The Angel of Death

Death, by Janis Rozentals

In the year of our Lord 2025, an influencer with 50 million followers was criticized for using the image of her young daughters, all babies, on social media. I think she is married to some country singer or the son of a country singer, I don't know. One of the recurring aspects of the criticisms against her was the use of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, a Brazilian law meant to protect the youth. ECA is the acronym in Portuguese. Many said that the ECA should be amended to protect children from being used by their parents in this capacity. Indeed, this is a valid criticism. But I think it is not enough. An ECA that truly wanted to protect children and young people from all evil would be one whose main rule would state not to have babies in the first place.

The other day I had the misfortune of seeing a video recording of a brutal act committed in a remote corner of Brazil. A man tied up inside a shallow and tight grave had his face and head destroyed with blows from a pickaxe. A gang-related crime. A horror that would send shivers down the spines of even Clive Barker's readers. This episode reminded me of the terrible Mangrove 937 case, which occurred in Fortaleza years ago, where, also because of a gang, three young women were brutally killed, one of them even being dismembered alive, dying in considerable pain and fear. The recording of barbaric events like these opens a window onto a disheartening reality. We are truly sacks of flesh and bones, completely disposable. We are like cattle to be slaughtered. And our pain serves no great purpose, just like that of cattle.

But an ECA truly committed to preventing children from suffering would nip all this evil in the bud. In fact, there wouldn’t even be a root to be cut in the first place, because the possibility of harm occurring would not even exist if the most effective rule for preventing children from suffering were in force and followed to the letter. It would also eliminate all types of suffering, not just that which affects children and young people. The angel of death cannot touch that which was never born, that which never existed. Once people are born, no matter how much we try to protect them, anything bad can happen, and many bad things certainly will happen, including death.

By this I do not mean to say that laws and statutes that aim to protect the integrity of people, whether young or old, are not important. Since we are here, let us follow a minimum set of rules of coexistence, of course. But after a certain point there is a futility in trying to protect against evils, because existence itself is subject to friction, as Cabrera said. A stone does not feel this friction, but animals and people do. Just by being born we are forced to face this condition of friction, from the first moment we are able to feel anything, until the last. That is why I completely reject the tears of parents who lose their children and say things like: “parents should never bury a child!” That is a revolting expression. Do they not know the kind of universe they live in?

If you don't have the heart to see your children suffer and die, whether at the hands of villains, by accident or by illness, then you shouldn't have them, because these possibilities are woven into our existence and it's impossible to free ourselves from them. In the case of death, it's not even a possibility, but a certainty. It will happen one day. So spare us the shock, which can only be false. And in the unlikely event that there are parents who are truly shocked by the possibility that their children may suffer and die before them, the question remains: what kind of learning did they have in their lives to be so stupid?

To be quite honest, I don't believe in this kind of ignorance. There are things that even a chimpanzee can understand. While I sympathize with the pain, I can't stand the crying of parents who are surprised by the suffering and death of their offspring. Suffer, yes, and you will have my support, you will have my shoulder to cry on, but don't pretend to be ignorant. We all know that no one gets out of this life alive, no one leaves here without a minimum amount of bruises and scars. If I'm being harsh, forgive me, it's because my patience for certain social games has run out.

Those who live, suffer and die. It is inevitable. We are still lucky enough to live in the 21st century, in a high-tech human world that can alleviate some of the pain, a make-believe world that can even give a lot of pleasure and joy. But what we live in is an outlier in the history of animal life, that life that hurts, that has consciousness, even if primitive. Even throughout the 20th century, with wars, holocausts and environmental degradation caused by man, the greatest amount of death and pain occurred in the natural world, without the need for human interference. And animals have existed for hundreds of millions of years in this grotesque struggle for survival.

Our comfortable, technological world is a bubble in time and space. Right now, trillions of creatures are being chased, tortured, and devoured by trillions of other creatures, something that has been going on for half a billion years, since the Precambrian era. Even so, despite living in a bubble, we cannot claim ignorance; we cannot say, when we create new life, that we did not know how the universe works for beings like us. We are food for worms, which in turn are food for other worms and fungi and plants. Life feeds on itself without mercy, without pity.

What I am saying is not an exaggeration. What is the acceptable level of pain and suffering that we are willing to inflict on a being? How much harm are we willing to expose a person to? These are questions we should ask ourselves before creating a new creature like ourselves. Is it okay to give birth to a child who will potentially develop horrible and incurable tumors, as long as influencer parents cannot show them? That is the feeling I got when I saw banal comments about the influencer. Those who commented such things certainly felt like heroes willing to defend the poor defenseless people. But there is no way. If they really wanted to defend them, they would have to go back in time and convince that influencer not to procreate.

Frailty of human life (detail), by Salvator Rosa

Whether we like it or not, we are forced to sign a contract when we are born, and it is our parents who take us to the office of death to sign it. In 1656, the Italian artist Salvator Rosa painted a painting called “The Frailty of Human Life.” The painting shows the angel of death holding a piece of paper in front of a mother who holds her baby. On it is written in Latin: “Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori.” Translated, this means: “Conception is a sin, birth is punishment, life is work, death is a necessity.” In the image, the skeletal hand of death guides the hand of the baby, who signs the paper.

Rosa painted the picture after the death of his son, who died during an outbreak of plague in Naples. The painter's sister and brother also died. Few works of art sum up the human condition so well. The condition of a considerable part of animal life is suffering and death. But in the case of human life, there is a moral aspect involved, something that does not exist in other animals. While the order of the day has always been that we can complain and try to change everything, except the condition of being forced to experience an inevitably frictional existence, I say that this is nonsense, it is a pathetic rule created by who knows who in the early days of our species. It is considered unquestionable. On the contrary, it is right to question the need to be alive and perpetuate life.

