Why the Grim Reaper is Capitalism's Best Friend

grim reaper

If there’s one thing we’ve learned this semester, it’s that our ideas about health and well-being are culturally-determined. It’s the same thing with our ideas about death. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and the reading on death salons offer us two vastly different ways of thinking about death, and neither of them fit in with our socially sanctioned fear of death. Both readings discuss the “Western” idea that death is something to be feared. But why? Clearly, there are other ways of thinking about death. Most religions have some belief in an afterlife or some answer to the question “what happens after we die?”. Secular America’s answer to that question is “nothing”. And there’s a reason for that: our lack of belief in an afterlife fuels our actions, especially including our purchases. And for this reason, a belief in the afterlife is detrimental to the biomedical model of health.

Ernest Becker, mentioned in the Hayasaki reading, was a cultural anthropologist who wrote The Denial of Death. One of his main ideas was that the fear of our own mortality is the driving force of all human behavior. And, as we’ve seen all semester, we’ve be socially conditioned to strive for health - from buying organic food, to exercising, to giving birth in a hospital. All of these things cost money, and therefore they benefit some producer of a commodity somewhere. And oftentimes, the one benefiting from our fear of death is the healthcare industry. We consume products that claim to make us “healthy” in order to ignore the fact that we will all die at some point. And we try to put off that moment of death as long as possible, to the point where we have criminalized assisted suicide, even when people are suffering so terribly.

However, as The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying instructs us, death is not to be feared. Death is simply a natural part of the life cycle, and we should neither run from it nor glamorize it. But if we all took on this belief, what implications would that have? How would our values change? How would we live our lives differently? If we let go of our fear of dying, embrace the whole process, and “find enlightenment”, we would be unencumbered by our need to consume health and delay death because we would search for the deeper meaning in our lives. And, as the Buddhist monks in the reading show us, the deeper meaning in our lives is about finding simplicity, and finding and sharing love. Our lives are not actually valued by how much stuff we have. But of course, knowing and understanding that totally goes against everything that a capitalist society values.

Our society values the ability to buy things and to make a profit. Our value as humans is closely tied to our value as workers, and how much money we’re able to make. And if we combine this with Ernest Becker’s idea that fear of death directs all human action, then we can see how the pursuit of health leads us to buy as many products that will increase our lives is a completely rational choice. So it’s completely normal for us to fear death, even to the point where we don’t talk about it. We put death away and try as hard as we can to ignore the fact that we will all die eventually.

However, on the complete other side of the spectrum, there’s a budding movement around death salons - educational and social gatherings that attempt to demystify death. These are based on research that shows that prolonged exposure to death in comfortable settings actually decreases the fear of dying. But doesn’t this also trivialize the idea of death? Being in a room full of (mostly) young, healthy people surrounded by skulls and bones might normalize death, but it doesn’t help us find the deeper meaning within it. And these death salons seem to approach the topic from a completely materialistic approach, without much thought about what happens to us after death. Focusing on our physical bodies and what happens to them after death is completely the opposite of what The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying tries to instill in us. We should not care about our physical surroundings; we should work to reach enlightenment and prepare for death so we can get the most out of it. But the implications of that belief is toxic to the values that we’ve been socialized to have. In this way, our anxiety about death is beneficial to the biomedical model of health.