Ninety-eight

We are all governed by fear. But it's not fear of death, as most neoFreudians claim.  

Most neoFreudians can’t or won’t understand Freud’s theory of Todestrieb. They dismiss it as the product of an ailing failing mind instead of the culmination of a lifetime’s thought.

Some of them even claim children don’t know about death, just as Victorians claimed children were innocent/ignorant about sex. They replace one adult secret with another because they think adulthood means learning things children don’t know, when more often it means forgetting things children do know.  

Freud said all organisms seek to die, but in their own way. Todestrieb is not self-destructive. What people seek is a good death, the culmination of a good life. What they fear is the meaningless death that ends a meaningless life.

Life should be a struggle to recreate the world, to leave it better than we found it. The death that ends this heroic struggle is a well-earned rest. But for most people there is no rest, because they can’t or won’t do what they know they should.

They console themselves for that failure with fantasies. Their victories and their defeats are equally illusory.

We’re all fascists now, soldiers just following orders. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

All my life I’ve waited for my real life to begin. Now it’s almost over. I began it in hope, but now I’ve accepted that I never had a chance. Few people ever do.