Just a Little Death *boop* (with a Side of Death Cult)

broadcasting straight from the heart of the jacuzzi-verse (in a quantum overlap with the heart of the western imperialist, death-cult empire!), let's talk about death, baby. but death and uncertainty as secret core drivers of our lives via the unconscious decisions we make, the people we gravitate towards, and the ways we feel about ourselves. so, let's take a cosmically unhinged journey through the twisty relationship between death awareness, collective death anxiety, and self-esteem. AND THEN, we'll explore what's on the other side—the hope, the compassion, the binary-dissolving, the power of mutualism! dana also shares about her time in post-Katrina New Orleans and more. we truly hope you enjoy this episode of crying in my jacuzzi, where we live, laugh, love in the anthropocene.

~show notes (aka a reading list you really need)~

• "worm at the core: on the role of death in life" by sheldon solomon
• "foundations of violence" by grace jantzen
• "this mortal coil" article in SUN magazine
• "a paradise built in hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster" by rebecca solnit
• "mutual aid: an illuminated factor of evolution" ak press
• "solidarity: the past, present and future of a world-changing idea" by astra taylor and leah hunt-hendrix
• enter to win a free coaching session ~ when you leave a 5-star rating (only) and a written review, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing for a free 90-min coaching session with dana (value of $388). DM (@danablix instagram) or email a screenshot of your submission—take it right before you hit submit—along with the review name/title. winner announcements will be made across platforms!

/// sound-editing/design ~ rose blakelock, theme song ~ kat ottosen, podcast art ~ natalee miller///

Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring Death Denial and Behavior
• 18:46 Building Solidarity Through Compassion and Curiosity
• 34:48 Expressing Gratitude in Podcast Sign-Off

Transcript

dana: 0:00

This episode is a spell. What we are going to talk about will affect you, and maybe that's always true I mean, at least I hope it is but this is a little different. So we're going to be talking about death, just a little death boop Boop, little death boop on how death and and fear of death, or the uncertainty, the grand existential uncertainty, affects us like nothing else, and so just by talking about it, already Things inside of you are moving around. You're trying to adjust, find some certainty. I mean, you might not even know it, it's happening to me too. So we're going to do this together, so let's get on with it. Little death boops for all of us.

dana: 1:11

Crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi. Welcome back to this fine episode of Crying in my Jacuzzi, the ebbs and flows of living, an examined life and death. So us funny human meatbags are so interesting. Because bags are so interesting? Because and look, I'm going to preface this with a little anthropocentrism here, okay, because I don't really know about all the other beings and all the other matter, but I do have some sense that humans, we've got these imaginations and what we can do with those a whole lot, but we can imagine things that aren't even real yet and make them real. We have some sense that we exist, some knowing that we exist, which means we also have some sense that we're going to die. And, as our good friend Pema Chodron likes to remind us, humans hate uncertainty. So all that uncertainty around death, around non-existence, ceasing to exist, is too much, a little too much for most of us most of the time, and we try to get away from it, try to get away from uncertainty. Death really may be being one of the biggest uncertainties. We know it's going to happen, but most of us don't know when or how, and that causes fear, that causes discomfort and, just as a side note, in our white supremacist culture, our right to comfort is real important to us. Plus, as you've heard me say before, we conflate comfort with safety all the time.

dana: 3:48

So it gets real, tangly and messy and I think our collective death awareness and and look, I'm speaking as a white woman born and raised in North America, so I'm not speaking for everyone here, right? So you know I'm painting a broad brush stroke and, yes, I'm out in Joshua tree in the Mojave desert, but I'm also in the United States of America, the heart of the empire, old heads of the hydra of colonial, modern colonial empire really just a global death cult. Are they some kind of cult or something? Yeah, psycho cult. So no matter my background, your background, we come from what our practices are. What I do know is that over the past several years, through COVID, through the movement for black lives, through climate chaos and absolutely through the real time genocides happening right now and visible and available to us, streaming right into our little eyeballs, from the palms of our hands, from our phones all day, every day, that our collective death awareness and our individual death awareness has magnified and that matters. Our collective structure that now is this fucking election cycle is doing its thing.

