized in comic book lore in the form of Darkseid’s “Anti-Life Equation”: a cold, calculating, unchanging numerical prison that reduces all of life to a solved stasis, and thus to no life at all. A solution with no absolution.
There is no subtlety, no nuance, no gradations of gray, no room for interpretation, no space for creation. There is no dangerous laughter or precipitate thought. No mischievous music or pernicious poetry. There are no new vistas to explore.
There are no questions.
There is only a binary prison of zero and one, of black and white, the straightjacket of certitude, the shackles of fatalism. There is only the deafening silence and the soporific stare. There is only the rubble of an infinitude of collapsed superpositions. There is only now. There is only here.
There is only the answer.
This is the primrose path, the siren song, the Faustian fraud of the Dark Side: sacrifice life for survival.
Similarly paradoxical is the Dark Side’s replacement of individual agency with ego frenzy, and of group comity with brutalist conformity. This can be seen from something as vast as our ascendant, egregoric, “Safetyist” medical tyranny to something as seemingly trivial as “trigger warnings.” The Anti-Life Equation infects and corrupts all aspects of the individual and the civilization—mind, body, and soul.
In fact, “trigger warnings” epitomize two loathsome macro trends in the micro:
1) The complete off-loading to everyone else of your own personal responsibility for even something as rudimentary as resolving your own issues to a level where you can “feel safe” in basic interfacing with the world, or at the very least resilient enough to move on when encountering content you find disturbing. This is a vile, selfish, and puerile maneuver by the self-asserted offended party in demanding constant accommodation from the world instead of taking care of themselves or embracing the capriciousness of life.
2) The currencification© of said faux-offense as a form of social currency, creating incentive structures that perpetuate and escalate such abhorrent and (ideally) aberrant behavior until it becomes the norm, ironically only harming those individuals as well in the end as they become weaker, more neurotic, more emotionally and psychologically hobbled and atrophied as their range of experiences narrows and any sense of personal responsibility, resilience, and (vitally) empowerment withers and dies, irrevocably leading us individually and socially into the terrifying, silent, singularity of Anti-Life.
Life is not safe.
Live anyway.
Please click here to read the thrilling, second installment in the Anti-Life Equation series!
This has been a Public Service Announcement brought to you by Apollo’s Lyre. The original Note thread that it is based on can be found here. Thanks to
What you describe is Utopia. People use this word as a substitute for Paradise. Everything is perfect, all your needs catered to. But that isn't a life.
Thomas More's Utopia had no crime and no sudden disruptions. Life was peaceful. But equally no one ever eloped, no one had a torrid affair. Nothing upset Utopia and that made Utopia fantastically boring. As a consequence Utopia produced no great symphonies, no great art or literature. Nothing can possibly inspire Utopians because nothing there carries any risk.
Utopia is society on life support; it basically works but would you want it?
The proponents of safetyism welcome the Nanny State with open arms. Retreat from responsibility and lack of agency have become the go to for many people. I suspect that a lot of these escape hatches are the reason many are turning away from becoming parents. It’s not just decline it’s nihilism. Thanks for putting into context the disastrous turn our society is leaning into.