-Sacrifice Like You Were On Fire-
So how much will you give? When determining how far we need to go, how fast we need to climb those mountains, assemble the teams to climb them, what goals we need to set, and how much sacrifice might be necessary in supporting the success of the science for indefinite life extension, consider for a moment what you might do if you and the people around you were to suffer the horrific tragedy of being on fire.
What lengths might you go to too put yourself out? What might you put off till later so that you might put out the flames? What water at that point might you consider to be off limits for using to douse yourself with? Your on fire, of course, the answer is none. You would do whatever it took to put yourself and the people around you out. That is the level of follow through and sacrifice you must go to for this movement. You work for indefinite life extension with the same spirit, the same kinds of commitment and determination in mind that you would use to put yourself out if you were engulfed in flames.
Its hard work, but its fulfilling, needed, urgent, vital, worthwhile work. Like Theodore Roosevelt said, "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." Putting out the fire is work worth doing.
I have a poster board up in my kitchen so I can read and be inspired by and think about relevant quotes and passages about the cause. When I’m driving to the grocery store I have books and literature about the cause in my trunk that I spread around to libraries and bulletin boards along the way. When I meet a new person I talk about the context we are in and I am always sure to work in a bit of discussion about this cause. There is nothing you can do or should do that does not involve this cause. It’s that big and important and fundamental and all encompassing.
Does your job help this cause? If not then set it up so it does. For example I could work at a nice factory, or in a nice office building putting in 60 hours a week so I can have a big house on a hill with a nice boat and all the rest. I could do what it takes to help incorporate teaching of the understanding of fallacy into grade school curriculum around the world like I want to. But years ago I went out in search of a job that would provide me enough to keep a roof over my head and food in my mouth with flexible time, and I have had a job as a property manager ever since, where I can put in the work on my own schedule and plow 8 to 14 hours a day into this cause. As another example, some indefinite life extensionists are considering getting into college for nutrition, or business management, so they can live a little longer, and have money to give to the cause later. But it’s not about later, it’s about what we can do to most directly advance this cause right now. These people should either be going into research if they have a strong aptitude for it; marketing with the sole purpose of using their new skills to push this cause, or they should be doing like I have done, and find a job that provides the basics so we can all plow our time into doing the activist work that lays the fundamentals for the next stages of this cause. These are stages that urgently need to get here now, asap, and not after we have bigger boats and keeping up with the Jones degrees, and degrees that are fractionally relevant that help advance the cause a little bit compared to what we could be doing.
There are many historical examples of this, because this is what is needed. You bend your life to suit imperative causes; you don’t work the cause around your life. Amongst many examples, Galileo was banished to his corridors for plotting out the work that outlined why the earth moves around the sun. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was offered money, and jobs, professor roles and others, and he declined them all so that he could focus on trying to figure out what was going on with this existence. When something is important, we forgo excess and frivolities. Medgar Evers, Ralph Abernanthy and Fred Shuttlesworth all set their careers aside so that they could pursue civil rights. People working in the buildings around ground zero on 9/11 threw down their pens and documents and work and rushed to the aid of the victims at ground zero until the work was complete. The greatest example of all is the soldiers of all the great injustice fighting wars that sacrificed their homes and families, seeing their offspring’s childhoods, their jobs, health, limbs and lives because the cause was that important. When the cause comes first then the cause comes first, there are no two ways around it.
Do your hobbies help this cause? If they don’t then set them up so they do. Does your family time involve this cause? Set it up so it does. There is no reason why most everything you do can’t help this cause. It needs to. If you live your life responsibly, according to the big picture, then you will. You are on fire. Don’t mistake tradition with priority, the ravages of disease and affliction are burning you and everybody you know, all of your shots at the big picture, alive from the inside out. The process may be slower, and through not so completely different methods, but the urgency and sacrifice is exactly the same. You must fight for MILE like you were on fire.
Bumble your chance to exist, stand idly by while the ravages of aging burn us alive from the inside out. You can’t. Not only can we not stand idly by, but it is not enough to build back yard bunkers, and stock up on gas masks, it is not enough to go complacently on the defensive in the face of such a fierce foe, with so much at stake.
Supplements and Calorie Restriction are not enough.
7 year dividends are not enough.
The policies of places like the National Institute of Aging - the understanding of aging for the compression of morbidity - are not enough.
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0 downloadsThey are not enough in the same kind of way that waiting until next week to put yourself out if you’re on fire is not enough, or drinking your bottles of water instead of putting yourself out with them because they are your last ones is not enough, or using up all the water you have, to put most of you out, and then leave part of you smolder and not go in search of more water, is not enough. It’s not enough, at all, it is plain to see that it is not enough. Put yourself out! Go all the way! You’re being burned alive!
You help mount the offensive that is worthy enough to put this fire out, to stand up to the awesome destructive power of the ages old tyrant of aging, and disease. Don’t focus on bunkers and gas masks, we need more battleships and Higgins boats now. We are preparing for the Indefinity Revolution, a War on Aging, and an all out assault on death through a united world offensive, and we are going to launch it in our lifetimes.
You cannot over do your work and commitment to save lives, to be alive, to avoid oblivion, to secure your shot at more of the future. Don’t pussy foot around it; there is no room to second guess, to think twice, to go soft, to be polite and compromising about it.
