Tag: life

The Death Lottery: What is the Value of Life?

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In The Death Lottery, Johnny Thompson of PhilosophyMinis poses this question:

In 1975 the philosopher John Harris gave us one of the most interesting and challenging thought experiments in moral philosophy it’s inspired lots of science fiction since and it’s a great intuition pump to test how you feel about the value of human life it goes like this imagine at the hospital down the road three people are dying from organ failure and there are no organs to donate and so everybody is given a lottery ticket and if your ticket is chosen then you are killed your organs are harvested they’re given to the dying and your one life will save three and as harris puts it no doubt a suitable euphemism for killed could be employed perhaps we would begin to talk about citizens being called upon to give life to others Harris is keen to add that everybody in this scenario is as innocent as each other so none of the patients did anything in their lives to merit their organ failure and so what is wrong with this system or this world if we say that we value human life then surely saving three lives is three times better than saving just one it might be said that death shouldn’t be determined by the luck of a draw but surely this is what happens anyway one person gets cancer another does not one person is in a car crash another is not luck is the biggest single killer of humanity so what do you think is wrong with harris’s thought experiment and is one life ever more valuable than three?

Video: YouTube inspiration for this post.

This fits rather nicely into a recent theme I’ve been dissecting — The Dubious Art of Reasoning: Why Thinking Is Harder Than It Looks — particularly regarding the limitations of deductive logic built upon premises that are, shall we say, a tad suspect. So what’s actually happening in Harris’s tidy moral meat grinder?

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Let us begin at the root, the hallowed dogma no one dares blaspheme: the belief that life has value. Not just any value, mind you, but a sacred, irrefutable, axiomatic kind of value — the sort of thing whispered in holy tones and enshrined in constitutions, as though handed down by divine courier.

But let’s not genuflect just yet. “Value” is not some transcendent essence; it’s an economic artefact. Value, properly speaking, is something tested in a marketplace. So, is there a market for human life?

Historically, yes — but one doubts Harris is invoking the Atlantic slave trade or Victorian child labour auctions. No, what he’s tapping into is a peculiarly modern, unexamined metaphysical presumption: that human beings possess inherent worth because, well, they simply must. We’ve sentimentalised supply and demand.

Now, this notion of worth — where does it come from? Let us not mince words: it’s theological. It is the residue of religious metaphysics, the spiritual afterbirth of the soul. We’re told that all souls are precious. All life is sacred. Cue the soft lighting and trembling organ chords. But if you strip away the divine scaffolding — and I suggest we do — then this “value” collapses like a soufflé in a thunderstorm. Without God, there is no soul; without soul, there is no sacredness. Without sacredness? Just meat. Glorified offal.

So what are we left with?

Null values. A society of blank spreadsheets, human lives as rows with no data in the ‘Value’ column. A radical equality of the meaningless.

Now let’s take a darker turn — because why not, since we’re already plumbing the ethical abyss. The anti-natalists, those morose prophets of philosophical pessimism, tell us not only that life lacks positive value, but that it is intrinsically a burden. A cosmic mistake. A raw deal. The moment one is born, the suffering clock starts ticking.

Flip the moral equation in The Death Lottery, and what you get is this: saving three lives is not a moral victory — it’s a net increase in sentient suffering. If you kill one to save three, you’ve multiplied misery. Congratulations. You’ve created more anguish with surgical efficiency. And yet we call this a triumph of compassion?

According to this formulation, the ethical choice is not to preserve the many at the cost of the few. It is to accelerate the great forgetting. Reduce the volume of suffering, not its distribution.

But here’s the deeper problem — and it’s a trick of philosophical stagecraft: this entire thought experiment only becomes a “dilemma” if you first accept the premises. That life has value. That death is bad. That ethics is a numbers game. That morality can be conducted like a cost-benefit spreadsheet in a celestial boardroom.

Yet why do we accept these assumptions? Tradition? Indoctrination? Because they sound nice on a Hallmark card? These axioms go unexamined not because they are true, but because they are emotionally convenient. They cradle us in the illusion that we are important, that our lives are imbued with cosmic significance, that our deaths are tragedies rather than banal statistical certainties.

