Biopolitics and the Conspiracy of Life: Erasing Death in the Age of Control
“We do not fear death. We fear the loss of the illusion that we are still alive.”
— Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Dedicated to those who have encountered death as a form of genuine life.
To those who found freedom from falsehood in captivity.
Death through the Eyes of Childhood
A mischievous seven-year-old girl is bored to tears at a grand national party reception. So bored, in fact, that she gets up from her seat, walks over to the Father of the Nation, and hands him a bouquet of flowers. In that moment, all event protocols are shattered by the rapid-fire clicks of press cameras, and the silence is torn apart by a wave of applause. The leader embraces the child, while, in the background—immortalized in a single frame—balloons and a floral arch stand bright and festive, like a patchwork of flags on the map of a colossal world dictatorship.
A few weeks later, the girl becomes an orphan. Her parents are arrested: her father vanishes forever after interrogation, her mother dies under murky circumstances in a godforsaken town. Years later, the girl will publicly recall her wanderings, her fear and loneliness, the leader—and the red balloon¹.
In time, this girl would become a symbol of the lethal hypocrisy of totalitarianism. For her, and thousands like her, that balloon would become a silent farewell to childhood, a mute embodiment of the brutal essence of the totalitarian machine—a machine that grinds up the lives of those who, on paper, fail to fit the etiquette prescribed by biopower. The symbolic funeral for hope takes place not just in her soul, but in the consciousness of a vast society. Yet none of this is ever spoken aloud: here, necro-politics works in silence. The loss will never be acknowledged; the official narrative remains focused on “life” and gratitude to the leader “for a happy childhood”—just as ideology demands.
A strong biopolitical regime has no use for death; it recognizes only life. “They want us not to think about death.”² The ideology’s vision must be immortal, and the energy of immortality is to be projected onto the people through a symbolic initiation. That’s why biopolitics organizes national farewell ceremonies, constructing a jarringly festive—yet inescapable—backdrop of celebration around the mourning of the mind. Citizens, like children of the nation, are handed symbolic balloons to distract from the grim ritual. The balloon, once an inappropriate detail, becomes a cheerful emblem of childhood, comforting and reaffirming the rule of “life” in society.
Biopoliticians are afraid of children. Their fear is the clarity of a child’s consciousness—the deep, intuitive understanding of death’s nearness and inevitability, which is felt most sharply in childhood.
The younger a person is, the more often thoughts of death arise. Through the trauma of birth, the loss of the warm world of the womb, the feeling of tightness and emptiness, we overcome our first deadly threshold and cross to the other side, beginning the cycle of life. But the terror of birth—the first shock of growth—subconsciously signals how close the threat of death can be, at any random moment. A child cannot easily accept the end of their existence at the very start, just as they cannot coldly grasp for the first time that the balloon they were given might deflate, drift away, or simply burst.
“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so, we survive as spectators. In the unconscious, each of us is convinced of our own immortality.”³
Only with age—and with painful experience—can a person, relying on instinct, move beyond the raw fear of death as a terrifying ending, learning to abstract from the irreversibility of it all and distracting themselves with the rituals of daily life. Politics exploits the metaphor of the “balloon of life” for its own ends: the balloon soothes those who remain loyal to the biopolitical regime. The balloon means a life full of joys and entertainments; a popped balloon is reserved for the dissenters, those whom the regime has classified as dispensable.
Biopolitical Antinatalism
“Nonexistence never harmed anyone, but existence harms everyone.”⁴
This observation is central to the philosophy of biopolitics.
Biopower flourishes on the fertile ground of bare life—Homo sacer⁵. Life itself is transformed from an individual gift into the political paradigm of modernity, where the architects of the regime coldly determine the value of each identity, deciding who gets to live, how, and when to die.
One of the most effective tools for reinforcing social stereotypes is antinatalism—the belief that bringing new life into the world is undesirable. Within the doctrine of biopolitics, antinatalism acquires a double-edged character and becomes a tool for subtle manipulation. Only those lives strictly defined and approved by the regime are considered desirable. Those who fail to fit the needs of power are ruthlessly erased from the stage of society.