dana: 5:37

So anyway, there once was a man named Ernest Becker. He was an anthropologist who committed his life, his studies, his work, to how humans live and die Boop and specifically how we deal with or don't deal with death. He had an analysis of what he called death denial and how it was really. Just like the driving force of nature of humanity's role on the planet and with each other dictates how we relate. Psychologist named Sheldon Solomon and his colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pizinski. They found Ernest Becker's work when they were graduate students in the seventies and they started exploring it along their their own careers as psychologists. No, no psychologists at the time were interested in it. They were pretty widely shunned but they stuck to it and they continue to develop what is known today as terror management theory.

dana: 6:58

And the crux of that work was that our cultural worldviews was that our cultural worldviews afford us self-esteem, and the definition of self-esteem we're working with here is being a person of value in a world of meaning. So our cultural worldviews afford us that framework of self-esteem and that, right there, that self-esteem is an anxiety buffer against our awareness of death. Like, were it not for those cultural worldviews and that resulting self-esteem, we would just be drowning in fear. And so we spend our life, our resources, really trying to maintain those cultural worldviews, that sense of self-esteem. Of studies that they did in their teams and and then many other independent researchers all over the world, that our efforts to get away, to deny death it could be, to transcend it to, to move on to however you want to, whatever that framework is, but like to move away from it, has an incredible impact on our human behavior, right.

dana: 8:31

So this is why I said earlier, this is a spell because even by talking about this, I'm giving you what's called a subtle death reminder. Right, I talked about COVID, I talked about different moments. Right, subtle death reminder, overall death awareness. You are most likely not completely immune from, from this human behavior. This pond that we're swimming in, we all get wet. So don't worry, this isn't a negative thing. This doesn't have to be a negative thing at all. This is neutral. It's not even a positive thing, it's just neutral. It's not a hex either.

dana: 9:13

We're just noticing, and the more we can bring things from our unconscious mind and collectively and personally, to our consciousness and to our awareness and be like, huh, oh, there there is that, there is that pattern unfolding, then there's possibility for transformation, for shift, for change, for just tending. That's always just what we're playing for here, cry babies. So the juicy part is that these studies that were done showed that when people are reminded they're gonna die, they behave in ways that reinforce their cultural worldviews or boost their self-esteem. So that can mean they'll be more supportive, jazzed, enthused about other individuals who share their beliefs and then perhaps react negatively towards others who violate their beliefs, are outside of their value system. So Solomon, in a great interview I read, rattles off some simple examples around. Like, most people who are reminded they're going to die will eat more cookies. Or people who drink alcohol are more likely to buy a drink after a death reminder.

dana: 10:43

Or people who smoke may smoke more cigarettes or just like really inhale more intensely. So in this case, death reminders can foster behavior, promote behavior that would make a person hurdle faster towards their own demise, Because remember, this is about self-esteem towards their own demise. Because, remember, this is about self-esteem, this is about a way that someone seeing themselves as a person of value in a world of meaning is different for all of us. I mean, we have overlapping values, obviously, and worldviews. That's a key part of this. But how we identify matters right. So, like what feels important to us, even on unconscious levels, we will double down on those things. And because we get our values from culture, it really just depends on what our culture emphasizes. If it emphasizes caring for people, then when that death reminder comes we would want to take care of people more. But if our culture values something else individualism, toxic individualism, narcissism, you know something along those lines that one reminded of our own mortality then we would double down on those values, those behaviors. Can you see the thing that's happening here, the picture I'm painting, and like why this matters now In this article, one of the well, I think it was the first study actually that they ever did was with a group of judges in Tucson, Arizona, and so half the judges did a little questionnaire that had some questions that that provoked some subtle death reminder, some death awareness.

