Mortality in public life—or rather, its absence—is the most significant civilizing force in culture. Death is a specter that haunts all social life. Not merely death in the abstract, as a brute fact of life, but death as a public presence, a thing witnessed in public life. The more that presence is felt, the more it frays the social fabric. The more the specter walks openly among us, the harder it becomes to build anything that requires long-term planning and collaboration: trust, openness, patience, gentleness, public joy. The specter cannot be fully exorcised—not within the limits of current technology, and perhaps not within the limits of being human. But it can be contained. And the better a society succeeds in containing it, the more pro-social and civilized it becomes. This is one of the clearest trends across human history. Longer lifespans, and a higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood and old age, tilt incentives toward long-term planning and nonviolent forms of engagement and cooperation. By contrast, in a world where life on the whole is nasty, brutish, and short, the social cost of disregarding life is not felt as strongly against the background radiation of death. When death is everywhere, the psyche adapts. It must. It learns to cheapen what it cannot afford to mourn constantly. Life is the rare resource whose abundance makes it more precious, and whose scarcity makes it cheap. The social contract of most modern societies hinges on this: that by participating in society, and subjecting themselves to its laws and customs, citizens can, on the whole, exist in a world where the specter of death need not haunt them as a constant public companion. There are additional discussions to be had, of course, about ensuring that life is not merely long but also of good quality, and about fairness and equality in who receives that protection. But these debates presuppose the guarantee that life can be lived at all. Here I mean mortality in a broad public sense—what we might call public death risk. This includes not only the familiar public health concerns of disease, hunger, and preventable medical catastrophe, but also deaths due to violence or war. And it includes something adjacent: conditions of *social death,* in which a person technically remains alive, but is rendered disposable or otherwise excluded from ordinary civic life in ways that publicly signal that their suffering is not urgent, their future not protected, and/or their dignity not assumed. Permanent homelessness, mass incarceration, and other forms of civic abandonment belong here. Even when they affect fewer people than disease or war, they have an outsized impact on the public perception of mortality, because they make death and disposability of life visible. Societies throughout history have succeeded or failed at containing public death risk to varying degrees, and history’s most dramatic ruptures are often ruptures in precisely this safety: famines, plagues, wars, collapses. On the whole, however, the long trend across human history—so far—has been toward containment. This should not be taken for granted. It is an ongoing project. Any momentary downturn has the potential to become catastrophically permanent if left unchecked. I fear that our current epoch is one of these inflection points, both on the world stage as a whole, and particularly in contemporary American society. Many of the forces shaping American public life—white supremacy, gun culture, militarism, interventionism, police brutality, and a cold-blooded willingness to treat preventable suffering as an acceptable externality—have long been present. But their effects have been allowed to fester, and are being felt with a particular intensity now. American society is increasingly one in which a social gathering or classroom can turn into a massacre, a confrontation with law enforcement can become a death sentence, a life-saving medicine or procedure can be economically inaccessible, and ordinary livelihoods can be treated as disposable by wealthy industrialists seeking maximum profit. It is worth noting, of course, that many of these burdens have long been borne most acutely by racial minorities—particularly African Americans and indigenous peoples—and that any honest account of American "civility" must begin there. But the more interconnected nature of today’s media environment has made these casualties harder to hide, and the institutions that normalized them have begun to spread. The rot consumes all. A society cannot build its peace on an exception carved into the bodies of the vulnerable forever. Eventually the exception becomes the rule. The decline of American public life into this state has many drivers of varying natures: economic, social, political, etc. But it is now being accelerated by ideological forces that have been allowed to take root in the body politic. These forces seek a return to high-mortality forms of engagement with the world: conquest, pillage, ethnic cleansing, suppression of minority cultures, and a general might-makes-right attitude toward the structuring of society. They are animated by a mythology of domination: a fantasy in which the in-group is a chosen few, the out-group is to be eradicated or subjugated, and violence is not only justified, but desirable. This is fascism. This is the cult of death. It is, in a sense, the societal manifestation of darker human instincts—instincts adapted to an environment where life is cheap and survival is kill-or-be-killed. It fetishizes conflict, eroticizes brutality, and promises that cruelty will restore greatness, as though a society can make itself safe by making others unsafe. But this mythology is just that: mythology. Attempting to use the machinery of modern civilization to build a society of brutal domination cannot last. It destroys the very conditions that built the machinery: the low-mortality environment in which civilization’s fruits are able to grow. Death cults do not merely kill people; they collapse time horizons, corrode trust, and turn public life into a theater of fear. They are another form of the specter itself—one that must be contained if society is to prosper. And I can only hope that, in the times in which we now find ourselves, we will be able to do so once more.