ACFM - ACFM Trip 46: Death

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Of all the unseen forces that shape human society, could death be the most powerful? The ACFM crew take a leftwing look at mortality in this Trip, asking how capitalism has altered our approach to the inevitable. Jem, Nadia and Keir think about how industrialised workers were taught to prepare for death, why powerful men […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Keir Milburn. Hello. and Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we are talking about death. So, guys, why do we want to talk about this subject?

Well, in part, we think this show will come out, you know, sometime around Halloween, the time when the gap between life and death is at its thinnest, according to tradition. And so we thought that it might be a topical. It came into our mind for that reason. But death is just a very interesting topic. is one of those topics which is under-discussed. One of those knowages, our mortality is one of those knowledgees that we keep in our minds,

but not at the forefront of our minds. It burges into sights, you know, usually around 2.30 in the morning on a sleepless night. So we thought we'd pull it fully into view and discuss the history of how we've dealt with death, et cetera, how it plays into philosophy and politics. There's lots to talk about, I think. I'd like us to explore together whether there is such thing as being done. good about death or being bad about death. So because it's such a difficult thing for human beings to really grasp, which I know is something we're going to get into, I'm kind of interested

in the idea about whether there is an actual good way of being able to cope with this, and whether there is a bad way? Is this down to on a kind of like, you know, individual level or culturally and politically, are there ways that we should be promoting or thinking about? Is there a line effectively on death? And how does that relate to us in terms of collectivities? We're going to be talking about rituals and things like that. But I am interested in using this conversation to explore for myself. I'm not sure whether I am good at death or particularly bad at it.

And kind of what level of denial plays into that. Before we get into all of that, we should mention that. You can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter. which we now send out about with every new trip, so not more than once a month. It's got bonus content on it and updates from the ACFM crew. So to sign up, go to navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. And for more music and less chat, follow the Everest expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM.

Also, it would be really great if you could leave us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on. helps us with the algorithms. And to support us to keep bringing you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, please support our hosts, Navara Media, from as little as one pound a month by going to Navara.media forward slash support. And a couple of more notices this month. I am running a series of consciousness-raising workshops. The next one is going to take place in Bath, in November. So if you are an activist or at all involved politically in Bath, that's Bath in the UK, I'd love to hear from you. Please email me at Not Alone in the World, 1,2,3 at gmail.com, or you can get in touch via Twitter or now X. And last but not least, we would like to wish a very happy birthday to

Matt Full, the originator of the term acid corbinism and friend of the show, who recently had a big birthday, so very happy birthday to you, Matt. Now, on with the show. So death, big topic guys, and quite a different one for us. So how do we want to approach this? Maybe we should talk about our own experiences of death or feelings about death, such as they are. What about, I mean, what about you, Keir? I've not died yet. No, I mean, that's actually a serious point, isn't it? We are always talking about our experiences of other people's deaths because, like, the death is actually unknowable to living beings. And so it is this great sort of, you know, this great, great unknown of the human condition of human existence, etc. There is also an age-related thing to

this, isn't it? The early experiences of death, like one of my friends died very young when he was 21. The father of my nephew Felix, a guy called Sam, and that was like an incredible shock because I was very young at the same time. We had no real, I found it very hard to deal with, basically. We all did, you know, the friendship group he was in. As you get old, of course, you come more familiar with people that you know dying, etc. And I suppose the most significant spirit of death was my father died probably like 15 years ago. He was like 62, so quite young, although he'd always been quite unhealthy. He was a big drinker and he smoked a lot, basically. So I did always expect him to, he was less surprised that he died relatively young. That was another thing,

which was like a really big, a huge shock. He had pancreatic cancer. So it was like, you know, diagnosed you've got like a month or something like that, perhaps five, six weeks from diagnosis to death, basically. It's this really quick thing. It's nothing nobody can do about it. So it's quite a traumatic experience. And I would definitely say, I've never particularly processed it. And there was quite a lot of grieving at the time, but I'm not particularly processed it. And so, like, you know, my own knowledge, my own mortality is not something I dwell. I'm not quite sure whether you can, you know, continue and get through life. If you bring the, if you really, really bring, you know, put a full consciousness of mortality into your, to the front of your consciousness.

Or perhaps you can. Of course you can. But you would live very differently, I think. That's something we need to talk about quite a bit, I think. That glib statement I just made. Actually, listening to you there, Keir, I'm finding it very difficult to not want to kind of reach out to you through the digital space and say, I'm really sorry. And that's part of like my experience of death is like a space where you really want to reach out to people and connect, I suppose. So even just listening to you there, I was like, oh, I'm really sorry that you had that experience.

I'm sorry I'm not with you. could give you a hug. My experiences of death are just not very unusual. I've lost a few people, including my dad, although he was old, and it was very easy death as they go. And I don't know whether I think about my own death very much. I did, I mean, a therapist did tell me that she thought I might be in denial about my own mortality, which I think is something that comes out of existential therapy, psychotherapy. But I think this is something that's normally told to people who feel like they procrastinate too much, which is basically everyone. Because there's some strand of existential therapy, I think, regards procrastination is fundamentally motivated by not wanting

to confront one's own mortality, infinity, because once you do accept that, you start getting on with stuff, because you know you've only got so much time, but I don't know how much I think about it. I think I probably am in denial about it, although I'm not convinced of anyone who reason. What about you, Nadia? Yeah, I mean, that really rings true, to be honest. I think that is the big question. It's like, I don't understand when someone would say, I think you're in denial about death. I think it's like part of life is to be in denial about death. Like, I don't, I don't know how, what it would look like, or whether we should rather, or like, whether it's a healthy thing to like be thinking about death in a different way. And I think that's part of the exploration of

what this episode is, is to me. I mean, I think, something I've thought about a lot in the last few years. And I do think, you know, this is why the age thing is interesting and how it's related to age, is that I know a lot of people who have died. And I know a lot of those people died when I was in school. A lot of people in my class in school. I think there's 15 of us out of a year of about 60 have died. Not all at that time, but a lot of people died when I was in school and university. And I've not ever really dealt with it. I mean, I remember my grandfather's death. I remember my young cousin dying when he was 27, which was tragic. And I remember it as if it's a film. I'm not even sure what processing is, really, in this case. So I'm interested in what I'm going to come out on the other end of this podcast recording, thinking in a sense,

because I guess I'm interested in the same question that you raised, Jeremy. me about like, like, you know, like, are, am I in some sort of denial and that is that a problem? Like, am I good at death? Am I processing in the right way for me? Or is there another way that I should be thinking about it? So that's, I guess, my best sort of experiences with death. I mean, apart from the fact of how I am going to funerals, which is very much to do with my very kind of controlling personality, which is that I just don't, I've never cried at a funeral. I tend to put myself in the role of supporting other people who are crying. I think when people are emotional, I find it difficult to be emotional. Another issue which gets me

thinking about death a little bit is autumn. And I'm someone who definitely as I get older, but living in the UK, I very much feel connected to the seasons. And I controversially, of course, this is quite controversial in England to say, is autumn is my favourite season. There is, something for me in the end of something and the kind of decay of something and then the potential that comes out of that creatively. I always feel at my creative best or I found that I have felt at my creative best in autumn. And I think that's interesting. But I wonder whether that's because when one observes it in nature, there's something about the understanding that life necessarily is, you know, that life is part of death. Like that that way.

around, but as things end, new things will begin. And that's, I suppose, because I'm trusting the season and I believe in the next spring. And that's perhaps a kind of positive, I don't know if positive is the right word there, but a positivist kind of outlook or like a belief in the future, in a sense. Whereas if I reflect on that, on a human level, that's not necessarily the same, because my relationship to particular people in my life makes it difficult for me to see how life lives on beyond them, unless I'm trying to see it as living on beyond them in their children, I suppose. I like that, Schmill then. It started off with goth Nadia and went into, I don't know,

folkloric Nadia. Both of those Nadias exist, simultaneously. definitely. You should also say, as well, you told us about this, that half of your class or something died the other day. Not quite a half, but like a fifth. Yeah, which is quite, it's, that's quite an unusual experience, I think, to experience that much deaf, really young. And not to think, no, I don't remember talking about it.

I don't remember there being any marking of it. And I think I've gone full circle and I wonder whether that is actually, for me, that was good. but I've not processed that in a way that is necessarily negative. You know, it doesn't feel bad, it's just what it is. It doesn't feel tragic, which is interesting. You know, I'm interested in that. Other than, of course, the worry that there is some kind of curse

and that we are all going to die young on our year at school, you know. We could hear Bob Dylan's evocation of imminent death in his famous 1973 anthem knocking on heaven's door. I feel I'm knocking on heaven's door. Knock, knocking on heaven's door. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door. Knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door.

