“The real world is simply too terrible to admit.

It tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die.

Culture changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe.

Immortal in some ways”

― Ernest Becker

It takes a lot to survive elections as an adult. Some pitch themselves headlong into the fray, scorching the campaign trail and patenting thirty different ways to amicably respond to “Nope, no- sorry, no, not round here, you fuckers, you’re all the same, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you? No, now you’re here, you’ll answer me: why are you here, with your politics? fuck off. Oh, going are you? All the same.” Some bask in the haven of progressive and ironic internet spheres. I do that, but mostly I’ve tried out lots of ways to stop caring about people, in the hope that by tightening my radius of concern and retreating to my inner citadel as a passive misanthrope, I won’t be affected by the human trauma of a consolidatory Tory landslide.

Strip-mining my emotional investment in humanity as the implications of continued conservative rule become gradually clearer, I kept returning to my creator. Ernest Becker, a twentieth century cultural anthropologist, and his Pulitzer-winning 1973 work — the genesis of my first coppery taste of mortal anxiety and existential irrigation — The Denial Of Death. Published shortly before his own death, Becker’s book introduced the most sober thesis of life that had ever been offered: As creatures unique mostly in the comprehension of our own inevitable non-existence, our cultural systems, pursuits, passions, buildings, borders and interactions are each uniquely carried out to unconsciously reject our common destination at every possible turn. Facing our reality, Becker explained, was not a biologically useful option. Doing so would be suicide of the ego; partial and irreparable deconstruction of the individual consciousness, so complete would our understanding be of our own existential impotence; so deafeningly hollow life, confronted without the trimmings, would irreversibly become. So, we create a duality of the self — between the limited physical self and the unrestrained symbolic self, onto which we can map our self-worth and create the margins for inherent meaning — to battle with the niggling secret that death, far from a mystic spindly hand guiding you into a benevolent and indescribable inwardness, is actually the eternal annihilation of the consciousness, in preparation for the sum total of our achievements, romances and unique composition to become an unravelling heap of fertiliser as the physical body. His thesis is so compelling because once one digests it, it seems achingly obvious. I chided myself for spending so much time unconsciously constructing my symbolic self when, having finished the book, I assumed I must’ve always known something so self-evident. Our sanity, then, is preserved through erecting our symbolic selves as heroes, transcendent through glory, with physical death perturbing only the physical self.

Becker’s work is not just unflinching to the point of making one want to vomit from mortal anxiety, it handles the idea of nothingness without ever giving it the coddling mundane substance we generally afford it in our daily thoughts — indeed, in our unconscious linguistic mechanisms. To discuss “death” is to humanly reject its reality. “Death” is very deliberately an open shell of a word, to be reassuringly filled with speculation and mythos. It is the treatment of death as a linguistic paradox identical to “nothing” that allows Becker to persuasively reduce all human behaviour and inclination to a desperate variety of experiments in blinding oneself to the literally inexpressible terror of un-existence. For Becker, there is no solution to reality; one might only hope to find the most compelling lie, a meaning as self-evident as possible, to keep themselves busy until they are no more: religion, nature, sport, culture, etc. From the eighties onwards, psychology professors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczsynski set to work empirically fleshing out Becker’s rhetoric, resulting in the unsettlingly well-respected Terror Management Theory. In short, this theory is that it’s not just a group of big and obvious institutions and behaviours that are informed by our fear of death, but absolutely everything ever. Not only that - the empirical tests themselves revealed that when reminded of their own mortality, humans generally become more hostile to those things with which they’ve not affiliated culturally and emotionally and strengthen their bonds to those which they have. The fear of death creates ideology, culture, war — all things are death. Like I said, it seems obvious.

_____________

The chosen instruments of death rejection in our rotting, frayed scab of neoliberal society are pretty clear: cultural uniformity (‘multiculturalism’ is only acceptable to a conservative country when the host culture subsumes its guests, digesting and regurgitating them in its own bile — thus constituting a passable sense of cohesion — rather than simply budging up for them), material worth and, for the blessed few, panicking at the end and opting to destroy everything good which could come after you’re gone. The common denominator across these affiliations is preventable death, from neglect to massacre, reheated as a palatable necessity.

