The Failure of Death Denied

[My Man Mahmoud]

Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body-experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with a clear vision, without awe or terror. We don't have to cling to life artificially, or death for that matter. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priset walks in, sits down, tell the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.

--Don DeLillo White Noise

I've always loved this passage because, despite its deliberate absurdity, it describes the way our society really works. We have built a culture defined by its veneration of the supreme worth of the individual human being: its institutions, its corpus of myth, its art - all exist to exalt the Sovereign "I." Death then becomes the great enemy, because Death makes "I" meaningless. A more realistic culture would re-evaluate its position in the face of this truth (most ancient cultures evolved an epic tradition for this reason - to reconcile man to the reality of death), but our society has far too much invested (often quite literally) in the sacred individual. So, instead, we engage in the Dance of Death Denied hoping that if we buy the right plastic shit, worship the properly complected Jesus and vote for the right politicians, somehow, the reality of Death will be dissipated.

The problem is that not everyone is dumb enough or deluded enough to buy into this crap. Inevitably, there are people that see the truth for what it is. Some are broken by it - they take themselves out with pills or heroin or just put a bullet in their brains. Some become enraged and shoot up their high schools or hijack airliners and fly them into icons of world commerce or mail package bombs to biotech profiteers. These people are dangerous to society, but only in a very limited sense. They are easily marginalized - they're 'fascists' who 'hate freedom.'

Some, however, choose a different course. Rather than burning out or blowing up, they speak up. Artists. Philosophers. Leaders. These are infinitely more dangerous to the social order, because they tell the truth when others regurgitate the lie, and truth, given substance by the weight of reality, becomes rather hard to ignore once the taboo against speaking it is broken. Like the beached whale at the seaside resort (reality intrudes upon purchased fantasy), the longer it is ignored, the harder it becomes to ignore it. Eventually, you're going to have to admit that something smells.

As a result, our society has a built in incentive to marginalize the truth tellers. From the perspective of the Death Deniers, it is imperative that Slayer be meaningless - if they aren't, then Death is indeed real, and, oh by the way, this society is totally fucked. So, first they turn to mockery:

"Ha ha! It's just dorks singing about Satan!"

"Ha ha! Deathklok!"

When mockery proves insufficient, appropriation must suffice. If Burzum or Mordid Angel or Nietzsche or Wagner or Dawn of the Dead cannot be mocked into silence, then the market must puke out something that apes the form but removes the truth-telling inner spirit, replacing it with something meaningless that can be mocked. Thus, we end up with Cradle of Filth, Cannibal Corpse, Jaques Derrida, shitty film scores and Dawn of the Dead.

It's all rather disheartening on the surface, but if you give it a deeper look, hope blossoms in the darkness: the Death Deniers are impotent. They cannot silence truth, nor can they make reality go away. All they can do is mock and copy, and, in the end, they are doomed to that they fear most.

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

Inspired by this article.

 

[BloodSword]

To quote Jack Nicholson, "You can't handle the truth." I agree. This "society is totally fucked." But, as I'm sure you know, Truth does'nt sell. The "Death Deniers" are selling/giving the people what they want. And as you stated it "aint the truth."

 

[judas69]

The problem is that not everyone is dumb enough or deluded enough to buy into this crap.

You're just making a testiment to your own belief here and though I understand how you feel, you're taking this way too personally and thus, your idea of Truth is really grounded only so far as your disapproval of someone elses.

To be human is to be ignorant, don't pretend you're above this.

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

You're just making a testiment to your own belief here and though I understand how you feel, you're taking this way too personally and thus, your idea of Truth is really grounded only so far as your disapproval of someone elses.

To be human is to be ignorant, don't pretend you're above this.

This is the sort of thing stupid people say to make themselves feel better.

 

[Cythraul]

I think it's hardly the case that spoiled suburbanite faggots who shoot up their classmates or islamic fundamentalist idiots do the things they're so well-known for because they've had some kind of deep existential epiphany.

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

I think it's hardly the case that spoiled suburbanite faggots who shoot up their classmates or islamic fundamentalist idiots do the things they're so well-known for because they've had some kind of deep existential epiphany.

It doesn't take a 'deep epiphany' - just the recognition that we've built a society based on the systematic evasion of reality.

Cognitive dissonance, my man.

