Chapter 26 Chapter 8 Talking about the Fear of Death

What would the world be like if people were not afraid of death? We can imagine that if no one is afraid of death, then there will be no dictatorship and tyranny in this world.Because no matter how violent a dictatorial government is, it is very difficult to squeeze the people. Everyone can pick up a knife and gun to confront it, and the worst is death.The dictatorship and autocratic system can be maintained by grasping the weakness of the people who are afraid of death. If the people do not have this weakness, the foundation of its rule will collapse. If no one is afraid of death, in a company, managers and supervisors will not be insulted by the boss, and ordinary employees will not be tortured by managers and supervisors. The phenomenon that one person can be violent against another if he has the right will disappear.In the same way, urban management will not fight hawkers on the street, and "security" in urban villages in developed areas will not randomly stop migrant workers to check their temporary residence permits and fine them.In this world, there will be no "sweatshops".Foxconn employees who have become a screw on a huge industrial production line do not need to jump off a building to seek relief.

We can imagine it endlessly, but the tragedy is that this is just a spring and autumn dream.The truth of the matter is this: we are afraid of death, very, very afraid of death. One night a few years ago, I got a call.The person on the phone said that he lived in a trance all day long, fearful, and every night, or walking alone in a dark alleyway, he felt very scared.He felt as if a ghost was grabbing him, threatening to snatch him from this world at any moment.He said that he had a "fear of non-existence", fearing that at some point, he would no longer exist. After he finished speaking, I made a difficult decision and told him the truth cruelly: his fear was actually the fear of death—using "non-existence" to refer to "death" showed that he was not only afraid of death, but also fear of death. For my own fear of death!

More than two thousand years ago, there was a famous person who was afraid of death, that is Mr. Ying Zheng.He is the first chairman of the Chinese Association of Fear of Death and the president of Qin Chao Co., Ltd.In 227 BC, a man named Jing Ke, humming the tune of "The wind is rustling, the water is cold, and the strong man will never return when he is gone", planned to use despicable means to assassinate Mr. Ying .The move sets a dangerous precedent for "terrorism" in business competition.But I didn't expect Mr. Ying to die, Jing Ke failed, and died himself.However, after this catastrophe, Mr. Ying suffers from the psychological sequelae of fear of death.

Therefore, in 220 BC, after merging the six companies of Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, and Wei and monopolizing the Chinese mainland market, on a cold night, Mr. Ying thought of a big event, that is I will always die.If he dies one day, all power over the world, delicacies from mountains and seas, and stunning beauties are all floating clouds, and he must resist death. So Mr. Ying decided to travel to various branches to enjoy the great rivers and mountains of the motherland.Those places used to be the territory of other companies, but now that they have been annexed by themselves, they have to inspect them to show the ownership of the property rights.Tourism is divided into two stages: one is to show off cultural and martial arts, leaving traces of oneself "visiting here" everywhere, for example, running to Mount Tai and engraving one's great achievements on stones, which is psychologically unwilling to die; One is to seek the elixir of life and want to become a fairy, which belongs to the biological do not want to die.

Think about it, if a person comes to the world, he does not leave behind enough things for future generations to remember his existence, such as an idea, a temple, a bridge, an event with great influence, sometimes it is really a It's a kind of sadness, because when a person dies, everything disappears, as if he never came to this world.In other words, if a person disappears completely after his death, it is equivalent to that he never existed.And if he left something that is enough to mark his existence, and this kind of thing has always existed in future generations and participated in the later history, it is equivalent to "immortality".In this way, his life is continued, and he is of course physically bound to die, but in the sense of existence, he is equivalent to immortality.

Therefore, even if some people cannot live forever, they will have a bad reputation for thousands of years.Because of this, psychologically he would not feel that his existence would become nothingness after death and be completely forgotten by this world. Mr. Ying used this method to overcome the fear of death in the beginning.He wants to make his mark on the world.Even if he dies one day, as long as people see these marks, it means that he still exists.The problem is that the world itself is passing and changing, and only ideas, literature and art are truly immortal, and those material things will be annihilated sooner or later.A thinker can use this method to obtain a sense of immortality, and he has a strong ideological force to support his calmness towards death. It is useless for ordinary people to do this, and it still cannot eliminate the fear of death in their bones.