But if academic nihilists still acknowledge the functional impracticality of the mass slaughter of the Other, only ever part-human beyond our borders, and trickle-down starvation of domestic minority races, working classes and those who fall into both — with particular teeth-baring revulsion — why don’t Conservative voters?

Death, here, today, is the reanimated marionette lovechild of a jobsworth dolphin and Lonesome George: Theresa May, using her almost infrasonic warble to echo-locate every indebted dementia sufferer within a nine-mile radius. Theresa May, loping through swing-seat shopping precincts, a chimera with the heels of a leopard and the body of a deputy locust, promising to ring-fence defence funding which will send Zodiac boats skidding out into the Channel to neutralise drowning immigrants, each newly fitted with an oaken bulldog figurehead. Theresa May, your next president — her campaign relying on the first-person singular in lieu of her party’s name — confidently hollering that human rights are a hindrance if you want to gun down an idea. The Darling Buds of Theresa Fucking May, picking aphids out of her bob, laughing contentedly while looking back across a freshly flounced-through wheat field where social housing should be.

— — — —

Voting Conservative this time is, unavoidably, tantamount to scribbling a little note agreeing with racists on your ballot paper. The skittish little ‘x’ suddenly leaks out and marbles across the page, twisting itself into words.

They scare me too.

When the prevalent method of death rejection is in finding cultural meaning and welding yourself to it, everything else is a threat; culturally unfamiliar people risk undermining your existential purpose with their own. Fuckers! Get off my purpose-lawn! They can’t stay, they’re wrong. The successful end of British history, for those who reject mortality by finding a movie-like hero’s quest in their ethno-national identity, would see cities decay and houses rust within a hundred years, with a handful of concrete strongholds scattered across the land in their place. Caucasian men — by now all named variations on either Alastaire or Deano, ‘Lord’ and ‘Sir’ since joined by sub-ranks of ‘Big’ and ‘Mad’ respectively, class system still resolutely intact — trudge back through castle gates after a day spent taking pot-shots at stray retreating foreigners but quickly getting bored because none of them had the energy to die with a Wilhelm Scream. Cheekbones lumped together out of loft insulation after a century of inbreeding, they sit hunched over their meals — salty casserole and really weak Ribena — until they jolt upright, hands quivering on their triggers because the wind whorling through the bricks sounded like it was whispering “samosa”. Beside the white men would sit a lot of white women, by the way, even the most progressive of whom have just filed in from their Two Minutes’ Hate of a large, beaming hologram of Leslie Jones, each wearing a badge bearing the Dunham family culture credo: “To struggle is to be kooky, yet super overlooked for Precious 2”.

— — — —

A common purpose existing simultaneously within and beyond capitalism is instrumental acquisition. Much of this election’s young Conservative vote — generally the aspiring second-generation nouveau riche — borrowing from Ceausescu and his plastic fruit stalls or Jay from The Inbetweeners, distil their immortality project into jazz-hands social media posturing, their meaning in the implications of ostensible materialism where their parents probably found it in money itself. The kids have abandoned their attempts at attaining any substantive core of corresponding wealth because they’ve had to take on a depressive pragmatism about the future they are uploading themselves into. Their commitment to a lived fiction subsists on the hope that we, the observer, will validate their death-transcendence by assuming that the money is actually there, just behind the door of that very locked Mercedes they’re leaning on, or under the counter of that breathable cocktail bar they’ve just been told they can’t inhale tap water in. Their meaning must come entirely from without. Committing to such a pervasive and personal facade naturally makes reinforcements of it all the more febrile, which means that those who build their identity on successful class superiority and the principles that facilitate it will frantically and convincingly espouse neoliberalism, just as their Instagram avatar would. Sadly, capitalism is a zero-sum war, so a vote for fraudulent vanity is still a vote for summary economic execution and, ultimately, an active apprehension of your belief that others, by virtue of their uncontrollable circumstance, deserve non-existence to the same degree you warrant profit by virtue of your own. Wealth, through the body politic, is puffed up with soothing, ageless meaning by taking frantic steps to reiterate and ideally enhance the class divide and wheel the result out as the product of simple merit.

