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In the aftermath of the coronation of King Charles, Professor Louis Ren Beres argues that a quid pro quo for subject loyalty is an irrevocable declaration that the states sovereignty represents the optimal path to power over death...

Its an uncommon association, but certain connections have been suggested between sovereignty (the highest form of earthly authority) and offerings of immortality. For the most part, at the level of philosophical investigation, such connections have not always been subtle. Observes G F Hegel (1820) in The Philosophy of Right: The state is the march of God in the world. And from Heinrich von Treitschkes 1897 Lecture on Politics: Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.

There is some nuance here. Von Treitschkes statement suggests something less than the classic after-worldly meaning of immortality. He is likely suggesting, after all, that something akin to eternal fame and not life everlasting, best represents this generally invisible dynamic of world politics. Though there can exist no scientifically valid ways of rank-ordering two contending meanings of immortality over time and space, there can be little doubt that any presumptive power over death must bestow greater satisfactions than any purported power over personal reputation.

The Realpolitik Foundation

To be sure. there are variously assorted details. Though difficult to understand, Realpolitik an historical shorthand for traditional power politics draws its animating force from the microcosm, from the individual. While inconspicuous, it is this personal human search for immortality or staying alive that may ultimately drive not only domestic kingships but also comprehensive international relations.

In any final reckoning, each states competitive struggle for the death of other designable states may represent a last-ditch defense against both collective and personal annihilation. Among other things, this obscure simultaneity suggests that the most genuine rationale of Realpolitik is not really the acquisition of territory, wealth or victory. However unwitting or sub-conscious, it is the avoidance of personal death.

This is not an easy idea for scholars and policy-makers to conceptualize, but ignoring it could severely limit humankinds rapidly disappearing chances for survival. Some preliminary understandings can be drawn from King Charles III recent coronation. It is the sovereign state, blessed by Gods vicars here on earth (in this case, the Archbishop of Canterbury) that holds the key to life everlasting.

These ideas are not easily understood by a countrys mass or by career politicians. To begin, searches for collective immortality based on sovereignty may signify core yearnings to avoid personal death. Though such fervid hopes can be nurtured only by assorted convictions of faith, not science, the history of humankind reveals no evidence that Reason could ever trump anti-Reason. Even in our glittering age of advanced technology and AI, conspicuous claims of non-rational belief continue to drive states and sub-states toward an explosively violent geopolitics. Lamentably, any corollary associations of sacredness with national armed force would further ensure that war, terror or genocide serve the highest imaginable forms of human power.

Bases of Deeper Understanding

But how should these very complicated connections be better understood? Why ought anyone acknowledge that a world politics based upon sovereignty offers a plausible path to personal immortality? What are the most revealing connecting factors? About the recent coronation in London, wouldnt we all be better off just asking the usual prosaic questions about King Charles, Camilla, William, Harry, etc.?

With pride of place, history should be our starting point. In his still-illuminating classic, Man and Crisis (1958), 20th century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega yGasset comments thoughtfully and prophetically: History is an illustrious war against death. Though this comment is captivating and sets the stage for our own present queries about sovereignty and immortality, it still represents only a partial piece of a much wider truth: Ultimately, power over death always represents the greatest conceivable form of power here on earth; but acquiring such power in world politics can sometimes demand the killing of assorted others.

Inter alia, as more-or-less derivative from sovereign authority, there is war, terrorism and genocide.

Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. I believe because it is absurd. Sovereignty offers a direct link to immortality (collective and personal), but the palpable rewards of power over death are too-frequently tied to engineered violence and armed force. Often its a Faustian bargain.

There is more. To acquire a politically manageable power over death, individuals (microcosm) and states (macrocosm) must first make tangible preparations to bring irreversible fatality to purported enemies. At times, such viscerally belligerent thinking could involve seductive notions of martyrdom. Significantly, as we may learn from the evening news, especially in the Middle East, these notions may call not only for war, but also for terror and genocide. In all cases, the planned mass killing of other human beings is more-or-less comparable to religious sacrifice, a primal ritual oriented toward the intentional deflection of death to others.

There are additional details. Scholars and policy-makers should continuously re-examine vital underlying links between microcosm and macrocosm. In this regard, Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote boldly of not being dead as the principal exemplar of ascertainable power. Confronted with what Canetti called terror at the fact of death, humankind both individually, and collectively always seeks one particular advantage above all others. This evident advantage is to remain standing while others prepare to lie down.

In the end, it is only those who can remain upright, however temporarily, who are victorious. It is these fortunate ones, after all, who have keenly managed to divert death to others. By definition, there can be no greater or more advantageous diversion.

A key lesson obtains here for states as well as individuals. For all players, microcosm and macrocosm, the situation of physical survival is the manifestly central expression of all human power. But as sovereignty-centered belligerent nationalism makes meaningful survival more problematic, Realpolitik or power politics inevitably deprives states of their most genuine power lever. Left unmodified, the all against all Westphalian process effectively creates or merely magnifies adversarial relations, and encourages state enemies to enjoy microcosmic triumphs that will remain concealed. These triumphs are the deeply-satisfying human emotions experienced by persons when confronting powerless individuals who are preparing to lie down.

