To my dearest friend, Alex, who, as I am writing these words, is dying from cancer at 22 years of age.
At the end of May 2025, Zoltan Istvan appeared in the opening lines of a major critical story by the National Catholic Reporter. His alleged crime? He dared to fight against people dying. That is it. There is no major caveat, no small print, no hidden agenda. The National Catholic Reporter believes that humans should die. That science should be bound by the state and dogma, so that it never allows humans to fully regain good health, to beat all variants of cancer, to overcome threats brought about by bacteria and viruses, to escape the humiliation filled final months of Alzheimer and Dementia, to replace the failing organs one by one, and to live for as long as they want to thrive. How dare Zoltan not accept that he should rot, slowly and without dignity, in a hospital bed?
No reasonably alert reader can make it through the text without sensing, beneath its pretences, the cold breath of evil itself. The author condemns humans to death on the whim of a made-up God. Theology, the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing, brings about the most anti-life, anti-enlightenment, anti-human, and anti-good position, too cartoonish to even ponder. It is evil incarnate.
Yet we are winning. The mystics are throwing tantrums as we fight death.
The FDA recently approved the first-ever clinical trial of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant into living human recipients.
UCLA just discovered the cure for baldness.
In a lab in Japan, scientists birthed a mouse that has two biological dads.
Generative AI will be designing new drugs all on its own in the near future.
Ozempic is set en route to cure obesity for any willing human. Big pharma just found a solution to the problem that all the gym bros in the world and their advice couldn’t hope to ever make a dent in.
A UK toddler had his hearing restored in a world-first gene therapy trial, and Richard Hanania acutely pointed out, commenting on the news: „STOP PLAYING GOD. Listen to Pope Pooh-Pooh IV who in his Encyclical Anusum warned against this kind of abomination.”
Around 10% of humans suffer from rare genetic diseases, and 95% of them have no treatment, let alone a cure. Genetic screening already allows parents to choose embryos with lower risks of inherited conditions, and advancements in stem cell technology are gifting countless children the prospects for a longer, healthier and more rewarding lives.
Could we be the generation that escapes death?
“One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
We just might have a chance. The age of reason, it seems, has returned with a vengeance; we live at the precipice of incredible scientific progress. The growth of AI could make it exponential, and bring about a century of rapid medical breakthroughs. If science can expand its prowess faster than new dangers to humanity arise, and outrun our ageing process, then immortality is within our grasp.
Whether the critical mass in the battle against death can be reached depends very much on how adamantly we refuse to let the men in Brussels and Washington chain us to the grave; how firmly we reject their instinct to regulate, delay, and deny the science that might save us. For the state is working to ensure we die on time. While I usually am wary of the alarmist use of “People will die!” to drive policy change, this is the one scenario where it is entirely justified.
If we lose our battle, everyone from our generation will die. Conservative politicians blocking research have literal blood on their hands. The socialist demagogues stifling industries have entire morgues to answer for. The statists of all stripes and colours seeking to halt human progress are sentencing men and women to death.
As Ben Murnane wrote in Zoltan Istvan’s biography: “If you actively work to hinder the transhumanist sciences, to prevent the goal of indefinite life—for example, you are a politician, and because of your religious beliefs you block funding for genetic research—you are guilty of involuntary manslaughter.”
To blow this opportunity we have would be a crime against humanity. To not fight for immortality would be the deepest act of nihilism. To cowardly surrender to death would be to revert back to a worthless primate.
Lest He Put Forth His Hand and Take Also of the Tree of Life, and Eat, and Live Forever
We must seek immortality, and we must do so with the utmost urgency. Imagine Operation Warp Speed, not for a passing virus, but for the one cause that actually matters: life itself. A full-throttle push to slice through the red tape that threatens human survival.
No new miracle cures are needed to already substantially boost the human lifespan; only the will to use what science has already handed us. The tragedy is not in what we lack, but in what we refuse to use, strangled by laws, lobbies, and pious superstitions.
Take, for one, the transplant crisis. Over 90,000 Americans rot on the kidney waiting list, thousands dying slow, preventable deaths each year, while bioethicists polish their halos. Why do they have to die? Because back in 1984, in one of its routine spasms of moral vanity, Congress made it illegal to compensate kidney donors. Market forces, the only way to solve the shortage and save countless lives, were banished from medicine.