But the truth — the unvarnished, unmarketable truth — is that The Death Lottery is not a test of morality, but a test of credulity. A rigged game. An illusion dressed in the solemn robes of logic.

And like all illusions, it vanishes the moment you stop believing in it.Let’s deconstruct the metanarratives in play. First, we are told uncritically that life has value. Moreover, this value is generally positive. But all of this is a human construct. Value is an economic concept that can be tested in a marketplace. Is there a marketplace for humans? There have been slave marketplaces, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what this aims for. There are wage and salary proxies. Again, I don’t think this is what they are targeting.

This worth is metaphysical. But allow me to cut to the chase. This concept of worth has religious roots, the value of the soul, and all souls are precious, sacred, actually. One might argue that the body is expendable, but let’s not go there. If we ignore the soul nonsense and dispense of the notion that humans have any inherent value not merely conjured, we are left with an empty set, all null values.

But let’s go further. Given anti-natalist philosophy, conscious life not only has value but is inherently negative, at least ex ante. This reverses the maths – or flips the inequality sign – to render one greater than three. It’s better to have only one suffering than three.

Ultimately, this is only a dilemma if one accepts the premises, and the only reason to do so is out of indoctrinated habit.

Postscript: Notes from the Abyss

David Benatar, in Better Never to Have Been, argues with pitiless logic that coming into existence is always a harm — that birth is a curse disguised as celebration. He offers no anaesthetic. Existence is pain; non-existence, the balm.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, the Norwegian prophet of philosophical despair, likened consciousness to a tragic evolutionary overreach — a cosmic misfire that left humanity acutely aware of its own absurdity, scrambling to muffle it with distraction, denial, and delusion. For him, the solution was elegant in its simplicity: do not reproduce. Shut the trapdoor before more souls tumble in.

And then there is Cioran, who did not so much argue as exhale. “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” He understood what the rest of us politely ignore — that life is a fever dream from which only death delivers.

So if the question is whether one life is worth more than three, we must first ask whether any of them were worth having in the first place.

The answer, for the brave few staring into the black, may be a shrug — or silence.

But certainly not a lottery.

Bullshit Jobs

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I’ve recently decided to take a sabbatical from what passes for economic literature these days — out of a sense of self-preservation, mainly — but before I hermetically sealed myself away, I made a quick detour through Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (PDF). Naturally, I emerged none the wiser, blinking like some poor subterranean creature dragged into the daylight, only to tumble headlong into David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.

This particular tome had been languishing in my inventory since its release, exuding a faint but persistent odour of deferred obligation. Now, about a third of the way in, I can report that Graeber’s thesis — that the modern world is awash with soul-annihilatingly pointless work — does resonate. I find myself nodding along like one of those cheap plastic dashboard dogs. Yet, for all its righteous fury, it’s more filler than killer. Directionally correct? Probably. Substantively airtight? Not quite. It’s a bit like admiring a tent that’s pitched reasonably straight but has conspicuous holes large enough to drive a fleet of Uber Eats cyclists through.

An amusing aside: the Spanish edition is titled Trabajos de mierda (“shitty jobs”), a phrase Graeber spends an entire excruciating section of the book explaining is not the same thing. Meanwhile, the French, in their traditional Gallic shrug, simply kept the English title. (One suspects they couldn’t be arsed.)

Chapter One attempts to explain the delicate taxonomy: bullshit jobs are fundamentally unnecessary — spawned by some black magic of bureaucracy, ego, and capitalist entropy — whilst shit jobs are grim, thankless necessities that someone must do, but no one wishes to acknowledge. Tragically, some wretches get the worst of both worlds, occupying jobs that are both shit and bullshit — a sort of vocational purgatory for the damned.

Then, in Chapter Two, Graeber gleefully dissects bullshit jobs into five grotesque varieties:

  1. Flunkies, whose role is to make someone else feel important.
  2. Goons, who exist solely to fight other goons.
  3. Duct Tapers, who heroically patch problems that ought not to exist in the first place.
  4. Box Tickers, who generate paperwork to satisfy some Kafkaesque demand that nobody actually reads.
  5. Taskmasters, who either invent unnecessary work for others or spend their days supervising people who don’t need supervision.

Naturally, real-world roles often straddle several categories. Lucky them: multi-classed in the RPG of Existential Futility.

