Hot Mics, Cold Souls

By Abe Greenwald 

In Beijing, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were caught on “hot mics” discussing the prospect of medically achieved longevity and even immortality. Yesterday, at a massive military parade in Tiananmen Square, the two leaders, walking alongside Kim Jong Un, were recorded having the following exchange through their translators:

Xi: In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one's still a child.
Putin: With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.
Xi: Predictions are, this century, there's a chance of also living to 150 [years old].

Two repressive world leaders—and enemies of the U.S.—at a military parade shooting the breeze about transplanting organs to live “younger and younger” and achieve life everlasting. It sounds like a joke and lends itself to easy mockery about Putin and Xi being evil, power-crazed maniacs. But the thing is—that’s kind of what they are. And the hot-mic moment provides a clear window into their dangerous grandiosity.

I take the point that one can look at some of their actions as evidence of their being “rational actors.” But just because we can point to more extreme historical and current examples of monstrous leadership, it doesn’t mean these two are entirely levelheaded.

Look, even in liberal democracies, you have to be wildly narcissistic to seek the highest office in the land. However kind or charming a given president may seem, he’s still an egomaniac. But oppressive leaders of authoritarian regimes got to where they are and do what they do because they’re basically clinical cases. Putin and Xi—while obviously retaining the capacity for rational thought and action—are deluded men with God complexes. They want total control of everything, including life and death. And they tend to think it’s within their reach. 

So it's good for us to be reminded of this now and then, particularly because we frequently want to forget it. Western liberals love to think that most conflicts can be resolved peacefully given that, in the end, “we all just want the same things in life” and most people are reasonable.

But it’s not so. Think what kind of man Putin must be in order to send nearly a million Russians into a meatgrinder war against a country that never attacked Russia. He cares not at all about sentencing a generation of men to violent death. And it’s not just that he’s a bellicose tyrant. During the pandemic, rumors of his eccentric and phobic behavior were legion. And Xi presides over a brutal and deadly campaign that’s put more than a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in slave-labor detention camps. It’s also worth noting that stories about China’s secret, unethical genetic and bioengineering experiments have been circulating for decades. The probable origins of the Covid pandemic should confirm at least some of it as true.  

As for the prospect of medical science stopping biological time or discovering the key to immortality, I’ll just rest on my go-to observation: Doctors still can’t make hair plugs look real. Tackle that first, and then we’ll talk about deathlessness. 

For now, let’s focus on preventing the very real deaths caused by evil men. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.