Both me and you, Nadia, talked about processing death, and Gem talked about going to therapy about it. These are obviously psychoanalytical. In the aftermath of psychoanalysis, these terms of like processing, etc. So we should, like perhaps we should do a little bit of a more of a historical look at approaches to death, perhaps how people prepare for death, how people have thought about death or included it in rituals through history and that will perhaps reveal to us a little bit more about how contemporary our own way of thinking about death is perhaps. The thing that's really striking is that I don't know any example of a culture at any point in history where apart from maybe now, maybe in highly secular post-religious societies like Britain where

large numbers of people profess a belief that human mortality is complete, that people just die, that no part of the self survive. So I think there is a strong argument that it's something that people really don't. People don't believe it. So, you know, people think that the spirits survive in some way, that the ancestors are still communicable with in some way, or they believe in forms of reincarnation. the assumption that death is actually the end of existence,

the end of organic life is like the end of existence is something that I'm sure there have always been people who believe this, but kind of remarkable how persistent it is. If you're thinking about practices around death, mourning, funerals, etc., like any time before very recently in history and human culture, There's some sort of assumption going on most of the time. You know, you're sort of saying good boy to somebody, maybe temporarily, but it's not a permanent separation.

It's not a permanent ending. And obviously it's conditioned by religion. I mean, it's one of the fundamental roles of religion in culture is to tell people what happens when you die, what is a good death? Like, how should you commemorate the dead? How should you manage the transition, which the end of life is conceptualised? It is quite likely that the conception of God or gods arises from that question of what happens

after life, after death, I mean to say, or after life, that's what death is, isn't it? Just to think about, like, when you said earlier Nadia that you never cry at funerals, and I always cry at funerals, I don't really enjoy it, like uncontrollably crying. And one of the, I have noticed that, you know, I do prefer a highly religious orchestrated funeral than a more humanist funeral. You know, I appreciate people who want humanist funerals, but they tend to be, you know, when people are getting up doing eulogies, etc. You're confronted with the reality of this person's death a lot more than you are when it's hidden behind a load of religious sort of ritual. Those rituals may well be distancing mechanisms. or they certainly function as distancing mechanisms

so that you can push away that a little bit and get through this quite difficult moment a little bit easier. Going back to Jeremy's point about what do we do with the information about the fact that it seems like for the whole of history, people have thought there will be more. And I wonder whether this is linked to being closer to, again, going back to nature, the cycle of life, of understanding that, you know, from decomposition comes life.

So surely that must be the same for the self or the soul or the, you know, the conscious being. It feels like a logical fit in a sense. It's like if the body is going to produce life through its decomposition, then there must be somewhere else which the conscious part goes, but also I think it's because of what we were saying initially at the top of the show, which is that it is impossible to conceptualize, that people are, and even the terminology we use, you know, in the contemporary world, of no longer here. We're much more comfortable with saying they are no longer here than they're kind of, they're gone. It's just that they're not with us.

They are not with us here. So we can only speak in the terms of like being able to conceptualize the absence rather than it being a gone, because even absence is something that can be temporary or it can be spatial. we can understand that over time and space because they can then come back or there might be another form, right? And I do think the answer to this question is just like you can't do it

unless you've died and come back and are a zombie, which we'll get onto. That's another point. It is quite hard though, isn't it? Like already I could see there were anachronisms in the way you were talking about the soul and the spirit. The soul in particular is a sort of Christian way of conceptualising a split between the body

and something else, basically. And we definitely know that, you know, at the root of most religions, there are conceptions of afterlife or reincarnation or some sort of belief in terms of what happens after somebody dies, et cetera. But of course, human history is long. And most of it is, like, beyond our ability to recreate in anything, you know, in any meaningful way, we can see, you know, burial rituals and we can interpret them in certain ways. But we really have no idea how people thought about that.

If religion is drawn out of this trying to go. grapple with this idea of what happens after death, then in fact, you know, that's almost like a survivability bias in that like those things are the ones that will last, do you know what I mean, the ones we'll recognise. A lot of human beings might well have gone through life without that sort of conception. Yeah, that's true. We're talking about the unknowability, partly, of death. I mean, it's one of the things that's completely, it's unknowable, and it's one of the things that we'll get into all this philosophically, maybe. It's one of the, the things that defines the singularity of a single person's experience is the fact that

everybody dies. It's sometimes conceptualised in such a way that everyone's death is their own. But we can come back to that because that's always problematic. But it's certain. I mean, there's that famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, isn't it? The only two things in life that are certain are death and tax it. The fact that death is completely inevitable also means that it's one of the features of life, which people organise a whole kind of sense of temporality around. And so the idea that death is something you have to prepare for that is really built into, I mean, every culture to some extent, I think. I don't know about all of them. As in each person should prepare for death?

Well, that's something that varies, isn't it? Sometimes individuals are supposed to make preparations for their own death or families. Sometimes to a certain extent, the whole community had to be sort of ready for it. The idea of preparing for making preparations for your own death, for example, becomes really important in sort of early industrial Protestant culture in Britain. I think partly because people aren't in these village communities anymore and they're not part of the established, a lot of them aren't part of the established church anymore.

So you can't rely on the idea that when you die, your burial, the prayers for your death, the disposal of whatever property you've got actually will all be handled by the community and its rules. So one of the things that marks the emergence of a modern, like highly individualised, semi-secular or secularising society and also a society really marked by Protestantism. Like in Victorian Britain is the emergence of like funeral societies. And it's one of the first forms of saving that people start doing. We were talking about holidays and people saving up for holidays and the way in which that really comes to shape people's idea of the

future and people's insertion of themselves into a particular kind of capitalist economy where you have to have a particular orientation to an idea of the future. And the same can be said of saving for funerals. It was one of the first things that people started to save up for. It's partly why the, you know, the biggest provider of funerals in Britain is still the co-op, the cooperatives, because one of the earliest functioned of the cooperative societies was providing funerals for people in the mill towns. I mean, in part of that would be because if you don't make a preparation, then it would be a burden on those who survive you, isn't it? Basically, they will have to pay for the funeral. Yeah, exactly, yeah. When you were talking then, Jim, it struck me as

like, we do have preparations for death and they are basically just about the disposal of our property. It's like, beyond our disposal of our own bodies. It's like what happens to any property we've built up, our money we built up, which is the will, of course. We make a will. I know from talking to you to earlier that I'm the only irresponsible adult here who has made a will, and if you two have not got around to it. How much you're leaving me? Oh, yes, I better alter that.

I leave all of my collection of dice, Jeremy Gilbert. There is a little story attached to that, which is when my daughter May was born, me and Alice, we thought we wanted to make a will about what happened, say that if we both died, what would happen to me, who would look after her to when she grew up, etc. And then it would be what would happen to her. Property would go to her. Obviously, you know, they almost didn't need say. So this was like 20 years ago, more, 24 years ago or something. And then we never actually finished the will because then Alice said, well, what about if all three of us died, at which point I was going, I don't care. I don't really care about

that. You know what I mean? They can have a massive fight over it and who gets the dice. I don't care. But that was the pausing point because then it was like, well, do you give it to like our friends? But like your group of friends changes, doesn't it? I'm going to have to fucking revise my will every, after every argument I have on Twitter or something. No. And so it only, only recently did we actually make a will, which didn't go beyond May basically, because we basically didn't care at that point. This is really interesting for me. And I want to know what you guys think about all of this kind of like, in general, this kind of preparation for death stuff. Because in my body, I find it incredibly repulsive. So it's not just that I dislike it.

It's that I feel like it feels on a kind of sentient level, quite anti-life and anti-joy, to go through processes and technically and kind of clinically prepare for one's death. I'm not saying I don't understand where these things come from. I'm not saying like it doesn't have massive advantages. It just feels hyper-protestant. And for someone who watches live or like non-streaming tele, like myself, like daytime TV over my lunch break, it's all about death. It's really weird how it's all about like funeral care and life insurance. And I'm just like A, I have that same reaction to that reality of it being like, this is just capitalism. This is all about, like Keir said, it's about how are you going to get rid of the body and

like who takes the assets rather than like who does the emotional care and well-being. But as a process to go through, like I just find it really weird and odd and I don't want to be anywhere next to it. Like, why would you want to like do that as a human being who's alive? it feels like when I see people clinically talk about it. I'm doing this for my funeral or whatever, or, you know. I want this played at my funeral. That's a whole other thing, which I think we should get into, which is like who the funeral is for.

And I also have thoughts about that. But staying with this for a minute, I would love to hear what you guys think and feel, they're probably not the same thing, you know, about this kind of like over-preparation for one's death while one is alive and well and kicking? It depends what you're talking about, Nad. If you're talking about Wills,

that is something weird about that. It's like this legalistic sort of dispersal of property thing. But then other people sort of say, right, I'm going to leave £250 behind the bar. It's not going to get very far as it. I'm going to leave £1,000 behind the bar for my wake, and I want this song played. And in a way, it's that thing of like, I might have died,

but I want... Yeah, but when do you do that? I think this is the thing, is that, like, are you talking about people, doing this, like, you know, in the, I don't know, when they think they are close to death, or are you talking about people doing this, like, when they think they have 20, 30 years? I just find it very strange as a human being to be planning for these things. The only time I've ever had these conversations is just after a funeral.

I went to a funeral quite recently, and that sort of came up. And I don't care about what music. And other people are going, I want this played, I want this. Nobody recorded it, and we were in the pub, so it's probably what happened. Like, yeah, that's when your mind turns to those sorts of things, I think. It did strike me recently that nobody would know what music to play at my funeral. And you should leave them in that kind of confusion. Well, I wouldn't know either.

