X-Message-Number: 6229
Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 00:12:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <>
Subject: Re: "One life is enough"

My understanding of the "terror management" aspect of the refusal to deal 
with death in a rational way is simply that death is a terrifying reality 
that most people refuse to contemplate.  

Since death is all around us, people who don't want to actually think 
about it develop ways to "think around" it: dead people are "laid to rest".
"Little Jimmy is probably playing baseball with Jesus in Heaven right 
now" etc.  In other words, death is not death.  

Asking people to seriously consider cryonics involves asking them to 
seriously consider the alternative: actual final and irrevocable 
termination of themselves.

Leading authorities, role models and opinion-makers are just as loath to 
do this as anyone else - maybe even more so, to the extent that they care 
about superficialities rather than serious realities.

Once enough people choose cryonics that it becomes a normal procedure, 
and people don't have to actively consider it, they will be able to opt 
for it without having to deal with the possibility of their mortality.  
My suggestion to hasten this is to encourage it to become a normal 
medical procedure in a hospitals.  This cannot happen before it becomes a 
normal medical procedure in a couple of progressive and respected 
hospitals.  This in turn can be encouraged by having cryonicists 
concentrate their requirements and demands on a limited few hospitals, 
rather than every cryonics procedure originating at a different 
hospital.  And this can come about when cryonicists live in closer 
communities.

Of course, that means that I ought to move out of Chapel Hill, NC, to 
Phoenix or the Bay Area or wherever.  I'm considering it, but it's not 
likely in the immediate future.

Ultimately, of course, the popular acceptance of cryonics *will* happen.

Always optimistically,

Robin HL


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