Death And Capitalism Discourse Take:
- I wouln’t want to live under capitalism forever.
- Regardless of their consciously endorsed ideologies, I don’t think most people would either; and, moreover, longer implied time horizons mean that investment in changing things would be worth it to more people.
- Capitalism under capitalists who don’t die makes it approach even further towards rule by vampire lords. Immortality might tempt a lot of people to think of themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires but knowledge that they’re not will approach an asymptote.
- So if you abolished death tomorrrow, whether for the few or the many, I’m skeptical that it would last.
- The same actually applies to basically all institutions and social forms. Religion as it currently exists is clearly not built for it. Family/kinship structures, also slot into that. If you’ve read Benedict Anderson you know that the nation-state is just a giant gothy macabre death cult.
- Thinking about this makes me a lot more positive towards death abolition (leaving aside all concerns of feasibility etc, which are obviously separate.) This is all sort of inspired by someone very reasonably pointing out that abolishing death would, regardless of anything else, create a whole bunch of problems. But it would also create problems for our problems!
What’s this about nation-states being death-cults?
All states are death cults where the mana of the sovereign and his ritual connection to the land have to be renewed through showing his power to deal death, but nation-states are especially goth because nations are presented as (1) an organic unity not just of people now but of the living, the dead, and the yet unborn, (2) renewed by the willingness to die, which acts as a vehicle for (3) immortality through honor of the war dead. Nationalism isn’t especially unique in having death as a product - liberalism piles up corpses, communism piles up corpses, traditional modes of legitimation pile up corpses, and probably radical nationalists are worse than any of those per capita, but what’s qualitatively different is that the language of nationalism is all death all the time, too. It’s all events where people died, their willingness to die, how we’ll avenge them, tombs of unknown soldiers, immortality through memorialization and through our children carrying on those traditions, etc etc.
Eh, the thing is all states and all ideologies must be willing to use force, and willing to kill, in order to enforce themselves in a world where other ideologies are willing to do the same. The idea of an Anarchist utopia is nothing more than a fantasy that will never come to pass, since the blank slate theory isn’t true and you’ll always have some individuals who don’t want it - either they must be brainwashed or they must be suppressed, and in either case this response will need to be organized and fairly uniform to work.
So in this sense, Nationalism isn’t actually special, so this doesn’t feel like some new insight to me, rather than yet another attempt to wear down the nation-state. What it comes down to is that you have to be willing to get people to fight. If you fall below a certain level of Nationalism it becomes difficult to field a volunteer army. Talking about noble sacrifices and making monuments to war dead is part of it. How many people would fight for a polity that went “lol no this country sucks and if you fight to preserve it you’re trash so we’re going to forget about you the minute you die haha”?