Yeah, no, I wouldn't know either. I'm not bothered. Have you heard of sound systems at these funeral homes, Jeremy? You'd be mortified. No, exactly. The acoustics were shit. We have to change the speakers. Jeremy Gilbert will...

Don't call that. Well, you know, Gerell and Jedrick can DJ. I've got to say, for me, there's something about that sort of, that tradition. I think if it is, I think of it as very much a continuation of sort of English respectability culture, people making detailed preparations for their death, but I do sort of admire it. Part of me does think that it represents a properly stoical ability to face one's mortality, its inevitability. So I actually sort of admire it, even though I haven't done it. Well, we've been talking about death.

we should play some classic death metal. You know, the extreme heavy metal subgenre, which very much likes to reflect upon themes of mortality and morbidity. This is maybe the classic seminal death metal track of all time. From 1989, this is Immortal Right by Morbid Angel. When you're young, it's not to eat the end up our human rights. Let's a rusty life. Biggestful with darkness, oh, it's like us to your ways.

When you have a kid that you're responsible for, the question of your possible death, does then become a totally different? set of prospects, really. And of course, that is something that has been really important to development of certain kinds of financial capitalism again since the 19th century, because basically getting people to buy life insurance, something happens quite early on once people start actually having income. I think that whole question of the dispositive property, that is really interesting to think about in terms of the historic development of capital. because, you know, for historians, it is one of the big questions around the development of capitalism as such is the question of where and when did something we would recognise today

as a properly capitalistic ideas about inheritance start to be implemented. I've got to say this last time, actually on the holidays episode, I realised when I was listening back to it, we were making all these comments about things like why there are holidays in August and harvest times in Europe. And I realized, I realized when I was listening back to it after we put it out, that we just, some of that we just got totally wrong that the reason, you know, the August holiday is really an industrial development in southern Europe because it's too hot in the factories. Like August is actually the harvest time. And the reason you have all the one-off, the one-day holidays in August is more because people are doing this exhausting,

back-breaking labour, like harvesting for days at a time. Sometimes we don't really know what we're talking about in the medieval history, but this is something I have properly read books about. So I'm saying with some authority I know a bit about this. And it is a real debate because there's a classic Marxian narrative and it's not only Marx's narrative. It's a classic narrative which Marx draws on and Marx's historiography has sort of contributed to. And it relies on the fact that at least in some European countries, before the modern period, you don't, before the, before the the early modern period at least. You don't really have test A3 law as we recognize it. In other words, individuals aren't allowed to just leave their properties to whoever they want.

One of the things are supposed to be a defining characteristic of feudalism, although historians don't really like that term anymore, even Marxist ones. One of the characteristic features is there were these rules about how property gets inherited, how it gets distributed. So if you're in a society where the rule is, you know, your property is supposed to be left to your oldest son, you can't just decide. or actually I don't feel like that. I don't like it. I'm going to give it to someone else. So there's all these rules about it. And then one of the things that was taken by a lot of historians to mark the emergence of capitalism as such, one of the things is you get to a situation where

people are allowed to just say, I am just going to leave my property and my will to whoever I decided leave it to. Which is better? I don't know. I was just going to say that there is, the English historian Alan McFarlane, for example, has argued that this is all wrong, at least in the case of Britain or in England. In England, he says that actually you could all, there was always kind of individualistic attitude to the disposal of property. But anyway, which is better? What do you think? I don't know. On one hand, like it's, again, it goes back to this, which I think we should explore more, like the what they would have wanted thing, is that how much choice is the progressive position, you know, what's the progressive position on how much choice the individual should have

or the person, again, trying not to use the term individual, the person should have about what happens to their stuff after they die. Because, you know, whole, you know, lineages of people are based on, you know, and wealth is based on inheritance, right? So that's one side of it. But then there's also like the side of like, when you're talking about feudalism, like, if it goes to the, you know, obviously the idea that it goes to the eldest son or whatever, like there seems to be a system. Obviously, you know, that's completely sexist in the way that it's written, but there is some kind of system which takes agency away from the person who's dying. And I'm really, I'm just trying to think about it live. Like, I'm in two minds about how much

the dying person should have a choice in this because they're dead. So why should it matter to them? Yeah. This kind of sense of like, on their deathbed, this person made this decision that this thing should do their way. And then it's like, well, fuck off. I'm dead now and I don't have to bear the consequences of it. There's an issue I'm having, I think this is the issue, with people not having to bear the consequences of their actions because they are dead. It's like the ultimate, fuck you. You know what I mean? Whereas when there is a system, where there is some kind of system into place, at least it takes that agency away from that person. And I think there's something there. There's another way of looking at this,

though, which is that when we think about that, about like that inheritance and wills and like The fact that it's property is the thing that we're deciding on, basically, also perhaps what songs we're going to play at our funeral, but they're very much minor parts of any will, whatever. And it's that thing of, like, you know, the temporality of a human being is being subordinated to this much more, well, it's almost like a conception of property being eternal in some sort of way. A house whatever isn't eternal, but you turn that into money, right?

That's something which takes the appearance of something, which is eternal and infinite property or capital or money is in some sort of sense eternal and infinite and we're not eternal, we're finite beings and our wishes, etc., are subordinated to the temporality of property. There's something in that. Well, there is, yeah, there's something about the infinite process of accumulation, which defines capitalism, is really important to its whole development. And it's different from the way in which profit is treated in. in pre-capitalist social formations.

But the question of who should get to decide about inheritance, I mean, that's really an important question. And I know there's a sort of tradition of Anglophone moral philosophy, which includes, like, the utilitarians, like the later Bentham, and then some of the Fabians, and people like that, which, you know, without any sort of a resort to,

you know, without being Marxist, has always said, well, from an objective point of view, actually, it's not really morally right, that anyone should get to inherit anything because what have they done to deserve it? You can have that perspective even with quite an individualistic and meritocratic perspective

to say, well, it's just not fair. Like, even if you're an abstract, liberal, libertarian capitalist, actually, you can still take a view, well, if everybody's supposed to just get what they deserve based on their hard work and their efforts, like why should anybody get to go to Eat them? And there is that tradition, of course,

and so in order to justify the compatibility between these totally capitalistic practices of inheritance and a largely sort of individualistic, liberal, philosophical tradition, which doesn't really give any very good answer to the question. Well, like if we're all just individuals competing with each other, and the job of the state is to make sure that happens fairly, then why do some people get to inherit loads of money? It has no good answer to that. You have to come up with these basically sort of psycho-economic theories of motivation.

So the answer they always make is that, well, you have to let people inherit. it. Well, partly it's because you have to say the right to leave your property to whoever you want is part of your one of your inane, the property rights. So it has to carry on up your debt. It has to. Otherwise, it's meaningless. And also this idea that nobody would actually do the incredibly important work of being an entrepreneur and a capitalist if they weren't able to leave their wealth to their children. But it is interesting to think about. I mean, it's a bit like the way in which, you know, they had to come up with theories of race to justify slavery, given the liberalism as the official political ideology of capitalism going back

to the 17th century, just has no good answer to the question of how the hell you're going to allow slavery and colonialism. It doesn't really have a good answer to the question of why you allow inheritance at all. So they have to come up with these claims, either this claim that it's absolutely an inalienable feature of your right to dispose of your property and like that you also get to dispose of it in debt. And this idea that, the only reason anybody really does anything is in order to, you know, leave money and properties of their children. You have to do that in order to justify the actuality of capitalism. And the actuality of capitalism is exactly that, is that it's all about people,

you know, creating these centuries-long dynasties, like, really, which are just as as are just as unequal in terms of the power effects as aristocratic, it's a warrior and territorial dynasties were. There's that famous line from the film Chinatown, which is all about rerouting the water systems in order to build Los Angeles, ruining thousands of farmers, etc, and all of this sort of stuff. And there's this private eye, Jack Gittins, who finally comes face to face with the person who's been orchestrating all of this, this old, rich guy played by John Houston, and Gittin says, like, why, why are you doing, Ollis? What have you got, like, 20 years left of life, 10 years, 20 years at best?

Like, why, all this, like, murder and, like, you know, how much better can your steak taste than my steak? You know, how much more comfortable is that chair, your chair, than my chair? And John Houston character says, it's the future, dear boy, the future. And it's that thing of, like, it's to control the future, the future beyond your own death in some sort of way, which is an incredibly big. strange form of motivation, isn't it? When you think of it, when you step back and look at it objectively, of course. But what's interesting about that is that in a way, this wanting to control

the future on some kind of level harks back to that conversation of life after death in a kind of in the cycle of nature. Because in a way, like I said, out of decomposition, out of the mycelium industrial complex, out of the recycling that happens naturally in the ecosystem, there is life sustained. It sounds like, in a way, what it is, is this is capitalism's co-option of that, like the inheritance kind of argument of basically saying, I'm going to control the future because the life that I will create out of my death will be the life that is constrained in these sort of ways and is and is delineated in these sort of ways. So not all life, but some life and life down this lineage. So it seems like, you know, it's a capitalist reconfiguration

of life after death. What if we're talking about inheritance and that sort of like a dynastic sort of dynamics within capitalism, we should historicise it as because the role of inheritance really diminished through the 20th century, you know, right until the mid-s of 1970s, because inequality, income inequality dropped dramatically. And now we see shows like succession, et cetera, these sorts of shows, which are really all about inheritances, et cetera, because huge inequality, so a dynastic sort of dynamic within families become something which is not just of concern to the super rich, or like, you know, the super rich are incredibly rich now compared to like the second half of the 20th century.

