How the Fear of Death Drives Anarchy

The appalling death of George Floyd rightly upset the nation, but we’ve also watched people loot and burn businesses (many of them owned by African Americans), beat the innocent (some of them African Americans), and injure and kill police officers (sometimes African American police officers). We shouldn’t be surprised. There is something going on here besides righting racial wrongs: people are afraid of death and for some, the fear of death drives anarchy. The fear of death is intensified by Covid 19 because people are more afraid of death than usual.

Nihilism and Anarchy

But before I explain how for some the fear of death drives anarchy, I need to define a couple of terms. Anarchy is “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority.” Of course, if there is a God, then He is the ultimate authority. If there is a God, then we can also have confidence in an afterlife where we will all come into judgment and where we can then even enjoy life eternal. But as our society casts off God, it casts off belief in the afterlife and if there is no afterlife, then that can lead many to nihilism–the belief that life is meaningless. After all, if there is no afterlife then when you die you’re just dead and, as the Hearse Song goes, “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The worms play pinochle on your snout.”

As Christian apologists point out, if there is no God, then there is no transcendent meaning. Indeed, atheist Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) acknowledges, “All the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”¹ Russell writes that we must build our lives on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair.”² Thus, Queen sang in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “nothing really matters, anyone can see… nothing really matters to me.” If nothing really matters, if there is no transcendent meaning, then people try to make up their own meaning, and for some, this lack of transcendent meaning leads them to anarchy!

Without an Afterlife Anarchy Is Predictable

As Martin Luther (1483–1546) writes, “If you believe in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God! Do then as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a fallen tree, all is over when you die. Then plunge into treachery, rascality, robbery, and murder.”³ Duke University psychologist William McDougall (1871–1938) says he has no “religious convictions,” but he writes about the afterlife, “It seems to me highly probable that the passing away of this belief would be highly calamitous for our civilization.”⁴ And why not? As Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) puts it in The Brothers Karamazov, if “God and immortality do not exist,” then “man is allowed to become a man-god,” and “then everything is permitted.”⁵

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), who founded Romanticism in French literature, writes, “There can be no morality if there be no future state.”⁶ The bishop of Clermont, Jean Baptiste Massillon (1663–1742), states, “If we wholly perish with the body, what an imposture is this whole system of laws, manners, and usages, on which human society is founded!” He asks, “Why should we heed them, if in this life only we have hope? Speak not of duty. What can we owe the dead, to the living, to ourselves, if all are, or will be, nothing? Who shall dictate our duty if not our own pleasures—if not our own passions? Speak not of morality. It is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention, if retribution terminate with the grave.” Massillon points out that “if we must wholly perish, then is obedience to the laws but an insensate servitude; rulers and magistrates are but the phantoms which popular imbecility has raised up; justice is an unwarrantable infringement upon the liberty of men,—an imposition, an usurpation.” Indeed, he writes that “the law of marriage” is “a vain scruple; modesty, a prejudice; honor and probity, such stuff as dreams are made of; and incests, murders, parricides, the most heartless cruelties and blackest crimes, are but the legitimate sports of man’s irresponsible nature; while the harsh epithets attached to them are merely such as the policy of legislators has invented, and imposed on the credulity of people.”⁷

Redistribute Everyone’s Possessions and Kill Those Who Resist

If there is no God, then some turn to anarchy, which fosters communism: you shouldn’t have more than me, so we’re going to take your stuff. That’s what communism was all about. If you take the stuff of someone who has more than you then pretty soon you’re going to reach an equilibrium where no one can have more stuff than another person. Those who resist this notion must be sent off to “reeducation” camps where they must learn that it’s wrong to want to have more than another person (even if that other person is lazy) and those who don’t learn this must be exterminated. Thus, communists killed at least one-hundred million people (I’ve studied genocide for twenty-five years and that’s a very conservative number).⁸

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the author of The Gulag Archipelago, who himself spent eight years in a Soviet gulag, sums up the reason for the murders and ultimate collapse of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics:

I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”⁹

If there is no God, no afterlife, then people will fear death and the fear of death drives many to nihilism and then to anarchy. Unless people return to a belief in God and an afterlife, there may be many riots and gulags in our future.

But belief in God is the only reasonable explanation for the origin and order found in our universe. What’s more, Jesus really did die on the cross for our sins and He was raised from the dead. So Hebrews 2:14-15 tells us that Jesus died so that “he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” People are held in slavery by their fear of death and people trying to escape that slavery without Jesus can do a lot of evil. But those who have a robust belief of eternal life in Jesus will not fear death and can enjoy the freedom of knowing they will live forever and ever.

The above was partially adapted from my book, Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It.

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1. Bertrand Russell, “The Free Man’s Worship,” in Russell: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell,ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (New York: Routledge Classics, 2009), 39. [↩]
2. Ibid., 39. [↩]
3. John Kost, Human Destiny (Lansing, MI: Robert Smith, 1903), 263–64. [↩]
4. William McDougall, Body and Mind: A History and Defense of Animism (Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2009), xiii. [↩]
5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 649. [↩]
6. François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity: Or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1856), 190. [↩]
7. Jean Baptiste Massillon, “Immortality,” Wilmington Journal, May 28, 1852, Library of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026536/1852-05-28/ed-1/seq-1/ (accessed December 25, 2018). [↩]
8. Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzj Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999), 4. [↩]
9. “‘Men Have Forgotten God’: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address,” National Review, December 11, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-men-have-forgotten-god-speech/ (accessed December 27, 2018). For more on the relationship of the fear of death to anarchy see, Peter J. Ahrensdorf, "The Fear of Death and the Longing for Immortality: Hobbes and Thucydides on Human Nature and the Problem of Anarchy," The American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), 579-593. [↩]