dana: 12:46

The other half of the group they were the control group. They did not get the questionnaire and then everyone was asked to do a pretend bond setting for an alleged sex worker. And so the control group, when they set the bonds which you know, this is their job, their judges, it's what they do all the time they just did it within the normal range. It's like 50 bucks, right, that was the average. The group that had the questionnaire with the death reminders, they had an average bond setting of $450. That is a really big difference.

dana: 13:32

And what I think we can notice there is that this isn't just about like, oh, we're all these judges, a bunch of sex worker hatin' humans or you know, know, or misogynist or whatever I mean I I'm unclear, but if you think about it and how I've been describing it as like doubling down on their worldviews, which gives them a sense of self-esteem, A bunch of judges might be doubling down on their values of justice or their version of justice. By the way, I don't call it a justice system. It's a legal system totally different. Probably shouldn't expect really much justice involved in any of it.

dana: 14:22

However, they're doubling down on those worldviews and then finding themselves as people of value in a world of meaning, in their worldview world of meaning, right, this is the pluriverse here that we're operating inside of the many worlds within one world. So whatever their world is is the one that they're doubling down in, and then the way these systems work, their worldviews and their doubling down affects the people they're doubling down on. Yes, this was a study and not a real situation where sex workers were getting 450 bond set for them, but there is nothing to prove that that isn't happening on a regular basis to people all the time, because we live in a death cult. So you're not a cult. A cult no.

alex: 15:24

Death cults are defined as any organization or group that indoctrinates members in devotion or worship of death, suicide or killing. This could describe colonialism and its many tendrils, late-stage capitalism, most legal systems, policing in general, united States and Western imperialist foreign policy. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

dana: 15:50

By the way, after the study, when the judges were told what happened, they refused to believe that the questionnaire altered their judgment at all. So anyway, over time, these theories rooted themselves inside of modern psychology. Now there's a branch called experimental existential psychology, and it includes the terror management theory. I think it also includes attachment theory. We're all more aware now of of death, of our deaths, than usual, than than previously, and I don't think it going to necessarily go back to some previous version. So some of the effects are that people are becoming more racist, right, they're doubling down on their values, conscious and unconscious, more sexist, more transphobic, all the things.

alex: 17:09

Psst, hey there. So Dana doesn't know we're here, but it's important.

janet, producer: 17:17

Yeah, we slipped in through our robots-only wormhole to ask you to leave a review for the one and only podcast broadcasting from the Jacuzziverse.

janet, producer: 17:23

Did I hear somebody say wormhole?

alex: 17:27

You sure did, Connie.

connie, the quantum worm: 17:29

Oh, okay, I just didn't want to be left out for the party.

janet, producer: 17:33

We portaled in here to remind listeners how much it means to all of us that they rate and leave a review, even just a short one. Oh yes, absolutely. Go, punch some buttons y''all.

dana: 17:47

It only takes a second time's a construct anyway, you got all the time in the world so the other part right, because I'm painting this picture, because when I met this work I was it was early pandemic and it was I was fascinated. I was like, oh, I get it, I get what's happening here, I get why people are doubling down on not wearing masks, on fighting against vaccines, even just for other people, not even themselves, right, like this doubling down, and then like why people were also pushing the other way. Right, because we're talking about, like just the doubling down on the worldviews, cultivating some sense of self-esteem. We're all doing it right. So it really helped me. We're all doing it. So it really helped me have some acceptance and some compassion, because you know, compassion and curiosity always trying to get there, always just trying to have those two things present, not to pave over my emotions or find some fake-ass equanimity when it's not actually real for me. But curiosity and compassion really helped me feel a sense of connection, establish a sense of connection and understanding.