But there also plays a really, really important role in like ordinary families. So like inheritance plays an incredibly important role now in the chances. of young people being able to buy a house, for instance, which will have a massive effect determining your future wealth, whether you own a house or not, probably a bigger impact on your future wealth than the income you're going to earn from work, basically, with asset appreciation over the last sort of like 30 years or something like that. Increasingly, it's like things such as life gifts, basically some sort of gift that you give to your children while you're still alive as a form of inheritance to help them get property. It's one of the

factors of determining your life course, basically. And of course, once again, that brings up the thing that Gem just brought up. That's really hard to justify in a society which sort of valorizes this idea of meritocracy, is that like we have our wealth because we've done things, which mean we deserve our wealth. You know, it justifies inequality through dessert in that sort of sense. That's really just really hard to justify, basically. That question of like the centrality of inheritance. That comes and goes, depending on like the wider iteration of capitalism that you have at that point. It is one of the things that's sort of really striking always to me about, you know, pre-modern history as well, though, is that you do, it is a very

persistent phenomenon, like men, powerful men being sort of obsessed with their legacy and seeing this as a way of somehow overcoming mortality in some symbolic way. And it's in a narcissistic way as well, because it's about them. It's not about, I want to leave this to my children, because I want my children to be, you know, better off, even though effectively that's what it is, you know, the language in which that is articulated, the way those actions are played out is about who has the last laugh, this whole concept about having the last laugh, about leaving part of your inheritance to one person and not another and like, you know, fuck you to this son or to this daughter or whatever, is part of that kind of caricature, I think, that you're playing, that

you're articulating there, Jeremy. but also if you think about like the pyramids etc boy leave the pyramid you leave the pyramids alone you're sorry now there's a lot of time we had this conversation

I'm having I'm having my own period for myself thank you very much here in the British suburbs no but that's like an ostentatious destruction of wealth isn't it you know that is a fucker no use to your children

basically pyramids are anti-capitalist for that reason no I think they are I mean like people like yeah but like people have I've analysed them in that way. Instead of, like, wealth being used to create more wealth,

it's like it's destroyed in an ostentatious way. It's a display of power, basically. We think, I don't know. And obviously, they're also about, like, the journey to the afterlife and all this sort of stuff, aren't they? I'm not really got a great grip on that. I mean, I think this also cycles back to, you know, what we were saying around this,

this is what they would have wanted thing. And I'm thinking about that, again, because I'm wondering, like, whether, like, this is like where that comes from and like whether there's something like how that's wrapped wrapped up with what we've been talking about and with capitalism. I mean, I only really have two cultures that I'm very close to that I can compare to. But you know, definitely in, you know, death, death rituals and like thinking and culture in modern day Egypt. Like this whole like chat about what they would have wanted or thinking about, you know, what the

dead person or the soon-to-be dead person will want is not. really a thing, you know. I think there's more of a recognition that, like, funerals and practices are for the living. They're not, you know, they're not for people who are dying or about to die. And, like, I wonder in what sense that's kind of related to like the needs of, you know, neoliberal capital. It's part of a culture of a sort of expressive individualism, but it's also obviously tied to that very long history, going back hundreds of years, within which one of the definitive features of a capitalist economy in a capitalist culture is the idea that the wishes of the person can extend and retain their meaning

and value after their physical death. So, yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think the point about what I was saying earlier about the history of testacea re-laws, it's not just to do with neoliberalism. It is something quite built into capitalism as such. It's a really interesting question now. Now, I'm sure there are cultural historians out there who could tell us, don't know, like at what point would people start to use the phrase, it's what they would have wanted when thinking about what happens to somebody after their death in terms of how they're commemorated or what happens to their property or anything? I mean, I don't know. For all I know, people might have been saying that in Old English in like the 5th century or people

might have been saying it only started saying that in the 1960s. I really don't know. It's a really interesting idea. Someone tell us. Yeah, somebody tell us, but also I think the thing to think about there, and there might be an answer out there, is what does that do for the person expressing that? So what function does it have for that person who is saying, you know, this is what they would have wanted? I'm doing this because that's what they would have wanted. Or I'm responding to someone by saying, this is what they would have wanted. Like, I think it's some sort of my sensation is that it's some sort of a balm. It has a kind of soothing, yeah, it has a soothing function for those persons to lay something to rest.

One of the aspects of death, which is like most disturbing, perhaps, or perhaps just to me, is the idea that life goes on and like basically what happens then you just basically get gradually forgotten because you're not around anymore. Do you know what I mean? And so that whole legacy idea is a, is it, and wills, etc. I suppose it's a way in which you're trying to, you know, you're trying to maintain your will beyond your own physical existence through contract law or something like that. But the reverse is, you know, that's what they would have wanted is a way in which that person is trying to keep away, keep alive the sort of image of that, you know, that person's will beyond their life. Do you know what I

mean? I mean, are you scared of being forgotten? I am, yes. That's why a podcast as often as possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, it's an interesting. It's an interesting one. I mean, I do think, and you guys have mentioned a couple of things. I think, I think, something that is not on top of mind for me is the reality of how some of these things change when you have children. I mean, I think like if you're like me and you don't have kids, you do think about these things different. Because I just do not give a shit, to be honest. Like I don't, I don't have that legacy thing at all. You know what I mean? I don't think, oh, shit, I should have written another book or whatever. I'm just like, this is not what I don't think about this

at all. Like, I do not think. There's too much to deal with in daily life or in the next year to be worried about this at all. A classic anthem about fantasizing about imminent death is, of course, the Smith's 1986 classic. There is a light that never goes out. This track has the honour of being the one track, the one piece of music I can ever remember shocking my mum when she heard me listening to me. I was watching the famous South Bank special, a South Bank show special documentary about the Smiths. And my mum heard this song and was really shocked by it. My mum was not at all shocked by hearing, for example, crass.

Yes, sir, I will. Like, coming out of my room, she got the point. It was noisy, angry music about being very angry at Thatcherism. She could understand that. But this guy crooning about a suicide fantasy, he found kind of shocking, for reasons I really kind of understand, like it is kind of shocking. But it's also a kind of disco anthem at the same time. I have dropped it into disco sets while DJ.

and kind of, it brings the house now. It's a very kind of interesting record. And if a double-decker boss crashes into us. To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die. And if a tent on charge kills the both of us. To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine. How does one mourn? Do we have an ACFM line on mourning? Should we be having a rave instead of a wake? What's the vibe? Obviously very different in Egypt than it is in the UK. I've experienced both.

Well, when we link to mourning is like the idea of melancholia. We talked about this. We did a sort of a trip, an episode on left. melancholia. My sort of gloss on Freudian conception of like the difference between mornin and melancholia is we set up this image of like we have a sense of ourselves partly through the reflection of how people treat us. So like we partly build up an image of ourselves through a reflection back of how people, the people are important to us see us in some sort of way. When somebody dies, there's all of a sudden there's a gap. It's a gap in like our image of ourselves almost because that person is not reflecting back their bit of that image. Presumably, like, morning is when you can come to terms of that and, like, close that gap in some sort of way. And like melancholia is when

you can leave that gap open and you're constantly trying to fill it with a self-reflection, which doesn't allow you to move on in any way. Because some living person who is reflecting back on you as you change, they will change their reflection back. A dead person's view of you in your head is basically fixed, do you know what I mean? So it prevents you moving on in some sort of way. I think that's definitely like an interesting angle or way to think about it because it's it then gives us an in that's slightly different to thinking about what that person would have wanted. Like you're kind of, we're now talking about the people who are quote unquote left behind and what this process does for them, which I think is is kind of the

interesting space. And it kind of speaks a little bit to this idea of like the functionality and the importance of remembering, wanting to remember and not remember. And again, for me, the jury is out on that. I don't try to remember anyone and I don't try to forget. It's just the reality of my life or, you know, like my mental space is that sometimes I remember and sometimes I forget. And it feels like a naturalistic, like a natural process for me. Whereas I know for a lot of people, you know, there's an active suppression that's going on. about a particular person's death. And for other people,

there's an important collective ritual around remembering. And I'm thinking here about shrines. So, you know, there's, I'm talking about shrines in the loosest sense. And that's actually something that I have quite a positive relationship to is that, yeah, for example,

there's a camp that I go to every year. And, you know, we've been going for 20 years and whoever's died, you know, we bring, you know, a funny picture of them or something or like an object and put it in the shrine to kind of remember them collective. And I'm quite into that because it's set in a certain time and space, but I'm not sure I've not had an experience of this kind of habitual need to remember somebody using a ritual or object, which I'm sure other people do.

For some people who have had, you know, very tragic or experienced as tragic deaths in their lives. Perhaps they need to have those kind of daily or weekly rituals and they need to be maybe collective or they need to be individual. I'm not sure. I just think it's an interesting space this kind of need to remember or forget. It's also that question of like, who gets remembered and who gets forgotten? Because as well as like individual shrines,

we also have collective memorials to the dead. Most towns have a cenotaph, which was usually erected after the First World War. And then, you know, the names of the dead of that town are engraved. And then we have a ritual which has been heavily politicised of the last sort of like decade or so, on Remembrance Day. Other events such as COVID is one,

a really good example, actually. There's almost like a collective agreement to forget about it and never talk about COVID, basically. So it disappeared from public memory. There will never be any memorials to it. Actually, probably was the same with like the great flu epidemic in 1980-19, which killed like, I don't know, 20 million people or something like that.

I don't know whether some deaths, the way that those deaths came about, and it deserve leaders to think that they deserve memorialising more than other deaths, etc. and perhaps natural deaths are the sort of things that aren't memorialised? It's like is it a glorify, which deaths get glorified? Where is their glory?

That's one way to put it here. I think that the pandemic, we are yet to see how it is thought about in the next 10 or, you know, so there's a huge event in our lives, huge event which many of us were fearful. I mean, you're absolutely right. We didn't even think about this when we were

preparing for the show and you're totally right. Like, for many of us, this fear that people we know we're going to die was real. And for many people, those people did die. And we're unable to process it. Well, at the time, I thought there would be rituals which you remember it. I thought we would wear masks much more commonly than we do. Partly because of there's a big tradition of Chinese students in the UK in particular wearing facial masks in the aftermath of the Asian bird flu epidemic.

And I thought that that would happen in the UK. but in fact, it's completely the opposite. In fact, wearing a mask is quite often treated with hostility, I think, because it's like a remembrance, basically, of something people would like to push away. Of course, that's got politicised into sort of like conspiracy theory, etc., etc., as well. If we think on a smaller scale, if we go back to thinking about,

like, what's the function of a wake? I feel I have quite a kind of outsider anthropological lens with this because, you know, I didn't even know what one was until a friend of ours and we used to play Samba with us kind of tragically died and went to the funeral along with the rest of the band and went to this wake

and everybody's drinking after somebody died which to me was like, wow, what is this? And that fulfills a function and it fulfills the function of some kind of togetherness and release of tension, I suppose, you know, for the collective there And I'm trying to think about that in relation to, for example, al-Irbain, which literally means the 40, which is the thing that is done.

I'm not sure if it's an Islamic thing or it's, you know, North African or the Arab world. I'm not entirely sure. I'm sure the answer is out there. But definitely in Egypt, when after somebody dies, your house is open, the person who is left behind, whoever that person is, their house is open for 40 days to receive visitors. It might be people you know, it might be people who don't know, who are coming to pay their respects in your home. And that has a function of keeping people company and keeping people busy effectively, which is also interesting.

So I'm trying to think about this in relation to on a more citywide or national level and whether that scales up to the sort of things that you were just talking about, Kea. Like what then happens when you have like a collective morning which is not just about family and friends? Does it fulfill the same psychological function? And can those rituals be scaled? I mean, the only way that we know that it is scaled is your initial example of, you know, memorializing war or, you know, the deaths in war when we have actual days or national days where things, whether it's Remembrance Day, etc. But I don't really understand the psychological function of that because that's not part of society that I've really been a part of. We should play the track.

I don't want to die by Geneva Jocuzzi featuring Patriarchy, which is a great name for an artist. And they are artists. They're both Geneva Jukuzzi and patriarchy are both sort of like musicians and performance artists. So this is a 2019 remix of a 2017 track and the chorus goes, I don't want to die, but you don't want to live. Let's find something in between.

Honey, it'll be a dream. We can't really do a show about death without at least mentioning one of these central concepts, arguably, of 20th century European philosophy. Martin Heidegger's notion of being for death or being towards death. Heidegger is notoriously difficult to translate out of the German, but this idea that one of the things that defines human existence is that, the fact that it is always heading towards death. What exactly you're supposed to do with that observation, or exactly in what way that conditions the being and the existence of the human being is, well, it depends how you read Heidegger,

and I'm not going to try to give an exposition of Heidegger, don't have enough expertise, and also because I'm always very dubious about the anthropological specificity of his massive claims about what human existence and being is actually like, given that it appears to be like that of an upper middle class German person in the 1920s. Apologies to the Heidegarians out there. But it's an interesting idea to think about, to think about what does it mean? In what way is human existence conditioned by the awareness affinity?

Of course, one of the claims is often made is that humans are the only animals who are aware of their own death and the only animals that inflict death on members of their own species. I mean, the second one is not strictly true, but humans certainly do inflict death on other humans far more infargrated numbers are more systematically than other animals, or at least, as Nadia pointed out when we were preparing these notes, and human men do that, and that is the thing. And whether or not animals are aware of their own mortality, I think it's highly tendentious this claim that animals are not aware of their own mortality. I mean, they're always running away from, I mean, they respond to danger.

So whether there's a difference between being aware that one day you will die and other members of your species die and just having a kind of neurobiological response to perceived dangers or whether there's any difference between those things, I'm not sure. But one of the things that often comes up in reflections on the Heidegarian idea of finitude of the inherent finitude, the human condition and human existence, it is. this question of, well, to what extent is it the case that one's mortality is the thing that defines one as an individual? Because, you can say that humans are all born into a set of social relationships, which pre-exist them. I often do say that. But arguably, you can say that each death is somehow unique. Well, I'm not really convinced by that either, but that's a thing that sometimes people say. But this whole question of, well, how does the experience of, in some sense,

knowing that you are heading towards death, how does it condition your experience of temporality? There is a whole tradition now of going, I mean, I'm saying go back to Heidegger. I would say in Western Europe it goes back to the Stoics, at least really. And it is a really important tradition of thinking about that. Yeah, I mean, from that you probably go into like, existentialism, sort of like mid-20th century existentialism, people like Sartre, etc. The idea there, to some extent, finitude and also knowing that you live in a world that doesn't

have a god governing it, is a condition of a certain kind of freedom. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was going to say, like, it revolves around freedom of like, you know, for Sartre, it's like, you know, this radical freedom of the fact that, like, life is in some way meaningless, it doesn't have an overt meaning or a given meaning is like this. radical opening for freedom, is it? Well, you're the one who can decide what the meaning is. Yeah, it doesn't have the meaning that previous belief systems would have conferred upon it because one of the things that other belief systems do is they tell you what the meaning of your life is because the meaning of your life is bound up with the nature of your death

and what happens after your death. I mean, we were talking about the pyramids and the Egyptians. I mean, one reason, those kind of Egyptian, ancient Egyptian belief systems seem to be quite important in terms of the long, long history of culture of that re-part of the world and the way it then went on to shape other religious ideas is that, you know, the ancient Egyptians had one of the earliest narratives that is recorded according to which, well, when you die, you get judged for your actions. So they thought in the afterlife, you got judged as to whether you've been a good person or a bad person. And then what happened to your soul, your spirit was partly a consequence of that. And so to some extent, the whole

meaning of your life is given by the idea that in death you are judged and then there are versions of that much more complicated versions of that with kind of karmic theories of reincarnation which all of the darmit religions have one way or another and so that is why like for somebody that's so ultra it's a really really big deal when you remove all that stuff you just say actually you know there isn't going to be something that happens when you die that then tells you what your life meant, that is supposed to confer a certain kind of freedom. Of course, that's in Sartre's existentialist phase. We should always remember Sartre became a revolutionary Marxist and properly said that the meaning of your life would be defined

by your contribution to the class struggle. Correctly. Just to join those two bits up, actually, I wanted to talk about this book that came out a couple of years ago, three or four years ago now, called This Life by philosopher Martin Haglund, which definitely takes out. this connection between finitude, the knowledge, the sort of pushed away knowledge of our finitude of finite time on earth and links it up with an argument for a form of socialism that we probably all three sign up for, I think. His argument was like, because we're finite beings, the most important question you can ever ask is like how we're going to spend this like limited time on earth. It's limited and it's uncertain because we don't know when it's going to end

basically. So how should we spend this like incredibly precious time on earth? And his argument is we basically never get really get a meaningfully get to ask that question because it's a question about values about like what we value, etc. What we would value in life. Under capitalism, you know, we can never quite get to that question. We can never collectively determine what we value because like the purpose of economic activities is already set. We can have democracy here on all sorts of things, except that. Like, what is the point of, what is the point of which economic activity takes place?

Because it is to increase economic value, it's increased zeros on an accounting sheet. You know, it's for capital to grow, basically, that is the whole point around which that's the determining point of economic activity. I suppose you could, just to link it back, actually. One way to you could put that is that capital thinks of itself as eternal and infinite. And because we subordinate our lives to its drive, lives, that obscures and pushes away our finitude, basically, which is one of the reasons we can never, can never sort of ask that. It's an interesting book, because his argument is

like, that Marxist critique of capitalism is not about unfairness in some sort of way, basically. It's about freedom. You know, it's about the fact that capital dominates our time, alienates us from the purposes of life, because we don't get to decide what the purposes of, collectively decide what the collective purpose of our activity is, basically. The only conditions under which you could actually really meaningfully, collectively discuss and pose the question of how we should spend our finite time is one in which we've overcome capital, in which the purpose of all economic activity in all of our life is something to be determined, determined collectively, but you have to have a democratic economy, it's a basic argument, he's arguing for democratic socialism.

Like, Sartre doesn't do this linking up between existentialism and his later revolutionary communism, but, like, I think it's a nice argument, basically, that links up, like, a Marxist's conception of freedom with this problem of finitude. Yes, I think that's really interesting. And it also makes me think about the tradition, the secular tradition, of thinking about what it is that gave life meaning, partly with reference to the idea of what it will be like when we've died, and framing that all within some notion of social progress.

So I think it, because it is, I was sort of joking about such as thinking that your life would be, the meaning of your life would be given by your contributions to the class struggle. And I wasn't really joking, because I do sort of think, I mean, that is how I think about my own death and my own mortality to a certain extent, actually. If I think about it really, I think, well, do, like Nadi said, do we want to be remembered? I think, I don't think I care about being remembered, but I care about while I'm alive. I care about feeling that I'm having, even on a really micro level, sort of social effects, that in some way are eventually going to make the will better for people.

Which is interesting because that also speaks to what we were saying about legacy. So you just saying that, Jeremy, makes me think that I actually want to take it back because I don't care about my legacy in a way, but I do care about what you just said. I do care that I have intervened in some kind of way in terms of progressive forces in society. Well, this is all summed up in that great quote from George Elliott that I read out a consciousness raising workshop we did at the world transformed in Liverpool a couple of years ago. It's the concluding lines of Middle March, which is the greatest line in 19th century English literature, which is the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon unhistoric acts

and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is parthewing to those who have lived faithfully a hidden life at rest in unvisited tunes. The idea of the unvisited tomb, the rest in the unvisited tombs, it really kind of evokes this idea of a kind of continuation of some sort of a collective progress. It's the unvisited tombs, though, is that it's not individual legacy. It's not the pyramid. It's not the person who demands the pyramid is built. It's the multitude of acts of like kindness and generosity and struggle, etc. Over time is the thing that increases the realm of freedom, basically. Why it pulls on you so much as a line is, I think, think because we, again, going back to what we're talking about and trying to explore and

understand this thing, this phenomenon, about wanting to be remembered, even saying that I don't care whether I'm remembered or not, it's the fact that there are people who have done significant things who are unvisited, like nobody knows who they are, nobody knows what their names are, and nobody will remember them over history, and books haven't been written about them, and there are not people visiting their tombs, putting flowers on their tombs or whatever. And I think that pulls on something, is that instinctively, I feel like, well, they should be remembered. But that's testing my theory from earlier. I mean, it raises something about the idea of the fear of death or the idea of not fearing death.

There's something that we recoil from about Elon Musk or Peter Thieler, whoever, like the great billionaires wanting to be pharaohs and also wanting to live forever. there's something we recoil from about the idea of the sort of ancient king, like wanting to be remembered forever for his conquest and wanting to be forever. There's something we recoil from because there's some sense in which there's some connection between a sort of pathological ego and the fear of death, because you can't possibly, you're so terrified of the idea that you're not going to exist anymore, that you create all these defenses and it becomes. part of a kind of sadistic relationship to the world in some way.

And I think, I mean, it's all interesting to link that with sort of, you know, Darmic, the Buddhistic, ideas about death and rebirth as well. Because in the, I mean, obviously, in the Buddhist tradition, really in the whole Darmic tradition, all those traditions coming up of India, really. There's a specific set of attitudes to death, according to, which on the one hand, there's an assumption of reincarnation, however you conceptualise it, whether it's an idea of reincarnation being that you have some sort of persistent soul that goes from one body to another,

or whether it's this seemingly more sort of complicated idea in classical Buddhism that may be, well, maybe this sort of, it's almost like your consciousness is made up of these bits of information, and they will carry on in some way in other forms after your physical body has died. And this idea of karma as being sort of actions having effects, having knock-on effect in an incredibly complicated or maybe infinite web of actions and reactions and relationships which will go on and on into the future. And that is all, I think, clearly motivated by some sense that

the way to be a really healthy person, the best way to be a healthy, emotionally, healthy, psychologically healthy person in the world is to somehow be the opposite of this egomaniac who wants to go around kidding people and then put up monuments to yourself. You want to be the opposite of that. Like in early Buddhist art, there was no representations with the Buddha for hundreds of years.

In fact, the images of the Buddha, the statues of the Buddha that everybody is familiar with today, they were created by people who had been really influenced by Greek art and Greek culture. Like before that, like Buddhist culture just didn't, you didn't represent the Buddha. You represented the Buddha as an empty space because the whole idea was that you somehow undone yourself as an ego and let yourself just be fully distributed into the cosmos. And whether you believe that cosmology or not, I think it's interesting because I think it's clear, the purpose of that cosmology is supposed to give you a way

of thinking about your relationship to death, which is supposed to completely remove the fear of death. It's completely remove it, but you remove it to the point where you think, actually, the thing you're aiming for in your existence is to end the cycle of death and rebirth. So A, you're not going to be reborn, if you die and B, actually, it would actually be better if you didn't, you weren't.

That's the thing you're ultimately kind of aiming for. And all that, I think, is a sort of metaphysical technology, which is supposed to encourage a particular sort of psychological disposition, which is absolutely characterized by a complete lack of fear of death. That's the whole point of it, really, is to completely remove the fear of death and remove the sort of desire for immortality, which you can see bound up with all these really sort of toxic behaviours. And it is really interesting to think about that.

A couple of years ago, there was a series of like TV shows, which revolved around this idea of being able to live forever, basically. One of them was a Picard, which is a spinoff of Star Trek. Another one was The Good Place, which was this comedy sort of series. So it's like after you've died, they think they've gone to heaven. In fact, it's hell, et cetera, et cetera. And they had a philosopher, Todd May, who was a consultant on the show, wrote a couple of books about Deleirs back in the day.

But the conclusion of both of those shows was that life is meaningless unless you die, basically, because they can live forever, etc. And there were other shows which revolved around that idea of living forever and being able to escape death. A series called Altered Carbon, which was all about how the rich could live forever and the poor couldn't sort of thing. And then there was another comedy show called Download, which was a similar sort of thing.

You could download yourself into virtual reality afterlife sort of thing, but it all depended on how much money you had. So they were like, people, I think they were called two gigs who could only be alive. They could only be woken up like for a couple of minutes a day or something. And if you had lots of money, you could be alive all of the time. In fact, the film Get Out, you could probably say, like, beyond race, it's got an element of that because it's like rich white people want to take over young black people so they can extend their lives and relive the life of youth again.

and that sort of thing. My interpretation at the time was like this obsession with like immortality and the problems of immortality and the fact that like only death gives life meaning, etc., was sort of like some sort of displaced anxiety around genocry of contemporary life in which, you know, the boomers basically won't give up power, they won't move on, they won't give up their wealth, etc, and they're a huge demographic bulge which sits over current society and provides a huge inertia to the change that can take place. My apology for any good boomers out there. I'm sorry to be so crass about it. But like that is

one of the phenomenons of our time is this sort of like gerotocratic sort of political setup in which you know, the baby boomer generation just had the numbers in some sort of way and had the wealth because of the time of life when they then they develop property, etc. They just have this inertial effect, which could if we were very clever, lead us through to a discussion of Freud's analysis of the death drive. The death drive. Let's talk about the deft drawer, which is a term which comes out of Sigmund Freud later work. And for much of his career developing models of how the mind supposedly works, Freud thinks that the human mind is governed by what's called the pleasure principle.

In other words, it's constantly seeking to maximise pleasure and seeking to minimise pain and frustration. Because one of the issues there is always what actually do you think pleasure is, what do you even really mean by it? And I think that is always a problem in Freud and psychoanalysis, there are assumptions about what pleasure is that are not properly justified or interrogated. And then he writes this really famous essay called

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he claims to be identifying phenomena which he thinks are somehow even more fundamental to human psychic life than the pleasure principle. I would say when I read it as a graduate student, I sort of announced in my graduate seminars, I thought Freud had not actually done this, that he, in fact, he hasn't actually gone beyond the president of principle in that essay, that he simply gives more of an anatomy of what pleasure actually is.

