The Great Leveler

There is something that has always struck me about stories of immortality. Behind all the technology, the money, the secret laboratories, and the fantasies about elites supposedly discovering a way to live forever, there is a very simple fear. The same fear we all have.

The fear of death.

The story of adrenochrome, with all its imagery of elites, stolen youth, and mysterious substances, belongs far more to the world of conspiracy theories than to that of established scientific evidence. But regardless of whether the story is true—and there is no credible evidence that adrenochrome is some secret elixir of youth—it tells us something interesting about the human imagination: the fantasy of those who already possess almost everything and would like to possess the one thing no human being can truly own.

Cinema and literature have been playing with this fantasy for decades. Limitless gave us the dream of a substance capable of pushing human abilities beyond their natural limits. The Club Dumas, which inspired Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, took us into a world of mysterious books, collectors, power, and occult ambiguity. Eyes Wide Shut offered another powerful fantasy: a hidden world of privilege, inaccessible to ordinary people, where power itself seemed to have its own secret rituals.

These are films and novels, of course. They are not evidence of how the world's elites actually live. But they work because they touch something real: our fascination with those who live at the top of the pyramid and seem to have access to a world we cannot see.

Today, that fantasy has also moved into the search for radical life extension.

There is nothing strange about wanting to live longer. We all do. It is perfectly understandable that someone with an enormous fortune can afford the best medical care, constant monitoring, leading specialists, advanced technologies, and perhaps, in the future, treatments that will initially be available only to a privileged few.

Money can buy a great many possibilities.

It may even buy a few extra years.

But it has not yet bought immortality.

And that is where the whole thing becomes almost ironic.

A person can spend an entire lifetime accumulating wealth in order to exercise as much control as possible over his existence, only to find himself face to face with something he cannot control at all.

Death.

Death is perhaps the one great power left that does not recognize social hierarchies.

You can be poor or a billionaire, famous or unknown, a president or a waiter. You can own a mansion or live in a rented room. You can have an enormous fortune or nothing at all.

In the end, before death, something becomes terribly simple.

And it is impossible not to think of Totò and his masterpiece 'A livella.

"Whoever has passed through this gate has lost both life and name."

It is difficult to find a more effective image of what happens when everything comes to an end.

We, the living, attach enormous importance to names. Family names. Titles. Positions. Wealth. Reputation. To what we have managed to become.

Then comes that gate.

And the name no longer matters.

It does not matter how much money we had in the bank.

It does not matter how many people called us doctor, professor, president, or Your Excellency.

It does not even matter how many people once stood beneath us.

It is all over.

And here we encounter a remarkable paradox: death creates on Earth a form of communism that no political ideology has ever managed to create completely.

It does not redistribute wealth, of course. It does not erase the injustices of life. It does not give the poor back what the rich accumulated. It would be absurd to claim otherwise.

But it does something even more radical: it ultimately renders every difference in rank meaningless.

Before death, there is no longer a billionaire and a poor man. No master and no employee. No powerful person and no outcast.

There is only the human being.

Death is therefore a kind of absolute and final communism—not the kind that tries to make human beings equal during their lives, but the kind that, in the end, takes away everyone's ability to carry their wealth with them.

It is a terrible form of social justice because it arrives when it is too late to correct the injustices of life.

And yet, in its final verdict, it is perfectly impartial.

The king and the beggar end up in the same place.

The billionaire and the poor man have the same destination.

The most famous name in the world and the name nobody ever knew are both eventually surrendered to the same silence.

Perhaps that is what Totò understood.

Death does not need a revolution.

It does not need to confiscate fortunes.

It does not need to pass laws.

It does not need to abolish social classes.

It allows them all to exist.

Then it waits.

And eventually, it outlasts them all.

That is why the race among the ultra-rich to extend life as far as possible has a symbolic dimension as well. They are not merely trying to live longer. In a sense, they are trying to postpone the moment when the great leveler comes for them too.

They can buy time.

They can buy treatment.

They can buy technology.

Perhaps, in the future, they will be able to buy many more years than we have today.

But however long they manage to postpone the appointment, the question remains:

What happens when their time finally runs out?

A difference of twenty years, fifty years, perhaps even a hundred years in lifespan would be enormous to us.

But against eternity, it is still nothing.

And so I return to Totò:

"These are the foolish games of the living. We are serious people. We belong to death."

It is a line that, read today, sounds almost prophetic.

We, the living, spend an extraordinary amount of time dividing ourselves.

This one is rich.

That one is poor.

This one matters.

That one is nobody.

This one commands.

That one obeys.

This one made it.

That one failed.

Then death comes and puts everything back in perspective.

It does not make everyone equal during life. That would be false.

There are enormous differences between human beings, and some of them are profoundly unjust.

But in the end, death reminds us of something no amount of wealth can erase:

We may be richer than others, more powerful than others, more famous than others. We cannot be more human than others.

And perhaps that is the true livella.

Not the one that brings everyone down to the same level while we are alive.

The one that, in the end, reminds us that we were all simply human beings.

Even those who spent their entire lives doing everything they could to forget it.

Death, in this sense, is the oldest and most uncompromising social leveler we have ever known.

And perhaps its greatest irony is this:

while we spend our lives building differences, death spends eternity erasing them.