The pattern underneath
A prior that feels like physics: death is a scandal, more years are always better, a light grief is a moral failure. The install starts early: fairy tales and first moral pictures paint evil as the one who kills, rots, or comes from the grave. Terror-management research already shows that reminding people they will die changes what they buy, whom they punish, and how tightly they hold a worldview. Grief research shows loss can be heavy without being a verdict on the person who remains. The pattern is not ‘people are stupid’. It is that an unopposed value becomes infrastructure — hospitals, markets, families — and then its costs (guilt, surplus empathy, trauma where mortality could have been ordinary) do not get a line in the budget.
How the phrase gets misused
Turned into a death-cult slogan, a permission to mock mourners, or a conspiracy that ‘they’ want you to live forever. The prior is folk. It does not need a cabal. It is also not a licence to withhold care.
A more precise frame
Keep the care. Name the vote. Ask what the prior prices that nobody put on the ballot: the weight of grief, the guilt of not stopping a body, empathy that cannot stop, trauma that treats a fact as a scandal. For NOOS the gauge is the named tilt — not a score of how much a nation fears dying.