We all know we will die, but not when and how. Can private death awareness become public, and what happens when it does? This mixed-method research on the Covid-19 crisis reveals how pandemic politics cultivates and uses mass existential anxiety. Analyzing global discourse across vast corpora, we reveal an exceptional rise in global ‘mortality salience’ (awareness of death), and trace the socio-political dynamics feeding it. Comparing governmental pandemic policies worldwide, we introduce a novel model discerning ‘mortality mitigation’ (coping mechanisms) on a scale from steadfast resistance (‘oak’) to flexible resilience (‘reed’). We find that political trust, high median age, and social anxiety predict a reedy approach; and that the oak, typically pushing for stricter measures, better mitigates mortality. Stringency itself, however, hardly affects Covid-related cases/deaths. We enrich our model with brief illustrations from five countries: China and Israel (both oaks), Sweden and Germany (reeds) and the USA (an oak–reed hybrid).
Modern political thought arrived on the heels of two revolutionary realizations: We are not at the center of the universe (Copernicus), which was not created for us (Darwin). How might political theory respond to a third revolutionary realization, that we are not alone, that other creatures, sentient and highly intelligent, share our vast universe? We explore answers through a dialogue between two political theorists, a human and an alien. Rather than superimposing astropolitics upon anthropolitics, we use the encounter to ask new questions, e.g., should PT foster bridges between humans and aliens, or harden the boundaries? Pitting Dark Forest Theory against the Campfire Theory, we outline the coming existential and existentialist turns in political theory, complementing Earth politics with exopolitics.
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