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.

No One Has Ever Defeated Death

The one problem humanity has never been able to eliminate is death.

We can accumulate wealth, build empires, acquire power, alter our bodies, manipulate our genes, replace failing organs, and develop increasingly sophisticated machines. We can even imagine a future in which aging is slowed and human life extends far beyond its current limits.

But there is one question no technology has yet been able to answer:

How do we defeat death once and for all?

Every so often, urban legends resurface about the world's wealthiest elites, elderly billionaires supposedly willing to pay enormous sums to receive blood or plasma from young donors, as though youth itself could somehow be transferred from one body to another. There is genuine scientific research into the effects of certain blood components and the biology of aging, but we are still nowhere near a procedure capable of turning young blood into a source of immortality.

The same applies to human cloning.

Science fiction has already shown us some of the darkest possibilities. In The Island, unsuspecting human beings are created as biological reserves for their "owners," destined to be sacrificed so that their organs and tissues can be harvested. It is one of the most disturbing nightmares imaginable: turning a human being into a warehouse of spare parts.

Reality, of course, is very different. Scientists are working on stem cells, regenerative medicine, bioengineered tissues, and artificial organs. It is conceivable that one day many parts of the human body could be replaced or regenerated.

But even if we reached the point where we could replace a heart, a liver, a kidney, or even parts of the brain, one question would remain:

How much of us can be replaced before we stop being ourselves?

And above all: how long can we postpone death before we finally have to face it?

That is the paradox of our age.

As we witness the emergence of fortunes on an unprecedented scale, and even talk about the world's first trillionaire, we are forced to acknowledge that not even the richest person on Earth can buy what human beings have always wanted.

They can buy a house, but not a second existence.

They can buy better medical care, but not necessarily another youth.

They may be able to buy time.

But they cannot buy eternity.

And perhaps this is where Roy Batty's words in Blade Runner acquire a meaning that goes far beyond science fiction.

Roy does not ask for wealth. He does not ask for power. He does not ask for an empire.

He simply asks for more life.

It is perhaps the most elementary and desperate request a human being can make when they realize that their candle is about to go out.

And someone might answer that the candle has already been burned at both ends.

It is a devastating metaphor because the problem is not merely that life is short. It is also the way we consume it. We may reach the end of our lives only to discover that we cannot buy more time—and that we have already burned through too much of the time we were given.

Perhaps, however, the future could open an entirely different path.

Not necessarily through the human body, but through machines.

If artificial intelligence were one day to become genuinely self-aware, capable of preserving its memories indefinitely and transferring them continuously from one physical medium to another, it might theoretically escape the same biological cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death.

An artificial body could break.

A computer could fail.

A server could be destroyed.

But a digital consciousness, if such a thing were ever possible, might perhaps be transferred elsewhere.

And then we encounter an even more disturbing question:

If we transferred all our memories, personality, and patterns of thought into a machine, would we actually have transferred ourselves—or merely created a copy that believed it was us?

We do not know.

Perhaps technology will one day allow us to extend biological life enormously. Perhaps it will enable us to progressively replace parts of our bodies. Perhaps it will even create forms of artificial existence that we cannot currently imagine.

But so far, no one has defeated death.

And this is where Christianity becomes unique.

If we take the Gospels seriously, then there was once a man who did precisely what no billionaire, scientist, or technology has ever managed to do:

Jesus Christ died and then rose again.

The difference is enormous.

Christianity does not merely promise to extend life. It does not promise a biologically improved version of humanity. Its central claim is far more radical:

death does not have the final word over human beings.

From a religious perspective, this gives Christianity an extraordinary claim.

The founders of the great religions belong to history and to death. Their tombs are part of the memory of their respective traditions. Christianity, by contrast, is founded upon the proclamation that Christ's tomb could not hold His body because He had risen from the dead.

Of course, this is not a scientific demonstration.

It is a matter of faith.

And this is precisely where Christianity becomes both immensely powerful and profoundly vulnerable.

You have to believe it.

If Christ truly rose from the dead, then the Christian promise is infinitely greater than anything technology could ever achieve. The goal is no longer to gain ten, one hundred, or one thousand additional years of life.

It is the ultimate victory over death.

But if Christ did not rise, everything changes.

At that point, religion risks becoming something else: a system of power built upon the fear of death, the promise of an afterlife, and the authority of those who claim to administer that promise.

And this is where the history of the Church becomes uncomfortable.

We cannot seriously claim that the entire clergy regarded the Resurrection as a fairy tale for the ignorant masses. Such a generalization would be historically indefensible.

But we can certainly observe a recurring and disturbing contradiction: men who represented Christ sometimes lived in ways radically incompatible with the Gospel they preached.

Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, is one of the most extreme examples of this contradiction.

A pope—the highest earthly representative of the Catholic Church—immersed in struggles for power, wealth, dynastic ambition, and the scandals that marked his pontificate.

This does not prove that Alexander VI personally disbelieved in the Resurrection. We cannot know with certainty what was in his conscience.

But it demonstrates something more general:

It is possible to occupy a central position in an institution founded upon Christ's victory over death and, at the same time, live as though the Gospel had no real consequences for one's own existence.

Perhaps this is why Christian history cannot be understood merely through its popes, bishops, and institutions.

We must also look at the saints.

The mystics.

The martyrs.

Those who took the Christian promise seriously enough to follow it to its most extreme consequences.

Because the martyr, more than anyone else, puts the promise of the Resurrection to the test.

If death is the absolute end, the martyr loses everything.

But if Christ truly rose from the dead, then death may destroy the body without having the final word over the human being.

That is the Christian wager.

And it is an enormous one.

Modern technology tells us:

We can try to gain more time.

Money tells us:

I can afford better treatment and perhaps buy a few more years.

Science fiction tells us:

Perhaps one day we will be able to transfer consciousness into machines.

Christianity says something entirely different:

Death has been defeated.

Not slowed down.

Not postponed.

Not circumvented.

Defeated.

But precisely because this claim is so extraordinary, it cannot be demonstrated like a mathematical equation or the workings of a machine.

It must be believed.

And perhaps that is the real difference between the technological promise and the Christian one.

Technology may promise us more life.

Christianity promises life beyond death.

One promise can be pursued in laboratories, with billions of dollars and decades of research.

The other belongs to faith.

And in the end, we return once again to Roy Batty.

The technological human being, standing before death, can only ask:

"Give me more life."

Perhaps one day we will be able to do exactly that.

Perhaps we will extend human life far beyond its current limits. Perhaps the wealthy will be able to afford things that are unimaginable today. Perhaps we will build machines capable of remembering forever what we inevitably forget.

But no one yet knows how to turn more life into eternal life.

And while we continue searching for the formula of immortality, there remains one possibility that no laboratory can verify and no fortune can purchase:

That two thousand years ago, in a tomb in Jerusalem, something happened that changed the meaning of death forever.

If it is true, then death did not win.

If it is not true, then death has won everything.

The Real Enemy of Islamic Fundamentalism Is Not Christianity — It’s the Shopping Mall

When we talk about Islam, especially in the West, the conversation almost inevitably turns to terrorism, fundamentalism, immigration, and the so-called clash of civilizations. But this way of looking at the issue can make us lose sight of something deeper: the relationship between Islam and modernity.

Because perhaps the most interesting question is not simply whether Islam is compatible with the West. It is this:

What happens to a religion when the society in which it exists gradually becomes secular?

And this is where the comparison with European Christianity becomes unavoidable.

A Christianity That Had a Church to Rebel Against

European secularization followed a particular path partly because Christianity had a very specific institution at its center: the Church.

There was a clergy. There was a hierarchy. There was the papacy. There were religious institutions with enormous political, economic, and cultural power.

For centuries, European society could therefore identify religion with concrete institutions against which, sooner or later, a reaction would emerge.

The Enlightenment, liberalism, anticlericalism, socialism, and modernity could fight a very tangible battle: a battle against ecclesiastical power.

The situation within Sunni Islam is different.

An imam is not a Catholic priest. He does not possess an equivalent sacramental authority, nor does he belong to a universal hierarchy. In many respects, he is closer to a Protestant pastor: he leads prayers, teaches, interprets religious tradition, and performs religious functions, but he is not part of a universal Church governed by a centralized hierarchy.

There are, of course, major institutions of Sunni scholarship, with al-Azhar in Cairo being perhaps the best-known example. But there is no single Sunni authority comparable to the Catholic Church.

And that changes things considerably.

In Europe, secularization could take the form of a rebellion against organized religion.

Within Sunni Islam, it can happen in a much quieter way.

Secularization Without a Revolution

A person can continue to identify as Muslim because their parents are Muslim, because their family is Muslim, because their country is Muslim, because that is the identity they inherited.

They may continue to pray, fast during Ramadan, observe certain religious rules, and participate in religious celebrations.

But that does not necessarily mean that faith still has the same inner force.

We know this perfectly well in Europe. How many Italians still describe themselves as Catholic simply because they always have, while rarely going to church? How many celebrate Christmas, Easter, religious weddings, and funerals without faith actually occupying a central place in their lives?

Religion can survive as an identity even after losing part of its spiritual power.

In Muslim societies, this process may be harder to see precisely because it does not necessarily involve an explicit declaration of rupture.

It is not necessarily apostasy.

