The cult of death
July 2023 has been the hottest month in human history. I know this despite the fact that most of this month has been unseasonably cold in the south of England. I know this because science tells me it is so and not because of my own local, subjective human experience. What’s more, I know this is not good news for the human race. I know this because I no longer believe the fairy tales of our primitive past.
I used to. Once upon a time I used to think that the earth was created for me. I used to insist that the land and all of its animals and resources were created expressly for my pleasure, my benefit, my privilege, and I was free to exploit and enjoy them at will and without consequence.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I looked forward to it all being destroyed for me someday. I advocated for that day, when a great battle would decide the question of good and evil and settle the question once and for all of Who was really in charge. I never stopped to consider that other people, people just like me, had different hopes and different dreams for the planet, that they were good people undeserving of the horror I had in mind for them.
I made my monstrosities more palatable by believing they were lesser beings, unworthy, ultimately evil, depraved and ignorant. I sustained my ultimately evil faith with the thought that they deserved the horror that I would so righteously escape.
I now see my former belief not as a hope but a horror, not as an advocacy for a New Birth but as a form of suicide, a death wish, spawned by a cult of death. And one day long past, I couldn’t tell you precisely when, through a series of rational realisations, painful confessions and disgusted observations, I turned my back on that cult of death forever.
I finally repudiated the teachings that have systematically demolished our human capacity to sustain life on earth. They were the actual destroyers, and I was once one of them. And the people who resisted us were our true saviours.
My nefarious past wasn’t all bad. I came away from that time and that experience with some valuable lessons learned. I learned that the human mind was capable of sustaining outrageous contradictions. That virtually anything we wanted to believe to be true we could believe to be true as long as we could find a moral justification for it no matter how flimsy and pathetic that justification might be.
We believed we were good people who loved our neighbours while simultaneously persecuting anyone who wasn’t just like us and who didn’t believe what we believed. Slowly, inexorably, we confused our faith with patriotism. That idea grew over time into something increasingly hideous.
I was no longer around when that patriotism became nationalism, when our religion became hopelessly entangled with the Republican Party, when God (for the cult) returned in the form of Donald Trump. But I understood its antecedents and how it was possible.
I understand why, for the cult of death, the destruction of the planet isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. MAGA Republicans of today are the inevitable result of the Reagan evangelicals of yesterday. Anyone who has lived through it, first from the inside, now from the outside, understands the origins of the cult of death and how it has grown to the monstrosity that it is today.
Since this cult of death lives as a contradiction to rational thought it’s immune from rational explanations. It will fade only when it collapses under its own weight. Until then it continues to thrive in the amniotic fluid of jingoism. Its greatest enemy is science and education, so it’s no surprise that it repudiates science, undermines learning and burns books. We should stop being surprised when darkness loathes sunlight.
This is why the election of 2024 is so important. The cult of death sees that election as a chance to triumph, a chance to take over. If we don’t all vote in that election then we may never have another chance to vote at all. I think we understand this. I hope we do. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.