In less than 12 hours, the president of United States appears on the press and turns an ambiguous situation into a simple narrative.
It’s the incompetence of people who were hired for their skin colour, sex, caste, creed and physiology.
DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) caused the Washington midair collision.
How did Trump connect so many dots at the speed of light and establish what went wrong with such conviction?
And why do so many buy into this DEI ideology as the cause of the accident?
Understanding all this requires an appreciation of how human beings behave when confronted with death.
In this article, based on Ernest Becker’s work, I suggest that the president is using fear of death to heighten public anxiety, create a divide and spread hatred in the society.
This death driven anxiety is the foundation of all human cultures. It has historically been exploited in many accidents, catastrophes and terror acts to avoid outbreaks of violence and maintain social order.
In this specific instance, this ideology is being exploited for political gains.
In this write-up we will discuss:
Why do humans fear death?
How do we react and how do we relate with others when we are confronted with death?
How does this explain President Trump’s reaction to Washington midair collision?
Let’s take a look.
Consciousness puts us in a dilemma
From time immemorial, human consciousness has been gifted with the unlimited capacity to dream, envision and imagine possibilities like no other species on our planet. We think symbolically, linking one thing with another, associating cause with effect, reducing complicated situations into abstract images and signs, recalling memories from distant past, imagining a future light year ahead in time, and turning feelings into language when we are overwhelmed by fear and desires. Animals too have a conscious mind, but human consciousness is extraordinarily gifted with a sense of autobiography making every single individual unique in their own world. I is the shortest possible word with the most significant meaning in the English language. ‘I matter’ shout all 8 billion people on our planet each day (and even more on social media platforms).
But the flip side to being the masters of our own autobiographies is the prophecy to foresee the last page of our self-authored book. Just like an onion or a dog we are going to perish one day. Children as young as 7 years old come to realise that we all have a limited shelf life. We dare to question gravity, the speed of light, the density of water and all the laws of the universe but we never doubt the certainty of death. Death is perhaps the only absolute truth of our lives. And it is not very helpful that despite all the human progress we have still not worked out what really happens to us when we die. But we do know that death is painful, what precedes death is unpleasant and there is not much we can do to avoid the suffering of death.
Consciousness puts us into a dilemma. We have infinite potential, but we don’t have a lot of time.
The anxiety of death
Ernest Becker, an American cultural anthropologist and the author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, devoted a lifetime to explore the thesis of death as the basis of regulating all human behaviour. A loyalist to true sciences, Becker always believed that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so, his work was never confined to any one discipline or theory. His lifetime contributions pointed to a powerful thesis that the anxiety of death is the basis of all human culture.
Since death remains an unavoidable mystery, every culture has found its own ways to deal with the anxiety of death. Early religion gave human beings a prescription of how to live good life and an unquestioned belief in afterlife and an eternal soul. Some believe that although the body decays, the soul remains immortal. In the ancient Greek myth, their god Thanatos carried the dead to the underworld where he handed the mortals to another powerful god Hades in their afterlife. The Egyptians too believed in afterlife, but the dead had to negotiate a dangerous journey in the underworld following the Final Judgment and through elaborate funeral rituals. In the Buddhist faith, there is no concept of afterlife. Death follows rebirth and the soul merely transfers from one body to another. For a very long time, humans across cultures have remained settled with their rituals and symbols to cope with the anxiety of death. Essentially, as Becker rightly points out we have always been a death denying species.
The power-hungry kings of ancient China and the Pharaohs of Egypt took to a literal meaning in the afterlife and the eternal soul even though the early theologians and scientists were always aware of the symbolic meaning in afterlife. The literal meaning of resurrection resonated with the uncritical – the reassurance that the dead will rise from their graves. Stories of immortality and super-heroism have remained at the heart of all human culture, and they continue to attract the masses. Throughout human history, humans have never really come to accept death as the end of life. But along came Darwin and he busted the myths and symbols of religion. Material philosophies and intelligent design made it quite explicit that death is real and there is neither an afterlife nor the eternal soul. We will die and decay just like a snail or a cockroach and eventually we will all become fossil fuels. Darwin and the laws of nature spoke to the myth of Enlightenment, capitalists, progressives, atheists and those frustrated by the corruption of church.
Although Darwin could never really explain the force behind the intelligent design, in the last century or so, the spread of material sciences took his evolutionary theories to the next level both literally and symbolically. Without doubt, science started to exploit on death denying anxiety by replacing inner meaning with evidence-based truth. In the Western philosophies for instance, avoidance of physical harm became the basis for all moral decision making.