Graeber’s parade of professional despair is, admittedly, darkly entertaining. One senses he had a great deal of fun cataloguing these grotesques — like a medieval monk illustrating demons in the margins of a holy text — even as the entire edifice wobbles under the weight of its own repetition. Yes, David, we get it: the modern economy is a Potemkin village of invented necessity. Carry on.

If the first chapters are anything to go by, the rest of the book promises more righteous indignation, more anecdotes from anonymous sad-sacks labouring in existential oubliettes, and — if one is lucky — perhaps a glimmer of prescription hidden somewhere amidst the diagnosis. Though, I’m not holding my breath. This feels less like an intervention and more like a well-articulated primal scream.

Still, even in its baggier moments, Bullshit Jobs offers the grim pleasure of recognition. If you’ve ever sat through a meeting where the PowerPoint had more intellectual integrity than the speaker or spent days crafting reports destined for the corporate oubliette marked “For Review” (translation: Never to Be Seen Again), you will feel seen — in a distinctly accusatory, you-signed-up-for-this sort of way.

In short: it’s good to read Graeber if only to have one’s vague sense of societal derangement vindicated in print. Like having a charmingly irate friend in the pub lean over their pint and mutter, “It’s not just you. It’s the whole bloody system.”

I’m not sure I’ll stick with this title either. I think I’ve caught the brunt of the message, and it feels like a diversion. I’ve also got Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism on the shelf. Perhaps I’ll spin this one up instead.

Flat-Earth Politics in a Cubic World

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We live in an age of two-dimensional minds trying to navigate a three-dimensional world—and doing it with all the grace of a toddler wielding a chainsaw. For over a generation, the US and UK have been polarised, Balkanised, and lobotomised by the Great Red vs. Blue Punch & Judy Show. Left, right. Us, them. Hero, villain. There is no nuance, no gradient, no middle ground. Just a glorious reduction of civilisation’s complexities into primary-coloured football teams for emotionally underdeveloped adults.

This is not politics. This is pantomime.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

And the real tragedy? The world isn’t even two-dimensional. It’s not even three. Try thinking of it as a cube—six sides at least, all pressing in at once, depending on your angle. Culture, history, class, geography, education, trauma, temperament, aesthetic preference—each a face of the cube. But tell that to the modern partisan and they’ll squint at you like you’ve just tried to explain jazz to a toaster.

No, to them, the world is flat. A line. A tug-of-war between two equally blinkered tribes dragging the rest of us into the pit. Pick a side or shut up, they shriek. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. If you don’t chant the correct slogans or signal the proper virtues, you’re obviously a heretic, a bigot, or—worst of all—centrist scum. They don’t want conversation; they want confirmation. Preferably in 280 characters or less.

Try introducing complexity and you’ll be accused of bothsidesism, moral cowardice, or—God forbid—thinking. It’s like throwing a Rubik’s cube into a toddler fight club.

This binary reductionism doesn’t stop at politics. Even gender—possibly the most nuanced and intimate aspect of human identity—has been flattened into a tug-of-war between biological essentialists and gender abolitionists, both sides wielding hashtags like holy relics. The irony? These same culture warriors still manage to marvel at rainbows, utterly unaware that their own worldview only permits two colours. How do they even process a traffic light?

The cult of the binary isn’t just intellectually bankrupt—it’s a threat to civilisation. We didn’t crawl out of the primordial ooze, develop language, invent calculus, and split the atom just so Karen and Kev from Facebook could reduce geopolitics to an episode of EastEnders. The world is messy. People are contradictory. Context matters. But nuance doesn’t trend.

We’re governed by algorithms, policed by outrage, and divided by design. The machinery of mass culture rewards the loudest, angriest, most wilfully ignorant voices, and we feed the beast like dopamine-addled pigeons pecking a lever. The cube has been flattened into a cartoon. And yet we wonder why everything feels broken.

So here’s a radical idea: what if we stopped flattening the world into a battlefield and started mapping it like a landscape? What if we admitted that not every problem has two sides—some have two hundred? What if we taught critical thinking instead of tribal loyalty? What if we made complexity sexy again?

But I digress. That might require imagination. And we’ve outsourced that to TikTok influencers and AI chatbots.

