The statistics on life span gave evidence of a falling death rate, which was read to indicate the progress of civilization. Demographics took an even firmer grip when Emile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, analyzed suicide statistics, showing that each district in France had a suicide rate that hardly varied from decade to decade. A predictable number of people in any given district could be expected to commit suicide in the coming year. When the incidence of suicide dissolves into the sociology of class, occupation, heredity, religion, age, and so on, then the act of suicide becomes a fact of sociology quite apart from the psychology of the individual who commits it. The statistical fact becomes a societal force, dooming a definite percentage in each district to die by their own hands.
Data become destiny.
The life expectancy curve carries a force of its own. If you place yourself on it as a female teenager, say, you may have a life expectancy of at least seventy. Once you arrive there, the statistical tables may place your life term at eighty-six. And so on. That same you.