Cancer Is Great… or It’s the Worst Thing on Earth… Depending on What You Think Life Is For.

Cancer is great.

If that sentence made you recoil… good. That recoil is the whole point. It means you are still living inside the children’s story where disease is the villain, the body is the victim, and medicine is the hero in shining armor riding in to save the day.

That story is useful… but it isn’t true.

Cancer isn’t an invader. It isn’t a foreign army that marched across your borders. Cancer is not an alien intelligence. It’s not a parasite with its own agenda.

Cancer cells are us.

They are our cells, using our machinery, obeying our rules… at least the rules that matter. They borrow our replication tools, our energy supply, our signaling systems. They don’t arrive from outside. They come from within. Which makes the war metaphor comforting… and also absurd. It’s like declaring war on your own liver.

So yes… cancer is great. Or it’s the worst thing on Earth. That depends on what you think life is for.

The Useful Illusion of the Self

I’ve written before about the useful illusion of the self. Not as some sacred gift handed down to the individual… but as a control system. A feature. A user interface. A practical hallucination that allows a biological machine to operate at higher resolution.

Humans are selves because it works. It works well enough that the species wearing it became the number one draft pick on Earth. Eight billion is the scoreboard.

But the body doesn't care about the "Self." It cares about continuity.

The Internal Auditor: Why It Prunes

We think of cancer as a "mistake," but it follows a specific, brutal hierarchy. It prunes at all ages, and it does so for the sake of the village.

In the young, cancer is the Quality Control Check. It finds the flaw in the foundation before the house is even built. If a child develops an aggressive, low-level cancer, it is the system identifying a blueprint that cannot sustain the future. It’s a hard "No" from the species to prevent the propagation of instability. It wasn't wolves that took that kid; it was humanity’s own internal architect.

In the old, cancer is the Ecologist. It is the mechanism that solves the problem of a finite world. Humans are sentimental; we will spend every scrap of food, every watt of energy, and every hour of labor to keep a beloved elder alive.

But the species needs those resources for the builders and the breeders. When the "Maintenance Audit" determines that an organism is no longer a net contributor—but a consumer of the present—the termination cascade triggers. Cancer works on behalf of the species to reclaim those resources. It is the "Internal Wolf" that culls the herd when the external predators are gone.

The "Tolerable Error" (The Genome's Betrayal)

Here is the secret: Your body has the power to fix these "mistakes."

The machinery of DNA repair is staggering. Your cells have "proofreading" enzymes that can spot a single misplaced base pair out of billions. We have the internal technology to be nearly perfect.

But perfection is a resource hog.

Evolution is a bean counter. It realized eons ago that building a "perfect" repair system would cost too many calories. So, it picked a tolerable level of error. It isn't that the body can’t fix the mutation; it’s that the body refuses to pay for the upgrade.

By capping the repair budget, the genome ensures that errors will eventually accumulate. It builds in a planned obsolescence. This is a budgetary decision made by the genome that is not in the interest of the occupant. The occupant (you) wants to live; the genome just wants to spend those calories on the next generation.

The Part Everyone Hates: Inputs

Some cancers are negotiated. Some are imposed.

If you spend decades bathing your tissues in carcinogens, disrupting your sleep, and running your metabolism hot, the organism eventually comes to a conclusion about you. And if that conclusion is “unsalvageable”… then yes, cancer is on you.

Not because you “deserved it.” But because systems respond to inputs. You fed it inputs that predictably break systems. The body doesn't keep score; it keeps budget.

The New Problem: We’re Rich Now

Here’s where it gets interesting. We are no longer living under the constraints evolution was calibrated for. We are rich now.

Evolution couldn’t afford nuance. It had to prune with a chainsaw. We can afford the scalpel.

In the wild, a mutation was a death sentence because the body couldn't afford the "fix." But we have excess energy now. When we treat cancer, we are subsidizing the repair budget. We are telling the genome: "I know you didn't want to pay to fix this, but I have the resources. I’m overriding your 'tolerable error' setting."

That is what civilization is, at its best. It is the decision to keep the baby… and dump the bathwater.

Stop Saying “Cure Cancer”

We should stop calling it “curing cancer.” Cancer is not the ultimate problem. Cancer is the output.

Cancer is what you see when the organism can no longer afford order. The war metaphor makes you feel heroic… but it also makes you stupid. It distracts you from the deeper question: What kind of inputs make the system decide it’s cheaper to let parts of you go rogue than to keep the peace?

Don’t just aim at tumors. Aim at the conditions that make tumors stable. Aim at the things that make cellular rebellion a rational move for the genome.

Don’t cure cancer. Outgrow it. Because cancer is only “great” or “the worst thing on Earth” depending on what you think life is for. And once you stop pretending life is a fairy tale for the individual… you can finally start designing a world where the individual actually has a chance.