necrophilia

When we hear the common refrain of “We’re fucked”; we have to conclude that the coming ecological crisis must feel like an expected and maybe even an appropriate end to our obviously degraded society. How are we otherwise able to make sense of the fact that people aren’t rioting in the streets at the imminent destruction of their lives, their children’s lives, and the entire web of life? Do we want to live? If we do, we need to wake up and grow up — right now. We are about to lose everything, but we aren’t dead yet.

Fromm describes the pull of death as “necrophilia.” This concept is informed by Freud’s theory of the “death instinct.” It isn’t a sexual dynamic — it’s a deeply personal orientation. Necrophilia is a love “for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of ‘order.’”

-from Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth by Margaret Klein Salamon, Molly Gage