“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
-Charlie Kirk, 2023
I can’t really speak as a Charlie Kirk fan — I’m not a Christian, and I’m only “conservative” in the sense that I am deeply anti-left, in the left’s modern iteration. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I heard Charlie speak, and I don’t particularly remember what he said. My recollection was that he was a fairly normal, “standard” conservative Christian pundit, a fundamentally decent guy with a fairly impressive memory for statistics and bible verses.
But there is something extraordinary and positive about his death, something illustrated by it that we all feel, but which we don’t name anymore — we’ve become too modern, perhaps too materialist to remember the words to describe what has actually happened to Charlie Kirk:
He had a good death.
Just a few months ago, I had a debate with Gennady Stolyarov, the president of the American Transhumanist Party. Though most people remain generally unfamiliar with transhumanism as an ideology, the idealization of earthly immortality seems to suit a population that is largely concerned with the price of eggs and affordable healthcare. Within that frame and focus, the very concept of a “good death” seems like an oxymoron. How could death ever be good?
If we begin with the default assumption of immortality (as many people seem to do, tacitly), then all death is terrible, and tragic. But as of 2025, immortality has not been achieved. Death is the default, the given expected outcome, and as Richard Dawkins famously said, “that makes us the lucky ones,” compared to the incalculable number of possible humans who will never be. And even if biological immortality were achieved, that would only increase our exposure (by increased time) to the chances of a car accident, a fall at work, a lethal environmental disaster… or simply being murdered.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
In the face of death as a given, the question is not “if,” but when and — perhaps more importantly — how we die.
Death is not just the cessation of life because our life is not merely the continuity of sensory experience. A part of our being is relational, and lies in the ties and shared experiences and effects we have on others. This component of ourselves does not disintegrate when the light in our eyes is extinguished. For this part of ourselves, death is not a burial, but the completion and framing of a work of art, which lives on after we die, to be viewed and contemplated — even conversed with — after we ourselves have departed.
The finality of this act is of especial significance because our lives are not static, but reflect change and trajectory. Things that we have done earlier on in our life reach a point in the past where they no longer seem to reflect who we “truly” are — we have grown beyond that, perhaps. Thus what we do, or what we are doing, in the moment of our death in a sense becomes the truest expression of our ultimate nature because it is our final act.
Solon famously took this so far as to say that we could not even know a man until he had died:
μήτε ἄνδρα ὀλβίον πρὶν ἂν τελευτήσῃς ὁρᾶν
“Do not count a man blessed before you see his end”
Implied in Solon’s words is an incompleteness to life without death, at least in terms of whether we can compare and contrast lives to decide which is best. This is important because this sort of comparison is necessary in a worldview which holds certain values, which some people live up to in greater or lesser degrees. Comparison is a symptom of meaning worthy of pursuit, and death is thought of as the finish-point which allows for a meaningful comparison in how we might pursue this meaning. Without comparison and notions of better or worse lives, life loses its urgency in actual living, in the pursuit of excellence, at least within a society with more or less shared values.
But if death and how we die is so important, we are faced with a problem: we do not always get to choose how we die. Death can come to us at any moment.
Classicist Greg Nagy describes the manner in which heroes attempted to “script” their own death, in pursuit of eternal glory, and that the moment of death can be the most intense, and the most “real” moment of life, even from the framework of appreciating life itself:
…for the Greek hero, the ultimate real-life experience is not life but death. In some situations, death can even become an alternative to sex. So death must be a defining moment of reality for the hero, and it must be not feared but welcomed, since the hero must ultimately achieve the perfect moment of a perfect death.
The importance of death in the achievement of glory in poetry was a matter of existential importance to the aspiring hero. But how can we script the perfect death if we do not really know when we will die? Indeed, there is a chance death takes us without us even realizing it.
Perhaps the only answer is to attempt to script our life — to become the sort of person for whom no matter when or how death comes, we are taken in the act of doing good, such that the good we accomplished becomes our signature at the end of a life that led up to that moment.
To me, this is how Charlie Kirk’s death strikes me, as coming suddenly, but still perfectly, as he was doing something that had come to define his character: going into hostile territory to debate and defend his ideas. From close-up videos, we can see that he was wearing a bulletproof vest, meaning he had some notion of the danger he was in. I like to imagine that had he known that one day, he would be shot while debating on college campuses… he would have come anyway.
Labeling Charlie Kirk’s death as a “good death” is not to be glad that he died, nor is it to imply that his death was preferable because it was likely painless. Depictions of heroic death that we find in works like the Iliad are full of morbid descriptions of pain, desecration, and needless suffering; these facts, by themselves, do not make a death “good” or “bad” in the sense that we are talking about. Charlie would probably insist upon the inclusion of Jesus, whose death was, by intent, both painful and humiliating. Neither is a death “good” because it was in any way politically ‘useful’. It might be useful to his cause, or it might be that there is no one who can replace him, in which case his murderer was, politically, successful. Rather, the idea of a “good death” is something personal, something just for Charlie himself, that we might hope to emulate for ourselves — not by dying before our time, but by living in such a way that whenever death takes us, we leave on our feet, doing something useful or courageous, or in connection with others we care about.
This is what happened to Charlie Kirk: he was assassinated while doing something he had become famous for doing. His death “in the line of duty” — so to speak — has iconized him in connection with what he was doing at the moment of the shot.
And we can take Charlie Kirk’s death as a particularly poignant reminder of this reality of the significance of our death, because today, so much of death is hidden from us. We are surrounded by images of death, in entertainment and games and so forth, but our body recognizes the unreality of those images. Our actual family members die in hospital waiting rooms or care homes, often far away. This is poor preparation for the reality of death that we will experience personally, when it is our turn.
