Memento mori

Denis CHEYNET, December 6, 2020

During Greco-Roman antiquity, slaves would remind victorious generals of their mortality during the parades that followed triumphant battles: “remember that you will die.”

When I wrote my novel *Tu crèveras comme les autres*, I believed humanity's greatest peril would come from the degradation of our environment — through climate change, biodiversity loss, and the end of abundant fossil fuels. But never could I have imagined that a simple virus, which has so far killed only 0.02% of the global population, would bring an entire civilization to its knees.

I now realize how wrong I was to underestimate our political and media systems' ability to turn a non-event on the scale of human history into a global pandemic.

Sadly, this only deepens my fear that we are entirely incapable of addressing the real challenges we will face in the years ahead: economic crises, overpopulation, migration, nuclear risks, ecological collapse, and the exhaustion of key resources.

That’s why I’m stunned to see so many of us — who’ve lived through an era of extraordinary material abundance that history will remember as an anomaly — clinging to a few extra months or years of life at the expense of future generations. Young people can no longer find jobs or internships, and much of the world’s population risks falling into extreme poverty. We are quite simply sacrificing the future to avoid letting those at the end of life... die. The meaning of sacrifice has vanished — along with that of reason.

But I’m even more shocked to witness the silent majority becoming complicit with a State that is slipping quietly into dictatorship. “Worse than the sound of boots is the silence of slippers,” wrote Max Frisch. That silence — slippers confined at home, not even protesting against major violations of our fundamental freedoms — chills me. Like Frisch, it’s not the boots or death that frighten me, but the thought of life spent recluse behind a screen, surrendering our thirst for freedom in the name of political correctness and the worship of individual life as the sole value.

We’ll all croak in the end anyway. So isn’t it better to live standing and free — even at the risk of dying — than to survive barricaded in fear?