By: Felix Xie

Maintaining social structure in an age of capitalist society is purely based on humanity’s urge for life. All laws, in a basic sense, are manipulating people’s longings. The reasons that people go to school, have a job, and work hard as citizens are to ensure a good life and, in turn, distract themselves from death. If someone is not scared of death and has no connection or things that they value in life (primarily because being alive is the main occurrence of value to people), then they have no reason to live or follow the law.

Human law was enacted to stop people from crossing a line by “threatening” to ruin their lives. When people prioritize their values over their own lives, it can result in terrorism and horrible acts in society. People are unpredictable and corrupted with insanity, so the law is not an ultimate way to stop people from doing evil things definitively. The law has no control over people themselves; it has control over a person’s morality and humane actions by holding hostage what people hold dearest: their life.

Law is made by thoughts of the flesh, which in turn causes it to only affect people who have the same thoughts of the flesh. Humans are under the slavery of the law, which, in turn, is the slavery of death. Humans fear death, which causes its depictions to be ghastly, dark, and harrowing. Death is a necessity in this world. Even if people are scared of the thought that everyone will die, that is how this world works and should work. In the end, the law is the simplest way to induce order by manipulating the animalistic instinct in humans to survive by using death as a repercussion for disobedience. Death is the reason, and death is the cause; all things go back to death.

Death is the final judgment and something that anchors all humans together. Every person will die and be gone one day. Death is something that all must face to be human. “As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.” — Publilius Syrus.

Image Credit by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA