Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (Episode Two, “Death”)

Money, wealth and possessions have long played a role in soothing human anxieties about death. According to Terror Management Theory, acquiring riches wards off fear of death because it helps us to attain symbolic and literal immortality. Symbolic because these riches leave a legacy in the form of seemingly timeless monuments and bequests to heirs and benefactors. Literal because they buy life extending technologies that bear the promise of one day eliminating “natural” death altogether.

In my new chapter in the fantastic volume Clickbait Capitalism, I historicize immortality striving through wealth acquisition (a pre-print of the chapter can be found here). Specifically, I am interested in what differentiates capitalism from other political economic orders in the way that it denies death. I also explore how death denial unfolds through different phrases of capitalist development.

The fear of death, I propose, is a universal feature of human existence. But the way that this fear is managed or denied varies greatly over time and space. At one end of the continuum is low denial, a culture where death and the dead are omnipresent. Here we find the archaic gift economy, organised around the redistribution and destruction of surplus. Archaic economic activity is collective and sacred, actively involving the dead and death in order to make payable the existential debts that haunt us from the moment of biological birth. Cyclical time and periodic redemptive ritual are purposefully designed to prevent accumulation of anything, whether it be wealth, power, time, anxiety, or guilt.

At the other end of the continuum is high denial, a culture where death and the dead are entirely excluded from social life. Here we find capitalism, a system in which economic activity is individualised and de-sacralised and the dead and death are banished, resulting in unpayable debts. Capital accumulation is the primary psychological defence mechanism, a power intended to stave off mortal dread. But because accumulation rests on linear time and is shorn of redemptive and sacrificial ritual, guilt and anxiety also start to accumulate. The system is driven by an endless and increasing neurotic charge.

Since the 1970s, I claim that capitalist death denial has intensified. Structural transformations in the so-called “advanced” economies over the past few decades have dissolved the remaining vestiges of collectivism in economic life and shattered any shared vision of social progress. The result is a disintegration of the remaining collective outlets needed to share, expiate, and to some extent relieve, the cumulative guilt and anxiety of capitalist life. Intensified death denial in the contemporary era finds its most spectacular manifestation in Silicon Valley’s quest for literal immortality. This privatised immortality project is a morbid escapism intended to hive the ruling class off from the irredeemable masses.