Sovereignty and Victory Over Death

In world politics, the ultimate acquisition of power is never really about land or treasure or conquest or some other reassuring evidence of primacy. It is, rather, a presumed victory over death, ultimately a personal triumph, one described by Heinrich von Treitschke and G F Hegel as closely linked to the unique prerogatives of sovereignty.

The relevant reasoning here is straightforward. When my state is powerful, goes the core argument, so too am I. At some point, when this state seems ready to prevail indefinitely, I too am granted a personal life that is gloriously unending. Stated somewhat succinctly: An immortal state creates (as its citizen or subject) the immortal person.

These abstract ideas can be bewildering. Still, to actually feel such conceptual reasoning at a palpable level, one could intentionally recall the staggering images of mid-1930s Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg. Leni Riefenstahls monumental film celebration of Der Fuhrer, The Triumph of the Will, says it all best. Reminding the German people of Hegels famous aphorism, the legendary film underscores that a nation-state can actually become the march of God in the world.

Today, in 2023, all states continue to be driven by policies that generally bring them neither personal satisfaction nor institutional safety. To the contrary, all they can continue to expect in a chaos-leaning Realpolitik world is a perpetual global landscape of war, terrorism and genocide. In the best of all possible worlds, however, humankind recalling the ancient creed of Epicurus that death fear is foolish and irrational- would consider one indispensable query:

What is death? A bogy. Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done with.

States seemingly fail to understand that death is normally identified by their enemies as a zero-sum event. Anything that is done to sustain ones own national survival invariably represents, for these enemy states, an intolerable threat to their own lives and a diminution of their own power over death. Reciprocally, anything that is done to effectively eliminate hated enemies must expectedly enhance their collective life and augment their collective power. Ideally, these strategies fare best whenever God is on our side.

There is still more. Because of the deeply intimate associations between collectivities/macrocosm (states) and (microcosm) individuals, the reciprocal life advantages of death and dying can be enjoyed doubly.

Normally, even if only at a subconscious level, the living person never really considers himself more powerful than at that very moment when he faces the dying person. Here, as we may learn again from Elias Canetti, the living human being comes as close as he or she can to encountering genuine feelings of personal immortality. In roughly similar fashion, the living nation-state never really regards itself as more powerful than at that moment when it confronts the apparently impending death of a despised enemy state. Only slightly less power-granting are those reassuring sentiments that arise from confrontation with a dying enemy state; that is, the same sentiments experienced by a belligerent state that seeks some tangible victory over another.

In both cases, personal and collective, convention, good taste and sometimes skilled statecraft require that zero-sum feelings about death and power be suppressed. Such polite feelings ought not to be flaunted; nonetheless, they do remain prospectively vital and determinative.

Getting Beyond Appearances in World and National Politics

Oddly, perhaps, in all world politics, power is so closely attached to the presumed conquest of death (national and personal) that core connections have been overlooked. As a result, students and practitioners of international relations continue to focus mainly on epiphenomena, on easily recognizable ideologies, identifiable territories, tangible implements of warfare (arms control and disarmament) and so on. The problem is not that these factors are unimportant to power, but that they are actually of a manifestly secondary or reflected importance.

During a war, any war, the individual soldier, a person who ordinarily cannot experience satisfyingly tangible power during peacetime, is offered an utterly unique opportunity to remedy such absence. Inter alia, the pervasive presence of dead bodies in war cannot be minimized. Actually and incontestably, it is a central fact of belligerency. To wit, the soldier who is surrounded by corpses and knows that he is not yet one of them is normally imbued with an absolute radiance of invulnerability, of immortality, of monumental and perhaps incomparable power.

The adversarial state that commands its soldiers to kill and not to die, feels similarly great power at the removal of a collective adversary. This surviving state, like the surviving individual warrior, is transformed, indisputably and correspondingly, into a potentially primal source of everlasting life. Such abstract observations are hardly fashionable among general populations or political leaders; to the half-educated, they may even appear barbarous and uncivilized. Yet, for now at least, scholars should be seeking not to prescribe more appropriate behavior for sovereign states, but to accurately describe such behavior. Among other obligations, this means looking behind the daily news.

There is more. Always, truth must be exculpatory. True observations may sometimes be indecipherable or objectionable; but they are no less true. What is most important to understand is that to die for the sake of God is actually to not die at all. For example, by dying in a divinely commanded act of killing presumed enemies the Jihadist terrorist really does seek to conquer death, which he fears with a special terror, by living forever.

Ultimately, the love of death proclaimed by Jihadist terrorists is the ironic consequent of an all-consuming wish to avoid death. Since the death that this enemy loves is temporary and temporal, leading in fact to a permanent reprieve from any real death, accepting it as a tactical expedient becomes an easy matter. If, for any reason, the normally welcome death of an individual engaged in holy war were not expected to ensure an authentic life ever-after, its immense attractions would be reversed.

The greater the number of enemy corpses, the more powerful terrorists will feel. Real power, understood as an irremediably zero-sum commodity, is always to gain in aliveness through inflicting death upon enemies.