Another example: the overzealous regulation has restricted the legal use of Ozempic for weight loss. Ozempic is FDA-approved only for type 2 diabetes, not obesity. Despite its obvious benefits in that regard, it cannot yet be widely sold to the millions in desperate need.
Health authorities are a major part of the problem, not just in their bureaucratic cowardice, they are driven impotent by public stupidity. When the FDA approves a bad drug and people die, the outrage is instant. There are headlines, hearings, and angry mobs on Twitter. But when the FDA drags its feet, buries a life-saving drug under paperwork, or makes it so expensive to develop that it never sees the light of day, no one notices. The deaths still happen, but they are silent.
Yet the fight here is much broader than just the constraints on scientific research itself. Fixing the FDA and CDC alone won’t ensure sufficient progress velocity. The quest for immortality requires a thriving unconstrained economy, industries oozing with innovation and growth, and capitalists free to bring about the sort of wealth that countless individuals can afford the life-saving medicine to come.
As economist Prof. Dustin Chambers noted in a policy brief for the Mercatus Centre, free markets are essential to life extension:
“Economists have long recognised a positive correlation between income levels and various measures of human welfare, including life expectancy and general health. The correlation between regulations and income inequality and poverty suggests that there may be a negative association between regulations and mortality. Indeed, researchers who constructed an index of state mortality find that a 1 percent increase in federal regulations (that apply to a given state) is associated with a 0.53 percent to 1.35 percent increase in this mortality index. Moreover, these results are robust to the measure of mortality.”
The fight for free markets is very much the fight for how long we are gonna live.
The Blueprint for Libertarians
“We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave us!”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Libertarianism suffers from a serious marketing problem. It lacks a visionary element. Whereas socialists long a radiant dawn where the smoke of industry no longer chokes the poor as the last hierarchy has fallen, and conservatives envision a trad society, in line with puritan religious ideals and ethnic homogeneity, libertarianism lacks a unifying utopia. Its refusal to impose a grand design leaves it honest, but also empty of shared vision.
This was already observed by Hayek in 1949:
“we must be able to offer a new liberal programme which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia…a truly liberal radicalism…the main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals”
Not much has changed since the time of Hayek. Anarchism has boldly entered the movement, but even under its banner, the vision of the utopia is blurry and fragmented. Probably the most distilled one is that rejecting urbanism and modern technology, and instead glorifying self-sufficiency, and subsistent farming, romanticising a supposedly “natural” life in the countryside with a home garden.
This is, of course, a ridiculous distortion, an attempt to shove libertarians onto the right flank of the culture war, feeding off the prepper fantasies lurking in some fringe corners. But that was never the libertarian vision. For 50 years, we dreamed of something bolder: relentless growth, radical innovation, a world linked by trade and reason, reaching from Silicon Valley to Mars. Capitalism, cosmopolitanism, the stars. And now? We have barefoot mystics peddling radishes and homoeopathy.
No one said it better than Ayn Rand:
“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. (…) The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel.”
I posit that the fight for immortality is the vision libertarianism requires. That is the ultimate positive programme: a world where free minds and free markets conquer death itself. And I cannot help but feel, it is a battle worth everything. The campaign we can drive recruitment for, because its urgency is irresistible. This is why we need capitalism, deregulation and Texas Chainsaw Massacres in national budgets; because this is the way we save countless lives. The dream of becoming the generation that escapes death could give libertarianism the moral focus and unifying purpose.
The message, of course, can be tailored to the audience. Silicon Valley can be approached in the spirit of Zoltan Istvan, with visionary grandeur and transhumanist ambition. But a libertarian politician may simply posit to his electorate that the choice of freedom will extend their lives by decades. Perhaps we can even persuade a few retirees not to strangle us with the bloated pension system.
I understand the weariness some might feel. Even ten or twenty years ago, the idea of escaping death would have seemed like a fever dream, better suited for science fiction than serious politics. It could have painted libertarians as unhinged. But today it is a grasp away. Libertarians need the sort of excitement about what humanity can become regularly captured by dr. Mike Israetel. We need to show what an amazing future is threatened by the statists.
With our eyes set on the prize, we begin to see clearly who we are not.
We are not the hippies of the right, swaying to Gwyneth Paltrow’s chants and rubbing essential oils on our foreign policy.
We are not the conspiracy masturbators, sniffing out CIA plots in every pill and Bill Gates chips in every syringe.
We are not the pious zealots who mistake death for virtue and suffering for grace.
We are the first men in history who can fight to live forever. We ought to.