During times of ideological formation, war, or mass mobilization, every life is deemed necessary for the biopolitical project. Here, antinatalism takes the form of a narrative about the equal right to exist. The system requires everyone: women as reproducers, men as soldiers, children as workers on the home front, and the elderly as both moral motivators and reminders of the debt owed for the right to be born. The lives of these “socially acceptable” groups are maintained by distracting them from the subject of death, and antinatalism is recast as a denial of death itself. Death is no longer recognized; what remains is a righteous imperative to live for the good of the people and the state—for one’s own children and family units.
In other historical circumstances—times of peace or relative prosperity—antinatalism is easily instrumentalized and inverted by power. It becomes a managed narrative with the opposite meaning: antinatalism now develops the idea that the worthiness of any individual’s existence can be judged, turning life itself into a filter. Any life deemed unworthy of biopolitical investment is cast out of society, subjected to discrimination, and ultimately destroyed.
Some people are simply not supposed to be born; and if they are, their place is at the bottom of the digital camp of modernity. They are likely to work in the pleasure factories of those higher up the social ladder, quietly disposing of their worn-out bodies at the end. These “proletarians of death” usher the spirits of average citizens toward their biological end so smoothly and professionally that the latter barely notice their own trivial passing back into the cradle of death.
Antinatalism, then, is a functional mechanism of control—a subtle algorithm of hybrid eugenics, biopolitically determining whose time it is to live and whose to die.
Overconsumption and Death Prevention
Biopolitics, wielding the full arsenal of antinatalist strategies, construct the isolationist architecture of cities—political centers of gravity. The individual within the state becomes a fully controlled, meticulously structured entity, existing inside a system marked by zones of prosperity and “life.” There is the upper city: stylish districts where money, beauty, and entertainment circulate endlessly; and the lower city: regimented working quarters, inhabited by those who have not sufficiently bought into the illusion of endless joy—those who have glimpsed life’s finitude, its emptiness, and deprivation, and thus dared to question the credibility of biopolitical doctrine.
“In the modern world, sovereignty is defined by the power to decide who may live and who must die.”⁶
Within the biopolitical world, beyond the proletarian dormitories and cemeteries, far from the crematoria and dissection ghettoes, the lights of the great city burn on. The Big City lives its “best life,” willfully ignoring the hard edges of control and the silent wardens of the regime, who watch for the slightest movement, monitoring the regular excesses of consumption within the comfort camp of the privileged class.
On the perfect smoothness of the roads, futuristic electric cars glide noiselessly. Stylish women in rare designer dresses savor expensive champagne, their slender fingers playing with delicate glasses. The currency of their life-affirming world is spent on costly attempts to escape thoughts of inevitable death, sorrow, and longing—distractions that biopolitics masterfully transforms into entertainment.
Strategy of Forgetting Death
Power understands that “authentic life is structurally negative, because it necessarily includes loss, pain, aging, and death.”⁷
Therefore, it designs public spaces so that the inhabitants of hybrid cities consign death to oblivion, encouraging them to enjoy life without looking down from their high-rise apartments—never seeking out the silhouette of a lost little girl with a balloon, nor the ghostly lights flickering on the graves of those who came before.
“Don’t think about death—just have fun, consume, stay young and beautiful.” This necro-narrative shines through every designer logo. The true function of power is “to make live and let die.”⁸
In biopolitical society, awareness is shaped not by reflection or the pain of self-knowledge, but by the techniques of biohacking and maneuvers of capitalist escapism: marathons, endless therapy sessions, and meetings with personal growth coaches. The state promotes the healthy life of healthy bodies, pushes through pension reforms to postpone old age, and routinely publishes reports and statistics about increasing life expectancy. The aestheticized medicine of private clinics, elite insurance, and update procedures to maintain spirit in aging bodies—all serve to extend the physical cycle of life, shaping in the minds of patients the illusion of endless existence. By purchasing a few uncertain years of extra life, we seem to be buying the chance never to die at all.