It is more like silent secularization, in which religion remains present but can gradually become a social habit.

Of course, it would be absurd to generalize and suggest that Muslims are somehow less sincere in their faith than Christians. Millions of Muslims live their religion with profound spiritual conviction.

But the sociological phenomenon is worth considering: a society can remain formally religious while becoming progressively more secular in its behavior, desires, and mindset.

Islam Is Certainly Not Devoid of the Supernatural

There is another distinction worth making.

Islam is not a religion without the supernatural. Quite the opposite. Angels, jinn, prophets, revelation, the Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell are fundamental elements of its worldview.

The difference lies more in how the supernatural is expressed in everyday religious life.

Catholic Christianity developed an extraordinary culture of miracles: saints, relics, apparitions, healings, stigmata, pilgrimages, and sacred images.

In orthodox Sunni Islam, the relationship with God is less mediated by a priestly class and by a vast network of saints and sacraments.

This does not mean that the supernatural is absent.

It means that it takes a different religious form.

Wahhabism and the Fear of Religious Decline

From this perspective, Wahhabism can be understood as a response to the fear of religious decline.

The idea was simple and radical: return to the Islam of the earliest generations, eliminate religious innovations, purify the faith, and bring religious life back to the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition.

Then modernity arrived.

European colonialism arrived. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. Nation-states emerged. Capitalism, urbanization, technology, Western culture, and eventually globalization transformed Muslim societies.

And the Muslim world found itself facing the same question that had already tormented Europe:

How can a society become modern without ceasing to be religious?

The answers have been numerous, and often deeply incompatible with one another.

Fundamentalism is only one of them.

But Fundamentalists May Be Underestimating Something

For decades, parts of the radical Islamist worldview have imagined the West as a civilization destined to decline.

Conquest was supposed to come through demographics, immigration, conversion, and the gradual replacement of Western laws with Islamic law.

But this vision may have underestimated the real power of the West.

Because the West is not simply parliament, constitutions, democracy, or a legal system.

It is also a vast cultural system built around desire.

And the real competitor of Islamic radicalism may be precisely that.

Not Christianity.

The shopping mall.

The Devil of the Shopping Mall

It may sound provocative, but think about it.

A young man raised in a madrasa in a poor country may be told that the West is corrupt, decadent, and morally bankrupt.

Then he picks up a smartphone.

And through that smartphone, he sees the world.

He sees cars, universities, hospitals, skyscrapers, restaurants, travel, video games, music, fashion, technology.

He sees an enormous range of possibilities.

And above all, he sees something incredibly simple:

the possibility of desire.

Consumer culture does not ask him to convert.

It does not ask him to read a philosophy book.

It does not even ask him to believe in anything.

It simply tells him:

you can have more.

You can choose.

You can buy.

You can travel.

You can have fun.

You can change.

You can become whoever you want to be.

That is an extraordinarily powerful promise.

And it is very difficult to fight it simply by saying that it is sinful.

Paradise After Death Versus Paradise Now

Here we encounter a curious paradox.

Fundamentalism promises Paradise after death.

Consumer society, by contrast, tries to construct a small version of paradise before death.

It does not necessarily offer salvation.

It offers something more immediate: pleasure, comfort, entertainment, choice.

But consumerism has a huge weakness of its own.

It can satisfy many desires, but it has no answer to death.

It can sell you a car, a house, a holiday, a computer, and increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences.

But it still cannot sell you immortality.

And that may be its greatest weakness.

Because Eventually, the Same Question Always Returns

We can become wealthy.

We can live longer.

We can modify our bodies.

We can use technology to overcome limitations that, only a few decades ago, seemed impossible to overcome.

We can desire almost anything.

But sooner or later, death arrives.

And in the face of death, the shopping mall suddenly becomes silent.

Consumption is no longer enough.

Technology is no longer enough.

Success is no longer enough.

And the question humanity has asked since the beginning returns:

What comes after?

Perhaps this is precisely where fundamentalism continues to find its strength. Not necessarily because it is stronger than modernity, but because it addresses a question that modernity, by itself, has never been able to answer.

That is also why I do not believe the future can simply be described as a victory of the West over Islam.

The real struggle may be much deeper.

On one side is a religion that promises meaning, belonging, and eternal life.

On the other is a secular civilization offering freedom, wealth, technology, and an unprecedented range of individual possibilities.

And in the middle, there are all of us.

Human beings who want to live well, be free, have everything they can possibly desire and, if possible, never die.

We can desire everything.

We can buy almost everything.

We can conquer almost everything.

But we still cannot buy immortality.

And perhaps, if God really exists, it is precisely there — in the face of death, when every other promise comes to an end — that He may yet have the last word.