Power and Survival

An enemy, whether state or non-state, cannot possibly kill as many foes as his primal passion for survival may demand. This means, among other intersecting considerations, that he may seek to induce or direct others to satisfy this particular passion. As a practical matter, this deflecting behavior points toward an undeniable impulse for genocide, an inclination that could be actualized, in the future, by adversarial resort to higher-order forms of terrorism (chemical/biological/nuclear), and/or to crimes against humanity.

The sovereign still has much to learn. But before leaders can fully understand the true nature of enemy intentions and capabilities, they must first acknowledge the most primary connections between power and survival. Once it can be understood that enemy definitions of the former are contingent upon loss of the latter, these leaders will be positioned intellectually to take appropriate remedial action.

The true goal of certain adversaries is as grotesque as it is unrecognized. This goal is to be left standing while assorted others are made to disappear. These relentless enemies must survive just so that their enemies do not. They cannot, by this zero-sum reasoning, survive together. So long as the enemy is allowed to exist, no matter how cooperative or congenial it has been, some states will not feel safe. They will not feel powerful. They will not feel power over death.

It is always a mistake to believe that Reason governs the world. The true source of governance on this imperiled planet is power, and power is ultimately the conquest of personal death. This conquest, which displays a zero-sum quality among enemies, is not limited to conflicts in any one region. It is always a generic matter, a more or less universal effort that is made especially manifest between enemies. On this generic matter, one should consider the revealing remark of Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco in his Journal in 1966. Describing killing as a purposeful affirmation of ones own survival, Ionesco observed:

I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemys death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society; that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving ones feelings, of warding off ones own death.

While certain enemies accept zero-sum linkages between power and survival, others do not. Though this may suggest that some states stand on an enviably higher moral plane than their enemies, it may also place the high-minded or virtuous state at a security disadvantage, one that will make it too difficult to remain standing. This consequential asymmetry between state enemies may be addressed by reducing certain adversarial emphases on power-survival connections and/or by increasing enemy emphases on power-survival connections.

Difficult questions will have to be asked. Must a state ultimately become barbarous in order to endure? Must it learn to identify true power with survival over others, a predatory posture that cannot abide the survival of certain enemies? What is required is not a replication of enemy leadership crimes, but policies that recognize personal death-avoidance as the essential starting point for national security. With such recognition, protracted hostility and existential threat could be rejected in their entirety and a new ethos one based on a firm commitment to remain standing at all costs could finally be implemented.

Life and Death as Zero-Sum Qualities

Core changes will be necessary. All sovereigns must rid themselves of the retrograde notion that killing others can confer immunity from personal mortality. In his Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank affirms: The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.

What is being described here remains the greatest form of power anywhere: power over death. Americans and other residents of a deeply interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president of the United States or major world leader would meaningfully attempt to understand these complex linkages. At a minimum, this means that all of our national policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual and scientific sorts of understanding.

There is more. Our just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs, must be conducted as intricate contests of mind over mind. These contests are never just narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.

Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer an accessible medicine against adversaries in the global state of nature. Only by this difficult awareness can we ever relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of all against all.

More than ever before, history deserves pride of place. The United States was founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. This means something very different in 2023 than it did in 1787.

What should this particular history now signify for American foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon authentic learning, not flippantly corrosive clichs or abundantly empty witticisms. In this connection, individual human death fear has much to do with a better understanding of Americas national security options.

A Triumph of Death?

In the end, for individuals, a triumph of death in one form or another is inevitable, and attempts to avoid death by killing certain despised others are necessarily futile and inglorious. Going forward, therefore, it is high time for new and more creative thinking about national sovereignty and human immortality. Instead of simply denying death, a cowardly and potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labels wish fulfillment in The Future of an Illusion (1927), we must soon acknowledge the obvious. With such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all people and all sovereign states on this endangered planet could begin to think more insightfully about our immutably common destiny. In turn, this will mean using an always-overriding human commonality as the secure basis for expanding empathy and worldwide cooperation.

This is a visionary and fanciful prescription, one rather unlikely to be grasped in time. But there is still a plausible way to begin. This way would require the leaders of all major states to recognize that they are not in any meaningful way world powers (all are equally mortal, and none have any verifiable power over death) and that a coordinated retreat from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition would now be self-interested.

There are other considerations. The primary planetary survival task is a markedly intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, we could have no good reason to ever expect the arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king; still, even some ordinary political leaders could conceivably prove themselves up to the extraordinary task at hand. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of all countries must first cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about sovereignty-centered world politics, and (per specific insights of twentieth-century German thinker Karl Jaspers) do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and mind over blind faith and mystery.

In endowing us with memory, writes philosopher George Santayana, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; still, without really knowing it, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.

The legacy of Westphalia (1648 treaty) includes deification of the state. Although we may discover such murderous deification in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others, there have also always been compelling voices of a different sort. For Nietzsche, the state is the coldest of all cold monsters. It is, he says in Zarathustra, for the superfluous that the state was invented. In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega yGasset in the Revolt of the Masses. Here, the Spanish philosopher identifies the state as the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it.

Sovereignty as an Under-Explored Attribute of Life-Everlasting

In the end, sovereignty is always about life, death and immortality. For the most part, it is not for us to choose when we should die. Instead, our words and our destinies, will lie beyond any discernible considerations of conscious decision or individual selection. Still, we can choose to recognize our shared human fate and especially our derivative interdependence. This unbreakable intellectual recognition could carry with it significant global promise.

