Previously we discussed how accepting our own historical nature can help us understand that others are products of forces they can’t entirely control, just like we are. As Thanatists, however, our grounds for understanding and empathy don’t end there. What we also know, is that for each of us, our greatest project–the building up of ourselves–will someday come to an end that only we shall face.
Some faiths, like Buddhism, also accept that we shall one day die, but they will tell you that there is nothing inherently tragic about it. Rather, it’s the holding onto our notion of immortality or an “I” at all that causes us to suffer. As indebted to these teachings Thanatism is, on this point, we shall disagree. Our minds, our hopes, and our destinies–that which we build up throughout our lifetimes–are greater than than bodies from which they come. They are sacred and long for immortality. Our rage when they are taken away from us or those we love is not an arbitrary or broken reaction. It is the fully just and righteous rage of the immortal fighting against its mortality.
As such, it is right to mourn this loss. It is our deeply human right to reject and flee from this unfair juxtaposition of the eternal and the unfathomably trivial. Understanding this gives us yet another, and perhaps the most uniquely Thanatist, common cause with those who surround us–we are all struggling through an existence that is, at some deep level, inherently unfair. Accepting this tragedy as a tragedy, helps us not only to better understand our own misguided attempts to hide from it, but also to empathize with the defenses that others have built up to do the same. Often these defenses are at the root of the hurtful acts of others. They reject us to protect themselves. They lash out because our words expose that which they fear. They treat us unfairly because they feel defenseless in this world and so act selfishly to protect that little which they have.
This world is indifferent to our survival or happiness. The only surety it offers is that at some point it will eliminate each and every one of us. As such, we must suffer with each other and collectively mourn the tragedy of human life on this earth. Rather than rejecting others because of their frailty, we must celebrate that we have become strong. We must use this strength of the real to resist being hurt and rather turn that hurt into a compassion that transforms us into agents that heal.
We, as humans, should all marvel at each other. We should marvel at the apes who have developed the ability to see our own inevitable end, and yet still, through the creation of fantastic myths, both global and personal, manage to carry on with our day-to-day duties as we march toward our end. We all participate in this collective myth making, and it is as close as we shall come in this life to a miracle that, in spite of what we know about this world and ourselves, together, we find a way to endure.
When we break through the veil of the ever-me and expose ourselves as the contingent, historically defined beings that we are, we open up a vast horizon of possibilities for re-creation. This acceptance of our contingent nature, however, not only serves as a powerful tool to build a better relationship with ourselves. It can also help us better understand others and ultimately accept them for who they are. In so doing, we open up equally vast new horizons for building relationships with others.
The reason for this is that when we hold onto the notion that the characteristics of the person we were born into are somehow essential, we tend to equate the way we are with the “correct” way to be. This makes those who have been born with differing genetics or in different societies feel “wrong”. Most of us who have been brought up in mult-cultural societies have been taught to overcome this initial reaction of wrongness, but it’s nonetheless incredibly powerful.
I used to teach a philosophy class about different concepts of the person. The university I taught at had many first generation college students and my class was about half black and half white. Since I knew my students had a hard time with reading and often wouldn’t complete the texts, sometimes I’d start the class by having a few students read out loud. One afternoon when I asked for volunteers to read, the usual suspects raised their hands, and I chose my star pupil, as I knew the text was challenging to read.
As part of the curriculum, that week we were reading a short story written by a black woman from the inner-city in the late 1970s. In it, she wrote with the exact voice she’d grown up with. As my best reader began reading out loud, she faltered like I’d never heard her do so before. She was struggling to even make it through sentences and sounded like someone who couldn’t read at all. After about a page, I had to save her, so I suggested I’d finish the section for her. I got up and began to read and was quickly overwhelmed by the text. My tongue simply wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do.
As I was reading, in the back of the class I saw a young black man who never participated at all raise his hand, straight and high. I was actually a little shocked. I’d tried to get this student to participate in class before, but he always just slouched in his chair like what I was saying was the stupidest shit he’d ever heard. I asked him if he wanted to read and he just nodded his head.
