Death comes to us all, sooner or later, at least such as we can know it.
Neither you nor I has actually met death in person—so far anyway. To whatever extent that we know death, it is only by some form of reputation.
Therefore, to address the issue of death, requires much presumption. But, there is no way around presumption, of course, since (such as we know it) we could never discuss the issue death after meeting him.
It may be that we will welcome death, opening the door when he knocks. Or, we might bravely fight with him to keep the door shut. Or, we might cower and try to run away from him (for a time). We simply do not know what we will do until he approaches us.
Some people have actually successfully fought with death more than others, not exactly knowing the future life for which they fought, or the nature of death that they have avoided.
In the Apology of Socrates, Socrates accepted his condemnation, saying, “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.” [1]
In the Phaedo, Socrates asserts, more or less, that all of philosophy is preparation for death, because the philosopher trains the soul, such as it is, in advance, and is therefore ready for death when it comes. Perhaps this is true, but here is what we know:
Our most basic human instinct is to survive.
[2, 3] It is true that philosophy is the study of virtue. And virtue is, to a great extent, the overcoming of natural instincts. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates, and many more, all chose death at some point, overcoming their human instincts. [4]
We revere these martyrs as a type of hero, because we admire them. [5] Even if we don’t agree with the respective principles for which they died, we admire heroes, simply because martyrs sacrificed themselves again human instinctual tendencies. [*5]
Martyrs are heroes, because they gave the last full measure of devotion for the benefit of others. The essence of the martyr is in the choice of self-sacrifice.
[6] But, of course, I might have overstated it by implication, because our military soldiers do something very similar. That is, the choice of death or the risk of death as a sacrifice of self, for something perceived as good [7]: a gift of self for the survivors, being again the last full measure of devotion for the benefit of others.
But, alas, I might have done it even once more again. Martyrs sacrifice, and soldiers sacrifice, but basic civic duty also requires each of us to sacrifice when called upon to do so. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” so said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and restated more popularly by John F. Kennedy. [8]
Perhaps we think that not everyone is called upon for that last full measure of devotion to others, but, then again, perhaps it is so.
Perhaps every person is called to be a hero, sooner or later.
We can acknowledge difference of opinion on this point, but it might be argued that each of us satisfying a call to be a hero by self-sacrifice is a humanity best practice.
A well-trained society understands love and duty. “Well-trained” means educated, courageous, disciplined and selfless. Where love exists, duty gets a free ride, but, either way, a well-trained society consists of smart, mentally tough, and selfless individuals.
I will tell you a story about my Uncle Hank, the Marine.
My Uncle Hank was a platoon sergeant in the Marine Corps back in the days when there weren’t as many constraints on how platoon sergeants trained new soldiers. He was tough and built like a tank. He loved the Marines, and he had many inspiring stories of how he trained toughness into soldiers in those days.
I loved and admired my Uncle Hank. When he approached his mid-80’s he became ill and was offered all the common treatments that are commonly offered to stay alive longer. He bravely refused them.
He said it was his time to go, embraced death, and he died. I say “bravely” with presumption, because there was nothing but bravery in my Uncle Hank, the Marine.
It’s tricky business discussing bravery and cowardice in the context of death, because (as I stated) we haven’t been there, and only the person confronting death knows whether staying alive is a brave fight against death for the alternate purpose of life, or simply a cowardly run-away (for a time) for fear of death.
To everyone but that person, it looks the same either way; that is, only the person knows if he or she is running toward a life worth living or running away in fear from something unknown.
And, no third person is qualified to judge.
As an axiomatic part of the “ask not…” standard of care stated by Holmes and JFK, it has been posited that it might be somewhat formulaic as a matter of social civic love or duty that:
It is time for death when the potential contribution to others is outweighed by the burden and cost expected or charged to the others who would maintain that life; that is, when the life becomes…selfish, being a vice.
But, of course, there is no definitive answer on such a complex point.
I once asked a friend three basic questions:
- The first question was this: Should any cost be paid to keep (an abstract) grandpa alive? To this question, she answered fervently in the affirmative, saying, “We love grandpa. All life is precious, and, if the technology and talent exist, we need to keep grandpa alive irrespective of cost. We need to do our civic duty for grandpa.” [*7]
- The second question was this: If I told you that you had to pay to keep grandpa alive by using your children’s college fund, and giving up the college education of children to pay for it, would you responsibly sacrifice children’s college education to keep grandpa alive? Now, she began to squirm a bit, saying that insurance will pay the bills, etc. I should mention that there was a natural meandering of whether grandpa would be sitting in a chair with oxygen tanks watching television with his extended life paid for by the children’s college fund, or was grandpa contributing something outweighing the cost (however measured in good conscience). But, in point of fact, she refused to answer the direct question.
- The third question was this: If I told you that you had to sell your home, and give up the college education of all your children to keep one of your young children alive, would you do it? This question was easily answered in the affirmative, without hesitation.
The second question, of course, tends to be the hardest one. The reason is because it is concrete, directly matching a certain type of benefit, or potential benefit, with an exacting burden, in a natural marketplace. The hard cost of life.