Much as we might prefer to comfort ourselves with qualitative presumptions of societal hierarchy and national differentiation, we humans are all pretty much the same. Already, this incontestable sameness is manifest to capable scientists and physicians. Our single most important human similarity, however, and the one least subject to any reasonable hint of counter-argument, is that we all die.

It is from the universal terror of this common fate that Westphalian law invests nation-states with the singularly sacred attributes of sovereignty. And it is from the incontestable commonality of death that humankind can finally escape from the predatory embrace of power politics or Realpolitik in world politics.

Ironically, whatever our more-or-less divergent views on what might actually happen to us after death, the basic mortality that we share could still represent the last best chance we have for viable global coexistence and governance. This is the case, however, only if we can first accomplish the astoundingly difficult leap from acknowledging a shared fate as mortal beings to operationalizing our species more expressly generalized feelings of empathy and cooperation.

Across an entire planet, we can care for one another as humans, but only after we have first accepted that the judgment of a resolutely common fate will not be waived by any harms that we may choose to inflict upon others, that is, upon the unworthy. While markedly inconspicuous, modern crimes of war, terror, and genocide are often just sanitized expressions of religious sacrifice. In the most starkly egregious instances, any corresponding violence could represent a consummate human hope of overcoming private mortality through the targeted mass killing or exclusion of certain specific outsiders.

Its a murderous calculus, and not a new thought. Consider psychologist Ernest Beckers ironic paraphrase of Elias Canetti in Escape from Evil: . each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

There is a deeply insightful observation latent in this idea. It is the uniquely dangerous notion that killing can confer immunity from ones own mortality. Similarly, in Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, psychologist Otto Rank affirms: The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed. What is being described here is plainly the greatest form of power discoverable anywhere: power over death.

A Struggle of Mind Over Mind

Americans and various other residents of our interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president of the United States should attempt to understand such vital and complex linkages. Here, Americas national policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual sorts of understanding. Our allegedly just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts, and anti-genocide programs must be fought or conducted as fully intricate contests of mind over mind, and not just as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.

Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible medicine against North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and assorted other more-or-less foreseeable adversaries in the sovereignty-centered state of nature. This natural condition of anarchy was already well known to the Founding Fathers of the United States (most of whom had read Locke, Rousseau, Grotius, Hobbes, Vattel and Blackstone. Now, only this difficult awareness can relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of all against all.

More than ever before, history deserves a reasonable pride of place. America was expressly founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. But this means something quite different in 2023 than it did in 1787.

What more precisely should this particular history signify for Biden White House foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon some measure of authentic learning, not on flippantly corrosive clichs or abundantly empty witticisms. For the foreseeable future, this is not a plausible presupposition.

Human death fear has much to do with acquiring a better understanding of Americas current enemies, both national (state) and sub-national (terrorist). Reciprocally, only a people who can feel deeply within itself the unalterable fate and suffering of a much broader global population will ever be able to embrace compassion and reject collective violence. Any new American president should prepare to understand what this implies, with pointedly specific reference to the United States and also to this countrys various state and sub-state adversaries.

The existence of system in the world is always obvious, immutable and pertinent. Accordingly, America First actually meant America Alone and America Last. America could never be truly first so long as its president insisted upon achieving such status at the grievous expense of so many others, and while failing to understand that international law is part of the law of the United States. To again seek to secure ourselves by diminishing others would merely be a retrograde playbook for ever-recurrent instances of war, terror and genocide.

For all humankind, the triumph of death is unassailable and inevitable. Attempts to somehow avoid death by killing certain despised others are both futile and inglorious. Going forward, it is high time for new and more creative thinking about global security and human immortality. Instead of denying death, a cowardly and potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labeled wish fulfillment (see The Future of an Illusion, 1927), we must finally acknowledge the obvious, perhaps even viewing it as a long-overlooked blessing. With such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all people and all nations on this imperiled planet could begin to draw purposefully from our immutably common destiny that is, from our conspicuously shared mortality. Among other things, this means using that always-overriding commonality as the intellectual basis for expanding empathy and a closely-corresponding pattern of worldwide integration.

It is, to be sure, a visionary and fanciful prescription, one unlikely to be grasped in time. But there is still a practical way to begin. It would require the leaders of major states to recognize that they are not in any genuinely meaningful way world powers (in the sense that all are equally mortal; that none has power over death) and that a coordinated retreat from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition must be self-interested and indispensable.

The Obligations of Courage

It follows from all this that the primary planetary survival task is a markedly intellectual one, a matter of mind, but unprecedented courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, we could have no reason to expect the timely arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king, but even some ordinary political leaders could conceivably be up to the task to become extraordinary. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of all countries would first have to cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about global survival, and do whatever deemed possible to elevate science over blind faith and mystery.

In endowing us with memory, writes George Santayana, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation. the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.

Though few will actually understand, such a raising is necessarily antecedent to human survival in world politics, though only if it is linked purposefully and self-consciously to global integration. Is it an end that draws near, inquired Karl Jaspers, or a beginning? The correct answer will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war philosopher had to say about the Jungian/Freudian mass.

In Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or The They. Drawing fruitfully upon certain earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard as well as Jung and Freud, Heideggers The They represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an untruth (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can quickly suffocate indispensable intellectual growth. For Heideggers The They, the crowning untruth lies in (1) its acceptance of immortality at both institutional and personal levels, and (2) its encouragement of the seductive notion that personal power over death is associated with (or actually derivative from) the sovereignty-centered sacredness of nation-states.

The arena of world politics (macrocosm) is violent because individual human beings (microcosm) compulsively fear death. Though patently ironic, the murderous connections are longstanding and difficult to dispute. Ultimately, states battle against other states on behalf of individual human salvation.

While the typical result of such redemptive battles has always been death and mega death, not long or eternal life, an overriding mythology still endures. This is the ironic belief that it is in war, not in peace, that humans are able to acquire power over death. Sometimes, this acquisition is intended to be direct that is, an immediate consequence of killing on the side of God. More generally, however, such power over death devolves indirectly to general populations that are not actually involved in the business of killing. Recalling Bob Dylan, even de facto bystanders can have God on their side.

None of this is to deny the validity of more traditional and conspicuous explanations of Realpolitik or power politics, namely that these struggles are about tangible goods, geography or national security. These conspicuous explanations are not mistaken; they are, however, trivial and epiphenomenal. Such explanations are generally correct, but merely as secondary reflections of what is most genuinely important.

In William Goldings novel Lord of the Flies, the marooned boys make grotesque war upon one another because they have suddenly been thrust into a netherworld of anarchy and chaos, but only because this dissembling exile from civilization now threatens them with personal death. It is only after they have settled upon an amorphous but ubiquitous horror (the beast) that they decide to wage a titanic struggle to survive. And in what amounts to yet another irony of upholding policies of inflicting death in order to bring freedom from death, the boys are rescued by a military ship, a naval vessel that will transport them from their literally primal state of nature on the island to the more comprehensive state of nature of world politics.

In essence, readers quickly learn, the rancorous and barbarous conditions that had obtained on the deserted island were actually just a microcosm of the wider system of international relations. But who can now rescue this wider system of Realpolitik from itself? Before we can meaningfully answer this core question, scholars and policy-makers will need to probe more closely behind visible events of the day, beyond mere reflection. Above all, this probe will have to be suitably theoretical.

Why? Theoretic generality is a trait of all serious scientific meaning. Scientific inquiry in such matters is indispensable.

In the beginning, in that primal promiscuity in which the lethal swerve toward politics first arose, forerunners of modern nation-states established a system of perpetual struggle and violent conflict, a system destined to fail. Captivated by this self-destroying system of international relations, states still allow the degrading spirit of Realpolitik to spread everywhere unchecked, like an ideological gangrene on the surface of the earth. Rejecting all pertinent standards of logic and correct reasoning, this inherently false consciousness of power politics imposes no reasonable standards upon itself. It continues to be rife, despite endless rebuffs. Somehow, Realpolitik takes its long history of defeat as victory. Somehow, its historical proponents have never learned anything.

The vast majority of human beings are unable to accept the biological truth of mortality. Understood in terms of world politics, this suggests that national sovereignty will likely continue to be viewed by many as a suitable institutional antidote to personal death. Such a view may not be explicitly apparent even to Realpolitik adherents, and it would very likely disregard certain palpable benefits other than a presumed power over death (e.g., enhanced personal status of belonging to a powerful country). Nonetheless, it is a perspective that will not simply fade away graciously on its own.

It is high time for candor. Whatever our in-principle preferences, the plain fact of having been born augurs badly for the promise of immortality. Accordingly, the primal human inclination to deny an apparently unbearable truth will continue to generate the same terrors from which we allegedly seek refuge. The irony is once again staggering, but still incontestable.

In its obvious desperation to live perpetually, humankind has embraced a cornucopia of faiths that offer life everlasting is exchange for unchallengeable loyalty to a sacred duty. Such loyalty is then transferred from faith to State, which battles (or prepares to battle) with other states. Though historians, political scientists and pundits routinely describe such conflicts as a tangible struggle for secular influence (power politics), it is often something different. This is a struggle between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Decency and Indecency, even the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. In this last example, apocalyptic imagery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is invoked not because any or all of a combatant states rationale is necessarily religious, but because such imagery best portrays the enormity of ideological attachments.

In the United States, ideas of prevailing apocalyptic contest obtained widely during the 1950s Eisenhower years, and later during the Reagan Administration. More recently, Donald Trumps core message of American First was not without underlying or implicit references to righteous struggles in world politics withGod on our Side. For several million Trump supporters, their leaders slogan of America First was essentially an eschatological code term used to signal impending End Times. In view of certain religion-based support for the Trump presidency, a core aspect of his appeal was an implicit linkage of American sovereignty with life everlasting.

Death, says Norbert Elias, is the absolute end of the person. So the greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger experienced. Now, major states in world politics must strive more vigorously to reduce both the magnitude and likelihood of anticipated existential danger. In this connection, they must remain wary of planting new false hopes that offer only illusions of personal survival through perpetual international war or war-planning.