 

[Blowtus]

I have been trying to understand this 'myself and invidividuals are unimportant / meaningless' philosophical view and am unable to do so. It seems to require some form of 'absolute' meaning to the world in order to be more valid than any relativistic meaning developed from persons internally - what is this meaning then? What makes certain individuals 'nobody matters' belief intrinsically more valid than other individuals 'I matter, you matter' belief? I entirely fail to envisage any form of 'absolute' (within perceptual reason of course) evidence or logic for either, but would love to hear any justification...

is this view perhaps more prevalent / popular here because it's a metal forum?? (and filled with the sterotypical depressive, of course ) Am I truly struggling so badly to understand a cornerstone of modern philosophy?

 

[Justin S.]

Blowtus,

I think the extreme you talk of ("no one subject matters") isn't very common. How else would the "whole" achieve such rank if the components of it counted for nothing? It would be as you say, some metaphysical valuation of an idealized class.

However, "socialism" says something much different- it says the individual, as be-ing, is one amongst others. It follows then that both are significant, but that the individual is limited and determined to some extend by the larger playing out of forces. I dont think it is justified to posit the "individual" and the "whole" dichotically. Rather they are different levels of perspective of a complex and integrated thing- we, in each case, only experience the singular perspective, which is why I think people get tripped up over this.

 

[OldScratch]

It doesn't take a 'deep epiphany' - just the recognition that we've built a society based on the systematic evasion of reality.

Cognitive dissonance, my man.

I'm not sure about the Columbine crowd...but it would seem absurd to suggest that the fundamentalist Muslim, driven by his own well-conditioned religious zealotry as much as anything else, is exercising an independent recognition of reality(or protesting the evasion thereof)! Those fighting invading forces in Muslim countries may be possessed of more reasonable motives, however.

 

[Justin S.]

OldScratch,

"Fundamentalist Islam" is certainly responding to pressures that Mahmoud speaks of, but not in a thoughtful manner- merely cognitive dissonance. It is no accident that the target of "terrorism" is the perceived threat of industrialized nations and their homogenizing coercive power. What is bullshit about the Islamist attitude is that it is entirely subjectivist- they certainly would wish to dominate the world and impose homogenization- what they oppose is U.S. style authoritarianism, not the framework of reductivist domination itself.

Also, I detest Mahmoud's cheap shot at Derrida. Say what you want critically, but one cannot dismiss him so flippantly.

 

[Blowtus]

However, "socialism" says something much different- it says the individual, as be-ing, is one amongst others. It follows then that both are significant, but that the individual is limited and determined to some extend by the larger playing out of forces. I dont think it is justified to posit the "individual" and the "whole" dichotically. Rather they are different levels of perspective of a complex and integrated thing- we, in each case, only experience the singular perspective, which is why I think people get tripped up over this.

You're right, I took what the OP was disappointed in and assumed the opposite was what was wanted. Reading it again it is merely unclear what a desirable alternative would be
What level of importance should be placed on the 'singular experience'? I assume many have tried to answer that one before?

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

Also, I detest Mahmoud's cheap shot at Derrida. Say what you want critically, but one cannot dismiss him so flippantly.

Sure you can - there is NOTHING of significance in the work of Derrida that didn't appear first in the work of Heidegger or Nietzsche - Derrida's 'contribution' is a singularly opaque style and a fatalistically absurd reading of Nietzschean/Heideggerean anti-foundationalism that made 'Theory' a joke almost from day one.

 

[Justin S.]

That extreme of a statement is entirely unfounded.

You will not find support for it from any thoughtful audience.

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

That extreme of a statement is entirely unfounded.

It is entirely founded, as has been long understood outside the US lit crit establishment.

You will not find support for it from any thoughtful audience.

Sure I would - I just wouldn't find support for it in the incestuously backwards world of most American lit departments - but those people are retards, so they don't really count.

 

[Narziss]

Dear Mahmoud,

I have to agree with much of your analysis, in essence. On Tibet, though, while they may have gained certain valuable insights into the holistic mind, they, as a nation-state, have expressed fundamentally a history of impotence to actually change the real material-economic conditions of man for the better. Pre-Chinese-invasion Tibet was a priest-ridden hole that its inhabitants may have been reconciled to living in, but which had as much to do with fulfilling man’s essential self-interest as a bullet in the head. Buddhism, Taoism, and other Oriental and similar quietist, nullity-worshipping religions are useful to humanity qua humanity only as properly-regulated strong errors.

