Science and technology have provided us with a Degree of development and well-being never known before. Knowledge is power, and the modern, emancipated from traditional moral bonds, has set out to control and subdue nature. This will to dominate also applies to human life, from its beginning to its end.

On the one hand, the interventionist bias, typical of modern medicine, leads to therapeutic overkill. Technology and pharmacology offer many possibilities for action (and profit) that it would be absurd to waste. The physician finds it difficult to accept his failure and attend passively to the death of the patient, he feels the imperious need to do something. Moreover, this terminal phase of life constitutes an interesting scientific challenge and allows experimentation under unique conditions. And vice versa: if the patient is a burden, either for the health care staff or for the family, or does not finish dying, he is simply eliminated (euthanasia) or persuaded to get out of the way himself (assisted suicide). And always, in each of these manifestations of control over human nature, business lurks. Indeed, it is often economic interests that are behind projects, research or legislation.

The connection between this desire for domination, made possible by science, and the emergence and consolidation of the culture of death is obvious. The modern will respect nothing, not even the life of the unborn or the terminally ill. Nietzsche condensed the modern notion of happiness into two words: "I want". This motto has become the new categorical imperative. What can be done, will be done, even when it means eliminating lives. The modern man intends to take command even over the entire evolutionary process. If up to now we have witnessed the unfolding of "biological evolution" (from the first unicellular to man), now we are going to enter the so-called "cultural evolution", in which man himself will determine the course. There is talk of enharsement, of the transhuman condition, of man-machine symbiosis (cyborg), of immortality, of the creation of a new human modality . Many of these pretensions are simply chimerical, but they tell us a lot about the modern mentality. And they open up a gloomy panorama. As C. S. Lewis has already lucidly pointed out, whenever we speak of man's dominion over nature, in reality we are talking about the supremacy of some men over other men; and generally, of a small minority over the immense majority.

Our society is characterized by a disturbing combination of civilization and barbarism, an expression of the ambivalent human condition, capable of the best and the worst. There are many factors that explain the proliferation of aggressive behavior. I wonder if we could speak of a radical factor: what is the ultimate aim of the murderer written request ? What is at stake when one man kills another? There is no human group without power, and the modern state concentrates an unprecedented amount of power. But this capacity, in spite of ways of exercising an unprecedented cruelty, is limited. Man, even the despot, is subject to a higher power: death. No one escapes its jurisdiction. Ultimately written request, the murderer is associated with death, with the supreme power. In the limit, he can aspire to be the last to die, which is a consolation. He who kills exercises supreme sovereignty, decides on the life and death of others, places himself above good and evil, plays God.

The authorities, the health care staff , the parents who decide on the life or death of unborn children or the terminally ill participate in the same game. They succumb to a particularly insidious fascination, which is to set themselves up as supreme judges. Hegel already wrote: "The work of absolute freedom is death".