After he slowly made his way to the front, he opened the text and began to read. What came out was nearly poetry. The naturalness and cadence with which he read was unreal. Here was a student that I didn’t even think could read, laying out a text that my best student and I couldn’t stammer through. After he’d finished a couple of pages, a black girl I’d also never heard say a word in my class raised her hand and read the text with equal passion and clarity. For the rest of the class, black student after black student, most of whom I’d never heard from before, read the rest of the story to us.
As someone working on my Ph.D. in Philosophy, I’d always considered myself pretty open to other people and other cultures. The fact is, however, although I doubt I would have admitted this to myself, I thought less highly of most of my black students than I did of my white and Asian students. I was pretty convinced that many of them couldn’t read at all. And although many of my students of all races did suffer from high schools where failure was a fully anticipated outcome, what I learned that day was that these particular students could read with the best of us if they were given a text that used the same language they’d grown up with.
The point is, even when we rationally accept that the person we are is a product of our unique history and biology, as the self-centered humans we are, we still feel like people who are different than us are wrong. This feeling of wrongness isn’t just a racial thing either. We secretly judge people for all sorts of ways they may differ from us–politics, sexuality, age, finances, and even what media they like. These misguided judgements of others by the ever-me completely cut off large portions of the population from the possibility of intimacy, and radically limit who we can feel close to.
That’s why it’s so important for Thanatism to be a faith rather than just a philosophy. Much of what death can teach us about ourselves and others are things that on some level we already know. When we emotionally accept our mortality, however, and through practices allow it to work into the core of our being daily, we begin to feel these things more viscerally.
My hope is that as we build a community, our practices together can help us live what we already know. Understanding that we have a limited perspective as humans isn’t enough. Understanding doesn’t break down the walls that prevent truly communing with those who are different than we are. We need to feel our limitations viscerally, so that our hearts can truly open to all of those people whose very differences would make them such incredible companions as we learn to walk this earth together.
I work in an office where people pass by on a regular basis. You can see inside of the office from the street, but the windows are slightly reflective to keep out the direct sunlight. When people walk by the window, they are magnetically drawn to look at it. Almost no one can pass without taking a glance. What are they looking at though? Are they fascinated to see me and my colleagues as we type at our computers? They are not.
What no one can resist is the opportunity to look at themselves. Even though the window is only slightly mirrored and doesn’t even give them a particularly good view of how they look, they find the opportunity to take a quick glance irresistible. Better yet, many will not only look at themselves, but while doing so, they will make a gesture or face to indicate that they were in fact not doing what they clearly were, but were rather deeply interested in the inner-workings of our office.
We use other people much like those passersby use my office window. We see them and nod in acknowledgement, but we’re actually looking at them as we would a mirror. We hold their gaze as our unconscious mind calculates what their countenance says about us. A friendly smile gives us confidence. An approving face justifies the outfit we selected that day. An askew glance might make us give ourselves a once over to see if there wasn’t something that we overlooked that morning. An avoidant glance can make us feel like we don’t exist.
Such is the mental life of the ever-me. Given how concerned it is about every aspect of our wellbeing, it should come as no surprise that it see others primarily as mirrors. It cares desperately about these others, but primarily for what they say about itself. Others put its vast computational power into overdrive as it sees every action as a reaction to itself. Of course, these vast mental resources are largely wasted because the ever-me is caught in a self-centered illusion of original sin. The fact is, these others don’t really notice us at all.
The way we use others as mirrors has many consequences. Some of these adversely affect us, the self-concerned viewer. We can experience social anxiety as the glance of the other petrifies us with fear. We can experience exhaustion as we over-calculate what their expressions are saying about us. Ironically, we may begin to lose ourselves as we constantly change our personality based on who we’re with.
Our mirror gazing causes us to harm not only ourselves, however, but also the others we use to see ourselves. Who hasn’t met a controlling parent trying to mold their child into the person they themselves could never be? What a joy is the spouse who tries to dress their partner for a big event, fearing how their partner’s outfit will reflect upon them? Who hasn’t experienced the overbearing manager who uses their power to control others in an effort to make up for the powerlessness they themselves feel?
Most importantly and most tragically for all involved in this game of mutual reflection is that we miss the opportunity to look through the window. What we fail to see through the immediacy of our own reflection is that there is an entirely other person waiting themselves to be seen. Our inability to look past ourselves and genuinely into another person’s soul robs us of moments of genuine intimacy.
