Death Cults Are Not Cool

In this letter, I state the extremely obvious; death cults are not cool.

The most disappointing thing about this letter is having to write it at all. So I shall moan about my reluctance to write it for as long as I can before I begin my labors.

Why should someone as smart as I, as blessed with free time as I, as creative in the dark arts of procrastination as I, and as handsome as I, have to sit down and write about the basic instincts of humankind, and why we should all strive to do something so sensible and straightforward. Why must I have to state the obvious? Why must I have to proclaim that the sky is blue and the sea water contains salt? Why must I describe an elephant to a man who can see?

Why did I have to pick up this pen and paper and write this missive? There is no sensible reason for me to be doing this. And yet I am here, doing it regardless. Because posterity must bear me witness. My only hope is that this letter will be short, and it won’t take me hours to clarify my thoughts.

(It took me about three days)

My assertion for this letter is simple; death cults are not cool. You should not belong to one, you should not support one, and you definitely should not do either of these things because you think they are cool. Because they are not. You may suspect that they are, but what you suffer from could be adequately described as a Psy-op. You are being psychologically manipulated by lizard men from Mars who want to take over earth.

If you are not alive to my point by now, you may ask yourself for some clarity. Why does this fellow drone on and on about this issue? He should arrive at his point.

When I was younger, I noticed that a lot of the people of my generation started making jokes about death. It started off as a way to be edgy and stand out from the crowd. It began on the mood boards of cancer-infested sites such as Tumblr and soon found home on the status bars of 2go and Twitter. But even then, it was not a widespread affliction. It was a sort of bourgeoisie framing of the angst of youth. Some people acted out by being rude and disrespectful to their parents, and others acted out by crafting a dangerous sense of humor that found death funny and cool.

This culture also came with a sort of familiarity with bespoke mental illnesses. Young people who were bored out of their minds diagnosed themselves with depression, and people with horrible behaviors simply chalked it up to their Bi-Polar disorder that they never got diagnosed of. People who had pretty normal childhoods claimed they suffered from childhood trauma, and lazy kids with horrific study habits claimed it was a result of ADHD. It was a fad, a way to signal to other terminally online teenagers, and a way to tell people that you were cool. It was the equivalent of light up sneakers or a pen with multiple colors. However, the problem is that these misguided people have grown up and they have fully transitioned from terminally online quirky teenager to terminally online weird adult with no capacity to participate in adult conversations.

These days, you see people proudly proclaim that they are anti-natalists (that is people who believe that it is morally wrong to procreate). These anti-natalists base their belief on the assumption that life is nothing but pain and trauma and introducing a sentient being to that intentionally is immoral. But that is the view of life you should get from an angry teenager, not a full grown adult. “I hate my life and want to die” is the angry retort a 15 year old raging with hormones gives when asked to put off the PS4 and clean his room. It is not the sort of thing a clear headed 25 year old bases their entire political ideology around.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where this is precisely the case. It is no longer obvious to this people that the continuance of the human race is in itself a good thing. It is now something that must be defended vigorously. People like this have now taken their angst at the world as teenagers into adulthood.

There are many reasons for this state of events. One reason is a generational fear of responsibility and an addiction to Youth. In yesteryears people understood that they could not be forever young. They knew that they had a short window of youth, and once that window was gone it was over. They had to deal with the responsibilities and afflictions that came with middle age, and then old age. But here is the thing; youth is amazing. No one who has been one wants to leave it. I am close to my mid twenties now, and if someone gave me a chance to relive my late teenage years (or even my early teenage years) I would take it in a heart beat. Everyone wants to feel young and be young. The vitality of youth is like sweet wine, and the capacity of young people can be dizzying.

Unfortunately, youth does not last forever.

For most people what ends youth is not age, or responsibilities or sickness. There are many 50 year olds who still get tattoos and turn up in clubs in their 2004 camrys. What ends youth is the responsibility of a child. If you are even quarter of a responsible person, a child essentially ends your days of hedonistic enjoyment. You cannot go out as much, you cannot spend as much, and you have to plan a lot more. In many ways, the old you is now dead, and you have begun a new life of living for two or more. If you see yourself as an everlasting youth, bringing a child into the world to begin a new life would feel like death. And who wants to die? No one. Hence, anti-natalism; garbing cowardice and awarding virtue points in philosophical language-speak. People want to be Peter Pan forever, and want to be self righteous while being that.

Anti-natalists are not the only ones who belong to death cults. In fact, this cult is pretty welcoming and has all shades of people. Black, blue, white, short, tall, lizard bug men, you have it all. The people who belong to this cult hold beliefs that, if taken to their conclusion, would end in the death and disappearance of a huge chunk of the human race. It may even lead to total human death.