Mortality salience makes murderers of us all. Death begets killing and indeed, all unprovoked killing is performed as part of the subjective dismissal of oblivion. We are often so anxious to consolidate whichever meanings we’ve set about pursuing in our lives into a more coherent immortality project that, usually, we will almost all vote in favour of immiseration, preemptive murder and lazily re-branded ethnic cleansing if we’re told convincingly enough that we’ll be on the right side of the chasm when it rumbles open. Annoyingly, we’re all told the same thing, but a lot of us will indeed have to end up clinging onto the fissured, collapsing side. Drunk on thoughts of living forever through financially qualified value to our country and our peers, we will bundle the minimum wage into a septic tank and drag the lid back over it — together — because Dad runs a small business without ever having been told about buying power. Then, we evict a proletariat who can no longer pay for their dignity — once we’ve punted their sons into war in order to ‘go and beat ISIS’. “ISIS” here presumably envisioned in its entirety as a sandy Luxembourg, a principality of terror within which faceless madmen schlep crates marked ‘ACME MURDER TOOLS’ from a truck on Evil Street over to Secret Plans Boulevard, rather than as an ideological hydra that is as easy to geographically destroy as the weather. Then we ignore those left homeless, waiting for them to die so we can nudge their corpses out of sight, if only to make sure there’s room for more. This is the essence of collective neoliberal mortality salience: in order to deny death, we must ensure only those economically worthy of life are on this side of it — the only side. Those who can’t extricate themselves from the circumstances into which neoliberalism hermetically sealed them are a burden on this odyssey of the strong, of the stable, of the profitable. The food bank queue is, by this token, a sentient museum diorama of the wrong and the hapless, and ideally the terminal.

— — -

Death, too, runs the engine room of stubbornness. That is why people can be presented with statistics and defiantly saunter further into what would suddenly be a delusion. Beneath one’s outright rejection of fact is the unconscious refusal to accept that they’ve irretrievably spent a part of their life in the wrong. Sure, it’s an indictment of their intellect, but it’s also a declaration of their permanently misspent time alive. There have probably been times in the last month when you’ve been sat with your friend, a pre-disenchanted floating voter, busy with work, critically untrained — yet more vocal than anybody you know about their “nose for bullshit” — and they have quietly announced they might vote ‘for Theresa May’. Why? you whisper, swivelling toward them. For what reason, you demand, tone suddenly formal and unsteady.

Well like, they say, avoiding your gaze, I just don’t trust Corbyn? And he’s not…I just don’t think he has a plan? You ask them if they’ve seen Labour’s manifesto, hand balling into a weapon of reason. Oh, they squint dismissively, no, well I just feel like he won’t be good, you know — good for our interests? And like, Theresa May wants us to get a good Brexit deal? Tell me…tell…tell me what you think that entails, please, you stammer. Like, she just knows what’s best for the U.K., doesn’t she? And like, I don’t see why I should have to pay more for healthcare that isn’t even mine just because immigr —

Rather than endure this with your excruciating mates who are too busy to find the institutions that determine the course of our species worth comprehending, themselves having found sufficient life purpose in a graduate scheme, only to then spend an hour stuffing them into a shallow grave having force-fed them the Sky remote, one could always channel Becker himself. Draw breath, and tell them that the immutability of their death invalidates the value of their life. Value itself will never be proven, and their perception of it forms part of a symbolic-physical duality that the individual constructs as a coping mechanism as their expiry date nears. Ideally, the more you get into it, the stiffer their sudden existential paralysis becomes and, while their chance of clinging yet more resiliently to their current immortality formula increases, so too does the chance of their ego death, leaving nothing but gratification through compassion in its wake.

NB — this, while satisfying, will be the last time you speak to one another.

Maybe, though, even this will fail with some. Beyond the realm of the racists, the obstinate and those who compartmentalise cowardice to avoid the reality of their extinction, an omniscient subculture watches on patiently — one for whom death has mounted the hill and is galloping toward their valley. Postal votes tucked into their cuffs, their pastel brains long since agglutinated into a hive mind that throbs out chants of “spoilt, spoilt, spoilt,” in telepathic pulses, they are the Embittered Elderly, and they are waiting for a chance to shit all over your flaccid ethical logic.

