The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

It’s not just that the powers push us around from the outside with demands, deadlines, and expectations. The powers also affect (and infect) us from the inside. A focus on service—how we work and make sacrifices for the institution—tends to miss how we often internalize the spirituality of the institution, how our identity becomes formed by and fused with the institution. A focus on service and work (though important) tends to be too behavioral in nature to capture how the institution gets inside us, inhabiting our hearts and minds and affecting how we see ourselves, others, and the world around us. As we explored above, we allow this to happen because we think that the durability of the institution makes it an existential lifeboat, a repository for our lives that will carry forward into the future long after we are gone. The allure of the principality and power is that it can do something that we cannot, namely, outlast death. But as we noted, this is an illusion. Every institution, organization, and nation—every principality and power—plays the same game that we play, the game of survival and self-preservation.