Another group of people who belong to this cult are green earth advocates and nature lovers who argue that humans are a net evil on the planet. They believe that humans and their activities are contributing to the death of earth, and as such human beings are parasites.

I don’t want to go into the specifics of that claim. But here is the nucleus of my rebuttal; arguing that human beings are parasites is a fundamentally fucked up way to look at our stewardship of earth — if we may even presume to call ourselves stewards. It is such an incredible thing to say and think. The only way one can rationalize such ideas is to assume that the holder belongs to a cult of people who are invested in humans dying off. And that assumption, while incredible, seems totally consistent with the facts.

The beliefs that these people hold, especially concerning human beings, are atypical and deviant in nature. They often belong to a community of fellow deviants who hold these beliefs, and their dedication to this idea is certainly irrational and dogmatic. It is hard to consider all of these facts and not arrive at the conclusion that people like this belong in a cult, and that it is a cult that venerates death.

There are many other subgroups that belong to this group. It is not easy to quickly discern that these people belong in a cult, because they look like you, talk like you, and are even worried about the same boring palavers of life that bother you. For example, over the past few months I have argued with many people who disagreed with my obviously superior opinion on many issues. After constant prodding, I discovered that the reason for our disagreement was not a misunderstanding or misapplication of logic. It was simply an asymmetry of incentives.

Here was the issue; I believed that it was a good thing for the human race to continue and prosper above all, and I believed that should be the overarching goal of the state and human institutions generally. Don’t get me wrong; I am not the sort of sod who believes all humanity is paramount. I like to say that I would light the world on fire to make my mother warm, so I certainly have a healthy appreciation for human self interest.

However, the people I spoke to could literally not comprehend why the continued existence and prosperity of the human race would be anyone’s headache, and why it could be a good rationale for certain behaviors today.

You've posted a lot about how religion and societal constructs exist for the good of society.

But the question is, why should I care?

Why should I want to sacrifice what I have today, for the so-called good of society.

— My friend

So many people, and I am certain you have met them as well, hold the bourgeoisie view (because that is what best describes it) that they live for today and themselves alone, and they let this opinion adorn them like a cape. A thousand years ago a confession such as this may have rendered them stateless. The people of the tribe might have asked them to just leave and never return. But today? It may get a few thousand retweets on the hell site called twitter, and one might even get a few friends and they may bond over their equal disdain for the continuance of society and their indifference towards the future of the human race.

Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the way human beings evolved and to put this pernicious idea in its proper context is to think of them first as chimps in a jungle. One thing you should know about chimpanzees is that they are extremely cooperative. That is, individuals usually work together for the betterment of the group. But how does this happen? Animals are not just born with a gene that dictates that they must work together. Well, at least most of them are not. At least not in the beginning.

Here is where a tiny little thing called natural selection comes in. Chimps, who by some accident of birth, happen to cooperate for the benefit of the tribe might find it easier to hunt. They might find it to have reasonable male power tussles. As such they may live longer and have more children than another gang of chimps who are not that cooperative. But nature is cruel, and ever so often a young chimp with no willingness to cooperate may be born into the gang of cooperative chimps.

In most cases the cooperative chimps will realize that this young chimp is in it for himself alone, and they would either stop working with him, exile him, or beat him to death. Anyway, the young chimp would not live for long and would not have many kids. The cocktail of genes that gave him that antisocial attitude may die with him. That is how the gang of chimpanzees would retain their cooperativeness.

I imagine that this would also pass on to human beings. Adults would quickly recognize members of the society who were not willing to give up things for the survival of the society, and would quickly remove them. Hence, the least coolest thing you could probably be as an early human being would be to be someone who says;

So how did death cults, in the fashion I speak of, go from being rather uncool to being the coolest thing ever? How did they become so cool that I had to write a long and bothersome letter to remind everyone that this is absolutely not a cool thing? How did not wanting your tribe to survive go from being something you were exiled over to being something that you could insist on and wear as a badge of honor? When did we stop killing the uncooperative chimps?

There are many probable causes of this. I have an article outlining how a new religion called Free Range Gay Space Atheism is contributing to what I describe here. It could also be because human beings no longer desperately depend on the approval of others to live their lives. It is easier to hold deviant beliefs in a city of ten million people than it is to hold it in a village of five thousand where everyone knows you. Another reason is that the trappings of modern life means that living for others or the rest of the tribe is simply no longer tenable. I have no doubts that any sufficiently gifted anthropologist could write an entire book on what has caused this shift in this behavior. That is not what this newsletter is about. Instead, it is about why this attitude towards the human race just ain’t cool.

