Until a few weeks ago, the American electorate was faced with a choice between one presidential candidate who probably suffers from early-onset dementia and another whose narcissism has peaked. Which is better: that the finger above the nuclear button belongs to a senile commander-in-chief or a megalomaniac?
Death touched both of them, but both of them deny it. Old age is the way death sneaks up on you discreetly, diplomatically, feeling you up piece by piece instead of forcing you to meet it face to face, but Joe Biden wouldn't admit that fact. It's as if he didn't realize that his transition to a light trot whenever he sees the camera is on him is not the same as being fit for the duties of the presidency. Instead, we are served the undignified sight of an old man clinging to power with his fingernails while his colleagues confess that they will break his fingers if he does not loosen his grip. At least Shakespeare's Lear knew when to admit defeat. Like money, power is a salve against mortality and incompetence. Elton John, for example, once asked his assistant to stop the annoying wind.
And Trump had an encounter with death that could still appear to him as a divine epiphany and shake him to the very core of his being. But as they say in Ireland, I wouldn't bet my farm on it. The bleeding from the condition was not fake but, as Agatha Christie well knew, cutting the earlobe is the best way to stage an attack because that place bleeds profusely and has no particular function. However, as far as Trump's spiritual transformation is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the incident was real or staged. The former president shows the arrogance of someone to whom death is an unknown phenomenon and who is therefore very dangerous. Only a man fully aware of his mortality can feel solidarity with the fragility of other people and try to protect them both from other people's attacks and from his own attacks.
But Trump doesn't think that way, in part because disease and death are even less American than Marxism. They show the limits of human existence, and that nation believes that the will is unlimited. "I can be anything I want" - that kind of mindless mantra is heard far more often in California than in Cambodia. Peter Thiel, another coffin denier, has compared what he calls the "ideology of the inevitable death of every individual" to "confiscating taxes" and "totalitarian collectives" and thereby suggesting that death is a violation of individual rights equal to what the Stalinist state was. It is, in fact, the metaphysical equivalent of a tax on wealth or public property.
Similarly, Madonna recently stated that she doesn't think about her age. She could be in for a nasty surprise in a decade or two. Capital is accumulated for many reasons, one of which is certainly defense against the absolute loss that death entails. Since there is no end to the accumulation of things, it has become the world's version of eternity. Freedom is endless and untamable, while death portrays us as fragile and finite. Trying to cheat death will soon become as natural to the rich as trying to cheat the IRS.
A Silicon Valley mogul has spent a hefty chunk of his $125 billion fortune on various death-defying technologies. It's a pretty logical project when you consider that death makes a life spent accumulating money pointless. Rich people are like unlucky gamblers, so they acquire fabulous wealth and then list it in a split second. Members of Joe Biden's church sprinkle ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday, a mocking comment on those who unconsciously believe they are immortal and therefore pose a trampolic threat to us all. "Forgetting death destroys us," complains a character in Humboldt's Gift of Sol Below. Hell is inhabited by those who cannot die.
From Oedipus to Lear, tragedy is an art form in which those who have transcended themselves must fail to learn their own mortal limits. Only facing the nothingness and utter misery of death in any symbolic form can divert them from the fantasy of omnipotence to the compulsions of reality, which also include their bodily connections with others. There is perhaps something cautiously encouraging in tragedy precisely because a breakdown can lead a person to be reborn and transformed, although no guarantee is given that this will happen.
It would be said that some of those who survived the attack on the World Trade Center experienced such a transformation. Having passed through death as though through a flame and emerged somewhere on the other side, they discovered that their sense of the brevity and fragility of life intensified, and with it the need to explore life in all its depth and richness. Trump's life, on the contrary, is neither rich nor deep; if he thinks about it at all, he just hopes that his life won't end. Everything else - capitalism, cheeseburgers, trophy wives - must remain exactly the same while he enjoys his infinite duration. Since the idea of eternity no longer has as many customers as it once did, infinity is welcome to plug the hole.
It's almost impossible for people like Trump to die because death requires you to give up absolutely everything, so those who are too invested in the status quo can't be dislodged so easily. That is why the Christian gospel believes that the rich have a problem with entering heaven. We are used to giving up this or that - steak, smoking, sex six times a day - but giving up the self that gives up all of that seems unthinkable to us.
Paradoxically, that self is present in the very act of thinking about renouncing it. It is easier for those who have known love to face erasure because it also requires a certain surrender of oneself in the name of increased existence. Those who know how to love can die. Trump would be said to have difficulty with the first condition, which could prove to be a problem when faced with the second.
Love is one of the highest forms of realism because it implies the recognition that the other we perceive as a part of ourselves is actually independent, and the awareness that we will die is another great form of it. This means living ironically: being involved in human affairs, but not taking one eye off the fact that at some point none of it will matter anymore. It's not quite the same as when that student in the Woody Allen movie refuses to do his homework because the universe is going to collapse one day. Ironic should not be confused with nihilistic.
There is, however, a kernel of truth that can be plucked even from nihilism. "Nothing comes of nothing," Lear warns Cordelia, but, as usual, he is mistaken. On the contrary, the lesson of tragedy is that something only happens out of nothing - only if we are stripped of our grandiose illusions and dragged through hell will we be able to live with some degree of authenticity. To darken things a little more: there is no guarantee that we will survive this radical deconstruction of our selves. Lear, like most tragic heroes, does not succeed in this.
To most liberals and conservatives, the described position seems too dark to be believed. Don't do it, it's not that bad, you don't have to start everything from scratch. In the end, radicals differ from their political opponents precisely on this claim. The human condition is far worse than a bright-eyed liberal will ever admit, but also more open to improvement than a skeptical conservative will ever admit. Is there more optimism in radicalism than in liberalism and conservatism? The answer is categorically yes and no.
Both Trump and Biden would have to read Swift's Gulliver's Travels, although it is rumored that Trump has no books other than coloring books. In Swift's novel, there is a description of some kind of beings called struldbruz, that is, immortals; their hell is that they are guaranteed eternal life, but not eternal youth. The first three decades of their lives are quite cheerful, but around the age of thirty they fall into a depression that will last until they turn 80. And then they are affected not only by the usual follies and weaknesses of the old, but also by additional vices arising from the disgusting certainty that they will live forever. They are ill-tempered, gang-headed, greedy, envious, irritable, vain, talkative, incapable of friendship and any natural affection. When they turn 90, they lose their teeth, hair, sense of taste and most of their memory. Reading becomes impossible for them because by the time they reach the end of the line they already forget the beginning. These wretched creatures endure all eternity distorted, sick and demented.
In short, there is something worse than death, and that is not dying. That lesson would have to be learned urgently not only by Biden and Trump, but also by the nation to which these two belong.
(UnHerd; Peščanik.net, translation: S. Miletić)
Bonus video:
