Thanatos, God of
Death
I wrote the other day about how there’s an epidemic of bad vibes
sweeping across the globe. Everyone I know feels strangely shaky, anxious,
disoriented lately — no, it’ s not just you.
What’s behind all this? It’s
obvious to say that living through an age of collapse like we are — countries
fracturing, planet dying, economies melting down, of Brexits and Trumps — is
profoundly distressing. It keeps us up at night. Is this
really who we’ve become? As a result, a greater tilt in the world’s axis — the
tenor and tone of the world’s emotions is changing.
This is an age of death.
Democracy, the planet, decency, humanity, society, global order, the
future — just a few things that are dying. You see that
impulse you just had to justify and rationalize this away (with factoids,
stats, numbers, some vague notion that “life will go on!” — instead of feeling
something, like grief, mourning, or sorrow? I’ll come back to that.
What’s happening these days is that Thanatos is rising — while
Eros is shrinking, fading, waning. The world is growing imbalanced. It is
becoming a much unhappier and more desperate and worried place as Thanatos
overwhelms Eros, takes it by the neck, and suffocates it — because Thanatos
kills. This imbalance is why we live in an age of death — and the strange,
terrible feelings you might imagine in such a time are beginning now to
overwhelm us.
Let me explain what I mean — I know some of you will find all
this strange and bewildering. (My definitions will be a little different than
American psychologists use — you can make of that what you like.)
Thanatos is the force of self-preservation in us. It is quite
happy to watch the whole world burn down — as long as we stand atop the
embers. Thanatos is the need in us for
superiority, for conquest, for primacy. It is what lies
behind our aggression and rage. It is the ego crying out to be the center of
the universe, the top of the pecking order, the first and last. It’s Donald
Trump, tweeting to put everyone down, boasting and bragging. Imagine a billion beings
full of Thanatos, competing to be the center of the universe, the top of the
hierarchy — they wouldn’t care if the whole world burned down, they’d be
suffused with the pleasure of the fight. That’s us, my friends.
You’d be quite right if you observed at this point that Thanatos
sounds like what we’ve built the world on for a very long time now. Capitalism
is Thanatos pushed to its outermost limit — you are the only thing that
matters, maximizing your own power and advantage should be the only that matters
to you, and society should just be an arena of vicious, brutal combat, which we
euphemistically call “competition” (but it’s not just “competition” when you
die because you don’t have healthcare — it is combat.) Fascism is Thanatos
going beyond the limit. It says that I must destroy you — anyone not like
me — in order to survive, just to live. I must preserve my “bloodline”, my
“land”, my “soil”, and so forth — it is pure Thanatos, unleashed, and it
results in atrocity, terror, and despair, just as it is in America today (how
to you think those kids in the camps feel?)
So Thanatos — aggression, self-preservation, dominance,
egoism — has been the operating principle of global order for an age. We
designed a capitalist global economy, which promoted these values, in slightly
less bloody forms than outright war. But those values remained at the heart of
the order we imagined was just and right and fair nonetheless — the idea that
by somehow being more cruel to one another we’d all prosper. Should it really
surprise us that selfishness and greed and viciousness resulted only in anger
and fury and despair, ultimately?
What happens when a society is built upon Thanatos, as its
primal force, what we might call its psycho-political principles? People will
want to deny one another basic goods, like healthcare and retirement and
education. They will believe that arming teachers is the best solution to
school shootings. They will believe that school shootings are, if not
justified, then at least normal. They will reject things like
vaccines — because remember, Thanatos says only the strong should survive, and
you must be weak if you need a vaccine.
In short, if we build a society on Thanatos, we end up eerily
and precisely, with modern day America. In every respect we can think of — from
school shootings, to massive deficits of basic things like medicine and
retirements, to a rejection of modernity itself, denying kids vaccines and
lunches and so forth. It’s every person for themselves. Why should I care about
your kids? They’re competitors — and this, our society, is just an arena for
brutal, bloody combat. Therefore, everyone should suffer — the one who can take
the most suffering wins. And the one who wins is the one who can pull everyone
else down the most, hardest, fastest — and climb atop them. Does that sound
like a pretty accurate description of what went wrong in America? It’s because
Thanatos — aggression, self-preservation, egoism, domination — came to be the
only force in society whatsoever.
Now, America thought has no understanding whatsoever of this.
It’s psychology doesn’t even believe Thanatos exists, it’s economics (LOL) is
still arguing whether race and gender segregation could have maybe been good
things, and its social thinking is nonexistent to say the least. That’s not a
coincidence. When we believe in Thanatos as the alpha and omega, the beginning
and the end of all human action, thought, organization, endeavour,
existence — what need is there left to think about anything?
So for a very long time, American thought hasn’t done any
thinking. It’s just regurgitated this one principle, over and over, on Faux
News and CNN, at Harvard and Stanford, in films and in culture and in
books — one things, repeated, endlessly: the more Thanatos, the better. The
more aggression, self-preservation, dominance, cruelty, the better — the better
a person you are, the better of we all are, the more rewarded and admired you
should be. That’s what “grit” and “resilience” and the endless articles saying
we have to “save capitalism!” but not, say, the middle class, really say.
American thinking isn’t, because it’s one long paean to Thanatos. And the
problem is that everyone can see by now that designing a society on Thanatos
only led America to implode as spectacularly as Vesuvius.
Let’s count up all the things Thanatos has cheated America of.
Democracy. Its kids. Its prosperity. Decency. Humanity. A future. And even the
ability to think about it all, instead of a class of intellectuals repeating
forever, just like their Soviet predecessors, a series of bullet points
discredited by…reality.
