X-Message-Number: 22983 From: Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 14:59:27 EST Subject: "Why Die?" Suggestion from Mark Shewmaker (Rudi Hoffman writing) One of my clients saw the "slogan" thread posting a few days ago, and wrote this to me personally. With his permission, I have forwarded it here in full. (Begin copying) I'm not subscribed to Cryonet, but only read it every so often on the web archives. I just came across your message in which you said: > But we need a rallying cry that "sings, compels, > annoys, and replicates" Well, here's one to add to any brainstorming ideas you may get: "Why Die?" Features: 1. It's quick, simple, and memorable. No hard-to-say or confusing statistics needed. :-) 2. It's thought-provoking in the listener's *own frame of reference*, in that it causes an instant need for the listener to justify to themselves any of their pro-death values, even if only in a very cursory sense, and to then possibly update those values slightly, all from within their own belief and value system. (No translation to ours required.) 3. Even a minor re-examination of a pro-death value system will help the listener understand a let's-not-die mindset, and thus help the listener be more open to honestly listening to and thinking about such ideas. Even more importantly: 4. It's fair--as a slogan it doesn't "cheat": There's no bias towards saying death is always bead--there may well be legitimate arguments for real death, (saving someone else's life, or maybe a person's considered religious system is pro-death in some ways and that's simply what they value, etc.) And although the question may use emotion to help someone to decide to consider it as a serious question, that same emotional jolt helps the listener to recognize and thus discount any thought-clouding emotion when thinking about their own, personal answer. If anything, there's a bias for the listener to consider their answer to the question in an honest and logical way. (ie, we want everyone to remove their own blinders and recognize what their own values are.) In keeping with the question being fair, the pro-longevity type argument is also fair: It's backed by facts, trends, hard data, and actual science. So from slogan to arguments to supporting data, everything can be presented in an open and honest way, with a mindset of "no-need to trust us on any specific point, you can examine and verify any bit of data or argument that you like." Even if someone determines that they have a different answer, this type of here's what-we-ask-ourselves question together with this-is-why-we-come-to-our-answer background to our point of view helps those who come to different answers to not disdain, but better understand the pro-longevity point of view. Oops, that went on for a *lot* longer than I intended. But, maybe it will be useful if you do get a bunch of slogans, and become "keeper of the slogans". :-) -- Mark Shewmaker 770-933-3250 Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22983