And nobody's ever given me a good argument as to why that's wrong. But I'm not going to get into that any more detail here. But what he does in this essay, so this essay starts off dealing with the fact that people seem to have what he calls this compulsion to repeat. So he's talking about the fact that people repeat, people do the same thing. over and over again, even when it seems to be something that's not really fun, like people have habits or whether it's just a physical habit, you're just scratching your own skin or whether it's doing really stupid stuff, whether you're talking about addiction. And he explains

this partly with reference to the idea that, well, there is this kind of tendency just to try to minimize the amount of stress and stimulation in the human nervous system. So basically you do the same thing you've done before because it's sort of easier to do the same thing you've done before. Even off on some level, the thing you've done before isn't really fun, isn't really pleasurable. And I think that I'm not, I think that is all quite right. And then on the basis of all this, he builds up this idea that actually there are these two fundamental drives in the human psychic, sort of nervous system. There's Eros, there's the drive towards joining with other things in the world and kind of creating life. And that can manifest itself as sexuality, but it can just

manifest itself is going out into the world and sort of doing things. And there's thanatos, there is the death drive. There is the drive which somehow seems to push people towards sort of self-destruction or aggressivity. But it's really important to understand by the death drive, he doesn't mean either like a suicidal tendency or a desire to like kill other people or destroy other people. Really what he's talking about there is a tendency in the human nervous system.

towards inertia, or towards minimizing, minimizing stimulation rather than seeking more and more stimulation. So, sometimes my example of the death drive, how we live the death drive is just, you know, it's when you feel really tired and like you just want to sit down and you don't want to do anything. So death drive isn't necessarily a particularly good term for it. It's a really dramatic term. And it's interesting, there's this famous footnote in Beyond the Pleasure principle, linking back to stuff I was just talking about where he refers to some other early psychological theorist, psychoanalytic theorist, and her idea of what she calls the Nirvana principle. And the Nirvana principle is, again, this idea that maybe there's

something in the human nervous system, which tends towards wanting to just be in a state where nothing is happening, where you're just unstimulated, because that's the most relaxed state. And the Nirvana principle is kind of a more positive way of talking about a similar thing than the death drive. It sounds a bit more positive. But it's basically this idea that, there's something in just organic life in general, which sort of wants to maintain a state of kind of non-stimulation, a kind of state of stasis. I don't know if I believe in it, though.

I don't know what I think about it. I think there is an argument that it's a sort of false distinction, that there's this argument that you can make that Freud's model of the death drive and eros as being kind of contradistinction to each other. you can counter that with a sort of maybe a sort of buddistic psychology or a sort of mystical psychology which says well actually everybody is trying to experience at the end of the kind of nightmare of individual selfhood which is a sort of buddistic idea but it's an idea which I think is clearly quite compatible with certain sort of socialist ideas and if you think that everyone is always trying to end the nightmare of our alienated individuated subjectivity

then one way of ending that nightmare is through joining with other people. That's why sex is fantastic because you have this intense merger of yourself with other people. But you might do it through mysticism or you might do it through merging yourself into the crowd at a rave.

I was going to say, or going to a demo, or going to a demo, yeah. Or doing all four at once if you're doing it right. Yeah, exactly. That's what we like to do. That's right. We all do every weekend.

Correct. You know, our death orgies that we all... Well, we're not playing Dungeons and Dragon. Which is also a way of losing yourself. You know, it's a way... We've talked about this before in terms of like getting out of your head. And so my sort of critique of that Freudian model, actually,

which I guess is a sort of Delisian Marxist, Spinoza's Buddhist critique, is that it misses like the fundamental thing which both the Death Drive and Eros actually have in common, which are just different ways. of unravelling the individualated self and experiencing collective joy, or not even collective joy, just collectivity,

experiencing non-individuated selfhood, non-individuated subjectivity. And I think to talk about that as death, it's kind of interesting. I mean, there is a whole tradition in certain sort of Buddhist traditions are talking about ego death, for example, as a desirable thing.

Like the end of the sense of the self as being the thing you are looking for. I think there is some quite powerful observation, in that idea that ending yourself can be seen as liberation or it can be seen as the thing you are most terrified of. And to experience it as liberation is in some way that the thread that links, you know, the mystic to the meditator, to the revolutionary, to the socialist, or just to George Eliot, you know, calmly reflecting upon the value of those who've lived hidden lives and resting and visited tombs.

We can play Death Kink by Fontaine's DC. Fontaine's DC are a, I suppose, are a kind of post-punk, well, post-punk influence band from Dublin. And Death Kink is from their album, Romance, which was released earlier this year. So, you know, that proves that I am, in fact, still with it and down with the kids

because we're playing a song from this year. Although, to my ears, it sounds like the Pixies, actually, in that old curmudgeon music was better in my day, Retromania type line of thought. Anyway, here's Death Kings by Fontaine's DC. When you came into my life,

I was lost, and you took that shine to me at what cast. She recognized the smell, human pain, said I'd never look at change. It was shit, shit,

bad to a cave in. It's difficult, amazing, stars from the tree, our name, a promise and I can't. It's difficult to do an episode on death and not talk about war and not talk about the period that we're living through now. And what's top of mind for me is the genocide in Palestine. And it really got me thinking in an ACFM way about becoming numb and desensitized to death. And when we talked about in the beginning of the show a little bit about how perhaps part of that is natural, like not actually being able to come to terms with it. But then, of course, if we're thinking about this in terms of killing effectively and death by war,

when we are outside that, what are the different kind of psychological factors that allow huge swathes, of the population to accept effectively mass death of people and to kind of brush it to one side. And it's just really interesting to think about what those technologies are and what comes to mind, I mean, whether it's broken down into thinking about it on the level of, what level of racism and discrimination is at play here. I think that the umbrella concept here is the function of dehumanizing to be able to accept death. So if we find death, difficult to accept when we know the person or when we are able to empathize with them in some way, the importance of the technology of dehumanizing in the sense of thinking about when you're

actually thinking about these people, you are not thinking about them as people. You're not thinking about them in the sense that you understand what a person is. And before going into more detail on that, we could think about this also in terms of, you know, certain people in the Tory party in relation to the cost of living crisis or any other policy that has resulted in loads of people dying, in different ways, perhaps, not always in war, but to be able to kind of divorce yourself psychologically between the policy that you're responsible for, or in the case of Palestine, like world events and the subsequent images when it comes to war of so many people being dead. I mean, I can't see any.

other way of accepting it other than really being able to divorce your understanding of what a human being is from those people by, you know, whether historically calling them slaves or, you know, terrorists in this case, or people who are not like you. And so therefore, they are not people. Because when you have such a kind of 19th century colonialist reality as is, you know, occupied Palestine, like these are people who are under-occupied. and we can see how different the reaction was in society and large, even though there is a very, very strong, you know, pro-human-being movement in the UK. I wouldn't even call it pro-Palestine in that sense, like as an activist movement. I could see the difference

with Ukraine. I mean, I was so surprised about the reaction of so many people to Ukraine, and I frankly can't see any reason for it that differentiates it other than the fact that, you know, in Ukraine, you know, like so many people that were fleeing in the images. as we know, blonde and blue-eyed, frankly. That's the conclusion that I've come to because of how horrific. In fact, it's almost like it's so horrific what's happening in Palestine at the moment, that an occupied population can be slaughtered in this way, you know, with more than 100 people statistically almost being killed, being murdered every day,

that that's the only way that you can deal with it, especially when you are living in a country where your government is, you know, totally complicit in those deaths. So that's really something that I want to talk about is kind of how we distance ourselves from death in that way. One of the big things about the genocide in Gaza is, and like Owen Jones is always going on about this, is that like, there's no way to understand people's position on this. And like, you know, say the difference between Kirstama's concerns for deaths in Ukraine and deaths in Gaza, like, there's no way.

way to understand that without a conception of racism, basically, that some people's lives are more valuable than other people's lives. There's no conclusion apart from that, basically. The egalitarian thing is that, no, like everybody's life is as valuable. But that's a very hard thing to hold to, I think. It's really, really hard to hold to the idea that everybody you meet in, like, your life as you go around the city, etc., they, like, their internal lives as, like, complicated and as, like, expansive as yours, do you know what I mean? It's very hard to to deal with people as these full human beings. There's his famous

line from the third man, filmed by Carol Reed, and Orson Welz is that, he doesn't direct the film, he's an actor in it, and the sort of story is that there's this guy, Holly Martins, who goes over to Vienna, to meet his old friend Harry Lyme, and Harry Lyme is dead, and

he's not actually dead. Austin Wells has gone into hiding because he's been selling diluted medicine, which has been killing lots of people and they eventually have this confrontation on this big ferris wheel, it's right high in the sky. And Harry Lyme looks down, Austin Wells, looks down at these tiny dots on the floor, he says, look down there, like, tell me you'd feel any pity if one of those dots just stop moving forever. When you've got a distance from something and you don't

feel, you know, it's not somebody you know, etc. It doesn't look like somebody you know, perhaps. It's easier to think of those people as like, you know, a number or a dot rather than as like fully complex human beings just like being new. Yeah, but the issue here is that it's not just that because people don't feel that same way about Israelis because Israelis, a lot of them originate from Europe. And so that's what I think is going on, is that what is actually happening

is an incredibly like subliminal, like racist ideology in this situation because people are able to identify with how a lot of Israelis look and not how Palestinians look. And I don't know how I would feel. I like to think that my politics come from my politics and my values, you know, but perhaps part of the reason why I don't feel the same way,

or I'm not going to be pulled in the same way on Palestinian deaths is, you know, like they've got the same names as my family. You know, these are people like who, you know, we border Palestine, like Egypt borders Palestine. So I can identify. And I can, and I find it very, very, very difficult to watch a lot of media around Palestine because of course I understand the language that people are speaking, you know, and I can identify culturally with it. But I'd like to think that that is not the reason why I

care about this issue. And the reason I care about the issue is just because there are thousands of people dying who are under-occupate. Like it's a deliberate, like, it's a deliberate situation. It's not a famine or like some, obviously we care about those things as well. But it's not, you know, a hurricane that's killed all these people. It could all stop, be stopped tomorrow. should probably qualify, actually, a little bit, like the distance between the British public and the British political and media class. There's a big gulf there, I think,

in like attitudes towards Gaza, etc. What we're seeing played out in, like, Starmerism, etc., is the racism implicit in British foreign policy and imperialism, isn't it? That's what, I think that's a link I need to make. Because that's why Stama, etc., is treating Ukraine different to Israel, is because, well, it's U.S. foreign policy priorities face that way,

but the conclusions of that are racist. I mean, you're right, and that's important to point out to any listeners who don't know that there's a very, very, very strong Palestine movement in the, I shouldn't say strong or effective necessarily, but quite a cohesive and large movement in the UK, so many people, if not the majority, but a large, large minority that can see what's happening in Palestine for what it is.

