Immortality as a Social Promblem

Immortality as a Social Promblem


Yakovenko А.V.

Dr. Sci. (Sociol.), Prof., Head of the Department of Sociology and Social Technologies, Lugansk State University named after Vladimir Dahl, Lugansk, Ukraine 6daoav@rambler.ru

ID of the Article: 7391


For citation:

Yakovenko А.V. Immortality as a Social Promblem . Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2018. No 10. P. 144-152




Abstract

Emphasis is placed on the fact that in recent years the reasoning about admissibility of creating technologies to significantly increase lives of individuals, and as a result, achieve immortality, has passed from the pseudoscientific into the objective category. The society in a sense is posing expectations of the realizability of “immortality technologies” in a tangible perspective. Therefore, it seems reasonable to analyze real and imaginary obstacles to achieving immortality on the basis of taking into account fundamental interests, habits and fears that create environment of rejection and resistance, even to the hypothetical possibility of moving to “immortal society”. It is pointed out that the discussion of this topic seems absurd, given the danger of human civilization transition to the phase of open, full-scale conflicts, and also taking into account the informed attributes of culture, based on the mortality of individuals, groups and macro-communities. In this regard, immortality is viewed as a social problem, since it is a force for the removal of anticipations and fears in the finiteness of the earthly path that shows the society’s unpreparedness for normal, meaningful, creative functioning. At the general social level, a reproducible bundle of “threat-security-threat” has been formed, at the level of social institutions, created dependency attributes will be difficult to refuse, in the case of immortality. On the personal level, several counterarguments are given with respect to immortality emanating from the current pragmatics of existence.


Keywords
immortality; fear; interests; hierarchies; personality; humanity

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Content No 10, 2018