We have all kinds of psychological tricks for managing the fear of death that arises out of awareness of our own mortality so that, as it plays out in everyday life, it can look at the moment like people are afraid of something else. Snakes, immigrants, getting fired, the flu, looking stupid, whatever. But at the bottom of each of our fears is sheer terror of our ultimate annihilation, fueled by the indisputable fact that, in the end, there’s not a damn thing we can do to prevent it.
We’re all gonna die eventually.
If we can’t manage that fear, we can’t function. We would spend most of our waking lives in literal states of fight, flight, or freeze, with the concomitant wear and tear on the body. We’d all be dead of coronary artery disease by middle age–if we made it that far. Because when you are fighting, fleeing, or frozen, think about it: You’re distracted from hunting and gathering, if you can attempt it at all, from building shelter, from raising offspring. We’d be cooked, in other words. How well can you function when you’re anxious about a dental appointment later in the morning? Multiply that by a factor of 100 and you get the picture.
So how do we manage it? One thing that we do is, we band together. We can do things to keep ourselves safe as a group (think building forts, forming hunting parties, sharing parenting) that we can’t do as individuals, or at least can’t do as well. We spread the worry: I don’t have to think about it tonight if a member of my tribe is guarding the entrance to the caves. I can sleep.
This is not the end of the essay!
This is where I ask you to help keep NotMyCat™️(a feral who actually answers to the name of Tinkerbell) in Kibble by clicking on buy me a coffee!
She helps write on pretty days like today, when I can work outside.
Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah! I was saying about banding together. That’s just part of it, though: We also have a huge repertoire of mental tricks we use to deny that Death is a thing at all. Hate is one of them. Scapegoating. Hitler did it with Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and disabled people. And I see it repeating with Palestinians, gender-queer people, and immigrants today in the U.S. and Western Europe. It’s sickening. It’s frightening.
Anyway, the entire point of banding together back in the day was literal physical survival. It only makes sense that we, who are aware of our own mortality in a way that no other species is, would be somewhat comforted by the presence of a supportive group of other humans. We have a need to belong.
But belonging means defining an in-group, which of course implies/requires an out-group. And, watching the raid on the hotel in Transatlantic (Orringer et al., 2023) last night on Netflix, I was reminded of everything we’ve been seeing in the news lately–ICE raids, the nasty rhetoric coming from everywhere from the White House down to threads on Nextdoor, the hatred you see on people’s faces, the fear. There’s a scene in which Varian, who’s running an American rescue operation, tells the French police chief that the people he’s dragging out haven’t done anything wrong– they aren’t criminals, they’re refugees! And the police chief gives him the ugliest look and asks, “What’s the difference?”
More on belongingness coming up Thursday. If you want to be notified when it drops, you know what to do!
Have you watched Transatlantic? If not, I highly recommend it. It’s based on actual historical events.
As for the future,
Reference
Orringer, J., Hendler, D., & Winger, A. (Writers), Chuat, S., & Reymond, V. (Directors). (2023, April 7). The Angel of History [Broadcast]. In Transatlantic.
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