But going back to the question of death, it's like, I'm trying to engage with this. Like, how do we engage with it? Is it better that, you know, I'm going to also turn what I say on its head is that, you know, when I worked in human rights and anti-war campaigning, you know, for years, I was having to deal with a lot of imagery and accounts of deaths in Iraq and deaths in Palestine. And I myself have become desensitized to it. You see what I mean? So in a way, it's almost like I've been desensitized, but I also make some sort of a choice of how I engage in order that I am able to take action on the injustice around deaths in a more productive way.

So I also, in a way, am desensitized, but that's because I choose to be desensitized myself in a certain way, so that I don't withdraw from the issue completely because it's just too horrific to deal with. Yeah, I think that's really useful to think about, I guess it's obvious in a way that the whole history of colonialism is bound up with this question of who are you going to give certain people a pass to kill, partly because there's this shift from a feudal world in which conquest is considered a legitimate source of authority. So if you go and fight someone else's army and you kill them, then it's, that means God wanted you to. too. So it's okay for you to exercise authority over them. And then you're moving into this world in which supposedly we're living in the world governed by commercial laws in which you're not supposed to go and kill people just because you want to be your prisoners and you want to take their land. But you're going to keep doing it anyway. So you have to keep, and in fact you're going to do it more than ever. You have to really desensitize people to ideas around killing. I mean,

it's in some ways arguably it's like the dark side of secularisation as well because one one of the things you have to you have to really get around the fact that universalistic religions like Christianity is supposedly supposed to tell you you're not supposed to do that you're not supposed to just go and like kill a bunch of defenseless people and enslave them so you've got to come up with all these excuses for doing it which ultimately amount amount to saying well they're not quite human these people and it is striking that it's still going on it's still going on The question of whose lives are worth what and who can be grieved is clearly really live to the politics of Palestine. It is the dark side of enlightenment, though, isn't it?

One of the knowledge is that gets invented is the idea of races, basically, to justify, you know, in a sort of secular sense, semi-religious and secular sense, the invention of the modern conception of races and race science, I'm doing that within inverted commas, etc, and of course it all leads in the mid-20s. of century, you know, you have people trying to cope with or come to terms of the Holocaust, Auschwitz and these sorts of things. And so you have that like Frankfurt school sort of critique of enlightenment, basically, of the dark side of enlightenment, the use of rationality and logistics, etc. to elevate mass killing to an even larger level. And of course, with the development of like technologies of war, etc., that just grows bigger and bigger. And of course, part of the development of those technologies of war

is to put distance between the person killing and the person being killed so that they all do look like, well, dots on a screen, perhaps pixels on a screen. Completely. And also like the huge backpedaling that's happened like over history and like rewriting of who was on what side, like when it becomes, when the horrors of like war or death

become, when people can see things for what they are. I mean, how many institutions and groups of people, like, just did not give a shit about, you know, the death camps in the Second World War. And then afterwards, they're all like, oh, yeah, of course, this was a terrible thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the same thing is going to happen with Palestine. When Palestine is free, which it will be, at some point, like, you know, history is going to be rewritten.

All these people who did not give a shit are suddenly going to be like, isn't it great that this land has been liberated? If we're going to hear something a bit more recent than most of what I've been playing today, we could hear the invocation from a 2018 album by a very long-running band, sort of British sort of goth, dance, pop, world outfit, Dead Can Dance. This is the Invocation by Dead Can Dance. Do you know what? To really test our commitment, to treat in each, to treat in each human being as a complex person, we should probably turn to times when we have celebrated people's deaths,

such as I'm going to put myself my card on the table. I celebrated Margaret Thatcher's death. I opened a bottle of champagne. Was it champagne? Was it proper champagne as well? To be honest, it probably wasn't. No, it was probably Prosecco or something like that. I won't get my best champagne out for Thatcher.

But then I went to a big party. We had a big party. And that's not treating Margaret Thatcher, you know, that was, I don't know if I was celebrating her death. I'm not sure, actually. I'm not sure. Because in part, I think it was almost like, I felt that week, there were like huge stories about like, you know, ex-mining villages, having these parties and celebrating, etc., etc. And in a way, it was like a battle over like history, which was long gone, like a battle over the 1980s, basically. The other version of like what the reaction to Margaret Thatcher's death, apart from the celebration, would be the imposition of

this hagiography, that the changes that happened in the 80s, they were natural, you know, she was the person who pushed history forward and all these sorts of things, celebrating her death. It's almost like keeping fidelity to like the situation in the 1980s when antagonism was much more open. This is what really happened in the 1980s, do you know what I mean? And it wasn't inevitable. There were people involved who did that, basically, it caused great harm, et cetera, et cetera. In a cold light of day, I don't know if I could totally defend justifying, celebrating some of these deaths, but... Yeah, no, but it is interesting, Keir. So, like, thank you for bringing it up. I do think

that there is something there about going back again to this idea of, like, collectivity, is that there is something that is shared, and therefore, like, a shared experience through something, and, you know, the symbolism of this person's death means that we can all get together. and, you know, remember the fact of, you know, in this case, like hating that person. And I remember at the time, you know, like with Margaret Thatcher died and there were people who very strongly said, oh, you know, I stop at that. I would not, you know, I hated this person and what they did politically and what they did to the country and what did to people I know, but I would not celebrate their death.

And I found it a really interesting conundrum, you know, for that people, certain people seem to find themselves in. And, you know, that got me thinking about like the yacht or whatever, or like rich people, like billionaires that we don't know, whatever, like dying, and how people feel about that as well. What the moral case is or, you know, what the issue is, rather for like celebrating when somebody's dies. And the other side of it was, I wasn't a lot to celebrate. She was like in an 80s or something.

She'd had a full life. I didn't tell her, Ray. I thought she'd won. But I understand why people did. I mean, I think you guys have made all the point about it. Let's hear Elvis Costello's tramped it down from, it was sometime in the 1980s, and this was Elvis Costello imagining how happy people would be to bury Margaret Thatcher in some imagined future.

Because there's one thing I know, I'd like to live long enough to savour. That's when they finally put you, in the ground I'll stand on your grip and trend the dirt

down What do you think Is death the end? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yes, I think life is all a terrible accident and I'm going to embrace death when it comes along.

I'm not actually impressed there. I mean, we could talk about what a good death is, perhaps. How would you like to go? I mean, I would like to really get good at meditating and die in a state of deep tranquility. Whether that will ever happen, I don't know. There's that story of Aldous Huxley, isn't it? Where his wife was giving him,

he knew he was dying on his deathbed, and his wife was giving him escalating doses of, I think it was mesculine. I think this would be pre-acid. No, it wasn't pre-acid. It was mescaline that he was writing about in things like the doors of perception, but no, he was asked his wife to inject him with LSD. Yeah.

And that is something we haven't taught about. That is really important. So the thing, the thing, the clinic, the first licensed clinical trials using LSD for therapy for decades and decades were carried out in Switzerland, the place where LSD was invented. a few years ago, and they were for end of life therapy. So there's been lots and lots of attention given to people trying to get patents to use psilocybin using magic mushrooms to treat things like depression in the state. And right now it looks much less likely that's actually going to happen than it looked

a couple of years ago because the federal Food and Drug Administration has turned down the license for using MDMA for post-traumatic. stress disorder that people thought they were going to give. So we don't know where all that use of psychedelics and parapsychedelic and pathogens is going to go now. But the licensed clinical trials using actual LSD, not just mushrooms, were conducted in Switzerland. In fact, it's not just that there were clinical trials. The clinical trials, I think, were successful.

I think I might have this fact wrong now, but I think you can't, I think, actually, I'm not sure, I don't know where it tended up in terms of people being routinely given it. And the whole usage of the psychedelics was in order to relieve end-of-life anxiety. So it was for people with terminal illnesses were being given doses of LSD because it was thought that having this ecstatic, mystical experience of blissful cosmic union would end the fear of death. And the results were very positive. So it is really claimed that having that sort of mystical experience does really relieve people of the fear of death. So I think that has really positive psychological effects with people who are kind of know that they're facing imminent death. Okay, well, let me make a living will now then, this testimony could constitute it.

I would like to be taken to Switzerland on my deathbed and fed doses of LSD where people say, fly away, darling, fly away. And then at my funeral, I would like, hour. after hour of ACFM to be played at both my funeral and my weight. What you want is like a mausoleum, like, where this is a sound installation. We're just ACF on a loop. Oh, boy. Like Osnambious, my two legs will remain, but ACFM will boom out across the desert.

Look, that's pretty far out.