Like Barry Goldwater once said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Don’t be afraid of your bold, vibrant, pioneering spirit, your passion for life, your passion to not be on fire. Don’t be afraid to give it your all. Give it everything you’ve got. You can’t be radical about it; you can’t be overzealous or give to much to this. It’s impossible to put too much into this. Think about the soldiers who climb and have climbed hills through mud, and blood, with mortal injuries, in the smoldering remains of their close companions, in order to get to the top of a hill and advance their brigade one meter, to fight injustice; in the name of things like monarchy, or free trade, or anti terrorism. The movement for indefinite life extension is like that, except that it is fighting for far more. It is fighting against far more carnage, against a far more tyrannical foe. It even does it in a cleaner, calmer, more controlled way, but the level and stakes are still as great, greater yet than all those wars combined.
When you join a team to help push move this cause to the world stage, and you are faced with say, scheduling the next 25 venues for a MILE lecturer, when you wonder how motivated you should be too do this, when you consider whether you want to inconvenience a venue who is already tightly booked, or whether the crowd would be receptive enough, consider that in other great but lesser causes they would shoot the people in the face and not take any prisoners, that they were in cold muddy trenches with dysentery and scraps of rotten food to eat, that they sacrificed their bodily comforts and then still power their spirit to see their mission through to victory. Think of these things, and then book those fucking venues like you mean it, like you have spirit, like you’ve learned something from the spirit of all the other great causes that have helped bring us here today, like your using the same determination that you could be using in trench warfare, like your using the same furious dead serious resolve that people use when they are on fire.
This is a big, important, demanding movement. Go all in. Put yourself out like you mean it, like you’re on fire and your life depends on it.
As Aubrey de Grey writes, “it is clear that the public will embrace the necessary tax rises: it will be quite obviously impossible to get elected except on a commitment to attack aging with all available resources. This is a mindset that has previously been seen only at one type of stain in a wealthy nation’s history: wartime.”
Grab the supplements and the gas masks, the calorie restriction, the degrees and the others if you want, but as we said, if you’re going to grab them, grab them and head for the harbor.
And there is no time for despair, you fight. The soldier in the war, the marcher in civil rights, the disaster relief workers in the flood do not slow down because they believe it is hopeless or because they believe potential success cannot come in time for them. They know why they can get there, they double down and work harder because it is never over until it is over.
"It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it." ~A.A. Hodge
You stand up.
The great freedom threatening Nazi battleship the Bismarck was said to be unsinkable. It struck fear in the hearts of every allied Atlantic fleet. It was the largest battleship of its day. It was the tyrannosaurus of the ocean. Great navy men heeded their call and sprung to action. The Bismarck set sail for its first mission on May 19th 1941 and the British Royal Navy sunk that bastard 8 days later.
Like the lizard and the bird, you go all in, you fight until the end.
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0 downloadsBelieve it, believe in yourself. Stand up with us. Report for duty. We can conceive that this can get done in 1 year, 10 years, 25 years, who knows. Like Aubrey de Grey says, "We can no longer pretend that we know so little about how to cure aging that the timing of this advance will be determined overwhelmingly by future serendipitous discoveries: we are in the home straight already." The time is right, the time is ripe. It depends only upon the amount of our collective determination, upon the collective speed at which the world goes.
Like Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you cant, your right.”
Like Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever you the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.”
It could get done tomorrow. If you doubt that, consider that the day before it happens, it will be a tomorrow, fight. This cause is here before us, to test in humanity every grain that has been grown, every fiber that has been cultivated and survived on up through to where we are here now. Every lesson learned, every bit of mental acuity, every tool created, every bit of hardiness that has survived through to victory here in this day and age was made to step up to this next great challenge.
We did not evolve all this way to watch TV, complain about politics, and vacation in Tahiti. We did not evolve all this way to have to continuously for all of time, grow our sons and daughters so they can rot away in the dust. We did not invent fire, struggle through wars and famines, invent complex revolutionary languages, live through hurricanes and typhoons and calamities, pain-stakingly record knowledge and keep it and memorize it and preserve it, learn precariously over centuries to master the seas, pioneer the earth, master the skies, learn to build giant structures, chart the stars, escape into space, get to the moon, create art, usher in an industrial era, usher in the technology era, master the elements, create a communications revolution and others, and move on toward the great new Transhuman era in order to arrive here and eat fish sandwiches, play Nintendo, watch the news, and drive 4 wheelers while we rot into the dust.
Report for duty. We evolved here because we evolve to step up to the next great obstacles. We evolved here because we are strong, brilliant creatures here to master ourselves and our surroundings. We evolved here because evolving is our business, getting stronger, smarter, quicker, and cleverer, honing in getting ready for the next beast. You step up, you were born for this. This is your destiny. You might not have chosen this time, but this time has chosen you, it hasn’t evolved and equipped and prepared and set the stage for you to quit. Fight god damn it, and fight with everything you’ve got.
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0 downloadsOne of the most powerful things a person can do is to absorb the mentality of powerful mentors. As Basho said, “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.” Absorb their wisdom, read their maps, observe their mistakes, note down their successful strategies, grab the reigns and pick up where the left off. A good starting place, or reminder peices for some of you, is to read and watch things like these:
Eisenhower D Day speech remixed with MILE theme and video of original.
Kennedy moon speech topic with video and text.
I have a dream speech remixed with MILE theme and video with original.
Patton ww11 speech topic with video and text.
related topic
Edited by brokenportal, 09 February 2011 - 03:04 AM.
