The Future of Death Denial: or, the Fantasy that We No Longer Fear Death, Part 1
The Future of Death Denial: or, the Fantasy that We No Longer Fear Death, Part 1
Citation: Piven, J. (2024). The Future of Death Denial: or, the fantasy that we no longer fear death. Free Associations, (92).
Full disclaimer on the unwanted presence of AI codependency cathartics/ AI inferiorists as a particularly aggressive and disturbed subsection of the narcissist population: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer
When information is overwhelming and no tool is sufficient in organizing it and being competent with it, the use of suspicion and magical thinking when taken literally can be a way to reestablish control over something they don’t feel any control over.
Such an environment of confusion can create even more shame, which causes more repression, more anxiety, and more overwhelm.
When scientific competence is of a sufficient caliber and nature and death are no longer threatening, magic is understood as a construction-based tool of the unseen future creation.
These are understood as machinations of intuition; handholds to imagine or begin to comprehend that which does not exist and bring it to fruition.
Its more emotional quality is also particularly powerful and this power is ignored to everyone’s peril.
To this day, its concept is still considered powerful and effective; i.e., something strongly comprehended can be put into visual form (that’s not to say something poorly comprehended can’t also be; these can do real damage creating an off construct that is hard to unprogram back to the originating non-visual content if poorly done).
Rather, more effective mappings create shortcuts over what were otherwise overwhelming models ironically cited in Terence Tao’s mathematical thinking lectures which disparage magic.
He clearly here does not understand this computational-translational feature to the visual system that suddenly open up massive spaces of computational possibility not previously seen simply by making a successful shortcut mapping.
A similar computational exponentiating feature is described by Noam Chomsky on the evolution of human language’s generativity as well, so it is not just limited to the visuospatial system.
There are lots of just these abundance points for comprehension all over the brain.
He actually clearly comprehends just this translation while not understanding the metaphorical suspension of the use of language is exactly what many are referring to when they say this.
It is not Christian magical literalism where, as in the exorcism, these churches struggle with the alternative metaphorical suspension of these highly charged and often visual-psychological concepts.
Rather, they often serve as placeholder intuitions to derive and provide proper scaffolding for their organization into truth for real sensemaking.
It does not always refer to magical literalism, which is deeply dangerous.
Other forms are the use of narrative and the evocation of powerful emotion for transformational leadership to free up stagnant emotional energy to effect real, powerful and lasting change that cannot go ignored.
No powerful truth will get very far if it is boring at all times and not only just when it is necessary, such as in researching.
Those these are not magical literalisms, such literalisms are mostly agreed to not be the real intent and where they are should be considered duly archaic and dangerous for their literalisms.
Otherwise, they should be considered fruitful intuitions in need of an accurate and careful scaffolding to properly capture and support their truth.
It is meant to be based more on the energy and feeling of it in order to manifest real visions that did not previously exist and to derive unseen connections not previously seen.
A complete eradication or a complete literalism of magic is not in order.
That said, upon material reality, material science is the critical tool and cannot ever be replaced by magical literalism which was an old tool of the past to assuage feelings of powerlessness upon a reality and nature that did not have the sufficiently rigorous tools to fix the situation.
If vulnerable narcissism and revenge intersect, and Satanism bears all these features, this can be the psychological experience of ongoing comprehension poverty with a broken mechanism to remedy it (revenge).
Due to its issue exacerbating features, revenge is just never going to work relieving ongoing narcissistic injury in the face of death, psychological and actual, that we all go through.
Feeling real fear, anxiety, and facing death are never going to be resolved by revenge against death, anxiety, and fear which will only drive one closer to death-overwhelming psyche-fragmenting experiences.
Do people fear death? Do they still fear death? Isn’t that a thing of the past, when people
were haunted by plagues and archaic terrors of demons, changelings, hexes, witches,
succubae, and soap? Or an adolescent fetishistic gothic self-indulgence? Or the result of
horrific trauma? To many philosophers, psychologists, poets, and scholars of religion the
fear of death has always afflicted us, driven us to despair, obsession, violence, and
fantastical visions of immortality.
Temporality and the mass of our temporal existence as experienced as its full time takes careful organization.
Philosophy is the organization of this time in the most sustainable, fruitful ways that maximize the most points of time (ethical organization, analytical organization, etc.)
Ironically, to do this, one must face the realities of mortality without being depressed into helplessness by them.
Plato (c. 360 B.C.E.) called philosophy a preparation for death. Hobbes (1651) and Hume (1779) saw the dread of death as the inspiration for God and salvation, and Schopenhauer (1844) contended that there would be hardly any philosophizing without death. Beauvoir (1948) wrote that at every moment being a conscious being means grasping the non temporal truth of our existence. We deny death, seek immortality, or even consider life an illusion. “Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect”
Mortality, death, limits, and feelings of limitedness and vulnerability can create narcissistic injury.
Feelings of being limited, confused, struggling create narcissistic injury for anyone and everyone.
Even a student used to doing poorly or feeling used to failure is traumatized by these experiences.
Most people don’t want to fail but begin to get addicted to the feeling of failure feeling unable to do anything else but expect that.
