What if the rich lived forever?

By Jason Lim

Everyone knows the famous story of how Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, made a fool of himself trying to live forever. He entrusted the magician Xu Fu of Zhifu Island with 6,000 virgins, untold riches, and a fleet of ships to travel to Pengal Islands, where eight immortals kept the elixir of life. Even when the magician failed to return, the emperor entrusted other charlatans with riches to go out and bring back a way to live forever. Ironically, the emperor ended up overdosing on pills made of mercury, which was a common ingredient in elixirs of life.

So, even the most powerful man of his era couldn't live forever. Everyone dies. Death is the great equalizer.

Until now, that is. According to recent press reports, scientists have been able to reverse aging in human cells in the laboratory. The study, as published in journal “Aging,” describes scientists delivering hydrogen sulfide directly onto mitochondria to regain the cell's ability to divide. “The researchers were able to reverse the aging process of some old human cells by delivering a specific molecule to their mitochondria, the structures within cells where energy is produced. This approach stops the cells from becoming senescent, a point at which they can no longer duplicate. Some researchers believe that the accumulation of these cells in organs is key to the aging process.”

Although we are far from having an actually working elixir of life, this is a pretty amazing start. Eventually, it's not inconceivable to have a treatment that somehow rejuvenates aging cells in people to keep them healthy, active, and alive a lot longer than would have been possible naturally. Such a treatment is bound to be revolutionary, a true triumph of science over nature. And it's bound to be expensive.

In the foreseeable future, it would literally be possible to buy eternal life since only the rich would be able to afford such a treatment. What does that make the rest of us?

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, warned about the dangers of the concentration of wealth in a few individuals and the widening gap of inequality driving political and social instability. In the U.S., the share of total wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent increased from 7 percent in late 1970 to 22 percent in 2012, according to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Such inequality has the effect of hurting socioeconomic mobility, “especially when combined with the other advantages that wealthy parents provide their children (such as more engaged parenting, better schooling, help with paying for college or investing in a home, and all kinds of social capital or useful connections).”

This is worse in Korea. According to a Hankyoreh article from Jan. 5, 2017 titled, “Most of South Korea's billionaires inherited their wealth,” a total of 62.5 percent of Korea's wealthiest stockholders inherited their wealth compared to under 30 percent in the U.S., Japan, and China. The myth of working hard to achieve your dream ― the foundational narrative of the Miracle on Han River ― has dissolved into the new narrative of Hell Joseon where your family background is what really decides your lot in life for the younger generation. There is even a joke that says building owners rank higher than the Creator in the hierarchy of divine beings.

Now imagine that the rich don't just pass on their privilege to their offspring. They can actually live and perpetuate their inequality forever and ever. They can buy the ultimate privilege. For the underprivileged who had a difficult lot in life with no hope of ever bettering themselves, at least they could take comfort in the knowledge that even the rich were human and had to eventually die. But now the rich can literally become immortal. They are de-facto gods.

Inequality is such a poor word to describe this unimaginably grand gap in life capacity. It's not a matter of buying things and services anymore. It's the buying of life. And as Qin Shi Huang's example shows, the rich and powerful will certainly buy.

In its Feb. 21, 2017 article titled, “The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe,” the Atlantic writes, “Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.”

Imagine a world in which inequality is defined not by merely wealth but by lifespan. The violent spasm that would inevitably result from the attempt to close such a gulf could be great enough destroy everything we know. Ironically, humans would have finally figured out a way to cheat death, only to gift death with more misery than ever.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.