Meanwhile, the cube spins. And the rest of us try to hold on.

Language Insufficiency, Rev 3

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I’m edging ever closer to finishing my book on the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. It’s now in its third pass—a mostly subtractive process of streamlining, consolidating, and hacking away at redundancies. The front matter, of course, demands just as much attention, starting with the Preface.

The opening anecdote—a true yet apocryphal gem—dates back to 2018, which is evidence of just how long I’ve been chewing on this idea. It involves a divorce court judge, a dose of linguistic ambiguity, and my ongoing scepticism about the utility of language in complex, interpretative domains.

At the time, my ex-wife’s lawyer was petitioning the court to restrict me from spending any money outside our marriage. This included a demand for recompense for any funds already spent. I was asked, point-blank: Had I given another woman a gift?

Seeking clarity, I asked the judge to define gift. The response was less than amused—a glare, a sneer, but no definition. Left to my own devices, I answered no, relying on my personal definition: something given with no expectation of return or favour. My reasoning, then as now, stemmed from a deep mistrust of altruism.

The court, however, didn’t share my philosophical detours. The injunction came down: I was not to spend any money outside the marital arrangement. Straightforward? Hardly. At the time, I was also in a rock band and often brought meals for the group. Was buying Chipotle for the band now prohibited?

The judge’s response dripped with disdain. Of course, that wasn’t the intent, they said, but the language of the injunction was deliberately broad—ambiguous enough to cover whatever they deemed inappropriate. The phrase don’t spend money on romantic interests would have sufficed, but clarity seemed to be a liability. Instead, the court opted for what I call the Justice Stewart Doctrine of Legal Ambiguity: I know it when I see it.

Unsurprisingly, the marriage ended. My ex-wife and I, however, remain close; our separation in 2018 was final, but our friendship persists. Discussing my book recently, I mentioned this story, and she told me something new: her lawyer had confided that the judge disliked me, finding me smug.

This little revelation cemented something I’d already suspected: power relations, in the Foucauldian sense, pervade even our most banal disputes. It’s why Foucault makes a cameo in the book alongside Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Saussure, Derrida, Borges, and even Gödel.

This anecdote is just one straw on the poor camel’s back of my linguistic grievances, a life filled with moments where language’s insufficiency has revealed itself. And yet, I found few others voicing my position. Hence, a book.

I aim to self-publish in early 2025—get it off my chest and into the world. Maybe then I can stop wittering on about it. Or, more likely, I won’t.

Life Consciousness

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Language is life. Yet, this assertion immediately raises a fundamental question: which came first, life or consciousness? It’s a classic chicken-and-egg conundrum. Physicist Stuart Hameroff posits an intriguing idea—that consciousness might predate life itself. This radical notion suggests that consciousness isn’t merely a byproduct of biological processes but could be an intrinsic feature of the universe. However, there’s a snag.

The challenge lies in defining life and consciousness, two terms that lack universally accepted definitions. The absence of clarity here opens the door to a multitude of interpretations, making it easy to drift into what could be considered ‘airy faerie’ ambiguity. One must beware of the temptation to engage in intellectual exercises that lead nowhere—what might be termed ‘mental masturbation.’ This is a prime example of the insufficiency of language.

Audio: Podcast commentary on this topic.

Life and consciousness, as concepts, are elusive. Unlike straightforward nouns or adjectives—where we can confidently say, “That’s a dog,” “That’s a tree,” or “That’s green”—these terms are far more complex. They are attempts to encapsulate observed phenomena, yet we lack the precise language and understanding to pin them down definitively. The video linked above provides perspectives on various approaches to defining these terms, but none prove wholly satisfactory. This lack of satisfaction might suggest that our conventional understanding of life and consciousness is flawed. To be fair, one might even entertain the idea that life itself is an illusion, a construct of consciousness.

This ambiguity isn’t confined to the realms of life and consciousness. I recently shared a post on the topic of gender, which illustrates a similar issue. Originally, there was no concept of gender. The earliest distinctions made were between animate and inanimate. Over time, these distinctions became more nuanced. Whether or not a proto-word for life existed at that time is unclear, but the idea of animation being linked to life was beginning to take shape. The concept of gender evolved much later, driven by the need to categorize and define differences within the animate category.