“They say live for today. Let's act like it's all okay.”²
Every so often, a pair of random eyes will catch sight of the crematory smoke drifting beyond the horizon, in the rush of the upper city. A quick, pseudo-contemplative glance out the window of an artisanal coffee shop—the gaze of biopolitics’ favorite: the thoughtless consumer—recalls Berliners during the height of World War II, calmly eating breakfast as the black pillars of smoke from the death camps rose in the distance.
In the end, the state compels society to forget about death, all in the service of global control—over both rampant consumption and predictable behavior.
Panopticism of Death and the Biopolitical Miracle of Resurrection
The processes of life and death must be placed under total surveillance within the system of power. In this social macrolaboratory, biopolitics investigates the boundaries of its influence on the collective mind, seeking the most effective formulas for constructing a self-regulating system of control.
The cultivation of self-control, the construction of a self-regulating (panoptic) order within society—these are the main objectives of biopolitics in shaping a psychologically malleable and obedient majority.
The panopticism of death is, at its core, an externally imposed social stigma—one that, over time, takes on the morphological qualities of a “traditional value.” Through algorithms and channels of communication, power obsessively transmits the idea that death lies far, far in the future.
Death itself still exists within the order of things, but the institutions of biopower quietly transform it—not into an end, but into a valuable experience that, like everything else, can be purchased with consumer capital.
The sacredness of death is now determined by the future deceased’s purchasing power. The latest trend: planning your own funeral in advance, with a curated guest list and a schedule of activities for those invited to the celebration. Biopolitics expects us to treat our own demise not as a final curtain, but as an “experience.” To die is to gain experience. The cult of death is losing value on the market of biopolitical tricks; life matters more—death can be staged, even directed.
Over time, under the pressure of propaganda, the society of consumption will inevitably come to see death as just one in a series of entertainments generated by the industry of life. The older generations will teach the young to keep their eyes fixed on the colorful balloons, letting the funeral procession pass by without a single gloomy thought.
Funeral of Public Consciousness
“Confronting the reality of one’s own death is an act of courage and honesty, allowing us to live more fully and consciously.”⁹
But this paradigm is incompatible with the operating code of biopolitics. The minority that dares to accept death forms the repressed core of power, populating the lower city and, through their very denial of life’s finitude, sustaining the prosperity of the upper city—most of whose inhabitants, in truth, are long dead inside, even as they remain outwardly intact.
Physical death, when life is closed in on itself through consumerist ego, is reduced to a mere demographic event. Real death—the collapse of consciousness, the extinction of spirit—happens while the body is still alive. We are the chief directors of our own funerals of awareness. The top managers of personal oblivion.
Biopolitics weaves false notions of meaningful existence into the fabric of daily life. Overfilled baskets of consumption clog and corrupt the mind to such an extent that there is no longer room for genuine thought, no way to break free from the zone of biopolitical control or the false comfort of material wellbeing. We run a pointless race for the trophy of a meaningless death.
Biopower is the ultimate death-nihilist: death does not exist, nor is there any need to resist the regime’s system of life and order.
The civic act of reflection—of disrupting the biopolitical flow of events—is equated with escape, revolt, and treason. Death itself becomes an enemy of the people; even the great Death risks being reduced to a disenfranchised political prisoner, cut off from the “happy membership” of biopolitical society.
The “gift of life” from the biopolitical regime is the denial of death and the funeral of public consciousness. The true curse of biopower is the gift of accepting mortality as the natural continuation of genuine life.
References
1. “The World’s Greatest Villains in History: Joseph Stalin.” Interview with E.S. Cheshkova. 2001, USA. Produced by Discovery Civilization.
2. Hybrid Collapse project, album “Biopolitics,” 2025.
3. Sigmund Freud, essay “Our Attitude Towards Death,” 1915.
4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1998.
5. Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 2010.
6. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, La Découverte, 2006; English edition, Duke University Press, 2019.
7. Julio Cabrera, Critica de la moral afirmativa: Una filosofía de la vida tragicómica, 1996; English edition, Critique of Affirmative Morality, 2018.
8. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Lecture of March 17, 1976.
9. George Yancy, Who Is the Antiracist?: Beliefs, Motivations, and Politics, Temple University Press, 2024.
09.07.2025Designed for thinkers.