After a lifetime of practice in the western world, they incorporate all the aforementioned flavours of death denial and, having earned the right to not care about anyone — because, and I’ll say this for free, lad, nobody cared about them — let them stew in nostalgia since they retired. The comfortable ones seem to uniformly refer to the working class as travellers, while the working class ones just want their street to be the world again, and they all get off on you asking them to please move on from saying ‘coloured’, even if it is Billie Holiday and that’s how the World Service described her.

In despairingly asking why such a big chunk of the elderly vote as they do when they’re unlikely to live long enough to experience the destruction they are encouraging, one occasionally answers their own question. Every so often, a person nearing the end of a transparently unrewarding life will cast their vote in whichever direction would yield the most seismic upheaval in their absence. That is, as a last stand, they will rage against the dying of the Right and co-sign the demolition of the future because it won’t matter to them then, but their own tangible importance is comforting, intoxicating even, in the present. They don’t care to know whether it’s meaningless or not, they’re bloody well doing it. Perhaps proximity to death itself, alongside a heretofore fruitless quest for purpose, amplifies the scale of the wanton trauma one is willing to support as the foundation of their bid for immortality through legacy — any legacy — and renders them impenetrable to self-doubt. I spoke to an older person who voted Brexit, and asked her if she since regretted it, what with even the mid-term economic implications for younger people. She mirthfully replied, “don’t suppose I’ll be around!” I can verify this because it was my otherwise clear-headed and fastidiously timetabled grandmother.

Then, beyond even this, there’s the elderly ontological realist. They’re all set to blip conclusively and unceremoniously back out of an existence that went by chaotically and quickly, and they know it. To paraphrase Michael Caine’s Alfred in ‘The Dark Knight’: “Some people — the old people, Bruce, proper neolithic sour bastards, really just mean fossilised little shitbags, don’t get up for them on the bus — just want to watch the world burn.” Calling Your Nan turns into a different task altogether when you discover that with age, rather than wrapping herself up more firmly in the cultural biases she knows, the generational anxieties she’s been exploited for that you can factually unpick, she’s gazed at her oncoming obliteration and done away with the charade of purpose completely, becoming a bored se-nihilist who, finally free of the search for a meaning that the world had promised her was there, has resolved to see herself out in a cyclone of inflation and prune juice. Understandably, they consider the end of their existence, for all intents and purposes, the end of our existence — maybe the Tories have worked this mentality out. As far as ideological re-education goes, nothing worthwhile can be done for these people, only against them.

Voting itself, in any direction, is clearly a way of buying into the denial of death, as may well be everything we do. Voting is a cornerstone of forward-moving life, the rejection of existential futility, or rather, at least stating your belief in the great May-As-Well — in effect, settling for that bereft springtime state of absurdism. While that means embracing the hilarity of being, it doesn’t have to mean insisting false purpose to oneself amid the absurd, like Camus’ Sisyphus, more that we’d do well to restrict ourselves to presentness, using death awareness as our springboard, and establishing compassion as perhaps the only enduring logic in the face of it.

The inflexibility of non-existence can create unity or division. Aside from brief and strange pauses for breath, human history has been a tone-deaf chorus of the latter. A conservative victory bangs the gavel on a million death sentences, where no other outcome would. But tomorrow, we can declare an end to the half-century cunterlude and breathe again. The choice is between futile narcissism and futile cooperation. To condemn so many distant consciousnesses to a life quantifiably beneath yours, through purely the wet-minded hatred of your own transience, somehow achieves villainy in a universe ignorant towards binary moralities. It somehow finds the room to be so pathetically craven that, were life to end up possessing intrinsic sanctity, tomorrow’s Conservative voter would be the most conspicuously undeserving of it.

@wolfmvc

The full text of Ernest Becker’s The Denial Of Death is available here.

You can buy Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski’s The Worm At The Core, an altogether more uplifting take on the role of our death, here.