“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ~ Frank Herbert, Dune
We live in a society that is death phobic to the highest degree and of that, there should be little doubt at this point.
In fact, “obsessive cultural fear of physical suffering and death has blinded and immobilized us, like prisoners staring at the end of the cave.” (Hans Boesma, Too Blind to Be Martyred)
And way before we all felt the ramifications of the pandemic and its orchestrating public health magnates, there were ample signs that most would do just about anything to avoid aging, suffering, and consequently, dying. In fact, that may be part of the reason the phrase “You don’t look you age at all” is so often offered as a compliment, a clear sign of how we are willing to sacrifice authenticity, or any kind of patina, for a kind of veneer of “immortality”… There is something to be said about society’s willingness to do away with sincerity… “sin-cera” (meaning “without wax”—referring to the more coarsely grained travertine marble, used “as is”—or, “alas, the holes [or wrinkles] show”), a quality that isn’t held in particularly high esteem in most circles. Such is the curse of this californicated, pathologized and medicalized world. This is not a new phenomenon, but I would propose to you that we certainly witnessed a new first in modern society: using this fear of death as a driver for mass compliance.
The first videos that came out of China in early 2020, which featured people randomly dropping on the streets, were some of the first images brought to the Western world for the purpose of propaganda promulgation and instilling fear. And although it became clear, later on and many months into the pandemic, that the initial modelling predictions and IFR estimations had been way overblown, or that this “novel” virus was mainly a disease affecting the frail and elderly, governments and public health entertained a new refrain: if you don’t do it for yourself, you should at least do it for others. And if you didn’t, you risked being deemed a selfish ‘grandma killer’.
As if that wasn’t already enough, the powers-that-be carefully added another layer to their crafted narrative: if you catch Covid, and you end up in the hospital, you will undeniably die alone. Neither your friends, or family or loved ones will be able to accompany you into your last days… (some nurses even came up with the “Hand of God”, pictured below, to “comfort” the ones dying alone…).
This, in turn, lead to the mass formation so many experts (Ariane Bilheran, Robert Malone, Mattias Desmet, Mila Aleckovic-Bataille, etc.), have alluded to, in other words, the ideological subversion of the unsuspecting masses through pulling the strings of society’s death phobia.
And what’s worse, almost two years into the pandemic, it appears as if we have learned very little. Our own government is fact preparing to levy a tax on the unvaccinated and to prevent these “less-than citizens” from further participating in normal society, by removing their access to yet another group of services. To what end…
I, for one, will admit to being anything but surprised. Death phobia, you see, also stems from an incapacity to learn, and from a failure to recognize that the “learning of many things [Πολυμαθίη] does not teach intelligence.” (Paul Feyerabend, Against Method). Data, and more data, is often little but added noise, and none of it changes what we have known for over a century about the workings of seasonal viral respiratory infections. Death phobia, compounded by incessant fearmongering tactics, leads to the inevitable: a daily existence relegated to the confines of the limbic system and the reptilian brain…
And because we live in a society that is addicted to “finding solutions”, a sort of mania even, what better dilemma to solve than dying. Our ongoing quest for a kind of life serum, for immortality, is nothing new of course.
Thus, when we consider the proposed alternative—i.e. never dying—and although I am quite certain most have imagined the many things we might gain from achieving this state of immortality, I suspect it probably never occurred to most what we, as a species, might stand to lose by virtue of our opting out of dying…
What would humanity miss by virtue of its citizens refusing to die, either because they now have their own “out clause in a syringe”; what would be the consequence then?
Forget more people, as that’s obvious. But what would be the consequence, day by day, after we forego the really stout tutelage “of the ending of things coming to visit us”, how even that would now be something that was negotiable, or a matter of opinion, or dependent on how much money or what connections one has with the serum company (or the transhumanists), and so on.
Leo Tolstoy wrote a book in which the code of “dying not dying” was central, in which the yearning for comfort and the resort to euphemism were revealed for the spell-casting shams that they so often are.
Comfort, in other words…
And not knowing how to go about it, most do end up handling the alien dying person with an almost mechanical comfort… But comforting, Tolstoy was clear, is also lying.
It is the direct consequence of our death phobia…
Yet, it is assumed that everyone knows they are going to die. But do they, really? Oh, most think “the other person’s going to die”, but how many think about their own death, its meaning, its consequences… Stephen Jenkinson once offered that it “is possible—and in a death-phobic culture it is almost inevitable—to know this in some fashion and not allow the knowledge any consequence or meaning in how a life gets lived.”
In other words, exactly what Tolstoy wrote about Ivan Ilyich suffering most from: “the [ultimate] Lie”…
Instead, Jenkinson proposes “we could start making a language in which dying actually shows up and using it at every opportunity. This “live like you were dying” stuff is shite, forgive me for saying so. This is how people who will die, but are not dying, talk. This is what they imagine is possible, and it is what they want for others. It comes directly from that adolescent caper that most have been in on: If you found out that you had a week or a month to live, what would you do? Giddy excess is the almost universal reply. Dying people aren’t usually physically capable of extravagant excess, and they aren’t “living like they’re dying.” Mostly they are dying, and they don’t know how. They don’t have the words to say it. So we could work toward a day when you ask a dying person, “So, how are you doing?” and the dying person says, “I’m dying. How are you?” Just as a start."
Interesting….one of the times in the last few months before my dad died in December that was his exact response when I asked him how he was.