The massive, brutal reality of death is one that seems to lie so heavily on the human soul that significant portions of culture seem to center around attempting to deal with it. To accept the brutal nature of death is to accept that we live in a prison reality. All life and matter is just a thin crust on top of the huge, crushing inevitability of being erased from existence. And what’s worse, not only is life ended prematurely all the time, not only do we have no control over when it happens, but the extinction of life seems to be necessary for survival. Not only do we live with this huge, horrifying curse hanging over our heads, but we seem obligated to inflict it on others.
Humans can’t live contemplating this truth for very long. It’s a massive, crushing reality. It flattens everything, makes your whole world seem like a thin film over the void. You will begin to lose yourself, contemplating this brutal truth for too long. So we seek ways to step back from the totality of it.
The first step is simply to try to ignore it. Acknowledge these truths, yes, but don’t think about them too much. This is a thin defense, however. The more you see of death, the less you’re able to avoid thinking about it, and unless you’re devoid of imagination, this central horror of reality will always be threatening to take over your mind.
Next, you might reach for reasoning. You might say that before you were born you didn’t exist, and so you have already experienced the state of not existing and didn’t seem to mind it. So the period after your death, when you will also not exist, won’t be so bad. This is a step further than simply ignoring the issue, and a clever mental trick. You’ve already experienced the central horror of reality – non-existence – so it can’t really be that bad, right? But the fact is, there’s a big difference between never having existed at all, and, having existed, knowing you must go back to not existing. But this mental trick may be enough to hide the horror of death for some people.
For many more, though, it is clearly not enough. The next step may be to deny the reality of death completely, through the invention of an afterlife, or the idea of a cycle of rebirth. You can even perform another mental magic trick, and attack the horror of death head on, posing oblivion and annihilation as a welcome relief to the endless cycle of rebirth. The problem with this tactic is that it requires faith, and faith requires cultural cohesion. It may even be – although I can’t say for certain – that the long-term maintenance of faith requires more than simple cultural uniformity, it requires a certain level of violent enforcement of dogma. Perhaps any faith that does not have the cultural power to punish heretics is a faith that is already on a long retreat. Perhaps no amount of social pressure can protect the central dogma of faith from the long centuries of unpunished skepticism. Perhaps any faithful society, no matter how monolithic the faith, is on the road to losing it if they don’t punish apostates, even if it may take centuries to see the faith truly crumble.
Another way to attempt to deal with the horror of death may be to try to claim its power for yourself. This is a thread of thought that the modern west is mostly isolated from, but those in military service may be able to relate, and you can get a dim glimpse of the idea from reading some select military literature. To grapple with the idea of mortality from a distance is one thing, to be required to deal it is another. To deal death is to command an awesome power, far beyond mere destruction of bodies, and if you wield it enough, it can become a mental magic trick, a way to deny the horror of your own mortality. Your own mortality seems somehow less intimidating when you hold power over the mortality of others. This, when operating among masses of men, can lead to a culture of death worship. When I say worship, I don’t mean that the men will literally be building temples to death. Nor do I mean that they will necessarily venerate death as something holy. But they will be engaged in constant rituals that put death at the center. They will get up and run while singing chants about killing and being killed, much of their day will be spent practicing different methods of dealing death, and they will often be exposed to extremely graphic imagery involving death. Individuals may respond to this in different ways – one may even view this whole culture with a kind of ironic detachment – but the rituals will still be performed. You could say that every military operates under a culture of death worship to some degree. Death worship is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. It is merely another method by which those who live with violence can deal with mortality. However, the broader culture of death worship can go wrong. Just as a culture of even the mildly religious can produce, through some mechanism, cults, so the broader death worship culture can produce death cults, which can lose themselves to brutality.
So there are many ways to deal with the idea of death, both secular and religious. More than I’ve
named here, certainly, there are other mental loops and religious ideas about death. But this is the totalitarianism of death: So much of our human thought is based around cultural, philosophical and religious ideas that sprang up around death, and the logic that extends from these ideas. If you are a conservative, your ideas on a broad range of issues are likely to be informed by (in America, at least) Christianity, and a large part of the Christian ethos is based around the story they tell themselves about death. But because so much of our belief systems are built up around how we deal with death, fundamental disagreements between two belief systems can shake people to their core. Not all disagreements are fundamental disagreements. Christians can have a wide variety of disagreements with one another, some taken very, very seriously. Fundamental disagreements are those in which two incompatible ethical systems clash with each other. If two people agree that, say, crime is a problem, they can argue over the way to deal with it. However, if someone is trying to argue the same point with a mob boss, they may run into the fundamental problem of the mob boss thinking that crime is a good thing.
Fundamental disagreements like this, then, shake us to our core because they can ultimately feel like an attack on our mental defenses against the horror of death, the defenses that keep us sane and functioning. It may be in the interest of society, then, to minimize the contact people have with fundamental disagreements like this. It may be that a certain portion of the population can be allowed to toy with the intellectual idea of non-standard mental defenses against death. In fact, I think this sort of mental freedom and experimentation can be a good thing. But if the majority of the country is of christian faith, you may want to limit their exposure to things that challenge the idea of their faith. After all, we all have our irrational beliefs about death to keep madness at bay. But the average human being may not have the ability (or inclination) to keep shoring up these defenses when exposed to constant attack. Just because we have a certain portion of the population capable of reasoning and experimenting with different mental defenses against death does not mean the average man is capable of doing so. (And given the mental eccentricities associated with the intellectual elite, I’d question just how ‘undamaged’ they really are, experimenting with their defenses like that.) Take your average man, and constantly expose him to the idea that his fundamental beliefs about death are wrong, and he may not be so likely to accept new mental defenses, but rather to let a little bit of that madness-inducing horror into his soul. It may be mentally unhealthy to, however gently, expose the average person to the idea that their beliefs about death are mistaken.
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