Mortality, Fear, and Society

The most fearsome thing you can say about a warrior is that he has no fear of death. Self-preservation is our strongest instinct; a person who overcomes it is free to do anything. He or she is freed from the prison of consequences society builds to control our behavior. We usually forget this when we are suicidal, but the people around us don’t.

When we start demanding reasons to live from the people in our lives, they can’t possibly give us a sufficient answer. Unless you’ve broken your self-preservation instinct you don’t need a reason to live. You live to live. You live to see what the future is. You live because typically we’re programmed to believe the future will be better than the present. That seems to be part of the ruminative apparatus.

Society rests on a few unspoken assumptions. The most important assumption is that people want to keep living. Humans are typically driven by self-preservation and self-improvement, and our social systems reflect that. However, if things go sideways, people (and entire societies) can be tempted to hit the self-destruct button. Unfortunately, this happens more often than most people would care to admit.

For example, the Black Death bulldozed medieval France. In some places as much as 50-70% of the population was killed in the first wave of plague alone. With so many people suddenly dying, people naturally looked for answers. Unfortunately, in medieval Europe most looked to the Church. The Church told them to pray. When high ranking bishops and cardinals started to die, lots of people lost faith. No one could out-pray the bishop. The pope went into hiding. Maybe God was angry for inscrutable reasons. Maybe there was no God.

As uneasiness became fear and fear became panic, the rich left the cities. Politicians, police, and doctors fled to the countryside, leaving the poor urban denizens on their own. Knowing their death was eminent and inevitable, they drank and screwed and looted and started fires. Others hid from the chaos while slowly starving. Without the looming threat of the future, crops went to waste in the field. Nothing productive can thrive when you’re staring death straight in the eye.

Once the plague receded, French culture changed. Artists adopted the themes of memento mori, or reminders of death. The very French attitude of “live today tomorrow you may die” has roots in this era. Germany was not nearly as devastated by the Black Death, and that’s one very important reason they have a different kind of philosophy.

16th Century French gravestone. That skull is having a blast!

This isn’t only an ancient story. The exact same thing happened in Memphis, Tennessee during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878. Within 5 days half of the city fled. For the entire summer, anyone left in Memphis suffered. Infrastructure and commerce collapsed, healthcare was gone, and no one knew yet that the mosquitoes were carrying the disease. Thousands died. This has happened over and over and over in New Orleans. Cultures that are literally plagued by disease are usually more comfortable with death. This freaks out people from other cultures (looking at you, Germany).

Here’s one of the main problems we’ve run up against in the war on terror. Many suicide bombers are forced into it, but most are not. The people who join the jihad are, for whatever reasons, at the end of their ropes. In their minds, there is nothing else worth doing until the jihad is successful.

For some people the goal really is a certain reactionary form of Muslim rule. However, for most, it’s more about opportunity. Under the current global climate, most of these men and women come from places where getting an education and a job and having a family and keeping them safe is an impossible dream. They’ve just been stuck in place, waiting to die their entire lives. We can’t scare people like that with bombs. Our aggression only proves that they are right-that if they had children we would have killed them.

We threaten death, but they no longer fear it. So, what can we offer instead?

A similar thing is happening with American gangs, especially those comprising people of color. Black men, who are 11 times more likely to die of homicide than white men, are the hardest hit.

I used to run Boy Scout summer camps for inner-city youth. These kids were bright and funny and creative, but most had few hopes or dreams for the future compared to their richer, whiter peers. Many of these boys had fathers in prison. Some would talk to me about how sad their moms were, about how hard they worked, even though things weren’t getting better. No one talked about college or a career.  

When the future holds nothing, the self-preservation instinct weakens. This happens because of societal failings (think Native teenagers trapped on a reservation) and/or because of personal crisis. At lower levels, this results in poor decision making and risky behavior. At higher levels it can result in violence, including suicide.

The weirdest thing is that people are terrible at thinking about the future. Our future hopes and dreams are always wildly different from what happens. The important thing is that we maintain that focus on the future.  

Today we live in a society where people are feeling more and more uncomfortable about the future. Things are angrier and more hateful than many of us have ever seen. Automation threatens all our jobs, and the planet is becoming more inhospitable to our delicate simian bodies. It seems the future is going dark for more and more of us, and we have the rising suicide rates to prove it.

This mounting distress is alarming, but I choose to reframe it. We are building a society of the fiercest warriors, hundreds of thousands of people who are unsticking themselves from the “shoulds” imposed on us from the outside. We need a vision for the future we can work for. If we can do that, we’ll be unstoppable. Only the strongest people can win a staring match with death.

See? Always be looking to the future. There is such a thing as dark optimism.