The Death Wish

 

Memento Mori

I still recall vividly a discussion I had one evening in first year university with a guy from Alberta, blonde, bearded, with granny glasses. I said that everyone had both a life wish and a death wish. He scoffed—preposterous. Nobody wants to die. And I was shocked, because I thought it was obviously true.

If my claim sounds Freudian, I did not get it from Freud. At the time, I knew little of Freud.

I meant simply that everyone secretly wants to die. There is an instinct that makes us fear death—easily explained by evolution. But there is another instinct that comes from somewhere else. 

I say the evidence is everywhere.

Everyone craves a beach vacation, a cottage on the beach, with the vast ocean before them. Why? Because they can feel apart from the world, only steps from eternity. There is a deep calm to being near the ocean.

It is the same calm one feels when walking through a cemetery.

Why do others crave a vacation or a cabin in the mountains? So they can look down on the world from above, be above all that, away from it all. Life looks small and insignificant and far away.

Why do people, for that matter, want to read novels, or watch movies? To escape, at least for a few hours, from their lives and from themselves. To forget they are there and just watch life go by, as God does. As saints in heaven would.

And why do young men actually seek risk, and danger? Why do they often eagerly sign up for war? 

The secret thrill is that they might die.

Each of us has an intuition that there is a somewhere else, a more perfect world. Each of us has an intimation that daily life is not our home. We yearn. We feel a nostalgia without knowing what for.

This, not incidentally, is behind many modern diagnoses of depression. The good doctors will always assume a desire to kill oneself or die to self is pathological, a “mental illness.” They will consider a general disappointment with the world a "mental illness."

This because they want to deny the existence of the spiritual. They act as materialist inquisitors against the heresy of idealism.

But the heart knows what it knows. Those who lack a secret death wish lack a soul.

Footsteps

 

Responding in Toronto to a man who refuses to shake his hand, Trudeau looks like he has seen a ghost.

Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government seem to be committing suicide. 

The Atlantic provinces were a stronghold for them; now they are losing it by pushing forward with their carbon taxes. 

Muslim Canadians were supposed to be their client group, a reliable constituency; recently, Trudeau branded Muslim parents “hateful,” and refused to apologize when the largest Muslim body in Canada asked for one. 

A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister picked a senseless public fight with India. This might play well with Sikhs in Canada, or those of them who are anti-India; but surely risks losing support among the 66% of Indo-Canadians from India who are not Sikhs. 

Last week, or the week before, the House of Commons entertained a Nazi. At a minimum, Trudeau’s government did not vet him, despite the obvious questions raised by someone who fought against Russia in the Second World War—and this turns Trudeau’s favorite attack on any and all opponents, that they are “Nazi sympathizers,” against him. He probably dares never use it again. The necessary level of incompetence here seems so high, the alternate explanation seems more plausible: a death wish.

And a death wish is plausible. We all have one. When our conscience tells us we are doing harm, not good, or have worn out our welcome in this world, it begins to nag at us. Not necessarily that we go and commit suicide; but our system mysteriously shuts down, and we die of one thing or another. Unless, that is, we seek and find redemption. 

Serial killers almost always take greater and greater unnecessary risks until caught. As one famously marked in lipstick on his victim’s mirror: “For God’s sake stop me, before I kill again.” Similarly, regimes that no longer feel they are legitimate begin to act recklessly—as if to see how much they can get away with.

Like picking fights with the voters. How much will they take, the peasants! Let them cancel Disney Plus! Like trimming your toenails or reading a newspaper during parliamentary debate.

The legacy media as a whole also seems to have a death wish. Faced with growing competition due to technology, they have dropped all journalistic standards, anything that might give them a claim to being a superior source, and begun to report only what they feel like. Disney Corporation seems to have developed a death wish. Everything they invest in any longer seems to go directly against their financial interests. Bud Light did: directly insulting their customers, and not backing down. The LA Dodgers did, honouring an anti-Catholic hate group in front of their Hispanic Catholic local community. The LGBTQ et al movement, the trans movement has; “We’re coming for your children.” Probably no further comment necessary. Pope Francis seems to have such a death wish, becoming increasingly open and reckless; as well as a desire to kill off the Catholic Church.

It resembles those times and days when people believed, for one superstitious reason or another, that the end of the world was at hand. A large proportion of them would then just drop everything, any pretense of morality, let the cattle stray, and begin fornicating on the hilltops. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. 

And we already know where we’re going.

I think the conscience of the woke is waking up.