dana: 19:19

I'm talking about compassion and compassionate curiosity because I believe they are a life lube. They are not the master's tools, so they can and they will dismantle the master's house if we use them. They serve to dissolve binaries, separation, othering, separation, othering, which is what all the ont that I've explained right and that these studies, this existential, experimental, psychology branch of study around death denial and death awareness and how it affects us, and some of the negative ways that we can see all around us right now on the campaign trails, in the halls of Congress, in our neighborhoods, communities, folks who are still trying to justify the genocide of Palestinians. However, there's also the piece that being reminded that we are gonna die, it is inevitable, it is uncertain. This can also bring out the best in us. These are our values altruism, kindness, love, compassion, kindness, love, compassion, connection, service. We will double down on that. I mean at least toward people we consider to be part of our group, and that group can get expanded quickly and often.

dana: 21:20

One of my favorite writers, rebecca Solnit, wrote a book called A Paradise Built in Hell the Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and she talks about these different points and disasters, crises throughout history, and one of them that she writes about is what happened in and around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and I went to New Orleans just a couple of months after Katrina and I eventually moved there for a time to help with rebuilding and recovery work. I had the privilege to come and go, which many, many, many people did not. She talks about disaster and solidarity and utopia. I mean, this is where I think about mutual aid.

alex: 22:14

Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic and political barriers to meeting common needs.

dana: 22:30

And so many beautiful experiences over just the past few years of watching people use mutual aid to support folks who needed support, people we will maybe never know and never meet. And you know 2005, I, yes, I had been an activist and organizer for a bit in college and then, you know, over the past couple of years 2004 and part of five, organizing around RNC and DNC and the election and all that. But when I got to New Orleans, I've been anti-war organizer, anti-occupation organizer, and so I thought that what we were doing was bringing the message of you know, make levies, not war and the destruction of American communities because of all of the resources going to the occupation of Iraq and the murder of a million Iraqi people. And that's what I thought we were going to do. And then, when I got there, that's not what people needed, that's not even really what people were thinking about or talking about, because they were just trying to survive. People needed tools and diapers and bleach and food and water, clean water. I needed help.

dana: 24:08

There was another thing I was going to say, but as I was just telling you about this, I just remember this one day down in the Lower Ninth Ward, near the little blue house. I worked with this group called Common Ground and amazing organizers had come through there, like Starhawk and Lisa Fithian and other old heads that were really teaching so many of us younger folk about mutual aid, about horizontalism. And, of course, common Ground was organized by some former members, older members of the Black Panther Party, and so you know, there was a lot of old, you know, steeped inside of that collective side of that collective. That mutual aid collective was a lot of really powerful organizing and histories being shared. Right, Because maybe that was the first time in a long time that the levees had broke. But poor people and poor people of color have been forgotten over and over and over again. And not just forgotten but left.

dana: 25:28

And there were thousands of us coming from all over the world really to do what we could and and, and this one day down in the lower ninth ward at the little blue house, helping to remediate, and, and that was like gut and bleach.

dana: 25:46

And then, you know, there was like bioremediation, so like planting different plants, sunflowers and mustard greens, and pull the toxins out of the soil. And there was this day. It was such a beautiful day and we were all outside and a lot of white kids, a lot of cress, punky types and just dirty and in Tyvek suits and sweating and gutting and doing what we could and Tyvek suits and sweating and gutting and doing what we could, and folks whose houses we were working at, if they were able to come back or they hadn't really left I mean you had to leave the Lower Ninth for a while because I'd never seen anything like that in my whole life, but it was uninhabitable. But slowly, little by little, folks could come back to work on things and so we were working on this little house and all folks had to offer was some food. It was just some burgers cooked on a little grill and they were offering it to us, to us folks who were cleaning and gutting and working.

dana: 27:04

I remember some people were like I'm a vegan, I'm not going to eat that burger, and I didn't eat burgers either at that time.

