The Fable of the King Who Would Not Die

Bryan Johnson: Meet the multi-millionaire trying to reverse ageing
—Headline on the BBC News website, 13 August 2023

Bryan Johnson

Once there was a certain king—a stupid ruler of a stupid kingdom, in a nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms and their useless kings. Every king in the nation, and many of the queens, thought themselves very important, because the nation had many town criers willing to ballyhoo the supposed importance of their particular monarch. These kings, and many subjects too, heard the ballyhooed fables so often, they came to believe their own mythology.

Like the myth of the king who ruled the kingdoms of lightning chariots and bluebirds. This king believed himself so important that, one day, he unilaterally declared he had renamed the bluebird kingdom, and henceforth, everyone had to honor his kingdom’s name. But every subject knew it was the kingdom of bluebirds, and called it such, ignoring what their king commanded except when his vast, and easily bruised, ego needed appeased. Which was fairly often.

Likewise, our certain king believed himself terribly important, and when he began hearing creaks from his vertebrae, and snaps from his knees, this king boldly proclaimed: “I shall not die!” The king gathered thirty physicians from throughout his kingdom and began dispensing gold generously, demanding research into diet and exercise, and into whatever alchemical potions the king could consume which would prevent his body from aging, and would keep Death, that eternal unwanted visitor, away.

Meanwhile this king’s subjects—we no longer call them “peasants,” though “peasants” is surely what they were—continued their labors. Some subjects hoed rows so they could plant and harvest wheat. Others smelted iron and brought the metal to the kingdom’s foundries, where blacksmiths forged implements so the field workers could hoe rows. The subjects needed little regular direction from their king, and besides, the king’s goldsmiths signed their pay slips, not the king himself.

Within the castle, the king continued demanding miracles from his physicians. “Make the potions stronger!” he commanded, for surely he saw grey beard hairs in his shaving mirror. His physicians bit their knuckles and wondered what more they could do. Saltpeter in his morning alchemical broth? Magnets on his free weights? Artists painted the king’s portrait with square jaw and bulging chest, but the king was not deceived, and knew he had not stopped age.

Elon Musk

Outside, town criers recounted breathlessly the accomplishments which the king and his physicians made in repelling death. Some subjects believed the stories, and repeated them widely, even unto the kingdom of bluebirds. But other subjects held aloft their iron implements and grumbled: “I care not. If he lives or dies, I must still gather the harvest. And look at this hoe! Barely had it, and already it’s rusty. No quality control in this kingdom anymore.”

Several of the king’s guards, watching from the castle, saw subjects raising their iron implements and grumbling, and this made them worry. The king waved away his guards’ concerns, however; what cared he for discontented peasants, when death still encroached? The captain of the guard wasn’t dissuaded, though, and prudently hired more guards, granting them more armor and more swords, because you cannot be too careful. And the stonemasons made the castle walls slightly higher.

All throughout, the king’s subjects continued improving their skills. The blacksmiths made ever-sharper hoes, which the field workers used to make ever-straighter rows, and thus the kingdom saw ever-increasing yields of bread. Admittedly, nobody had more gold to buy bread, so it rotted uneaten, but the bread existed, and surely that merited some celebration. The king permitted the goldsmiths to sign pay slips worth an extra ducat, or whatever, couldn’t everyone see he was busy?

Eventually the day came, which surely everyone must have expected, when the town criers announced that the king had died. Though they carried portraits of the king as square-jawed and muscular, everyone knew the magnets had made him addled, and the saltpeter had made his pecker drop off. Throughout the kingdom, sad-faced subjects agreed this was a most tragic day, then they turned back to their forges and their fields, because work still needed done.

Throughout our nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms, the death of one king mattered little. Workers still worked, and goldsmiths still banked, and everything carried on much as it had before. And somewhere, in a distant castle, the king of the bluebird kingdom struggled to invent another reason to postpone his cage match against that other weird king, Mark Zuckerberg, who, even in the world of allegory and fable, still looks like a pasty-faced android.