Conversations between two people who primarily see themselves in what the other is saying are maddening. Every word spoken is an attempt to mold the conversation. Every word said by the other is heard as a personal slight. There are couples who have spent lifetimes convinced that their partner doesn’t understand them when they’ve never taken the opportunity themselves to look through the reflection into the other human who lives inside.
When we allow death, however, to fully enter into our lives, our reflection begins to dim. It’s difficult to fully explain, but the self begins to shrink. We begin to find ourselves less interesting. We become less obsessed and more amused about the trivial, temporary beings we ultimately are. And although this transformation has consequences of its own, it nonetheless dims ourselves enough to see the other human beings with whom we share our world.
Instead of feeling anxious when we encounter another’s gaze, we feel incredulous that another being could really care enough to judge us. Our calculators stop processing what the glance of another says about us, and begin to process what it might say about them. Rather than reinvent ourselves for every social occasion, we plod along consistently as we speak from what we know we are at our core.
Losing our self-importance isn’t always easy on us as Thanatists, but it’s nice to be able to go out into the world of others and actually hear what they’re saying. It’s nice to be able to see an expression not as a reflection of ourselves, but an outward display of what someone’s got going on inside. And as we learn to use the practices of Thanatism to open ourselves to new horizons, we can find that interacting with others no longer feels like a mutual act of self-preservation, but rather an opportunity to see inside an entirely other universe that we otherwise could never have known.
We are a society that has been silenced about matters of the spirit. For many of us in the secular West, these things simply aren’t discussed anymore, certainly not among strangers, but even rarely between friends and family. We remain silent out of both respect and fear. The silence born from respect is a good thing. We greatly cherish our freedoms and none more so than the freedom of the mind. This is a great privilege many have died for, and our willingness to allow others to believe as the will is a great virtue.
Our silence is also born of fear though, and this silence has a cost. As children, we grow up without guidance from our parents who fear speaking of death because they themselves have yet to come to terms with their end, or from our schools who fear treading on any particular personal fantasies, or from traditional faiths whose ancient values seem so out of place in our modern world, we create our own private fantasies about life and death. We each end up living in our own private spiritual mirage created from movies, stories from our childhood, and tidbits gleaned from religious holidays.
Because we each create our own spiritual worlds, we don’t discuss them openly. We don’t discuss them because we haven’t really fully considered them and feel ashamed of our ignorance. We don’t discuss them because we know they are fantasies without rigor. Most importantly, we understand that because each of our fantasies are unique to ourselves, any attempt to share them with another will most likely lead to a conflict without resolution.
This spiritual silence is a great tragedy for the world. Matters of the spirit, no matter how deeply buried, affect us in all that we do, and without discussing them openly, our weak foundations cause us to drift into meaninglessness. The greatest tragedy, however, is that in our silence we are always alone. Humans weren’t designed to sit in silence about the core of their beings. We long to listen and share these deepest matters of life with those we call mentors, students, friends and lovers.
The exception to this world of silence about the spirit are the communities of traditional faiths. Here the foundations of spiritual belief are prescribed from birth. Others join, first in curiosity and finally in acceptance, as they are guided in these matters for the first time. As someone who was once deeply involved in such a community, I can attest to the power and joy of this kind of spiritual sharing. By making matters of the spirit public and by creating a common language, members of traditional faiths are able to build connections with each other we simply lack in secular society.
I am unconvinced, however, that it is the substance of these traditional spiritual conversations that create the closeness. Just the opposite in fact. I suspect that traditional faiths live on in spite of their substance. They live on rather because of the richness of the relationships between their practitioners. It is the community and trust that is built between people who share regularly about these deepest matters of life that sustains beliefs that would have otherwise long ago faded into history.
This is the fundamental dilemma of traditional faith in our modern world. It is becoming increasingly untenable for people to set as their core belief one prescribed by a primitive people hundreds if not thousands of years ago. What if we didn’t have to make this compromise though? What if we could share a common core without having to resort to a special way of thinking? What if we had a shared language about matters of the spirit that encouraged us all to speak plainly about life and death?