After traveling for a period of time, Mr. Ying realized this, and felt that it is not so easy to achieve psychological immortality, so he decided to solve the problem of fear of death once and for all—to pursue physical immortality.Immortals are, of course, gods. If you want to become a god, you can ask the gods to promote yourself. The next best option is to take some immortality pills.Therefore, President Ying went around asking witches and gods, engaged in feudal superstition activities, and sent alchemists to search for elixir pills everywhere. At this time, a liar named Xu Fu appeared, Mr. Ying's idea of ​​becoming a fairy was instilled by Xu.If a person falls into a desire that cannot be satisfied but is extremely eager to satisfy, he clears the way for himself to be deceived. As long as the liar pretends to satisfy his desire, he can only be deceived. Playing between the palms of your hands.A person is often deceived because he actually desires to be deceived, or presupposes the ending of being deceived.The essence of being deceived is that a person bets his hopes and judgment on the liar.

Mr. Ying bet his hope and judgment on Xu Fu.Student Xu is also too smart, he can see at a glance how much our Mr. Ying desires immortality.Normal people know that this is impossible, and Xu also understands it.But since a person doesn't even care about common sense, it means that he is completely living in his inner world and has been swallowed up by the desires in his heart. As long as you give him a little hope, he will instinctively cling to it like a drowning person. Let go, treat you as a savior.Why not take advantage of this psychological weakness and make a fortune? So student Xu applied to Mr. Ying for some financial allocation to let him go to sea to find the fairy medicine.This is a fool, where is there any fairy medicine that Xu can find.Therefore, although he became a great navigator, he failed time and time again in finding the elixir.But Mr. Xu still has Mr. Ying's appetite, saying that the magic medicine will always be found, and please continue to provide financial support.In the end, in order to perform the trick a little more realistically and make it serious, classmate Xu also asked to send five hundred virgins, boys and girls to accompany him to the sea, where they disappeared mysteriously.Some people say that they went to Japan, and when five hundred boys and girls were paired together, the Japanese became what they are today, and student Xu became the first emperor of Japan, called Emperor Shenmu or something.This, of course, is just a legend, right for obscenity.

The extent to which a person is afraid of death is the extent to which he is irrational.The more he is afraid of death, the weaker he is psychologically.Of course, just not being afraid of death does not mean that a person is psychologically strong, but only if he is not afraid of death can he be truly invincible psychologically. People living in this world have never been equal. If there is anything that can smooth out the differences between all people, it is death. It is an absolute egalitarian law. Whether you are a president or a beggar, God treats you equally. There is no " Amnesty" happened.The existence of a life logically implies mortality.

It seems that death is just a biological fact, but why are people so afraid of death?Mere death itself does not create a problem, for example it does not create a problem with animals.Because they can only respond to the outside world with instinct, only the process of death causes physical pain to animals, and they have no fear of death. But it is different for people. Fear of death is a psychological problem, a spiritual problem, and it is the core.It's not just the process of dying that's frightening, it's death itself, and how it's reflected in life, that people fear. The French existentialist writer Camus said that there is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is: whether a person can commit suicide.This statement belongs to the usual rhetoric of literati and is a literary exaggeration.It is accurate to say that how to deal with death is the most important philosophical problem and life problem.

If most people in this unhappy world are not seeking happiness but trying to avoid pain, then, for almost everyone, everything they do is ultimately to eliminate death psychologically. Fear, escape the end of death! There is a requirement in philosophy, that is, in order to avoid talking with chickens and ducks and avoid being confused, the concept used by a person in a certain context must have a specific referent, and he must clarify the language he uses so that people can understand What did he say, and what exactly did he want to say.So, what does "fear of death" mean? People are instinctively curious about the mysterious and unknown things in this world, and they want to try anything, even drugs.However, even the craziest people dare not experience the taste of death, because it represents the most unbearable physical and mental pain, and it is irreversible. Once you die, you will not be able to survive. This kind of experiment cannot be done. The cruelest act is not to kill a man, but to torture him slowly to death.Killing represents barbarism, but slowly torturing a person to death also represents humiliation.It is to use people's painful experience of the death process to destroy a person's dignity and completely defeat his psychological defense.In ancient times, autocratic rulers liked to do this kind of thing the most, and a lot of tortures such as "skinning and cramping" and "lingering execution" were invented.When a person wants to express his deep-rooted hatred for another person, he also says "I will tear you to pieces!" For some people, in the psychological situation where he feels hopeless and extremely depressed, he may also hope to use death as a relief (this is different from "just want to die", death is only a way of relief, logically Said there were other ways to get him out).However, when he thought that no matter whether he cut himself with a knife, jumped off a building, or drank poison, he could not avoid the pain during the death process, so he couldn't do anything to himself, because the pain of the death process was more painful than the pain he wanted to be freed from. More terrible, more unbearable! Even if life is meaningless, people can give it meaning in various ways.But death is absolute meaninglessness, it is a destruction of any meaning, it represents absolute nothingness and silence.Death is the end of all possibility, the impenetrable eternal darkness. Man appears as a speck of dust at an accidental time in the vast universe.But no matter how small he is, in his view, his existence is a world.If his existence is erased by death, then everything about him is erased.In this sense, the fear of death is closely related to the endless attachment to the world.When a person thinks that if he dies, he will be completely tied to the property he owns, the life he enjoys, the people he loves, the career he has done, the sunshine and rain he enjoys, the mountains and rivers he sees, and all the good things in this world. He would tremble with fear when he said goodbye to the things that belonged to him forever, and he dared not think about it any more. If a person can take all this with him when he dies, it will be a great comfort to him.The problem is, such a beautiful thing is impossible even in a dream! In martial arts dramas and novels, a quack killer cannot have love.Because as long as he has love, it shows that he has nostalgia for this world.And as long as he has nostalgia for this world, he will have a weakness, and then his death will be approaching. If one is only afraid of the pain of death and death itself, then it is not so terrible, because when one is about to die, one is afraid of it and it is over. Usually, one can still pretend that death does not exist, and not let death interfere with one's life.But the problem is precisely here, the vast majority of people don't know when they will die!It is certain to die eventually, but it is uncertain when to die.Death is like a hunter lurking around people, and people who are prey don't know when they will be slaughtered by it. what does this mean?It means that since you don't know when you will die, it may come at any time and grab people suddenly like a ghost.In this way, the fear of death becomes a double fear of death itself and uncertainty.The fear of death thus permeates a person's daily life, especially after seeing many people die unexpectedly at a young age, it is even more intensely stimulating. I have heard many people sigh, saying that a person can play as much as he wants, and spend as much as he wants, and he is reluctant to spend money after there is no need to earn money, and he might die one day.It is the uncertainty of death that has the most destructive power, psychologically, it can frustrate one's efforts and the meaning of life. Death is the erasure of a person's existence in a way that ends life.And we know that the existence of a person can be experienced psychologically as his attributes of existence, his "self"—the property he owns, his status, and so on.The fear of death is projected into real life, and a person is very afraid that he will be ignored, that everything he owns will be threatened, disintegrated, and taken away. At a dinner party, I once saw a face showing fear in a social background with great disparity between rich and poor.It was the face of a rich man, who was said to have a net worth of hundreds of millions. The dinner table is different from all kinds of pure performance occasions, allowing jokes, expressing views on the current situation, and occasionally causing debate.A group of people who care about national affairs chatted and talked about corruption, the poor and the rich.That's when I noticed him.Despite his best efforts to appear detached from his identity, with a fake smile, a sense of fear quickly passed over his eyes and facial muscles.This is a psychological reaction to the unknown when the danger will come.Obviously, he is very clear that once the "society" game is reshuffled, everything he has now may be lost overnight. Why are many corrupt officials greedy and crazy?A very important reason is that he has a doomsday mentality. He doesn't know that he will be arrested one day, and he has no sense of security, so he can't stop his greed.In other words, it is no longer that money has any meaning to him, but greed itself has become