The evolution of language reflects the evolution of thought. Yet, when we dig deep into these foundational concepts, we encounter the same problem: how can we argue the precedence of two concepts—life and consciousness—when neither has a solid foundation in language? If our words are inadequate, if they fail to capture the essence of what we are trying to convey, then what does that say about our understanding of the world?

Perhaps it suggests that our linguistic and cognitive tools are still too crude to grasp the true nature of reality. Or maybe it hints at a deeper truth: that some aspects of existence are beyond the scope of human understanding, no matter how sophisticated our language becomes. After all, if consciousness predates life, as Hameroff suggests, then we may need to rethink our fundamental assumptions about existence itself.

Ultimately, this exploration reveals a paradox at the heart of human knowledge. We seek to define and categorise, to impose order on the chaos of the universe. Yet in doing so, we must confront the limits of our language and, by extension, our understanding. Perhaps the true essence of life and consciousness lies not in definitions or categories but in the very act of questioning, the relentless pursuit of knowledge that drives us forward, even when the answers remain elusive.

Value of Life

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Captain Bonespurs now has a flesh wound. Former president-elect Donald J Trump was the target of a not-so-sharpshooter yesterday. Immediately resorting to Godwin’s Law, I wondered if this was like the philosophical hypothetical asking, ‘Would you kill baby Hitler to prevent the eventualities that unfolded?’ Was Hitler the symptom or the disease? What about Donald J? Whatever the cause or motivation, not unlike the fire at the Reichstag, this event has galvanised his supporters. Let’s hope that the outcome doesn’t follow the same path. There is a fear that he’ll take a path similar to Hitler or Ceasar before him in a quest for power.

What is a life worth? The average US-American life is valued at around $7 million, give or take a few million. The number ranges between $1 MM and $10 MM depending on which agency you see. That they equate lives to dollars is curious enough, but that they can’t agree on a single figure is priceless.

For background, this value is used to determine intervention. For FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), a human life is worth about $7.5 MM For the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) it’s slightly more than $10 MM. Are these cats playing Monopoly? Nah.

The human life calculus considers factors like lifetime earnings potential and discounts it to Present Value. In action, assume there is a disaster. Let’s not use COVID-19. Instead, there is an island with 1,000 inhabitants. Using the $10 MM per person figure to simplify the maths, we would be justified in spending up to $10,000,000,000 to intervene in some potential disaster – $10 MMM or $1e10.

Human lifetime value is an average. Mr Trump has already shown himself to be worth more than $10 MM. I suppose this means that not all humans are created equal. No matter. Another logical question might be what is the cost of a person’s detriment to society. This is a question for a Modernist or someone who feels that a given configuration of society is preferred to all others – or at least some others. How much damage might one human do?

Trump enriched himself and his family and entourage in his first term. In Ukraine, Zelenskyy and his lot bilked the country out of billions. It’s nothing new, but do we subtract the costs from the benefits or is this a gross calculation?

Irrespective of the costs, the next four years ahead are expected to be tumultuous no matter which corporate-sponsored party prevails. Heads, they win; tails, the country – if not the world – loses.

In Defence of Nihilism: Embracing the Absence of Inherent Meaning

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Nihilism, often misunderstood and misrepresented, shares a common plight with philosophies such as atheism, anarchism, and Marxism. Like its counterparts, nihilism is frequently subjected to the creation of strawman arguments in public discourse, resulting in its vilification and scapegoating. In this article, I aim to demystify nihilism by providing a clear definition, description, and defence of this philosophical perspective.

Firstly, let’s address the misconception that nihilism entails a chaotic disregard for morality and societal norms: “If life has no meaning or purpose, then anyone can do anything.” This sentiment is often echoed in discussions about nihilism, as well as anarchism and atheism. However, it presupposes a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Despite the absence of inherent meaning in the universe, humans are not devoid of emotions or social affinities.

It is crucial to recognise that while the universe does not impart meaning or purpose, humans have constructed various systems of meaning throughout history. Whether through moral codes, religious doctrines, or cultural norms, individuals and societies have ascribed significance to different aspects of life. These constructs provide a framework within which individuals navigate their existence, albeit one that is socially constructed rather than inherent to the universe.

