A brochure came in the mail advising me to put my body into cold storage or, as a backup plan, to have my head removed, dipped in liquid nitrogen and turned into a cerebral popsicle.
On the face of it, the process just builds on Clarence Birdseye’s pioneering work in frozen food. He worked out how to freeze fish so quickly the ice crystals wouldn’t grow and turn tissues into a soggy mess on defrosting. I have eaten fish fingers, and Birdseye’s method works. By contrast, the cryogenics people aren’t offering cool cannibal cutlets fresh from the fridge when global warming besets our beleaguered descendants. They claim that at some point the dead will rise, or at least be raised, from their long-life freezers.
The same week the hot sell on freezing arrived, the Wall Street Journal reported that the would-be chilled-out are now leaving money to themselves in their wills, on the basis that yes, you can take it with you, and when you come back, it would be useful to have a few shekels for a start-up.
This is dangerous – theologically, legally and financially. These trust-fund frozen fish fingers are risking paradise. Hitherto, the dead – separated from the trappings of life – have been guaranteed to be poor but that didn’t matter since the sure and certain resurrection of Christian belief assumes that Celestial Social Security will provide. If, however, you are frozen but are your own heir, you consequently have the same remote chances of getting into heaven as camels getting through a needle’s eye, although the liquid nitrogen may indeed have some palliative effect against infernal flames.
Of course, cool guys would argue that they are not superstitious. But how much more faith can you have than truly believing that companies taking your money, whether for trust funds or freezing, will survive more than a generation? I’d rather trust a lifetime guarantee from the street peddler who sells knock-off Rolexes. A look at the Victorian private cemeteries run wild with lack of maintenance suggests that private enterprise works best taking money off the living rather than the already dead.
But lots of investors are buying internet stocks again, so lawyers and trust fund managers are probably raking in the money from those who are about to refuse to die. Let’s assume the trust funds survive in perpetuity and are not torn apart by legal sharks, confiscated by governments or purloined by descendants. Let’s assume the funds grow to the level expected by some of those cited in the Wall Street Journal. Then we have a problem, anticipated in ancient law books: mortmain or ‘dead hand’ on property is a very bad thing. At the exponential rate of compound interest, with no income being taken from these trust funds, it won’t be an eternity before these cold raiders own controlling stakes of every major company.
Well before that point, will IROs send ballots to dead letter boxes in stiff proxy fights? Will they be the ultimate in silent majorities, or will cold dead hands be raised to unseat boards?
Or has this already happened? Maybe our modern titans of industry did not grow richer than the dreams of avarice by fiddling options after all. Perhaps we are seeing the afterlife of 19th century robber barons, resurrected and blessed with their unlocked trust funds. It sends a chill down my spine.