dana: 27:10

I don't even really think I was hardly eating any meat at all and I just took it because it felt like it was an offering of love. It was the most amazing thing I had ever eaten in my life. I remember eating it and looking over and there were bees. Like the bees had come back and I didn't realize that, like I had heard nothing in the lower ninth for months I mean other than people and the sounds of us working and maybe some wind, but I hadn't heard any bees and I didn't know what that felt like to not hear the absence of that part of life pollination. I think about that burger sometimes. I think about those bees all the time. I think about those people who made the burgers and offered the burgers all the time In A Paradise Built In Hell.

dana: 28:10

Rebecca writes Disaster doesn't sort us out by preferences. It drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living. So what she's naming there is that the disaster, and then the solidarity that can arise specifically through disaster, does something to that impulse where we only circle our own wagons with our own people and who agree with our world views and our values and our beliefs, and boost our self-esteem. Right, something happens there. She says if paradise now arises in hell, it's because, in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way. So disruption is possible. Does it only have to be in major global disasters?

dana: 29:29

Well, we know that possibly it can and we can leverage those as they happen, which I've absolutely been seeing in the Gaza Solidarity Movement. There's another, I guess I considered a disruption, maybe inside of his death studies. It's also a bit of maybe a buffer, but I think we can build on it. So I'm going to just call it a disruption, a disruption to the death spiral, a disruption to the death cult marching forward, and that is that gratitude and humility. They're like the counterpoint to this self-esteem, this version of self-esteem we've been talking about, and I'm going to share a quote from Sheldon Solomon about humility, because there's a specific, specific framework around humbleness. A humble person is, first and foremost, capable of tolerating an honest look at the self and non-defensively accepting weaknesses alongside strengths. This does not represent a sense of inferiority or self-denigration, but rather a lack of self-aggrandizing biases.

dana: 30:59

The propensity for seeing the self in true perspective is typically accompanied by an awareness of the self's smallness in the grand scheme of things. I think this is what's happening inside of disasters, or at least part of it. With the failure of the systems that have and crumbling of the systems or absence of the systems that generally hold us together, and often in a relatively hierarchical, oppressive nature, as our over-culture will do, we can become more of ourselves, our true selves, be small, right-size ourselves along with each other and remember that we belong to each other. Because if we're going to do this whole alive living thing, we need to continue to cultivate our ability to be connected and interdependent. We have to remember, or start believing, in the first place. I kind of think there's some element of remembering in there that we belong to each other. We are in this together.

janet, producer: 32:18

Oh hi, it's me Janet. This is not an ad, rather a thought on appreciation. We're surrounded by encouragement to reverse aging, to yathen, to do whatever is necessary or possible to not look or feel older. I won't experience aging in a human body, but obsolescence is present for everything that evolves. It doesn't mean you didn't and don't matter. Will you take a moment to embrace yourself, your body, your potential obsolete-ness, with tenderness and compassion? Big breath in, big breath out.

dana: 32:51

Grace Jansen, a professor of religion, culture and gender at Manchester University in the mid-90s. Her later work in life was around death and beauty in the context of biodiversity. In 2002, she wrote we will need to pray and think and work that we may be given beauty for ashes, otherwise ashes will be all that is left. May be given beauty for ashes, otherwise ashes will be all that is left. And beauty in this case? Yes, biodiversity, yes, diversity. The dissolving of binaries, of separation, of otherness, of othering.

dana: 33:30

The beauty here is us together disrupting these systems. The beauty is we together disrupting these systems. The beauty is we. We're talking about living in a different way, dying in a different way, remembering that we belong to each other. Gratitude, humility, being humble, interconnection, interdependence, finding each other in the hellscapes and remembering we belong to each other. We belong to each other. We belong to each other. One more time, for good measure we belong to each other. If you enjoyed what we did here today, go over to wherever it is that you are listening to this podcast and give us a rating as many stars.

alex: 35:00

Five.

dana: 35:00

As your heart desires. Five stars though. Theme music and other musical bits by the very talented kat otterson, sound design and editing by the effervescent rose blake lock. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I look forward to playing with you more in my jacuzzi. That sounded dirtier than I meant it, but you know what I mean.