I will start with a bold statement; it is wrong to have these sort of attitude towards the human race and society at large. I know that there is no such thing as objective morals and whatnot, so I am not going to appeal to any objective measure of what is right and what is wrong. Instead, I will be appealing to the same values that these people, that insist quite ardently that society’s needs come after theirs, hold.

Whatever we as human beings have and cherish today flows downwards from the quality of the society we live in. Human rights, for example, are a relatively new idea and they only exist at the pleasure of the state. The quality of the human rights anyone enjoys, or the rights they are allowed to enjoy, is directly linked to the quality of the state they exist in.

American citizens, for example, enjoy really robust free speech rights because the American state allows it. Nigerians? Not so much. The difference between the stations of both citizens is the quality of the state they live in. Hence, whatever rights anyone enjoys in a state is subordinate to the existence and prosperity of that state. This does not just refer to rights in the constitution. It refers to daily life as well. It is not granted that one would always be able to sit down at a computer and type ten thousand words of schizio postings. The state makes that possible. Parties, family life, friendships, and existence itself, are all mediated on the quality of the state and the society one lives in.

This is so true that even Jesus had this to say about it;

‘Seek first the prosperity of the state/society/race and everything else shall be added on to you.’

He might not have said it exactly like that, but you would agree that my paraphrase was the spirit behind the scripture.

The state is the horse that drags that cart. Therefore putting those trappings, that are only available because of the quality of the state, above the state is logically retarded. There are no rights before the state, hence the state is superior to individual rights. Hence, if the state demands a sacrifice for its sustenance, your reply should be “how big”. (Except, of course, you have a better vision for the state, in which case you should probably acquire power, but that is for another letter).

However, the pre-eminence of the state its importance to anyone’s quality of life is not the only reason why one should generally care for it and have an healthy appreciation for its importance. There is also, as the kids call it, the fact of basic human decency. Let me explain.

The sort of people who belong to this peculiar death cult are also the sort of people to have cavalier social concerns. They are the sort of people to care about things like sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism and other such nonsense. If they truly believed that the prosperity and continuance of the human life were irrelevant to their struggles and aspirations, they would not have these social concerns. It is like a man leading a lamb to the slaughter, and bothering that it looks lean. What is the point if the lamb is going to die anyway? If you believe humanity were a parasite on the earth, and that introducing babies to that parasitic life were evil, and that the survival of the state is not important enough for you to sacrifice anything, why would you care about the social dynamics of the parasite? The answer to that is buried in the first part of the missive.

Why do people join cults? What is their motivation? Do they do it because they love the idea behind the cult? Do people who join the Pyrates really just love the pirates of the Caribbean? Do people who join the seadogs really just love sailing and bitches? No. They don’t. The biggest motivations behind joining a cult isn't the idea behind it, but the camaraderie. It is a way of signaling to others that you are hip and cool and fun and proper. Just like ironic jokes once were. Hence, it does not need to have internal logic, it just needs to be a good identifier. Ironically, the utility of this death cult to the ardent believer is to foster even closer social connections. To be fair to them, this is how most beliefs work. It is the way of the world.

I am sure that many people who hold these beliefs truly hold them earnestly and do not think it’s just a way of signaling to others. But I am willing to bet that most members of this death cult do not even know or consider that they belong to one, and if they did they would reconsider their priors at almost the speed of light.

The one thread that ties all of these beliefs together is that if followed to their rational conclusion they conclude in total human death. Too many lone chimps spoil the troop, and too many spoilt troops spoil the species. And that eventually leads to the species being an interesting footnote under the survival of the fittest chapter of the Darwin games.

There are many who assume that the current state of human advancement and civilization is granted, and that we live in a zero year where nothing ever changes. But that is false, and allowing death ideas — like the assumption that we are here to serve the earth, not be served by it, and that birth is morally untenable — run rampage would eventually intimate us with how wrong it is to believe in such historical fiction.

I read somewhere that all the good nihilists are dead. Perhaps it is the case with these cultists. All the good ones are dead, and the ones alive now are merely masquerading and indulging themselves in teenage angst. Only that it stopped being cool in 2013.

In the end, I suppose my message is this; death cults are not cool because life is good, and without it you would not have the freedom to even belong to a death cult. Death cults are not cool because you almost certainly don’t believe in them. And lastly death cults are not cool because you are a 28 year old lawyer, not a 14 year old angst-posting on Tumblr. If those reasons are not good enough for you, there is really nothing else to say.

Dude, death cults are literally not cool.

— Josie ‘IDAN’ Elewa