Although every normal way of looking at death implies that it is both universal and permanent, paradoxically, the majority of people don’t believe these truths about death at all. The fact is that a majority of people believe in the “ever-me”. This is the me that we currently are, but in some real way, see as existing outside of time. It’s the me through which we interpret the world. It’s the me whose every discomfort or inconvenience we spend an inordinate amount of care upon. I call it the ever-me because, for most of us, we at some deep level believe that the we that we currently are is someone who has always been and will, in some way, always be.
When I say that we see ourselves as always having been the person we are, I mean this in two ways. First, as humans, we have a difficult time seeing the contingencies that have gone into making us who we are. In other words, the way each of us sees the universe isn’t a universal perspective, but rather one restricted and even created by the historical, cultural, and biological circumstances that have made us the person that we are. What’s very hard to see, however, is that the seeing and doing that seem so natural to us are a once in the universe occurence of perception.
Another way our ever-me mistakenly sees itself as always having been is that it sees the current version of itself as the definitive version. To understand this, I want you to summon your 13-year-old self (or if you’re precocious enough to be reading this at a young age, a previous you). Ask that self what its greatest fear is. Ask it whom it would most desire to be closer to. Ask it the one thing it knows about the world that most people deny.
If you’re at all removed in time from that 13-year-old self, you probably have a hard time even guessing what that previous you would have answered, and if you can guess what that version of you would say, likely your answer today would be entirely different. That 13-year-old you was just as much you as the you that you are today, but somehow we forget that the person we currently are, just like that 13-year-old was, is no more permanent than a ripple in the river of our existence.
Of course, the aspect of the ever-me that is perhaps of most interest to Thanatism is the me that shall remain once our earthly selves have passed. To understand how deeply entrenched and universal our belief in the afterlife is, I think it makes sense to look at some statistics. Fortunately, Americans have been widely polled about their belief in the afterlife since 1944, and this polling has provided some incredibly useful data. According to Cornell’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, less than 20% of Americans believe that death is the end (most polls put this around 15%). Remarkably, this number has remained largely unchanged since polling began 75 years ago.
As you may expect, religious people tend to believe in life after death more than non-religious people, but you may be surprised that a survey conducted in 2014 by The Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture (AISFC) reveals that 32 percent of Americans who identified themselves as agnostics and atheists ALSO believe in an afterlife and that less than half this group believes that death is final. Also of interest is that according to a recent Canadian survey, although only 66% of society’s favorite whipping generation, the Millennials, believe in God (compared to 80% of people 70 or older), they are actually significantly MORE likely to believe in an afterlife, with 70% of Millennials believing in one, compared to only 65% of those over 80.
Not only do most of us believe in an afterlife, we’re also quite certain about that belief. In the same American polls going on since 1944, less than 10% of people answer either that they “don’t know” or have “no opinion” about the afterlife. I find this remarkable given that no matter what our beliefs about life after death are, none of them can be proven definitively.
I also love how much we apparently know about the afterlife. 90% believe that we’ll be happy. 88% think that there will be love between people, though only 14% believe there will be sexual relations between spouses (apparently one lifetime is enough of that!). 81% believe that crippled people will be able to walk, but only 20% believe we’ll be playing sports. Most importantly, of course, 87% of those who believe in heaven, believe that they will be going there.
My question is, where are we getting all this information from? How are we all so certain? I mean, even if the obvious non-functionality and decay of every human who has ever died doesn’t definitively prove that death is the end, it certainly doesn’t imply that death is a new beginning. What’s going on here? How can people who are so skeptical about even the smallest claims, KNOW that there’s an afterlife where they’ll be happy but without their spouses or any sports?
Billions of people walking this planet, most of us spiritually if not intellectually convinced, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the “we” that we currently are will always be–if this mystery doesn’t excite you, you are already dead. If you don’t believe that this level of cognitive dissonance, one that is so deep and so widespread, doesn’t affect us individually and as a society, then there’s no reason to read any further.
If, however, you’re beginning to get a sense, even if it’s just an inkling, that something might be going on here, something huge, something weird, something the resolution of which could transform this world like nothing before it, then buckle up. Because what is to follow will be an unflinching examination of why this massive contradiction exists in all of us and the extraordinary transformation that we can experience once it’s resolved.
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.
Now that we’ve gotten a brief look at what Thanatism is and why we might want to consider it, I think it only fair to briefly look at why it is almost certainly doomed from the start. This is a relatively easy task, for Thanatism has so much working against it, if I knew what I know now when I first started it, I no doubt wouldn’t have written it at all.
First, it’s essentially a book. Although, were I to format it as such, what follows would be a relatively short book at 200 pages, books aren’t really at the top of the food chain when it comes to public consumption anymore. I’m releasing this serially online to hopefully reduce the burden it presents, but even as what is essentially a blog, it is a good decade out of fashion. Believe me, if I were capable of distilling what follows into a meme, I would.
Beyond the failings of verbosity, the subject itself–death–dooms this project from the start. Although we’ll make the case that death is an extremely powerful part of our psychology and that our denial of it causes a great deal of harm, we repress it both personally and socially because it’s depressing as hell. I’m literally asking us to put at the center of our being something we hate so much as humans that nearly every successful faith in history has been built around finding a way to avoid thinking about it.
Speaking of traditional faiths, another problem is that it’s quite likely that Thanatism, should it ever manage to overcome the obscurity it’s most likely doomed to, will be received by their members with nothing less than complete hostility. As if being a competing faith alone weren’t enough to doom it to such a fate, Thanatism literally advocates the near opposite of the most sacred tenets of most traditional faiths. Whereas they promise eternal life, Thanatism tells us we shall all die. Whereas they claim that a higher power is in control, Thanatism asks us to accept the responsibility that comes from our position as the highest power on this planet. Whereas they claim that we are important to the creator of the universe, Thanatism teaches that our self-importance is an illusion that we must overcome.
Of course, this wouldn’t be so bad for Thanatism if the silent, secular majority were to embrace it, but from the early feedback I’ve received from the few people I’ve released this to, I’m likely to have more success with the currently faithful. Nearly everyone who’s read this has been nothing less than hostile to the concept of a faith at all. Given how much secular society rightly values our freedom of thought, this reaction is on some level justified, but quite frankly, I’ve been shocked at how negative the energy has been even toward a faith built on a rational foundation that promotes that freedom of thought as one of its highest values.
Having acknowledged the futility of this project, I’ve pressed forward because these exact things that condemn Thanatism to obscurity are exactly what make it important. Death, although depressing, sits at the center of one of the last great contradictions in the human mind, the resolution of which may just set us free. In spite of Thanatism having none of the assurances of traditional faiths, like them, it deeply values the power of personal commitment to a belief and at least entertains the notion that we humans might just be better when we believe together. And although secular society has gained a great deal in overcoming the totalizing superstitions of the past, we need to consider equally the impoverished sense of community that our individualism has led us to.
There are obviously a great many things working against Thanatism, but I can promise you this–if you can approach what follows with openness and curiosity, if rather than judging its obvious shortcomings, you can mine it for the occasional nugget of truth, you will enjoy the journey. You most likely won’t become a Thanatist, but Thanatism will leave its mark. It will challenge you to consider who you are, how you came to be, and show you a path that you almost certainly haven’t fully considered. I hope that’s enough to encourage you to join us on this journey, as the one thing I know for certain is that what we create over the next year, will be better for having you involved.
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.