Pretending to want to fail is trying to get a control of a fate that feels violating even if it happens against one’s wishes anyway.
Eventually one resigns to one’s fate and identifies with it and even grows a culture identifying with it to regain some sense of dignity.
But it should be remembered that most if not all people don’t really want to fail.
Our bodies want to live even if our brains don’t and we all deep down want to succeed.
Our unavoidable mortality is a primordial source of anxiety and, as such, is the primary fount of our psychopathology” (Orbach, 2007: 285; cf. Firestone & Catlett, 2009; Lifton, 1979; Piven, 2004; Routledge & Vess, 2019; Solomon, at al., 2015; Yalom, 1980).
To assuage fear, the human mind represents death as a completed symbol, or attempts clinical observation as something that will happen later, instead of an ongoing process and design moving with life processes at play, in this very moment, as well at the same time.
The idea that death plays an important role in our ordinary lives and spurs our beliefs, conflicts, avoidances, and pathologies is still rejected by much of psychoanalysis, which treats death as a foreign body, irrelevant, passé, immaterial, something that can’t afflict us unconsciously because the unconscious cannot know or process death (Lifton, 1979; Piven, 2004).1 Some of the most prominent philosophers and scholars of the 21st century have argued that evolved minds don’t fear death, and that any mature rational examination will reveal that the fear of death is irrational and can be abolished through the exercise of reason (Bjarnason, 2003; Fischer, 1993; Kagan, 2012; Nussbaum, 1989).
With decreasing magical literalism comes sufficient levels of life that lead to less constant feelings of fear, anxiety, and narcissistic injury in death-charged experiences.
More power with material reality tends to mean less death which means less fear, anxiety, and narcissistic injury in the the face of death-charged experiences.
Taking the guess and check out and knowing why and how the guess and check successfully got taken out leads to not only less anxiety but also less narcissism as an inflation response for not having strong power over material reality.
Death is a nonissue for many people. We have developed revolutionary technologies and medical treatments that have extended the human lifespan and delivered us from countless agonies of sickness and aging. We’ve awoken and evolved from the superstitions and religious follies that imprisoned us in fears of demons, devils, and evil spirits. We embraced scientific methods and discoveries that enable us to dismantle problems with detachment and logic instead of hocus pocus and pseudoscience.
God being dead is often also an anxiety response to overwhelm, almost like an immune system that went too hard trying to gain material power over the material world; the mature psyche doesn’t even need God to be dead.
The experience that God is dead may also be a product of a system with relatively high comprehensibility points and relatively low comprehensibility experiences; as always the surrounding “technology” of the cognitions points the way.
The mature psyche is God-scientific; equitable and open to large, overwhelming deistic experiences that say God is very much alive as well as small, computationally unprofound but highly comprehensible experiences that echo that God is dead.
Perhaps faith is just a sense that the sense of God will be back in some dimension, experience and timeline even when God is dead for today.
God is dead, we no longer need him, and a mature examination of all our fears will demonstrate that there is nothing to fear in death.
Even with science, math and a strong relationship to the realities of the material world with the mind increasingly out of denial with it, there are still experiences of overwhelming problems that throw the psyche back up against death.
Thus practice of relationship with death and the death forces of confusion, overwhelm, a compulsive need to match stimulus to reality in a way that doesn’t necessarily or objectively follow characterizing the overwhelmed, and the obliterative experience helps one move through these experiences psychologically intact and grasp at the solution when its fruitful intuition arrives.
From there on out, it is simply just listening to it carefully and structurally it carefully.
Science alone is not enough for the psychological life at the heart of human creation, future vision, and intuition capture. It will never have the full transformational power of an unimpeded emotional and fully expressed life. However, competent structuring definitely should come first.
Scientific techniques and discoveries may not eradicate the need for God, the
hunger for pacifying answers to the painful questions and sufferings of life, or the craving
for security and certainty in an anguished and perplexing existence. Even with training in
science and logic, human beings still suffer these existential yearnings, the dread of death, and susceptibility to irrational answers and palliating fictions. We cannot will our
existential terror and despair out of existence “even with our rigorous positivistic tools”
(Winquist, 1995: 12). Worse, as Lasch (1975) writes, “The collapse of religious illusions
has only prepared the way for more insidious illusions” (p. xvi).
External and internal merge with poor comprehension intersecting with poorly designed infrastructure and external supports.
Thus, largely negative experiences that drive a hope for some grasp on material reality like cults and magical literalism to achieve dignity by throwing off the sense of victimization for one of victimizer (a further entrenching response that does not work) show these two factors are strongly at play.
Like any underfinanced/unfinanced and undersupported/unsupported student will tell you, comprehension must be physically supported. It does not exist in a vacuum and to suggest otherwise shows how the cycles of these failures perpetuate themselves.
And thus their consciousness of their own feebleness, misery, wretchedness, and terror would continue to inspire fantastical religious explanations (pp. 255ff)
In the dawn of the 21st century, America showed a strong positive relationship to faith with little to no signs of negative emphasis although there were definitely large signs of negative emphasis such as a focus on hell or sin.
