You're listening to Radio Death

Man, let me tell you–if you like death, hilarity, comic dynamic duos, Waiting for Godot, Hamlet, witty treatment of profound topics, or theater in general, you should probably read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. )

Or see the play. Or see the movie, which is good, but not as good as the play. (No, there’s no movie currently available with Benedict Cumberbatch in it. Sorry, guys. It’s just the clip. Although if you’re fast you can see him in an encore presentation of Hamlet live on screen)

But seriously guys, this play (script?) is great. There’s actually stage antics. Like they bump into each other and stuff. Comically. In a play about death.

And it’s based on Hamlet. Did I mention that I like Hamlet? It’s great. It’s very relevant to modern times, and so on.

(above is from the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern movie)

Like many moral rules, “killing is wrong” can be used as a justification for harming an outside party (sometimes, ironically, by killing them). So in addition to (and in part because of) its direct mortality salience effects, a murder is cause for retaliation because it is an opportunity to create an “eternal” self by contrasting an out-group (the killers) with the in-group (the extended, “eternal” self).

Also, the sign in and of its self is an expression of another cultural view--some kind of pacifism--which serves to separate the sign-holder from anyone who ever kills, and especially those who kill in retaliation of killing. The sign says, “I am different from and morally superior to all who kill. I will live on through those who share my viewpoint.”

Basically, we use our cultural identities (professor, golfer, skier, vampire, etc.) as a way to give ourselves a sense of permanence in a fundamentally transient world.

If you have an “identity”--a stable collection of qualities, embedded in various cultural institutions that will in all likelihood outlast you--it is much easier to forget that you won’t go on and on forever.

Sheldon Solomon on America

For Sheldon Solomon, experimental social psychologist at Skidmore College, life in America is good — for the vast majority of Americans, the question is ‘what should I eat?’ not 'will I eat?’  However, the psychological and environmental costs of the good life are tremendous:

“We are a culture that happens to value things that are not realistically attainable for the average person and, in so doing, renders self-esteem impossible to acquire for too many of our citizens … Despite the great material benefits that a capital-based economy affords us and that none of us should be hesitant to recognize or appreciate … when the goal is unlimited wealth, no one can ever be successful in that regard, so our standards are unattainable … and because we teach our citizens that if you weren’t an idiot and if you tried hard enough, you too could be rich and famous, when that turns out not to be the case, the average person blames themselves and suffers the psychic consequences accordingly … Psychologically speaking, we don’t have a set of values in places that renders it acceptable to just be a person of integrity … 

My other concern has to do with the more material consequences of the way that we conduct ourselves as a culture … when you take a free-market, capital-based economy where the goal is to make as much cash as possible and you juxtapose that with the Judeo-Christian worldview — 'God created us in His image and then put everything here for us to use at our leisure’ … that has given us license to turn the world into a giant Bic lighter, to use at our will and to dispose of accordingly … 

I don’t think it’s overly histrionic to note that Americans are responsible for a scandalous amount of environmental destruction and that we use a disproportionate amount of non-renewable resources and that we seem to do so in cavalier disregard of the fact that this is highly problematic and completely contrary to world opinion … 

But even if we manage all that, the universe is probably finite in either space or time, if not both, and one day we will run out of resources and the trillions of humans that have proliferated will die.

More importantly, material wealth should not and cannot be the end-all, be-all goal of civilization. Our true subconscious goal has always been everlasting life--which is something we can probably never obtain. We should focus on being kind to each other, and trying to minimize suffering while we are passing through this world.

And if we do figure out how to live forever--without using up all the resources of this vast universe--we are likely to get very bored. Certainly we will no longer be human, because our impermanence is a fundamental--perhaps even the fundamental--aspect of the human condition. But alas, because the final goal of life--eternal existence--has been achieved, what do we have left to live for?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (via gimcrackproductions)

Ah, but if death is truly the ceasing of existence, how could we feel solitary?

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”