his prescription for eliminating fear! Just as not all men are afraid of life, so not all men are afraid of death.for example: The religious extremist lives psychologically in his religious world, which replaces the real world.He completely believes that death is an entrance for him to enter heaven, and whether it is a terrorist attack or mass suicide, it is a necessary ritual before he is saved and enters heaven. One extreme way to overcome death is to become psychologically close to it.The reason why a cold-blooded killer is not afraid of death is because he brings death, he is death itself. Emotions, opinions, desires, value preferences, all of these are just things that belong to people, and they are an expression of people to the world. They neither come from the depths of this world, nor are they combined with the objective logical structure that governs the operation of this world together.But reason is embedded in the depths of the world and has insight into its secrets.One of the secrets that classical philosophers are not afraid of death is that reason is not just a function of the mind, but has entered the depths of his life.In this way, he is firmly united with an unchanging world, and will not feel that the passing of life will cause the disappearance of his own existence! In extreme situations, a person experiences only the social role he plays, not who he really is.A soldier rushing forward on the battlefield has forgotten that he is a living person. All he has to do is to perform according to the requirements of the role of a soldier, and not being afraid of death is one of the requirements of the script. Extreme emotions have a fatal psychological consequence, which is that people cannot bear the state they are in, forget themselves, and only see the target to which their huge psychological energy is directed.The reason why a person is not afraid of death when he is overwhelmed by extreme emotions such as despair and anger is because at that time he is no longer a person, but a kind of energy! Human behavior and preferences are so strange that animals can't match them.But fundamentally speaking, he only has one more problem to solve than beasts, and that is how to forget the existence of death. As long as the problem of survival can be solved, the problem of how to forget or not be afraid of death will be put on the agenda of human beings. Fundamentally speaking, the direct and indirect purpose of productive labor, commercial trade, and inventions and creations is to make people (or some people) survive and survive better.Singing and dancing, fighting cocks and dogs, praying to gods and worshiping Buddha, and studying philosophy are, in the final analysis, to gain a layer of meaning for existence. Human beings use this layer of meaning to package their lives and escape the fate of death. Why does almost every nation have a cultural and religious belief system that communicates with ghosts and gods? Of course, this is not for people to eat enough, and people have to solve the problem of death, and culture and religious belief systems are the spiritual devices used by human groups, large or small, to protect themselves from the fear of death. One thing is certain: whoever can devise a belief system to solve the problems of life and death will capture the hearts of mankind.A religion that cannot answer the question of death does not exist, and a culture that avoids the question of death will eventually be defeated by a religion that can solve the question of death. Therefore, we have seen that Christianity has gained more and more believers in China in recent years, and many intellectuals and farmers have been swept away by it.In contrast, the Confucian culture, which once occupied the absolute dominance of traditional Chinese culture, is increasingly being marginalized among the people.After learning from the pain, those who revived Confucianism played the banner of "Confucianism".There is no way, if you want to compete with Christianity, you have to solve the problem of death, then you have to interpret Confucian culture as a religion. There was a year when the entire earth was in a carnival, and that was the year 2000, the so-called "millennium".On the day when human beings congratulated themselves for finally stepping into the 21st century, I sat quietly and watched the crowd dancing and dancing.At that time, I didn't understand why such a time made them so excited. It was just a time mark, and it had no meaning in itself.Later, I understood that human beings must "reasonably" find an opportunity to have a carnival, convince themselves of the meaning of a certain time, and then experience a certain meaning in the psychological atmosphere created by everyone.Not only the "millennium", but also the Chinese New Year and holidays. Just as a person must dress his "self" in social clothes to protect himself in an unfamiliar and dangerous world, he must also dress his life in meaningful clothes to get rid of the real state of life and death.Why does one feel a certain degree of fear at night, or when walking alone in the forest?Think about it and you will understand, because at that moment, you were disconnected from the crowd, you lost the clothes of meaning, and you were restored to the real state of existence! Seeing this, it is not difficult to understand why there are witchcraft and theatre, and all kinds of singing and dancing arts in all parts of the world.Their function is to "enchant" the ordinary things in daily life, to make them mystified, sanctified, and sublime.In this way, man does not seem to live in a world where questions of life and death are always upon him.Because of the fear of absolute nothingness after death, religions set up a heaven, which is the place where people live after death.In this concept of heaven, not only is death not terrible, but it is even a bridge for people to obtain ultimate happiness. Since modern times, the reason why nationalism and nationalism have become more and more attractive is not because the propaganda masters and educators have superb propaganda skills, but because, in this secular world, they have become a secular Religion caters to our fear of death.Of course a person is mortal, but as long as he is a part of the country or the nation, he will not die either if the country or the nation is not dead.