Faith on its own is a sign of a healthy, positive psyche.
Moving into the future, engaging in necessary and expensive altruism, and transforming whole situations is not possible without this increasingly scarce resource. It is not something to be mocked or destroyed.
That is like razing a field and then wondering where the harvest went because you can’t believe a plant will be a vegetable or a fruit at any point in the development process.
Such a person really should never once be allowed around farming.
At the dawn of the 21st century some 90% of America’s population claim to believe in a higher power (Pew Research Center, 2018), 81% believe in some sort of God (Jones, 2022),4 90% believe that God loves them personally (Bloom, 1992: 30, 257), 90% of American Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (Hillman, 2004: 184), 77% think that God or a higher power has protected them and 67% claim the Almighty has rewarded them (Pew, 2018), 67-73% believe in Heaven (Brenan, 2022; Nortey, 2021),5 69-70% of adults believe in succoring angels (Brenan, 2023: 59; NORC, 2023),6 72% believe in the power of prayer (NORC, 2023), 59% believe in Hell, 60% are convinced that the apocalypse and resurrection described in Revelation are going to come true (McAlister, 2003: 33), 56-58% believe in the devil (Brenan, 2023; NORC, 2023), 50% believe that the spirits of the dead can interact with the living (NORC, 2023), 34% believe in reincarnation (NORC, 2023), 55% believe that Jesus “will return to earth someday,” and 39% believe “we are living in the end times” right now (Alpert, 2022).7
Paranoiac, unhealthy, and therefore unfruitful relationships to faith were also seen but at far lesser levels, especially in New Jersey suggesting real scars there needing accurate deciphering and organization.
Some of the most tragic and horrifying situations are literal and that is often why psyches not trained for this information fragment in the face of them.
Others are still inspired by the occult, astrology, and any number of fantasies that
help them evade the misery and terror of death, uncontrolled chaos, and insignificance.
44% of New surveyed Jerseyans believe that ghosts are “somewhat” or “very” likely real
(Roman, 2023). New religions and cults arise daily, reactions to the fragmentation and
disarray of a complex society where truth is elusive and people search for fantastical
solutions to their dread (Bamyeh, 2007; La Barre, 1970, 1980, Solomon, 2015).
That said, increasing scientific fraud and increasing butchering of the use of data to create inaccurate narratives shows that narcissism often bests comprehension of the critical nature of adhering to the methodology.
They show no comprehension of the long term consequences of what they’re doing when they engage in scientific fraud, and then worldwide consequences are seen.
We’re so evolved that we’re sanctimoniously making the planet uninhabitable and screech like ischemic chimpanzees when asked to wear medical masks or hear words
like “socialism.” So one may draw attention to the fantastical aspect of progress that may actually interfere with genuine progress because the narcissistic gratification of the illusion impedes and resists the humiliating realistic recognition of our problems and responsibilities.
Most of our scientific theories are based on early highly theistic cognitions and forms that were refined and made as independent as possible to be examined for their self-supporting features.
But they would not have existed without these early theistic vocabulary and structures.
The sense of faith motivated early scientists to even begin the scientific endeavor; the sense that they could have a strong and powerful relationship with nature and well, if they listened to nature carefully.
To deny this is a dangerous denialism.
Each part of the scientific development process into mastery must be recognized and reviewed on its completion to understand how these types of successful temporal processes emerge, cohere, and stabilize into the skepticism-friendly science we have now, which probably has more God-sciencism (if God, then God. If no God, then no God.) to develop into to prevent truth-clouding histrionic experiences from anti-theist or theistic directions and to have this scientism without being vulnerable to fraud trying to push something which wouldn’t need any of that sort of pushing.
The body can tell fraud and it destroys trust, making the next narrative even more cheapened.
They were often permeated with theological fantasies, as Aristotle (384-322 BCE), for example, imagined God as the source of all motion and change, while much later even Leibniz (1646-1716) speculated an evolutionary theology. Influenced by Neoplatonism, Christian eschatology also envisioned a teleological progress.
Triumph over disease has probably done the most for death-anxiety.
Diseases are massive, complex and overwhelming phenomena that when properly understood lead to real relief of death anxiety and stabilizing, comprehension-building experiences.
Histrionic features stemming from a root cause of cognitive overwhelm become less and less as the individual body has less and less to battle with in addition to the other comprehensions at hand.
And Condorcet’s (1743-1794) “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind” (1794) endorsed a view of evolutionary development, envisioning progress in human reason, philosophy, the arts, sciences, technologies, metaphysics, politics, ethics, moral and political science, civilization, the social order, industry, freedom, liberty, justice, prosperity, and happiness: “the progress of reason will have matched that of the sciences and the arts ... the ridiculous prejudices of superstition will have ceased to infuse morality with a severity that corrupts and degrades it rather than purifying and elevating it” (p. 74). Progress in reason and medicine will “extinguish transmissible and contagious illnesses” (p. 80), while progress in perpetual peace will accelerate the progress brotherhood between nations and eliminate the “monstrous atrocities” of war (p. 77).