A society without death or the hegemony of the social

The influence of the accelerated pace of life to social relation to death in contemporary society is considered in the article. Technology has liberated people from many routine tasks, leaving the possibility of creative life for them. However, released for creativity time is being mercilessly destroyed in society of consumerism and mass culture. Acute shortage of time creates a new image of society in which death has no place. Forms of social learning of space expand, creating a social escapism which is an escape from reality into the sphere of the social. Death as the last bastion of reality is strongly ignored, and a society supports the socio-psychological setting of continuous social activity and productivity, which contribute to belief in overcoming of death, or social immortality. At the same time, society realizes the hollowness of such immortality, because nobody is exempt from physical death. People begin to experiment with reality, constantly generating new forms of duration: marriage is no longer seen as an eternal union, the work is not a place to which man is bound all his life. Contemporary man has an unusually long life, using countless possibilities. Death is tabooed by both the acceleration of the pace of life and the growth of social in man. The breach of the taboo puts the marginal position all humans, who are touched with a death. The largest of this marginal groups are old-aged people. Being outside of the active social life, they inhabit «social desert» of contemporaneity, in which life is too close to death. Because of this proximity to a death old-aged people are exposed to all kinds of segregation and discrimination. Aforesaid phenomena create a need for a kind of «thanatological reform», which will redefine the social in terms of mass and infinite acceleration in the pace of life in favor of friendly cooperation and temporal continuity. The reform involves changes in various areas: art, science, politics, law, education. Breaking the taboo from the death marks the total freedom and responsibility, when people do not simply increase the number of created forms, but fill them with qualitative content, for which they are responsible. Thus, a society has a proper place for a death.

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