The mood of American life reflects America’s long-standing love
affair with Thanatos. American life is profoundly unhappy. It’s full of
despair, anxiety, worry, panic. It’s not a happy place to be. But again — we
should have understood from the beginning, because Thanatos doesn’t get us to
happiness: it just gets us to the pleasures of domination, cruelty, and
aggression. It lets us gloat, it gives us a thrill, it consumes us with the
pleasure of the kill. But what it doesn’t do is anything deeper, truer, and
more enduring. It doesn’t get us to fulfillment, purpose, meaning, truth,
contentment, self-discovery, or self-realization.
Eros, son of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty
For those things we need Eros. Eros, sometimes called “libido”,
is the need for self-transcendence. It’s true that you can understand in a
narrow sexual way, as Freud did — but it’s better seen as the need to lose
yourself, to merge, to become one. It is feeling the “connectedness in things”,
we often say. Sure, you feel that during (good) sex — but you probably feel it,
maybe even more deeply, during a sunset stroll on a beach, looking into your
child’s eyes, holding someone you genuinely love.
We’re so distant and detached from Eros in our culture, in our
society, in our age, that I think many people have a hard time even
comprehending it — or they react with the anger of defensiveness to it. But
Eros is the simplest thing of all. There’s a perfect spring day. All that
thinking of you, you, you stops. A feeling of purity, of wonder, of beauty
rises in you. You seem to be experiencing something truer than what you can
see. Time stops. There’s just this. You’ve disappeared. Where does the spring
begin — and where do you end? That’s Eros. You can feel this sense of oneness,
this merger into unity, this transcendence into wholeness with a lover — but
you can also feel it with a society, with a city, with yourself, or with the
whole world.
Now. The simple fact that we live in an age of death — a time
when the following things are dying, the planet, democracy, decency,
prosperity, humanity, the future — should tell us something very powerful, if
you understand all the above.
These things were always going to die if we only obeyed
Thanatos — if we prized it above and beyond Eros. There was no way they were
ever going to live. Thanatos is self-preservation, aggression, conquest, the
destruction of everything else i remember — and so that is what we did to all
these things. We destroyed them so that we could feel the pleasure doing so
gave us. The feeling of being on top. The feeling of “owning” them. The thrill
of controlling them. Right down to other people. A species ruled by Thanatos,
like we have been for far too long, will destroy everything it touches, because
it needs to preserve itself as dominant first, last, and, and always, and fight
within its own self for dominance, power, control — at the price of everything,
period, full stop.
It shouldn’t be any surprise, for example, that the planet’s
dying, when we value our own self-preservation above every single thing on
it — so much so that sending selfies of ourselves in makeup is worth ripping
down the forests. What would say if monkeys started sending selfies of themselves
in makeup, or rippling their biceps — while their trees burned down? You’d
laugh. But we are just those monkeys.
So you feel disoriented these days (it’s ok to admit it, I do
too) because the world is deeply out of emotional balance. Thanatos ruled us
for too long — and we politely brushed it under the rug. Maybe we went to
church once a week and told ourselves we were good people — while our societies
were still segregated. Maybe we gave a few dollars to charity every now and
then — while voting against healthcare for everyone. And so on.
But now all that Thanatos we tried to politely hide, with social
games of politesse, by smiling fake smiles, by shaking hands with our neighbors
while taking away their futures — it’s all coming exploding out. A great
tsunami of Thanatos is sweeping the globe. Self-preservation through
aggression, domination, control. That’s Trumpism, Brexist, the wave of
neofascism shredding democracy after democracy, from Brazil to Hungary.
The problem is that many of us have never really accepted
Thanatos as a good or wise thing to let rule us. So as this wave rolls over
us — we sense it — and we feel deeply discomfited, disturbed, distressed. We
can feel the world’s emotional tenor and tone changing — our deepest selves
can — even if our rational selves don’t know what to do with it, or even how to
admit it. Emotions are contagious, and the emotions Thanatos produces — the
cheap gloating of conquest, the thrill of aggression, the rush of
domination — bleed over onto us. We find them unfamiliar, unwanted,
undesirable — repulsive, grotesque, vulgar. But there they are, ruling our
worlds, spilling over onto us.
This emotional spillover is a kind of acid, which corrodes us
from the inside, which threatens our own goodness and truth and humanity, and
so we must work harder to defend against it, which is exhausting. See the
vicious cycle we face — those few of us who remain good and decent people in an
age of death? I’d bet many of us don’t even want to say these distressing
words: “an age of death.” But do they fit how you really feel? Perhaps you see
my point.
So what’s the answer to all this? Well, the simple answers go
something like: talk about your feelings, don’t hide them away, and be kind in
small ways, no matter how draining it is, because it will recharge you more
still. But the big answers are really the big questions.
The 21st century is going to need to be a time where a tsunami
of Eros arises. Where human beings really discover their will and need for
self-transcendence, for connectedness, for nourishing and caring
for…everything. From democracy to each other to the planet to the river to the
insects.
It must be a a time where a tidal wave of Eros rises to meet the
thundering waves of Thanatos which are ripping the globe apart — and slices
through them. Without more Eros — the knowledge, sense, experience, that we are
more than our aggression, spite, contempt, rage, hate — that we are things that
can heal, build, create, renew, not just destroy, ruin, plunder, pillage — I doubt
whether we have much of a future, my friends. But don’t mistake that for
pessimism.
Is there more to us than Thanatos? I believe there is. Art,
medicine, literature tell me so. A little child’s laugh tells me so. The water
against the waves does, too. But I also believe that we’ve been told for so
long that there isn’t more to us than Thanatos — that all we are is little
walking vessels of greed, rage, spite, and hate — that Thanatos is all we know
how to be anymore. Let us, then, begin the difficult, beautiful work of
discovering a greater truth about ourselves.
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