Fundamentally, Thanatism asks us to accept, with the fullness of our humanness, that we shall one day cease to exist forever. The notion of creating what I think ultimately is best described as a “faith” in the 21st Century is such an outmoded way of thinking, that I think it deserves some explanation. Although I’ll give my full “testimony” toward the end of this work, I want to first acknowledge my personal reasons for writing this. It all started when I was at an evangelical college working on my degree in Philosophy. I was doing an independent study reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, when I noticed that he was using death much like the Christian faith uses God or Jesus–as a belief that gets deep inside us and transforms us for having believed.
I didn’t think too much about this for several years, but when I was 25, I left my Ph.D. program and began to question the postmodern philosophical outlook that I’d developed while working on my degree. It was then that I realized that I was using my skepticism about the very notion of truth to help me psychologically evade what I believe every human actually knows at some deep level–that we each shall die and that our death is the end of us. What I experienced when I allowed this truth to center itself at my core was almost identical in its transformative power to what I’d experienced in my teens when I accepted Christianity.
Since then, I’ve felt that such a powerful belief deserves further exploration. Personal reasons aside, however, there are other, more objective reasons for building a new faith based on our acceptance of death. When I ask the question, “Why Thanatism”, there are two deeply intertwined questions that must be answered–”Why death?” and “Why a faith?”
As to the first question, “Why death,” I think it’s important to consider what characteristics a faith would have to possess to even have a shot at being something of any value. I think there are at least three–it must be a core belief, generally not accepted by most people, and yet utterly obvious. It must be a core belief in order to be transformative like a faith needs to be. It can’t be generally accepted because if it were, it wouldn’t change anything. And finally, if it isn’t obvious using our ordinary way of thinking, I doubt many in this skeptical generation would consider believing it. Fortunately, death is uniquely qualified in each of these regards.
When I say that death is a core belief, I mean that it sits at the center of who we are as humans. In other words, our belief about our own personal mortality doesn’t sit in isolation from our other beliefs, but rather touches almost every aspect of who we are as humans. As such, should we fundamentally change that belief, it can have a cascading effect on our other beliefs and the actions that follow. In what follows, we shall see that when we fully accept death that such acceptance isn’t benign; just the opposite in fact–accepting death deeply and personally, radically changes who we are.
As stated above, for a belief to be truly transformational, it must also not already be accepted by the majority of humans. Obviously, if most of humanity already believes something, writing about why we should accept that belief would not only be uninteresting, but largely impotent. What we shall discover in what follows, however, is that the great majority of people in this world don’t believe that they are mortal at all. Even more interestingly perhaps, we shall discover that even those of us who intellectually accept our mortality, on some deep level, still deny its personal implications for us in the way we lead our lives.
Finally, our transformative new belief must be something that is obvious using our ordinary way of thinking. As I suggested, it must possess this characteristic because this world is skeptical enough at this point that any faith asking us to believe something that requires a suspension of our ordinary way of assessing events would simply be rejected by most people. Fortunately, death meets this criterion like few other beliefs, as it is as close to a statistical certainty as we get in this world. When we consider that not a single one of the nearly 90 billion people born before the 20th Century currently walks this earth, in spite of humanity’s obsession to avoid death, I don’t think it requires a giant leap of faith to believe that we too shall one day die.
As to the second question, “Why a faith?”, I believe there is nothing in the human psychological toolkit quite as potent as a faith, and its power extends to our relationships with ourselves, others, and our society. With regards to our relationship with ourselves, by setting a new belief at our core, we humans are capable of undergoing a transformation that affects every aspect of who we are. This isn’t speculation, as millions of people throughout history have experienced this kind of transformation through traditional faiths, usually by building a relationship with God or gods. We shall find, however, that death’s power is at least equal to these gods of old in its power to transform.
As to how a faith can strengthen our relationships with others, we modern, secular humans have created a world where we value our freedom to set our own core beliefs more highly than anything else. The battle for this freedom has been hard fought, and we shall see that the right, and indeed, the obligation to set our own core beliefs is a fundamental principle of Thanatism. Having said that, we shall also discover that our respect for freedom of thought has had some unintended consequences for our relationships with others. Namely, we’ll propose that our individualized stories about reality make it harder to build deep connections with each other. In short, we’ve exchanged intimacy for control.
Finally, faith is important to society as faiths inherently help bring our private beliefs into the realm of public discussion. We’ll discover that our absolute respect for the freedom of the individual has led to an implicit ban on considering the merits of one core belief versus another. As such, we find ourselves living in a world divided where we’re not even allowed to discuss the very things that divide us. We shall advance the premise that because our public actions emanate from our core beliefs, these beliefs must once again become the subject of public discussion, as it is only by starting from a common place that we have any hope as a society of arriving at common solutions.
I understand that the notion of a 21st Century faith, nonetheless one with death at its core, must seem the height of absurdity. Having said that, I hope that through the above you can at least see that such outlandishness hasn’t been undertaken without at least some consideration. We shall see that our own personal mortality has a uniquely powerful role in what defines us as people and that the tension between its obviousness and our insistence that it doesn’t apply to us personally leads to a great deal of personal, relational, and societal unrest. Finally, we shall at least consider whether our complete abandonment of the notion of a faith itself might not contribute to the sense of personal powerlessness, the erosion of intimacy, and the divided society that seem to define this current age.