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Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death…
Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, pp. 123-4
… in an age if individuality and mass isolation … one fears death more than ever before, precisely as one is being advised from all directions to forget it.
Bamyeh, Of Death and Dominion, pp. 84-5
… efforts to manage existential terror affect virtually all human affairs.
Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, p. 14
Do people fear death? Do they still fear death? Isn’t that a thing of the past, when people were haunted by plagues and archaic terrors of demons, changelings, hexes, witches, succubae, and soap? Or an adolescent fetishistic gothic self-indulgence? Or the result of horrific trauma? To many philosophers, psychologists, poets, and scholars of religion the fear of death has always afflicted us, driven us to despair, obsession, violence, and fantastical visions of immortality. Millenia ago, Lucretius (1st c. B.C.E.) observed in The Nature of the Universe:
I must throw out the fear of Acheron head over heels - that fear which blasts the life of man from its very foundations, sullying everything with the blackness of death and leaving no pleasure pure and alloyed. The heavier their afflictions, the more devoutly they turn to their superstition. These running sores of life are fed in no small measure by the fear of death they heap carnage on carnage. With heartless glee they welcome a brother’s tragic death. Often from fear of death mortals are gripped by such a hate of living and looking on the light that with anguished hearts they do themselves to death. (III. 37-82)
Plato (c. 360 B.C.E.) called philosophy a preparation for death. Hobbes (1651) and Hume (1779) saw the dread of death as the inspiration for God and salvation, and Schopenhauer (1844)