Essay:Anarchism and death

• religion views death as the exit from this life to the "great mystery" to which our memories and deeds are, arguably, transported with the last breath of the now-expired human body, and serves the role of the "intellectual gatekeeper" or "intellectual middleman" which, depending upon the region of the world, maintains monopolies over the explanation of the great mystery to the living survivors and eventual successors to human death.
• state, in whatever system of governance which is assumed for it, is meant to, for as long as possible, guard against the deaths of a preferred group of individuals, henceforth known as "citizens", by violently defending the citizens from harm or offense by other citizens or non-citizens; for the sake of this purpose, the state which has the largest capability of violence in a given, carefully-defined region has the official monopoly over violence within the border of a region, henceforth known as a "country", and has the de-facto right to visit harm against other citizens or non-citizens for the sake of the citizens and the legitimacy of the state.

Hence, religion has a monopoly hold over explanations of the afterlife to its adherents, while the state has a monopoly over killing or oppressing the basic functional capabilities of any citizen or non-citizen for the "protection" of its own members and beneficiaries. Neither institution is ultimately voluntary or life-affirming; neither institution provides a reason for living or residing in this life, as they both function on the guarantee and celebration of human expiration.

Enter the third level of human institutions: the corporation (also known in other forms as the business, company, cooperative, conglomerate, school, etc.). Formed primarily for the purpose of facilitating the production and exchange of goods between living individuals, they have formed various extents of relationships with states and religions which desire access to the businesses' inventory for various purposes (often related to violence and death or often using the coercion of violence and death). However, unlike states and religions, businesses and corporations are not concerned in the least about death; death of any person or population does not really figure in the day-to-day dealings of a business, as this only means that another potential client or competitor has "disappeared" - not "been received into the hands of God and the ancestors" or "died in the service of his country".

The client, personnel or competitor who has died no longer figures in the functioning of a corporation, and there will be no corporate funeral service for the deceased, no highly-trusted corporate symbol upon the tombstone of the deceased (think...would you honestly countenance the Apple Inc. symbol etched upon the tombstone of Jef Raskin for his contributions to the pivotal Macintosh project while an employee at the company?).

Instead, corporations need their clients, personnel and competitors to live long, contribute to the revenue, and evolve the stature and well-being of the company and its partners; even the ideas of the dead and buried are used, exploited and stretched to various contortions for newer or more timely applications and pursuits. Indeed, corporations only function when people are alive to perform the art of business (even if the people in question are zombie slaves...I kid, I kid).

But even then, corporations are not the only entity which function through the participation of the living: most dynamic collaborative websites on the Internet, P2P file sharing networks, chat rooms, open source software projects, etc. Anything involving production and creation, exchange and distribution, needs the support of living, breathing participants.

The downside of this is that corporations and other networks which need mutual production, mutual distribution and mutual reception may eventually communicate with the state to use its coercion-fueled capabilities to support or reform itself to entrench the interests of a particular group of corporations into coercion-fueled law.