From Duality to Nonduality: Death Anxiety and the Architecture of Power

This essay argues that death anxiety is not merely a psychological or cultural phenomenon but a structural consequence of dualistic perception—the assumption that the self is a discrete, enduring subject standing apart from an objective world. Drawing on Ernest Becker’s theory of symbolic immortality, the essay interprets modern civilization as a collective response to this anxiety, expressed through institutions, moral systems, scientific practices, and structures of political and economic power that promise continuity, control, and permanence. Cartesian dualism is identified as a decisive historical crystallization of this perceptual framework, shaping modern science, technology, and social organization by privileging separation, hierarchy, and domination. The essay then turns to nondual philosophical traditions, particularly early Buddhist thought, Bhakti and Sufi poetry, and the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti, to offer an alternative diagnosis. In nondual perception, the self is understood not as a substantive entity but as a conceptual designation arising within interdependent processes. When this assumption of separability is seen through at the level of perception, death anxiety dissolves at its root rather than being symbolically managed. The essay concludes by suggesting that domination, hierarchy, and violence are not inevitable features of social life but contingent expressions of unresolved death anxiety, and that enduring ethical and political transformation depends upon a fundamental reconfiguration of perception rather than the replacement of one ideology or institutional form with another.