The end of eternity
02/10/2026
Let's agree with Ernest Becker that all human culture is, at its root, life giving ritual -- or more directly, death defeating ritual. And let's accept, too, for the sake of argument, that the specific flavor of life-giving belief is ultimately unimportant, whether it's as bold and artless as eternal feasting and seventy-two virgins, as tempered and nuanced as social progress and the bright future, or as spectral and watered down as living on in hearts and minds.
We all must tell the critical lie, though the details matter little: Here's why I'm important. Here's why my death is not the all-ender, the undoing of everything. Which lie we tell is unimportant, as long as we believe.
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. John 6:47
If we take it as given, then, that our personal bouquet of beliefs and values, regardless of how fascinating and distracting their blossoms and foliage may be, unerringly thrust their taproots deep into death anxiety, where exactly does that lead? It led Becker into the supposition, crudely paraphrased, that evil is what you're willing to do to safeguard your immortality. From personal snubs and prejudices, to hate crimes and wars: when our imminent death is laid bare, evil is the lengths we'll go to cover it up again.
Herein lies the ambition of all life-giving ideologies to conquest and monopoly. If everyone believes what you believe, you can rest easy in the power of your immortality vehicle. Or a close second: non-believers are wrong and will forfeit eternal life.
But what if those with conflicting beliefs aren't in some remote, backwards country? What if they are your neighbors, your colleagues, your community leaders? One must doubt, or quash doubt.
In doubt we tread water in the river Styx: anxiety, depression, anhedonia, and all manner of individual neuroses. In quashing doubt we grasp at destructive, divisive, and disastrously short-sighted death defeating ideologies, tacitly agreeing to refute evidence, disparage conflicting beliefs, or even kill, die, and perpetrate horrors in defense of our bright national destiny, our legacy, our progeny, our eternal souls. Or seen from the other side: in defense of our mauvaise foi, our bad faith, our audacious and fragile escapism in the face of imminent death.
It's worth reflecting here that defending our life-giving beliefs need not unfold at dramatic scale - it is often pitifully mundane. Think less of the Holy Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, and the Spanish Inquisition, and more of petty clambering up the corporate ladder, subtle maneuvering for social position and romantic recognition, or righteously self-sacrificing at the alter of making the world a better place.
Few of us, anymore, have something to die for, but how we envy and admire those that do! How intoxicating that elixir must be! What soothing, what tranquil release to close that most critical of deals, the trading of this meager, vulnerable, uncertain life for life eternal -- even if only in hearts, minds, history books, or an implausible paradise.
What is man without belief in something? We could ask Dostoevsky's atheists if we can catch them before they descend into madness and despair. Far better to live with some measure of life-giving delusion, says every human civilization, ever.
A thing could be true, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it - so that the strength of mind might be measured by the amount of "truth" it could endure - or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. Friedrich Nietzsche
And before we retort that we're finally standing tall on our own two feet with our heads proudly above the clouds in this scientific age, let's remember that hindsight is twenty-twenty; let's reflect briefly on the zealotry of Maoism or Bolshevism, their promise to deliver mankind, their demand for personal sacrifice in service of a great ideal, their hallowed canonization of state heroes (Lenin hasn't aged a day since his death more than a century ago), even while they denounced religion outright in classic doublespeak.
It bears repeating the specific vehicle does not matter. We must take our self-transcendence, our denial of death, our sweet escapes wherever we might find them, as Goethe well knew.
He who has Science and has Art,
Religion, too, has he;
Who has not Science, has not Art,
Let him religious be!
No one, to our great relief, demands we make a spiritual inventory of our own modern era. It is the unique blessing of Zeitgeist and hyperopia that forgive us our delusions, because delusions we must have. We need not look the spirit of our age directly in the eye, for fear of frightening away its last vestige of preservative power. But while world religions sink into inconsequence amidst a veritable flood of artificially generated art, waning and fractured nationalisms, and droves of sponsored influencers peddling products perfectly aligned with any and every given ideology, we might allow ourselves a moment of panic. Are the old gods dead? Are the new gods weak and unconvincing?
If the prevalence of individual neuroses is diametrically opposed to the efficacy of life-affirming delusions a resounding Yes! might be in order. The magical tonics have gone flat. Who doesn't know someone wearing one, two, or more thorny crowns from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? ADHD, bipolar, OCD, seasonal depression, PTSD, the list goes on for nearly one thousand entries.
The fascinating question after so much preamble: What sort of human experience lies in total disillusion? When the levee of death denial breaks, is there something else beyond the flood of neurotic despair? Without heaven, legacy, progeny, social progress? If every conceivable form of after and beyond is a cunning farce, what remains? What lies in store for us beyond the end of eternity?
If we can accept neither delusion nor madness, what will become of us?