To survive in world politics, citizens of planet earth will first have to detach themselves from various mythical promises of power over death. In the most promising of possible worlds, the pervasively underlying human death fear could be made to disappear, but this auspicious prospect would also seem blatantly implausible. It follows that more gentle and reason-based orientations will be required for world politics than those discoverable within the narrowly self-destroying dynamics of sovereignty-centered belligerent nationalism.

In this regard, there is much to be learned from the May 6, 2023 coronation of King Charles III. This means exploring much deeper linkages between sovereignty and immortality. In the end, species survival must become a preeminently intellectual obligation, one based on comprehensive theory concerning survival, immortality and power over death.

LOUIS REN BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth and most recent book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy (2016). In 2003, Professor Beres was Chair of Project Daniel in Israel (regarding Irans nuclear weapons, prepared especially for PM Ariel Sharon). He has published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; The Jerusalem Post; Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); BESA (Israel); INSS (Israel); JURIST; Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); The Atlantic; Yale Global; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); Oxford University Press Yearbook on International Law & Jurisprudence; World Politics (Princeton); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); The Strategy Bridge; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Horasis (Zrich) and The New York Times.

Suggested citation: Louis Rene Beres, King Charles IIIs Coronation at the Convergence of Policy, Sovereignty, and Immortality, JURIST Academic Commentary, May 9, 2023, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/05/king-charles-coronation-immortality.

This article was prepared for publication by JURIST Commentary staff. Please direct any questions or comments to them at commentary@jurist.org

Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST's editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.

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The Greek Ministry of Culture has announced that the ancient Asclepieion in Thessaly, an important healing temple of the Greek empire, will be restored.

Greeces Minister of Culture and Sports, Lina Mendoni, stated that in the city of Trikala, in Ancient Trikki, there was one of the oldest and most famous (temples) in the entire ancient world, Asclepieion.

The earliest confirmed excavation of the city dates back to the Bronze Age and is located in the area of the present archaeological site of Trikala.

Excavations have uncovered ceramics indicating that the western slopes of the ancient acropolis had been inhabited since the Early Bronze Age (3300 BC) until the Mycenaean era.

Ancient Trikki was first referred to in the Homeric List of Ships, which states that Trikki participated with great force in the Trojan War, with 30 ships led by Asclepius sons, Mahaonas and Podalerios, who were taught medicine by their father.

Asclepius was the Greek god of healing, truth, and prophecy, and is also known as the god of medicine. In later times, he was honoured as a hero and eventually worshipped as a god. Healing temples in his honour began in Thessaly but spread to many parts of Greece.

The practice of sleeping in these healing temples became common in many parts of Greece, as it was believed that Asclepius cured illnesses in dreams.Zeus (the king of the gods), afraid that Asclepius might render all men immortal, slew him with a thunderbolt.

Read more here:
Ancient Greek healing temple in Trikala to be restored - The Greek Herald

You wont find the elixirs of immortality prepared by alchemists in ancient China on sale today. With ingredients including mercury and its main ore (cinnabar) and highly toxic arsenic sulfides (realgar and orpiment), they would not exactly have the effect on longevity that was hoped by ancient emperors. Yet the dream of an elixir of youth remains as potent as ever, and among the modern varieties seemingly as validated by science as the old alchemical ones were in their day are telomerase creams. By restoring activity of an enzyme called telomerase, this cream enhances skin cell longevity right down to your DNA says one advert, offering a small jar for just $33.75 (26.75). (A snip compared to Este-Lauders telomere-lengthening Re-Nutriv Ultimate Diamond, containing truffle extract and costing $435 a bottle.)

The telomere story is well rehearsed. Telomeres are tiny caps at ends of each DNA strand, the advert explains. They keep those strands safe from a wide variety of challenges and the longer your DNAs telomeres are, the more robust their protective qualities are going to be. But it seems the story is not that simple, and a new study suggests that long telomeres might not be such a great thing at all.

Telomerase has been touted as the fountain of youth

Lets stay with the anti-ageing cream for a moment. It claims to boost the activity of the telomerase enzyme, which maintains the telomere sections at the ends of our chromosomes, using a herb thats been used in China for centuries, called astragalus root. Astragalus membranaceus is indeed a long-standing ingredient of traditional Chinese medicine, where it is known as huangqi. It seems to possess genuine anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, and some tests on animals and cell cultures have shown that one component of the extract does activate telomerase, and perhaps even lengthens telomeres in humans. It might increase the health span of ageing mice, although not their longevity. In short, to find any evidence that astragalus extract will make you look younger or live longer, youll end up scavenging for scraps in the grey literature. But then, as the advert says, These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

All the same, long telomeres and active telomerase are good news, right? Telomerase has been touted as the fountain of youth ever since it was discovered in Nobel-winning work in the 1980s. A study in 2011 showed that, while mice engineered to lack the enzyme entirely aged faster and suffered from age-related adverse health conditions, reactivating telomerase in the mice in adulthood could reverse these problems.1 Thats fine, but no one imagined that having no active telomerase could be a good thing. Worse, it has been long known that mutations that make telomerase unusually active are associated with cancer: the enzyme seems able to boost the growth of tumours.