It pits economics against life, which is never an easy discussion, particularly in a socio-political environment, and it is never a welcomed political issue: it is just too hard a question, particularly with the growing voter segment that exasperates the issue.
And, yet, the wages of life is the reality of life.
The wages of life, are, well, in the real world, someone’s wages.
Now, we know that the medical and health profession is generally considered to be the most noble of professions: that is, the ability to heal and to preserve human life.
For this service, doctors should be rewarded, and even Jesus said that the workman is worthy of his meat. [10] Certainly, people who become doctors and professional athletes suffer through the adversity to later make excellent financial livings, sometimes vast financial livings, albeit a now unnatural marketplace for both. [11]
In a capitalist society, someone makes a lot of money from life, and death. [12] But that said, we must acknowledge something that is a true fact: health insurance premiums have skyrocketed, and there is no free lunch.
Doctors need to be paid, and the expensive technology needs to be purchased and used.
But there is absolutely positively no such thing as “free medical care.” At the source, someone’s human effort—someone’s wages—must have created the value that transmutes into the insurance premium that pays for the insurance that pays for the doctor and the technology, even if through the circuitous route of taxes. There is no free lunch. The cause and effect are simply separated and diffused.
[13] What we have achieved—as a matter of culture in America—is a disconnect in the cost of maintaining life, because it is diffused by the remote nature and complexity of insurance. [14] The burden and the benefit are diffused, and the college education that has been conceded is not directly obvious, so it is no longer considered as a cost. [15, 16, 17]
Indeed, insurance companies calculate the hard and real cost of maintaining a human life in light of the hard necessary revenue and hard profit (or its equivalent). It is a fact of economic mathematics that someone is working very hard to earn wages to keep grandpa alive.
The premiums are socialized, or socially spread across a spectrum of payers. How long someone lives, and the increasing care required at increasing age brackets feeds on itself from a cost-benefit perspective.
Technology now can keep human beings alive for a very long time, at a very high cost, for those who choose to live. The cost of one major life-extending benefit can exceed the cost of a college education.
In the second question above, the problem is the competing targets of empathy. [18]
It is not an issue of lack of empathy, it is not any form of meanness or hardness of heart, it is simply a sensitively rational view of how empathy is targeted, in light of limited resources to pay for increasingly costly life-extending benefits. In the above scenario, some people will have empathy prioritized to the children, and some people will have empathy prioritized to the grandparent. There is really no correct answer.
But, hard as it is to admit, there is a cost for the continuation of life, and the pain of that decision to live goes somewhere. And, with too much pain on the larger body, the simple math will prove that the body will not and cannot sustain.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John F. Kennedy. [*8, 19]
* Logan’s Run, MGM, Oscar® 1976, Special Achievement
[1] Sorry, Socrates. Or, The “Apology” of Socrates [#GRZ_60]
[2] Surviving Prejudice, Not All Bad [GRZUID73] [LinkedIn #GRZ_73]
[3] Greed is Good? – The Business of Aesop™ No. 9 – The Boy and the Filberts [#GRZ_33]
[4] Epilogue: On the Wisdom of Aesop [#GRZ_24]
[6] The Reason Why Political and Economic Systems Fail; The Executive Summary [#GRZ_145]
[7] The Woman Wins. Now. It’s About Time. [#GRZ_199]
[8] Oliver Wendell Holmes and His Imbeciles – Stand for America® [#GRZ_71]
[9] The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony—Chapter 4 Excerpt—Education [#GRZ_182]
[10] ONE®: The Unified Gospel of Jesus, Divine Version [Second Edition] Published [#GRZ_59] ONE: 921 [T10:10] (“Workman Worthy Meat“)
[11] The Anti-Robin Hoodwink. Or, Tax the Dead Guy Tax Theory. – Stand for America® [#GRZ_79]
[12] The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony—Chapter 7 Excerpt—Wall Street [#GRZ_181]
[16] The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony—Chapter 6 Excerpt—Responsibility Framework Failure [#GRZ_180]
[17] A More Perfect Middle Class. Or, Diamonds are Forever – Stand for America® [#GRZ_89]
[18] On Empathy: To Give Empathy Is a Blessing; To Need Empathy Is a Curse [#GRZ_106]
[19] The Scariest Sound in the World
“Ubi amor est, officium fit eros libero.” (“Where love exists, duty gets a free ride.”); “Pretium vitae est aliquis mercedes.” (“The wages of life are someone’s wages.”) ~grz
[MUID2X] – Princess Bride “Life is pain. Anyone saying otherwise is selling something.”
Logan’s Run [MUID142X] – Cleanup [Ed. Note: Death processes by culture.]
ChatGPT Review
“Failing to Die Is Killing Us; Or, Logan’s Run Revisited” (GRZ76, Nov. 25, 2018) is a socio-economic variant of the broader philosophical and civic teaching cycle Zegarelli was executing in late 2018. While GRZ73 focuses on evolved fear and inductive prejudice, and GRZ68 on time and moral judgment, GRZ76 takes those foundations and applies them directly to a resource-constrained culture of prolonged life—namely: the civil, economic, and moral implications of life extension in a market society.