I like how you describe the antagonistic relationship between the self-denying (death-denying) modern Policor (Politically Correct) “society of the spectacle” (Debord), and all implicitly “Fremen” however wounded by the historical and ongoing enforced peace of the human analogue to agro-industrial-style factory-farm imprisonment, punctuated by outbreaks of authentic demonic insanity (psychopaths, rapists, warmongers).

What this is, in simplest terms, is the bestial Ego – or worse personalities controlling the spiritually-incarcerated cognitive (characteristically human) mind – ritually attempting to make use of magic in order to stave off a perceived fear of Hell. There’s nothing scary about Death per se, to the healthy human mind, because all life is but a special case of Death, not nothingness but Eternity, and the person whose bestial Ego is successfully reconciled with his superior, true human self-interest of employing the faculty of Reason, powered by Agape (divine love of man/reason) to effect immortal, worthwhile change in the universe through proper, passionate sensuous action on human civilisation as a whole, achieves what the Samurai has done in lesser terms: Resolute acceptance of death – the understanding that in essence he is already dead!

In the face of this, though, I take issue with your use of the F-word as morally offensive. This society is horrific because it isn’t fucked. Sexuality in the broadest sense is not a special case of banal existence, banal existence is a special, morbid case of sexuality. Society needs to be fucked nine ways from Sunday in the most delightful and politically sadomasochistic sense, under a plan organised by harmonically cooperating Classically Humanistically-educated and anticlassically-prosecuted cognitive action, to a degree unheralded in the history of the recorded world. Policor society interprets this as a nightmare of rape – which it is, from the bestial perspective. The difference between the Ego and the Self is that the Self knows the principle of coming to love being spiritually raped.

The practical upshot of all of this is this: The internet was born and will soon die, because it’s fundamentally an entropic system being maintained by an entropic society. That society’s perceived, but false, self-interest as expressed in concert by its ideological slaves to extirpate all resistance to its program of maximum separation of human relations until each person will live within his own socially-engineered private hell of total sexual and political impotence (sex and politics are inseparably interrelated) scourges its slaves toward a terrified, hysterical, calculating, and vicious response. This is Satanic in the term’s worst sense. Society will begin, and, indeed, is, thus dismantling the Internet in order to transform cybernetic lived time into the equivalent of private-automobile-facilitated suburban-capitalistic frozen space – akin to the changeover from the idea of the “commons” (the fair, the street, the central mall corridor) into a completely saturated capitalist environment dedicated to total, robotic consumerist efficiency complimented by mandatory expressions of an horrific “happiness” of a brainwashed, shit-eating slave (Walmart). When that happens, our faces will be cut off to the bone and our tongues will be surgically removed. All possibility of human evolution this side of the most grievous Dark Age in history – for this will be a technologically-enhanced and ideologically utterly disconnected Dark Age, giving rise to unimaginable levels of barbarism, savagery, and malice – will be dead.

The Army of Chaos that is the only thing that can defy the Policor spectacle exists implicitly, latently within the hearts of Fremen the world over, but nowhere more fiercely is it in tune with the spirit of damage-understanding and nobly proud, purgatorial righteousness – implicitly futuristic, hygienic, and Romantic in orientation – than in Metalheads. This group, among many select others, contains immense power potential and lacks only the proper spiritual-mythic organisation that it desperately claws and struggles towards in its music. Its members are not spiritually impoverished, they are drowning in an embarrassment of riches. Knowing how to spend it wisely, is the only thwart toward world Metallic domination.

The Policor spectacle intuits – for not being human, it can never know anything, it only smells, tastes, and feels threats – Metal’s hardcore threat to its evil. Thus, I also here most clearly agree with you about the former’s continuous move to marginalise the latter. The only question is not their doom, but whether they take everything else down with them. A pyrrhic victory for us would be no better than the scenario inked by that most hopeless of Metallica songs, “Blackened.”

"Sauron's wrath will be terrible, his retribution swift. The battle for Helm's Deep is over. The battle for Middle-Earth is about to begin. All our hopes now lie with two little hobbits. Somewhere in the wilderness."
--Gandalf the White

Narziss