Critics of nihilism often argue that the acknowledgement of life’s inherent meaninglessness leads to despair and existential angst, rendering life devoid of purpose. However, this perspective fails to account for the resilience and adaptability of human beings. While some individuals may struggle initially with the realisation that there is no inherent meaning, many nihilists find liberation in embracing the absence of preordained purpose. Rather than succumbing to despair, they recognise the freedom to create their own meaning and forge their own path in life.

It is essential to understand that nihilism does not negate the validity of individual or societal pursuits. While nihilists reject the notion of inherent meaning, they acknowledge the significance of subjective meaning and the importance of human connection, fulfilment, and well-being. Whether it is pursuing personal goals, fostering relationships, or contributing to the betterment of society, nihilists recognise the value of such endeavours within the context of human experience.

In conclusion, nihilism offers a perspective that challenges conventional notions of meaning and purpose. By acknowledging the absence of inherent meaning in the universe, nihilists embrace the freedom to create their own meaning and chart their own course in life. Far from being a philosophy of despair, nihilism invites individuals to confront the uncertainty of existence with courage and resilience, recognising the inherent value of human experience in a world devoid of inherent meaning.

What is Life?

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George Harrison asked What Is Life? in a song, but he had a spiritual bent. The question is actually even more fundamental. Science has no settled meaning of what life is. Some posit that a virus is not life, and there is a multicellular organism discovered here on earth that requires no oxygen to survive. So when we are looking for signs of life on other planets, what is it that we are looking for exactly?

I spend a lot of time calling out weasel words, but we can’t even reliably define something we fundamentally are, which is alive. What is life? Forget about truth, justice, love, and freedom. These are abstract concepts, but not life. We live. We see life—experience life. We are a subset of it, but how do we know we’ve accounted for the full domain? Could something non-living be intelligent?—have intelligence?

It’s late and I am heading into a new year, AD 2023 BCE. And I was just thinking. If I am to believe Descartes, at least I’m alive parce que je donc, but I’ve got no answers in this realm.

Life Annihilates Life

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Life is an opportunistic parasite. It’s been speculated that life on Mars annihilated itself. This is almost a truism. In most models, there are only two options: life annihilates life or the inanimate environment intervenes. As regards anthropogenic climate change, occasionally, it’s both, though some are afforded a sense of plausible deniability—they get to throw their hands up into the air and proclaim that these things just happen to happen in cycles. It’s happened before; it’ll happen again. What can you do?

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

“Besides, they threatened a new Ice Age in the 1970s, and now they’re warning about climate change? I’ll have none of it. Climate change is just another way for certain so-called green industries to fleece the public and abscond with government subsidies, but we’re wise to them.”

Dramatic Reanactment

Humans refer to life feeding off of other life as parasites, seeing no irony in fitting the same description. This is not a novel observation, but most prefer to ignore it. We proclaim that we are at the top of the food chain, except it’s a food web, and we’re not at the top. We’re a mediocre species on a unique but mediocre planet in a mediocre galaxy supported by a mediocre star, we call the sun, and so on. As the saying goes, “as above, so below”. Mediocre all the way down.

But life annihilates life. Of course, there is war and hate and intolerance and ignorance. These comprise the lion’s share. In fact, I’m not sure what one might add. We annihilate other life, and we annihilate ourselves. Sure, there’s age and disease and trauma and asteroid strikes, but most of these are beyond our control.

Annihilation is inevitable, whether on an individual micro-level or a macro-level. Annihilation is entropy—the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Earth is a macrocosm of Easter Island, driven to extinction through resource depletion. There are other ways to go. We’ve even got some locked and loaded.

100 seconds to midnight.

Trustwise

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The lamb spends all its time worrying about the wolf and ends up being eaten by the shepherd.

— Unknown

I think one could look at this from several perspectives or through different lenses.

We worry about the wrong things.

At some level, this is about trust.

We trust the wrong people. Those whom we most entrust do us in. But I feel this is contextual.

One might feel this shepherd is Capitalism or the State or organised religion. Perhaps it’s culture or identity cohorts. Or all or these or none of these.

On another level, it recalls the inevitability of death. This shepherd reaper is always waiting in the wings whether or not one worries.

In the words of RATM, Know Your Enemy.