As
our modern living environment becomes increasingly cover with and filled with
technology, people increasingly feel separated from their organic grounding in
nature. And because this loss of
grounding leads to a loss of participation in the flow of processes in nature, many
people become increasingly unused to and uncomfortable with this flow of
processes and, in particular, the final process which is death. Even though they still crave and need the
organic stimuli involved in these processes, as they become more and more
involved in defending themselves against sensory distortion, they lose their
capacity to effectively absorb organic stimuli.
These people become increasingly conscious of their mortality, because
organic perishability – the mortality of all organisms – is just not a part of
their daily lives. And then these people
develop different ways of defending themselves against a growing sense of dread
because of this ongoing growing sense of mortality.
One
path of defense is to use technology to help suppress an elevated awareness of
death. By becoming more like machines –
either taking on machine behavior or trying to replace more and more parts of
the organic body with machine parts - people try to deny their mortality by
identifying with those entities that don’t suffer from organic
perishability. Modern machines, with
their relatively easy-to-replace parts are potentially immortal. To identify with machines is to adopt the
aura of immortality. Some people adopt
what they perceive to be positive traits of machines – productivity,
efficiency, objectivity. Some people
immerse themselves in defined discrete data – the language of modern
machines. By opening themselves up to
oceans of data, rather than oceans of water, and filling their minds with such
data, people develop pixilated landscapes in their minds, fragmented
consciousnesses built on points of data.
The result is a gradual loss of coherent consciousness. This loss acts as good protection against the
panic that comes today from being estranged from organic grounding as well as
from the natural flow of organic processes that leads ultimately to perishing
in death.
Of course, some people
want to go one step further and actually give up their organic physical unity
as well as their organic mental unity by replacing more and more parts of their
coherent organic body with machine parts.
This further leads to fragmented self-awareness, which, when all is said
and done, may be one of the best ways to numb one’s consciousness and thus one’s
awareness of death. Of course, in the
long run, as has been discussed in previous articles, developing a robotic
consciousness or becoming a cyborg is ultimately a way of killing the organic
human essence. It is like people who
become somehow robotized are also willing to experience a partial death in
order to avoid focusing on a total organic death.
Then there are those
people who are unable to use modern technology to practice a denial of death,
who experience their modern inflated awareness of death as putting them in an
ongoing living death and who find terminating their lives in the physical world
a preferable alternative to the pain of their ongoing awareness of their
mortality. What is interesting is that
the act of suicide can lead to a kind of surrogate immortality for the person
who commits it in today’s world that he would not have been able to achieve
while staying alive. I’m talking about
the shocking painful memories left with the people who survive the person who
commits suicide. The graphic unnatural
death of the deceased engraves a vivid long-lasting memory on the people who
knew him or knew of him. Suicide helps
the deceased rid himself of the pain from his separation from organic grounding
as well as giving him an awareness before he dies that he is doing something
that will give him a kind of life through the memories of others after he dies.
The preserved organic
imprint from the suicide is amplified when other people die in connection with
the suicide. The death of others can be
accomplished through a mass killing, after which the killer can point a gun at
his head and kill himself. Or there can
be a mass killing in which the killer puts himself in a situation where he will
be killed in a shootout with law enforcement.
The imprint of these mass deaths is much greater than that of the
isolated suicide. Unless the suicide is
a well-known individual, the imprint of the memory of his death extends only to
his family, his friends, and his acquaintances.
In the case of a mass killing, the imprint of the memory of the death
can extend to a whole nation and even internationally.
This approach to dealing
with the fear from the increased awareness of mortality in an ungrounded living
environment is very different from the approach of embracing and merging with
the cause of the loss of organic connection - namely modern technology. A person who merges with this technology as a
cyborg does not have to worry about leaving organic imprints as a basis for a
surrogate immortality. As a cyborg that
aspires to real immortality, such a person finds that a surrogate immortality
is unnecessary. Such a person believes
he can go on living forever.
As for the person who
merely identifies with modern technology rather than merging with it, living in
the modern work environment filled with computer screens and computer data
doesn’t help him to fully affirm his immortality, but it does help him to
forget about death by becoming numb to his mortality. The reams of data on the computer screen are
free from any hint of organic perishability.
They exist free from any hint of organic decay, as they float in the
experiential vacuum created on the computer screen. In a sense, as the person’s mind absorbs
these data, it experiences a temporary sense of immortality. Such a sense of machine-based immortality is
obviously not as enveloping as that of becoming a cyborg. A person who just uses a computer would have
more of a sense of his mortality than a cyborg, because his involvement with
the immortalizing machinery would not be as constant as that of someone who had
merged with it. Nevertheless, truly
immersing in the world of a computer would still be an effective means to deal
with the modern existential despair that comes from being disconnected from
organic grounding.
So here we have two basic
approaches to what we can call a modern existential despair over death as a
result of separation from organic grounding.
One approach uses technology to decrease one’s fears through either
identifying with or merging with the supposedly immortal modern complex
machines. In the other approach, feeling
shut out from organic grounding by modern technology, and despairing of ever
being able to make meaningful organic imprints to feel alive as well as to
preserve some of them to prepare for death, a person gets rid of his pain by
taking his own life and sometimes the lives of others in the process. The person gets rid of his existential
despair and leaves a searing imprint through the memories that are left in the
minds of the people around him and sometimes the minds of strangers as
well. While the second approach involves
total death, the first approach involves a living death from numbing a person’s
consciousness to the pain of a real death.
All this proves is that we need a solid organic grounding in our field
of experience in order to feel fully alive and to prepare for death. The challenge today is to find some way to
recreate enough of this grounding so that the dangerous approaches to life just
discussed no longer play such a prominent role among modern humans.
(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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