I want to now discuss a concept that underlies a great deal of the harm that our acceptance of death can help us overcome. I hope you’ll excuse me once again utilizing an ancient concept to explain myself, this time, the concept of “Original Sin”. Original sin is the idea that every human being is born with a fundamental flaw that prevents us from leading the good life. This concept itself has been a great evil in the world. It’s taught generations, particularly those genetically or socially outside the current society’s mainstream, to feel that who they are, through no real choice of their own, is somehow wrong.
It may come as some surprise then that in Thanatism I might suggest we reintroduce this concept. Thankfully, Thanatism’s concept of Original Sin shall neither codify some particular instantiation of a human as “normal”, nor attempt to make us feel bad about ourselves. Less easily, however, it will ask us all to acknowledge something about ourselves that we each work vigorously to deny.
Specifically, and I hope not too controversially, Thanatism would say that each human who has ever been born, has been born self-centered. What do I mean by this? Well, what I don’t mean is the colloquial and pejorative use of this term, which typically describes someone who puts themselves before others. Certainly, this is an example of human self-centeredness, but it’s a rather extreme form of it. What I’m describing is something much more fundamental about people.
When I describe us as self-centered, I really take the term more literally–we are at the center of our worlds. This manifests itself in the experience of being a human in a number of ways. One quite literal way is that we experience the world as if we’re the center of it. To experience this, for a moment I’d like you to turn your eyes away from this text, stand up, look straight forward, and turn in a circle. You might also want to look all the way up and all the way down. If you did this, particularly with these words in mind, you might have noticed, perhaps for the first time, that you are the center of everything in your world.
Another way that we, as humans, are self-centered is that we can’t understand the world outside of what we already are. By the time we’ve developed enough to even consider our existence in any meaningful way, we’ve already been defined by our biology and our culture. We, as humans, of course, have no say in these things that happen to us before we even understand that there is an “us”. Nonetheless, because we’re the ones doing the understanding, we find it incredibly difficult to step outside of who we are to see our personal lenses that shape our world.
A final way that we’re self-centered, one that gets closer to the colloquial meaning of the word, is that we care deeply about ourselves. If we thought about any other object in the world even a fraction as much as we think about ourselves, we and others would clearly diagnose us as obsessed. Not only do we obsess about the big things in our lives–our health, our social status, our futures–but we equally obsess about the mundane–Am I hungry? Are my fingernails too long? Is this room a degree warmer than I’d like it to be? We don’t care about anything quite like we care about ourselves.
Now that we understand what I mean when I say that we’re self-centered, we must now explore how this self-centeredness is both original and sin. For our self-centeredness to be “original” it, in some sense, must be necessary for us as humans. In other words, it’s something we are, rather than something we choose to be. In the first way I described our self-centeredness, this is certainly the case. It is axiomatic (and in this case, I actually mean this from a mathematical perspective) that when we look around (note the term “around”) that we are at the center. That is as essential as it gets.
Our second way of being self-centered, in that we interpret the world through the lens of what we currently are, is equally necessary. As a thinking, perceiving being, by definition, I’m the thing that will be doing the thinking and perceiving. As such, as long as I’m the one doing the thinking and perceiving, I’ll be doing it through the being that I already am. In this way, I can hardly be held accountable for seeing things the way I see them. I can’t do anything else.
Finally, the way that we care about ourselves is essential in that we, as humans, are one of a number of living creatures on earth. In biology, the definition of a “successful” biological trait is one that enables a living organism to pass on its genetic code. It should come as little surprise then, that creatures who care deeply, even obsessively, about themselves tend to survive. In this sense, we don’t choose to care so much about ourselves, but rather we exist because we care so much about ourselves. Put most fundamentally, our self-centeredness is why we exist.
Given that our self-centeredness is necessary (although we’ll see later that Thanatism provides us with the key to unlock these paradoxes of our being), it hardly seems fair to call it sin. This would be entirely true if I were using the word “sin” as it’s commonly (or in today’s world seldomly but at least occasionally) used. When we speak of committing a sin or sinning, it typically means committing a willful act against an established moral code. In this common use, it’s more akin to breaking the rules.
Originally, however, before sin gained this moral connotations, it was an archery term that simply meant “to miss the mark”. In that sense, our self-centeredness is sinful, for indeed it misses the mark. The fact is, regardless of our bodies being the center of our perceptual field, or the logical necessity for us to perceive the world through that which we are, or our biological imperative to care primarily about ourselves, from a universal perspective, we are not the center of the universe in any way.
There are, in fact, seven billion creatures, almost genetically indistinguishable from ourselves, each with a unique history, who are also perceiving and creating this world. Not only that, but there are trillions of perceiving creatures on planet Earth who aren’t human at all. Finally, if we are willing to play the odds, it seems most improbable, that our planet, being one of a couple hundred billion in our galaxy, and our galaxy being one of a couple hundred billion in the known universe, is the only one with creatures who can perceive. Put simply, as humans, our perception of the world is inherently, but mistakenly, self-centered.
Original sin–alive and well in the 21st Century–who would have guessed? And although this particular post borders on philosophy (with all the language play that makes that field so frustrating and fundamentally uninteresting at times), make no mistake–the original sin of self-centeredness has real, profound, and devastating consequences for humanity. It is the root of great suffering and violence. In fact, as the moniker of original sin implies, it may lie at the center of what robs us of the joy that seems so ever elusive for humanity.
The good news, however, and what is ultimately going to take up the vast majority of our time together, is that the original sin of self-centeredness, although necessary, can be overcome. This error, in all of its manifestations, no matter how deeply rooted into what it means to be, isn’t a prison we are bound to. Rather, what makes Thanatism so terribly exciting, and the reason I’m compelled to spend this year writing, is that, in spite of its bleak outlook for humans, Thanatism may very well hold the key to our freedom.