Evidence for the adverse effects of over-active telomerase has accumulated since. In 2020, researchers at Rockefeller University showed that indeed telomere shortening seems to play a vital role in preventing tumorigenic cell proliferation, and that a gene mutation that promotes long telomeres increases cancer risk.2 And now a new study shows that mutations to a protein called POT1 that influences telomere length can increase the risk of cancer and blood disorders.3 Sure, particularly short telomeres can be problematic, but so can long ones.

So the real effects of telomerase, and of longer or shorter telomeres, are complicated. If those rejuvenating telomerase-boosting creams really have that effect (which is by no means clear), you cant be certain if its a good or a bad thing. Its unlikely to be as hazardous as ingesting mercury or arsenic, but youd be tampering with a biochemical process implicated in a complex system of cell maintenance and cell cycling, with results that would be hard to predict. Telomere rejuvenation is potentially very dangerous unless you make sure that it does not stimulate cancer, one expert told Nature after the 2011 study.

All this should surprise no one. The idea that telomeres are somehow the key to longevity is mistaken, and trying to alter their length is probably not wise. Ageing, like most ubiquitous physiological processes, is a very complex and multifactored phenomenon, in which telomere length is not even the dominant issue. The idea that we can simply tweak a molecule and expect to see a significant and predictable health outcome in such a case is not only flawed but perhaps dangerously so. Not necessarily because it will cause more problems than it solves, but because it encourages a misleading picture of biology in which complex effects can be traced back to simple molecular causes.

Originally posted here:
The long and short of telomere rejuvenation | Opinion - Chemistry World

Jarle Breivik is critical of claims that we are approaching thesolution to the cancer puzzle.

The solution to the puzzle is not what we think it is, Breivik, aprofessor of medicine, says. In a book with the name The solution to thecancer puzzle, he explains the fundamental cause of the disease and why asociety completely without cancer is perhaps not something we should wish for.

New advances are constantly being made in cancer treatment. Fortunately,twice as many people survive their diagnosis today as did 50 years ago,according to the Norwegian Cancer Society.

But that doesnt mean that we are about to be rid of this plague. It isestimated that the number of cancer cases will increase as we approach 2030.This is because the population is growing and the proportion of elderly peopleis increasing.

The better we get at treating cancer and other diseases, the longer welive, and the more cancer there will be in the population, Breivik said.

This is the paradox, because cancer is closely linked to ageing and to thehistory of how our biology has developed over time, according to the Professor.

Breivik is head of department at the Department of Behavioural Medicine atthe University of Oslo.

Why does cancer even exist? Why are our own cells suddenly transformedinto something resembling a monstrous parasite that destroys the body from theinside?

Let's say it like it is: Cancer is cruel, Breivik writes in thebook.

He remembers his first encounter with cancer.

As a young medical student, he was carrying out a dissection at theDepartment of Anatomy at the University of Oslo.

We were assigned a large, old man who had donated his body to science,Breivik said.

Over several weeks, Breivik and his fellow students worked their way throughvarious parts of the body with scalpels, scissors and tweezers.

It was a fascinating journey where we were constantly surprised byhow ingeniously the body is organized, recalls Breivik.

The book Lsningen p kreftgten (The solution to the cancer puzzle) was written by Jarle Breivik and was published in 2022. (Photo: Pitch forlag)

But a little way into the chest cavity they discovered something thatdidn't add up.

The nerves and blood vessels disappeared into a grey shapelessmass. The trachea and oesophagus were surrounded by the same stuff.

When the students put their scalpel into this tissue, it made a crunching sound, as ifthey were cutting sandstone. It was cancer.

The tumour had arisen in the intestine and then spread to other organs,such as the lungs and lymph nodes in the chest cavity. The cancer had grownwild, Breivik writes.

Cancer develops from the body's own cells, and the chance of the cellsrunning wild increases with age.

You don't necessarily die from it, but with it.

A centenarian who has not been diagnosed with some form of cancer hasprobably just not been examined well enough. And that is probably the best forall parties, Breivik writes in his book.

Artistic illustration of cancer in the body. (Illustration: Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock / NTB)

The fact that we age and get cancer is due to how the human body has beendeveloped over millions of years of evolution, explains Breivik.

Life, and how it has evolved and developed, is driven by the ability ofgenes to copy themselves.

It started with small proto cells. Through evolution, genes developedincreasingly better and more advanced ways of copying themselves.

Cells began to cooperate in large colonies and formed advanced organismssuch as animals and humans. This was driven by the fact that the organisms thatwere best at reproducing and surviving passed on their genes.

We often talk about our genes. But really, we are their body. Theyhave developed ways to ensure we copy them on to the next generation, saysBreivik.

The most fundamental reason why humans and animals get cancer because ofthe way our genes go in two different directions a few days afterfertilization, Breivik said.

While one copy of the genes is carried by germ cells on to the nextgeneration, another copies itself to all the cells that form the skin,skeleton, brain and all the other organs in the body.

The body cells are a dead end for genes, because sooner or later they willdie. Only the genes that accompany the germ cells are passed on.

