The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [88]
“Those of my peers who want to inherit the earth,” he said, “know perfectly well that its present owners regard their stewardship as a duty rather than a privilege and will be only too willing to surrender their authority when they find more interesting employment. The vast majority, mercifully, have no such desire.”
His subsequent opponents were not so easily quashed, but Nyxson had made his point and grabbed his moment of opportunity. Thanaticism was hot news, and hence hot philosophy. All death was, of course, news in a world populated almost entirely by emortals, but the Thanaticist “martyrs” who took their cue from Standress and Nyxson took great care to make their deaths very newsworthy by making a great song and dance about what they were doing. The whole purpose of the first true Thanatic suicides was to make a public spectacle of self-destruction.
To begin with, the newscasters and their avid audiences were only too ready to collaborate with Thanaticist ambitions. The twenty-sixth-century fashion that had derided the TV audience as “vidveg” had passed away with the Wildean Creationists who had pioneered it, but we new humans had been a trifle premature in deciding that our own viewing habits were more sophisticated and more socially responsible. The avidity of the media coverage poured gasoline on the flames.
Unlike the suicides falsely claimed by Nyxson’s followers as martyrs, most of whom had been over a hundred, those inspired by his idiot crusade were mostly very young. The movement scored its first spectacular succès de scandale when a sixty-five-year-old woman named Valentina Czarevna took her crucifixion to the limit in 2733. The cult’s most fervent adherents had already begun to cry out that everyone who had lived more than threescore years and ten had already violated the fundamental Thanaticist ethic, but most of those who committed suicide in the name of Thanaticism were somewhat younger. People of my age were far less vulnerable to the tides of fashion.
As the number of Thanaticist martyrs multiplied, so did the variety of the means they selected, although they always preferred violent deaths. They usually issued invitations and waited for large crowds to gather before putting their plans into action. Jumping from tall buildings and burning to death were the most popular methods in the beginning, but these quickly ceased to be interesting. As the Thanaticist revival progressed, those adherents prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice sought increasingly bizarre methods in the interests of maintaining media attention and outdoing their predecessors. EdEnt’s masters soon changed tack, deploring the suicides and ostentatiously refusing to broadcast them, but it was obvious to everyone that they were merely anticipating the fact that the familiarity would breed audience contempt.
The total number of individuals involved in the Thanaticist “movement” was very small. In a world population of more than three billion, a handful of deaths per week was a drop in the ocean, and the maximum attained by self-appointed Thanatics was less than fifty in a month. “Quiet” suicides continued to outnumber the ostentatious Thanatics by a factor of five or six throughout the period when the pornography of death attained its climatic phase.
Even so, it seemed terrible thing at the time, and I could not help but take a keen personal interest in every development. I confess that in spite of my fierce determination to maintain a scrupulous objectivity befitting a historian, my opinions drifted slightly with the tide of fashion.
FORTY-SIX
I