There has been a lot of talk about the danger of human extinction, that we must maintain or even increase birth rates, for whatever reason. Even the sustainability of social security and the welfare state have been brought up in the discussion. Yes, if the population starts to fall drastically, there will be an inevitable collapse of everything. But I ask you: so what? Our extinction will come, we know that, whether we like it or not, one day. Let it come as soon as possible, then, voluntarily and peacefully. Better than waiting for some catastrophe generated by a dozen tyrants with inflated egos and nuclear arsenals.

There is little point in trying to protect some rich person's children from being presented to the public by them, when there are much worse things that no one can be protected from, such as: sporadic spongiform encephalopathy, spinal muscular atrophy, gliomas, meningitis, serial killers, depraved maniacs, torturers, various accidents due to neglect or natural bad luck, among so many other horrors that await our little ones. These horrors await our elders, too. They await all of us. I'm sorry to have to harp on about this so much, but it's too much for me to have to read and listen to expressions of indignation from people who certainly believe they are The Good People. But you are not the great heroes you think you are for trying to save an influencer's children from being exposed by her.

Demonstrations like these are almost as pathetic as saying that one is on the right side of history, or that history will condemn such and such a thing in the future. My God. A measly solar flare or a rock a few kilometers in diameter can cause our entire planet to evaporate into outer space, and you are arguing about the right and wrong side of a recent human fiction? Not that I don't sympathize with one side over the other, but there is no collective metaphysical field called history that guides our steps towards somewhere. If there were, it would clearly be a kind of ironic deity, who lives by giving us some blessings while adding new problems, in an endless succession.

Let's be honest, life is a real piece of crap. It is addictive, yes. But it is no good in the end. However, as Cabrera rightly says, paraphrasing, it is not we who hate life, it is life that hates us, it is life that massacres us, even when we do everything to make things better. You can live in a peaceful and idyllic town, but that will not save you from the inexorable march of time, from the frictions inherent in existence. You will wither away. You will have to invent or absorb myths that make your painful decline something necessary or even good, myths like God, paradise, the beatific vision, nirvana or the simple materialistic and poetic view that nature is a cycle and we must adapt to it.

I have a question for all of you: aren't you tired of suffering? Even if you believe in some of this nonsense, why make new copies of yourselves to suffer and die? Is it because God, the most famous of imaginary friends, ordered you to grow and multiply? Or is it because you know that there is no right or wrong in the ultimate sense and you don't care about your children's suffering? In any case, regardless of the answer, there is a psychopathy disguised as theatricality in the attitude of continuing to generate new troubled people, new poor souls.

In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, Socrates says that the body is the tomb of the soul. In another dialogue by Plato, Phaedo, Socrates says that the body is the prison of the soul. Two thousand and five hundred years later, we are amazed at the fact that more and more people are being imprisoned in this fetid and illusory necropolis. The problem with the influencer exposing her children is not so much the exposure, but the pride that she and her husband have in their achievement: they produced a few more condemned people. At the same time that Socrates was walking around Athens disturbing people in search of the truth, around five hundred years before Christ, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, understood that to be born is to suffer and achieved enlightenment in India. There is no light in all the vastness of the cosmos that can hold back the weight of darkness.

Old man and death, by Ladislav Mednyánszky

While living means suffering greatly and dying, let us now focus not on pain but on death—our own death, not that of others, which for us is a cause for suffering, or indifference, or even celebration. Think about your own death. For Epicurus, death is nothing, so we should not fear it. When it is, we are not, and when we are, it is not. This argument is used to support the notion that death, our death, is not something negative. For us, it is absolutely nothing. In the sense of something that is experienced, something that is lived through, it is true that our death is nothing. Of course, I am excluding here the concept of an afterlife embraced by those who have imaginary friends. Then death can be anything that imagination allows.

The idea that death is nothing and only negatively affects the living who happen to miss the deceased is questionable. Benatar questions this Epicurean concept of death by stating that, although it would be better if we had never been born, since this would prevent any and all negative states, he includes in the group of negative things not only pain, but also death. This is because when we come into existence, most of us quickly develop an unshakable interest in continuing to exist. Yes, the interest in continuing to exist can diminish or disappear due to depression or a deplorable state of life, as it happens with those with chronic or terminal illnesses. But, in general, people who are alive and reasonably healthy have an interest, even if implicit, in continuing to exist.

Thus, it can be said that death is indeed something negative even for the deceased, even though they no longer feel anything, not even their desire to continue existing. I don't know if I completely buy Benatar's argument, but I tend to agree. The reason I tend to agree is that, when we stop to think about it, we generally respect the wishes of the deceased, as long as they are reasonable. We respect whether they want to be buried or cremated, for example. We tend to respect the distribution of inheritances according to a will. When someone who made it clear that they wanted their body cremated is instead buried, we tend to see this as a lack of respect for the deceased, even though they no longer exist.

If we didn't care at all, in fact, there would never have been any laws about how we should or shouldn't deal with our dead. We would throw them all in the nearest landfill. After all, from the dead person's point of view, it doesn't matter, they no longer exist, right? This concept, that death can indeed be seen as an evil even though we no longer exist when it arrives, when applied to the philosophy that not being is better than being, reminds me of when Cioran wrote that we do not run towards death, but rather flee from the catastrophe of our birth, the greatest disaster of all. Never being born is not the same as being dead after living a life exposed to the friction inherent in sentient existence. In both cases we feel nothing, because we are nothing, but the interlude that occurs between the two nothings generates enough tears to last an eternity.

by Fernando Olszewski