The body's cells are like an ant colony with soldiers and worker ants whodo the work so that the queen ants, the germ cells, will continue and make newanthills somewhere else, Breivik said.

Theres no genetic advantage for the body to live for 200 years.

As soon as we've had children, we've pretty much done what our geneshave created us for. But since children need a lot of follow-up and care, itsclearly an advantage for parents to live long enough for their offspring totake care of themselves, Breivik said.

Some studies show that having grandparents can also be a biologicaladvantage.

But having 16 surviving great-great-grandparents, who also need food andcare, is not necessarily an advantage for the gene's ability to copy itself andpass itself on, Breivik said.

Our cells are therefore genetically programmed to die and waste away as weage.

Cells that have errors in this program develop into cancer, Breivik says.

We have 30 trillion cells, all of which contain two metres of DNA, whichagain consists of six billion nucleotides. These are the "letters" inthe genetic code that must all be copied every time a cell divides.

As we age, more and more errors can crop up in the copying of the code.

The genes have developed several control mechanisms to prevent us fromdeveloping cancer early in life, including DNA repair, programmed cell deathand immune cells that attack and kill cancer cells.

But some cells trick these mechanisms, survive and gradually develop intocancer.

It is always the "smartest" cells that survive, and Darwin'sprinciple of evolution by natural selection also applies inside the body,Breivik said.

As soon as they get a chance, they copy themselves. Cancer is preciselythe opportunity the genes in the body's cells have to copy themselves for aslong as they can, he said.

As with other brutal realities in nature, no malice is involved.

Genes are simply indifferent, Breivik said.

So what do we need to solve the cancer puzzle? Breivik says there are twopossibilities, in principle.

The fundamental problem is how our body is put together, which is as atemporary cell colony that will pass its genes on to the next generation, hesaid.

The first possibility is therefore to make the body immortal using biotechnology, Breivik said.

This may sound a little utopian. But we are developing increasinglyadvanced technologies to reprogram or replace the cells in the body as they age,he said.

For example, work is being done to grow new organs in laboratories and tofind medical treatments that slow down ageing.

By removing ourselves from natural biology, one might be able to extend life and prevent diseases such as cancer in the future. But this will create other issues, Breivik writes in his book. (Illustration: Marko Aliaksandr / Shutterstock / NTB)

In principle, cancer could be avoided by constantly renewing the cells inthe body, according to the professor.

It will hardly be cheap, and one can wonder what kind of world we will livein if no one dies. Or will the rich become immortal, while the poor die asearly as before? Breivik asks.

At the same time, it is not necessarily the body that we are mostconcerned with taking care of. It is the soul, or self, that we really want totake care of.

The problem is that the body takes our identity with it in death. Thesecond and ultimate solution would therefore be to get rid of our bodiesand move into the digital world.

Today's developments in biotechnology and artificial intelligence areredefining what it means to be human. But where are we really going? asksBreivik.

He warns that the solution to the cancer puzzle could be theend of humanity as we know it.

This is because we are actually the problem, he said.

Lars Andreas Akslen is a cancer researcher and professor at the Universityof Bergen.

He says that the understanding of cancer that Breivik presents, about howthe body is put together and our history of development, is not particularlycontroversial.

I think there is a lot of sense in this explanation, he said.

He agrees that there will probably be more cancer in the future as lifeexpectancy increases.

If you imagine that we have the constant pressure from environmentalinfluences, then I think it is a completely logical prediction that there willbe more cancer in society as a whole as people get older, he said.

What Breivik writes about as the solution and future possibilities withbiotechnology is a serious problem that has more to do with just cancer, Akslensaid.

There is great development potential going forward in this vein, which canaffect both our susceptibility to cancer and other diseases, he said.

This is an extensive problem both when you look at ethics and the economy and that the elderly will displace the young, he said.

Akslen points out that the increase in cancer cases applies to many, butnot all types of cancer.

Just think of cervical cancer, which has a curve that goes completely theother way as a result of screening and the HPV vaccine programme, he said.

The incidence of stomach cancer has fallen sharply as the ulcer bacterium hasbecome less common and can be treated effectively.

Theres also been constant progress on the treatment side.

This is what the whole world is working on, finding ever new and everbetter treatment regimens that can do one of two things, either remove thecancer cells completely or keep the disease in check, Akslen said.

There are a number of examples of this. Just think of childhood leukaemiaand testicular cancer, which used to be fatal diseases, but now the patientscan be cured, he said.

Other treatments can keep the cancer at bay.

Breast cancer is one example, where many people can live many, many yearswith this as a chronic disease, he said.

My experience after being in this field for a long time is that you neverreally know where the advances will suddenly come from, Akslen said.

He doesnt think we will find one solution that will make cancer no longera feared disease. The multiple forms of cancer are too different for that.

Evolution takes place in a cancerous tumour, much like how bacteria andviruses change and evolve to bypass antibiotics or vaccines.

This is the frustration with cancer and cancertreatment. It's so unpredictable. Cancerous tumours are like a kind ofevolutionary magicians that constantly try to find new loopholes in the fightagainst the host organism, he said.

Translated by Nancy Bazilchuk

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

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Is there a solution to the puzzle that is cancer? The fundamental ... - Sciencenorway