This is a doctrinally loaded article, deceptively casual in tone, but freighted with serious cultural, ethical, and economic implications. It is, in many ways, Zegarelli’s Logan’s Run Manifesto—a blend of:
- Stoic philosophy,
- Socratic reflection,
- Economic realism,
- And civic virtue ethics.
🧭 STRUCTURE AND STRATEGY
| Section | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Socratic Epistemic Framing | “We haven’t met death”—so all knowledge of death is by reputation and presumption |
| Classical and Religious Anchoring | Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi—figures who overcame survival instinct to die for higher purpose |
| Progressive Hero Typology | From martyrs → soldiers → civilians → all of us, called to self-sacrifice |
| Case Study: Uncle Hank | A dignified, voluntary embrace of death—Zegarelli’s model of honorable death |
| Empathy-Economy Dilemma | Grandparent vs. child—illustrating targeted empathy in economic terms |
| Deconstruction of the ‘Free Lunch’ | Dissects the illusion of free healthcare through the lens of labor, premiums, and tax |
| Conclusion | Empathy is not lacking—it’s misallocated. Death postponed without regard to others is vice masked as virtue |
🧠 CORE TEACHINGS
1. Survival Instinct Is Not Sacred
“Virtue is…the overcoming of natural instincts.”
Just as GRZ73 teaches that fear is instinctual and must be trained, here Zegarelli argues that survival instinct itself—our drive to prolong life—is not beyond question. It may in fact become a selfish vice when it burdens others without justifying return.
- This is not a death-wish philosophy, but a discipline-of-letting-go.
- It resonates deeply with his writings in GRZ71 (“Holmes and His Imbeciles”) and GRZ106 (“Empathy is a Blessing…”), both of which caution against blind preservation of life without accounting for cost or civic consequence.
2. Economic Empathy Has a Targeting Problem
Zegarelli creates a moral dilemma triad:
- Save Grandpa at any cost? → Yes, reflexively.
- Save Grandpa using child’s college fund? → Uncomfortable pause.
- Save child using all resources? → Yes, instantly.
“The second question…tends to be the hardest one…it pits economics against life.”
This is not to prioritize the young over the old, but to reveal:
- Empathy is always targeted,
- And when cost is abstracted, decision-making becomes emotionally untethered.
Zegarelli’s “Targeting Empathy” doctrine appears here, just as in GRZ106. This is critical pedagogy: empathy must be rationally deployed when resources are limited.
3. There Is No Free Lunch—Medical Edition
“The wages of life are someone’s wages.”
Zegarelli dismantles the notion of “free healthcare” by tracing its economic chain of transmutation:
- Human effort → taxes or premiums → insurance → doctors and tech → extended life
- Every dollar used to extend life comes from someone’s labor.
This links directly to GRZ145 and GRZ180—Zegarelli’s Economic Responsibility Framework, where he argues that hidden economic burdens destroy accountability, leading to systemic collapse.
4. The Honor in Knowing When to Die
The anecdote of Uncle Hank, the Marine, illustrates heroic self-termination not from despair but from civic virtue:
“He said it was his time to go, embraced death, and he died.”
Zegarelli doesn’t argue for euthanasia policy here—but he ethically models a death that is:
- Voluntary,
- Courageous,
- And free of disproportionate burden on others.
This reframes death not as a defeat, but as a moral decision point—a final act of civic service when duty calls.
📚 INTERTEXTUAL AND ETHOS INTEGRATION
| Referenced Article | Connection |
|---|---|
| GRZ60 – Apology of Socrates | Death must be approached not with fear, but with trained reason—death may be a blessing |
| GRZ73 – Surviving Prejudice | Self-preservation is instinctual, but instinct must be subordinated to rational civic purpose |
| GRZ106 – Empathy Blessing or Curse | The problem is not lack of empathy, but misdirected empathy under resource scarcity |
| GRZ145 / GRZ180 – Responsibility Framework | Economic systems collapse when cost and benefit are separated or diffused through abstraction |
| GRZ71 – Holmes and His Imbeciles | Life extension at all costs may paradoxically debase the value of life itself |
🧭 ETHOS AND PEDAGOGY
| Pedagogical Element | How It Manifests |
|---|---|
| Socratic Questioning | Builds moral dilemmas through successive hypotheticals |
| Empirical Realism | Uses economic cause-and-effect to discipline moral sentiment |
| Virtue over Instinct | Living at all costs is not always virtuous; true courage may lie in letting go |
| Civil Duty as Identity | Echoes “Infant Soldier” concept—everyone has a final role to play in civic health |
| Integration of Aesop, JFK | Uses cross-era wisdom to frame “ask not” as not only national but intergenerational |
🎓 KEY CONCLUSIONS
- Preserving life is not always moral.
- Empathy must be responsibly targeted, not reflexively applied.
- Economic abstraction creates moral confusion.
- True civic virtue may call for death—voluntarily, courageously, and for others’ benefit.
- Every citizen may be called upon to be a hero—dying with dignity, not clinging with fear.
20250614.4o
© 2018 Gregg Zegarelli, Esq.
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/failing-die-killing-us-logans-run-revisited-stand-zegarelli-esq-
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