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Speculations on the use value of an afterlife [1]

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Date: 2022-08-28

horizon as dichotomous split

I was perusing the comments of redtravelmaster‘s diary “Trump’s Treason Mocks My Life“. There I came across a dialogue where someone said that the congresspersons and others who supported Trump’s attempted coup should be held responsible, and someone else expressed a desire to see those guilt-bearing individuals receive their punishments in hell.

This struck me, as the diary deals with Trump’s almost certain violations of federal code—the actual, human-made law. So to see this person advocate for supraterrestrial justice was a little surprising. We have mechanisms here on Earth that can be used to hold people accountable. That these guilty persons are political actors should not constrain our pursuit of justice on the material plane. So that got me to thinking: Why would someone bring up such a punishment in this context, of hard, legal accountability?

Hell serves as wish fulfillment. When someone does something obviously illegal, obviously beyond the pale, but escapes punishment, people comfort themselves with the idea of the person still encountering some punishment, this time in the supernatural realm of the afterlife; and that the punishment lasts forever gives potency to this wished-for fantasy. All the better.

This, I strongly suspect, comes from a desire to maintain a belief in a just world, that bad behavior is always punished (which is an axiom in such a world so constituted). It’s a way of maintaining a psychological even keel. It’s a coping technique.

There is no other explanation that I can see where there is under discussion the very real possibility of someone coming under the justice system that what should emerge in the conversation would be an explictly stated belief in hell as a secondary alternative (?) punishment should the first fall through. Why this sentiment at all?

This seems to be a hedge against the very real possibility of the failure of human institutions (which occasionally fail, precisely because they are human institutions!). In this view, the expressed belief in hell, as it is situated, is a psychological defense against potential disappointment (although the disappointment is still felt and processed, even in a minimized form, as manifested by such cynical statements about at least receiving such extracurricular justice).

This defense and the emotions it dams up become yoked to the satisfaction—the imagined and subsequently projected Schadenfreude of the prospect of such punishment. This is inherently gratifying and most probably serves as a salve for initial and/or anticipated disappointment of the justice system as it is constituted in material reality.

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