Introduction to the Death of Death

and why you should read history book

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about dying in war lately. One of the big challenges, one of the big glowing red weak spots of late modernity-mindset and our conceptualisation of history is, the question: “Why would you storm Normandy”. The question varies a bit based on where you are geographically, but it’s something like “why would you run into machine gun fire, what are you, stupid?”. What possessed men to not just risk death, but apparently, go in willingly?

We cannot account for it in our cultural framework. It doesn’t make sense, for an entity who is a logical “pleasure maximising” machine, to storm Normandy. To account for this having happened, we must make seriously weird judgements about the people who did: They were all retarded.

funny movie reference! this is a trick to make you feel bad later in the text.

They didn’t know any better and didn’t realise that they were not maximising pleasure. They didn’t Have The Data. Storming Normandy, on an individual level, must be a miscalculation, somehow. The clever man would have not joined the army, or if he was conscripted, he should have faked being retarded as a way to get out of it. That way you could stay home and eat nice meals and have sex, maximising pleasure.

So we are left with the only two options: Either, everyone who stormed Normandy was literally retarded…