This is why, once again, it is the acceptance of death that is at Thanatism’s core. Believing that we all die doesn’t require us to mutually adopt some ancient magic. Believing that we all die doesn’t require us to take a leap of faith. Death is just the opposite. Nothing in life is as statistically certain. Death is utterly common, and yet, in spite of this, because it is so intimate and deeply set, there is no belief more able to wrest our commonalities from their prisons of isolation than to mutually accept that which to this point we’ve all agreed to deny.
Thanatism doesn’t require that we come from any particular culture. Thanatism doesn’t require that we accept the word of an ancient people whose thoughts about anything else in life we would never countenance. Thanatism gives us the opportunity to take the most present spiritual matter that each of us will ever know, and bring it forth with each other, so that we might share with each other that which lies in our deepest core.
As humans, like all primates, we have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, so much so, that we will even forgo a personal benefit should we deem it unfair. In primate studies, monkeys will refuse to do a task for a reward that they have always willingly done if they learn that another monkey is getting a better reward for the same task. We can see this same instinct in humans in how conflicted society is about social programs like universal healthcare. Even though it can be proven that this policy would reduce healthcare costs for everyone, our sense of fairness inclines us to take the otherwise irrational choice to pay more ourselves, to ensure that freeloaders don’t benefit from a shared social good.
Given how powerful this instinct for fairness is, it should come as no surprise that we spend massive mental energy calculating the fairness of situations throughout our day. Why should I continue to wave at my neighbor when they never wave at me? Why should I wash this glass I just used when the sink is full of other peoples’ glasses? Why should I initiate sex with my partner when I’ve had to be the initiator the last three times?
And as if the mere act of constantly tallying our debits and credits with each other isn’t divisive enough, our self-centeredness also makes us terrible accountants. As I often remind my teams at work, we see 100% of the work we do, but only a small fraction of what our others do. Because of this, even if everyone does an equal share of the work, we each, simply because of the inherently self-centered nature of our perspective, will feel like we’ve done more than our fair share.
Worse still, not only do we make genuine mistakes about fairness because of our inherently self-centered perspective, that part of our self-centeredness designed to value ourselves more than others, enables us to create radical fictions about our own fairness. I first encountered this in the fifth grade, when I was an unwitting participant in a social experiment. For an entire week, instead of our normal schedule, my grade was asked to play a trading game. In that game we had certain commodities represented by cards and by trading them back and forth, we could earn more cards. At the end of the week, there were three of us who controlled nearly all the cards in the game.
At this point, our teacher took us out into the hall, and told the three of us that we could now change the rules however we saw fit, and left us to discuss our changes privately. I remember my two fellow classmates immediately began to discuss adding rules that would make it impossible for us to lose what we’d gained. I was shocked, as the game had become boring and I thought we were going to rework the rules to level the playing field.
We soon came to an impasse and brought the teacher out to explain our predicament. She said that we had to come to a compromise and if we couldn’t, the three of us would have to put the rule changes to a vote. My two classmates quickly outvoted me and changed the rules to protect our power. After going back into the classroom and explaining these changes, the teacher ended the game and explained that she had been rigging the decks all along.
In other words, even as children, we were willing to use power imbalances to exploit others, all while creating stories to justify how this should be seen as fair. We create these fictions of fairness, not only in our political thinking, but in our most intimate relationships as well. At the risk of breaking a long-standing bro-code, we can see our willingness as humans to justify unfairness in the way we divide domestic work between spouses. The fact is, we husbands will do as little around the house as we can get away with. We know this. Our wives know this. Everyone knows this, and yet, this truth is never spoken.
Just because we mutually agree to allow this imbalance to continue unspoken, however, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have real consequences. Because it’s inherently unfair, wives begin to feel resentful. Because they feel resentful, they nag their partners to do more. Because husbands have concocted some story about how their unwillingness to do their fair share is entirely justified, they find this nagging unfair in itself, and resent their wives for doing so.
This common domestic dispute may seem trivial, but how many relationships have been destroyed because of the dynamics described above? How many families have been broken because of misunderstood or misrepresented fairness in domestic life? Isn’t it absurd that we humans would sacrifice our relationships with our spouses and our children, literally the only things that can assuredly provide meaning in this world, so we don’t have to vacuum on a Sunday afternoon?
Even from a self-interested perspective, that is utter foolishness, but it’s a foolishness that Thanatism can help us overcome. By helping us to accept our corporality, Thanatism enables us to understand both our self-centered misperceptions and the biological imperative of self-centeredness at our core. By destroying our ability to deceive ourselves, Thanatism exposes our false narratives of self-justification for exactly what they are. And most importantly, Thanatism helps us see that we derive infinitely greater meaning through authentically being with each other than we shall ever find from getting a slightly bigger piece of the pie.
Failing to get as much as we can used to lead to death, so it only makes sense that we’re wired the way we are. Unfortunately, in the world of abundance that we’ve created, this wiring radically miscalculates the value of more things when compared with the value of greater intimacy. This is why we need a true faith that can tell us true stories, not only about what we are as humans, but also about what we can become. Greed, as this self-centeredness is colloquially known, isn’t a sin only or primarily because it hurts others, it is a sin just as much because it distorts our vision. In so doing, not only does it create an unjust world, but it equally deprives us all of the intimacy that makes our lives worth living in the first place.
One of the reasons we so diligently hide ourselves from others is that on some deep level, we fear that we’re frauds. No matter what our age, no matter our accomplishments, when we look into the mirror, we still see the child we’ve always been. We see that curious, expectant being looking back at us, just waiting for the real adult to show up and explain to us what this all means.
Of course, that adult never shows up. We wait expectantly throughout our lives to hear the answer, and it never comes. After time, as we age, we suddenly find ourselves in positions of authority. We are parents. We are bosses. We are teachers. In spite of these newfound roles and responsibilities, however, we still feel like children. Even though we become the leaders, we are still secretly waiting to be led.
In spite of the fact that we, ourselves, have no idea what’s going on in the world, we value the power of the roles we’ve been given. We want to be respected. We want to be followed. We genuinely want to lead well. Because of this, we hide our doubts about ourselves. We bury our insecurities deep within. We create outward manifestations of strength, and the less we believe in our understanding, the more elaborate these spectacles of authority become.
The reason few of us feel like adults and the reason why few of us feel like we actually have a clue as to how this world works isn’t because we’re too stupid to understand. We cling to the stories of our ancestors and build the walls of false self-assuredness, not because we’re incapable of understanding the world, but rather because we fear the world our understanding would reveal to us. In other words, we all know what’s going on, but we choose not to accept it because it is hard.
We don’t want to admit that this universe created us by accident. We don’t want to admit that this world doesn’t care whether we humans survive or not. We don’t want to admit that even those we perceive are in power can’t really direct our social institutions. We don’t want to admit that we feel powerless in our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we’ll never know the reason why. And we don’t want to admit that one day this universe will end us, never to consider us again.
We hide like children because we are children. We are children who would rather cling to the apron strings of illusion, as long as they can protect us from what we fear. We tell ourselves comforting stories about our world, so we don’t have to face the meaninglessness of life. We don’t feel like adults because we aren’t adults, and we aren’t adults because we have abdicated the responsibility of living in the truth.
This hiding from our responsibility is one of the ways that our denial of death keeps us from authentically communing with each other. In place of the truth from which we could speak plainly with each other, in place of the truth in which we could be certain of what we said, we project illusions of confidence and self-aggrandizement in an attempt to protect our positions of power from those who might expose us as the impostors we are.
Protected we remain, and yet at what cost? Our illusions protect us from being exposed, but in turn they prevent us from freely exposing ourselves. When we’re forced to act like adults that we are in fact not, we end up playing a game of sock puppets with each other–our projected personhood speaks in place of our true selves with the other’s projection. We’re not interested in these projections though. These fake adults are so utterly boring to each other. They exchange pleasantries about the weather and the kids, but they prevent us from ever truly knowing or being known.
Isn’t it time we stop playing this game with each other? If we each have the courage, individually, to accept ourselves for what we are and to share that broken and fully human self with others, might we find that those others are exactly the same and that we didn’t need to hide at all? We might. And we might actually find ourselves in a better world than the one we work so hard to project to each other, for it is only by genuinely communing with each other that we shall find the meaning that we so desperately seek.