I once travelled British Airways where during the last minute of landing, the stewardess asked me to swap my wine glass for a plastic one. Why I asked?
It’s not safe for you.
Today, we have arrived at a stage where you can bring any intelligent conversation to an end by saying just those six words, ‘this is not safe for you.’
Look around and you will see how much of our death denying anxiety regulates our behaviour. Insurance, healthcare, automobiles, baby products, maternity items, sport equipment, age defying cosmetics, gymnasiums, aerobics, studio yoga, healthy eating, sleep aid devices, and luxury homes – we will buy all that we can to keep safe.
We may think religion is a thing of past because we have become scientific but just like the primitive man fell for the shamans and the priests, we see a proliferation of safety gurus, experts, professors and podcasts that exploit our death denying superstitions. Becker saw in all religions an immortality system.
Come to my ‘immortality system’, follow my way and thou shall be saved.
In risk and safety, we have a raft of ‘immortality systems’ – HOP, Safety II, new view, safety differently, psychological safety, traditional safety and BBS each one promising what it cannot give. Just like the shamans and priests, they offer us a path to salvation. ‘Safety saves’. As with religion, people associate with one group over another, demonise those who don’t align with their ‘immortality system’, but most importantly, like all religions neither makes space for dissent, critical thinking and questioning and none declares their moral philosophy.
But beyond any literal sense in the illusion of being saved, we humans think symbolically and imagine possibilities that can amplify our fear. Each day we participate collectively in death denying symbols, myths and rituals to overcome our anxiety of mortality.
Am I really going to die one day? The thought itself scares us to death. We crave to be remembered forever so we capture photographs and make memories. We want to leave a mark and so we conquer a new destination every time we go on a holiday. The thought of being alone is so frightening so we distract ourselves through entertainment, cinema, leisure and indulgence. Faced with boredom, we get into mindless eating or drinking, or we throw away parties to celebrate life. Once our basic needs are met, we want to leave a legacy for those who we really love. What would life even mean if the thought of death did not concern us?
One critique of Becker’s theories is that not everyone lives in the fear of death so how does this apply to me. From the time that you get up to when you hit the bed, news outlets, advertisement agencies, marketing campaigns and artefacts of history are subliminally reminding us of our mortal being. It is so hard to escape the fear of death. Our death denial tendencies is what define our species at large.
When we face an accident
Even on a day-to-day basis, if you consider yourself an atheist, a progressive, a heterosexual, or a rational, logical person there is not much motivation in engaging with someone who believes in an elephant headed god, prays five times a day, or simply acknowledges homosexual beings as equal. But our tensions with competing beliefs increases manifold when the symbols and myths of our own culture – failsafe systems, ultra-safe technologies, predictive analytics, and robust risk controls – come down crumbling like a castle in sand. Faced with failure in our face, the knowledge of alternative cultures, their symbols, their rituals and their notion of risk and safety can shake up our entire physiological and emotional make up. It destroys our worldview.
What good is all the science, research, expert advice, barriers, regulations, leading indicators, audits, inspections and training when two airplanes collide in the air and leave so many dead? We are not only proven wrong, but our existence is also threatened.
The civilised way to deal with fear and anxiety is to accept human fallibility with grace. We tried, we tried hard, but we are not perfect. What more can we do? We learn and we try to make the world a better place to live. Humble, compassionate and intelligent beings rise to the challenge.
But there are those who will exploit such situations for their personal benefits by channelling death denying anxiety towards members of another culture. If the move to channel this anger comes at a time when the fear of death is at its peak and the message is kept simple pointing at a singular cause, it is bound to resonate with meaning hungry masses. If the move points at a culture that contradicts the beliefs of the ruling classes, it is a double gain.
It glorifies the saviour, and it reinforces the belief of the cult.
I find it over-simplistic when people think that Trump is jumping too quickly to conclusions. Let’s wait for the formal investigation to conclude.
What assumptions are we making? Science will reveal the truth?
Accident investigations are meant to find out what went wrong and how it went wrong.
Why it went wrong is a matter of what soothes our anxiety.
Let me share an African myth before we end this podcast. There lives a community in South Sudan called the Azande. When a member of their family is sick or dead, the Azande don’t look for a natural cause. Instead, they turn towards a member in their community whom they don’t like. They hold this person responsible for their loss, tie a rope around his neck and drag him through the fields.
We laugh at the Azande, we call them savages in the civilised world.
But how is the instinct of the savages any different from us?
How is it different from Donald Trump?
Recommended reading:
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
The Worm of the Core by Solomon Sheldon et al.
