The hand ax is a remarkable tool. Essentially, it’s a round rock that fits nicely in the palm. One side of the rock is then chipped away to make a sharp edge. Holding it in their palms, early humans used these simple tools for just about everything–cutting, scraping, digging. The oldest of these hand axes dates to about 2.6 million years ago. It was our first real tool as humans. Not only was it our first tool, but it actually reached its widest use only 200,000 years ago. Consider that. For 2.4 million years, our most important tool as humans was a sharp rock we held in our hands.
Since then, the pace of innovation has increased somewhat. It was also about 200,000 years ago that we first wore clothing. We didn’t have a boat until about 12,000 years ago. We started making decorations out of iron about 6,000 years ago, but didn’t use it widely until about 3,000 years ago. It was shortly before that, that we wrote our first words.
We invented the printing press about 600 years ago, which really kicked things into high gear. We had our first gun 400 years ago, steam engines 300 years ago, our first vaccine, car and telegraph only 200 years ago. Electricity and the phone came around 150 years ago, the airplane about 100 years ago, TV followed shortly thereafter, and 50 years later, all of humanity watched the first man land on the moon, which may have been the last time humanity all rallied around a single event.
The point is, as beings that evolved during a time when a rock was the state of the art for a couple of million years, for us to go from the horse and buggy to landing a man on the moon in a single person’s lifetime has been a bit disorienting. The fact that we’ve been able to develop the social institutions to manage this kind of unprecedented change, even if poorly, is nothing short of a miracle. Whether we like it or not, however, the pace of change in technology continues to accelerate, and I fear that our existing social institutions are having a hard time keeping up.
Thanatism can help us as a society become more agile though, and it can do so in two ways. First, the mass acceptance of our own mortality would be a conversion event at a scale unlike any humanity has experienced before. Having that many individuals reassess their core beliefs at the same time would give this generation an incredibly unique and valuable perspective. We could see that we’re capable of massively rethinking who we are as humans almost instantly.
More specifically, with Thanatism, our conversion isn’t a one-time event. As Thanatists, we will explore practices that daily confront us with our eventual end. These moments of “existential clarity” help create a space where we can cast off our daily mindlessness and consider, even if just for a moment, why we’re doing what we do. These moments of clearing help promote an incredibly agile mind, one that re-evaluates itself as a continuous and integral part of its being.
As we discussed earlier, society acts as a large-scale entity that reflects and amplifies the minds of the individuals of which it is composed. As such, we could hope and perhaps even expect that a society composed of Thanatists, who themselves have a natural proclivity to reconsider, might be better suited to considering and adapting to the rapidly evolving technological environment we’ve created for ourselves.
Static minds and a static society are perfect for beings that inhabit a static world. We’ve become so powerful, however, that our planet and the virtual ecosystems that we humans are increasingly immersed in aren’t static anymore. If you think the change from the horse and buggy to rocket ships in a single lifetime was difficult for society to navigate, imagine how quickly our world will evolve, once freed of the material constraints of physics and subject only to the constraints of the latest upgrade. In order to survive, each of us, and the society that we generate, will need the kind of agile mind that Thanatism promises.