Control of death?

When I was reading Robert Jay Lifton's Superpower Syndrome (2003), I was struck by a phrase he used in describing apocalyptic cults.  He said they were trying to achieve control over death.

This reminded me of an essay by the controversial philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).   It's called "The Ideology of Death," and it appeared in a collection of essays called "The Meaning of Death" (1959), edited by Herman Feifel.  This brief essay deals with how Western philosophy has treated death.  He particularly focuses on the ways in which the state exercises control over death, as exemplified by the execution of Socrates.

Marcuse writes:

Death assumes the force of an institution which, because of its vital utility, should not be changed, even if it could perhaps be changed.  The species perpetuates itself through the death of individuals; this is a natural fact.  Society perpetuates itself through the death of individuals; this is no longer a natural but an historical fact.  The two facts are not equivalent.  In the first proposition, death is a biological event: disintegration of organic into inorganic matter.  In the second proposition, death is an institution and a value: the cohesion of the social order depends to a considerable extent on the effectiveness wwith which individuals comply with death as more than a natural necessity; on their willingness, even urge, to die many deaths which are not natural; on their agreement to sacrifice themselves and not to fight death "too much."

What he's saying there is not a protest as such, but rather a description of a reality in all societies.  Later on in the essay, he ventures some thoughts about how death as a social institution of the kind he describes could eventually be changed.  Marcuse was a fan of one of Sigmund Freud's most controversial and least accepted ideas, the notion of a "death instinct" in people.  And in the historical sense in which Marcuse uses it, the idea may have some validity.

And the prospect of endless wars like the one in Iraq under the Bush concept of the Global War on Terrorism, with a new draft a real likelihood in the near future, gives a fresh urgency to Marcuse's further description of the social institution of death in existing societies:

There is another sinister aspect of the exalted acceptance of death as more than a natural fact, an aspect which becomes manifest in the ancient stories of mothers who delighted in the sacrifice of their sons on the battlefields; in the more recent letters of mothers who assured the killers of their sons of their forgiveness; in the stoic indifference with which they live near atomic testing grounds and take war for granted.  To be sure, explanations are ready at hand: defense of the nation is the prerequisite for the existence of all its citizens, final judgment of the murderer is God's and not man's, etc.  Or, on more material grounds, the individual has long since beome powerless "to do anything about it," and this powerlessness is rationalized as moral duty, virtue, or honor.  However, all these explanations seem to fail at one central point, the undisguised, almost exhibitionist character of affirmation, of instinctual consent.  [This leads him into a discussion of the "death instinct."]

Despite the sound of the section just quoted, Marcuse was not a pacifist.  He did not imagine that the social need for patriotism and self-sacrifice was going to disappear in the immediate future.

I'm not trying to draw any particular conclusions from all this.  I was just struck by the ways in which Lifton's ideas linked back to this short piece by Marcuse.