Like those unable to escape the burning in Dante's hell...

Like those unable to escape the burning in Dante's hell, modern man finds himself somehow feeling trapped within what the bourgeois sociologist Max Weber described as the “iron cage” - it may not be burning on the outside, but the inner torture of perpetual prison burns from within.

The “dungeon of necrophilia,” as Seyed Javad Miri describes it, is not an imaginary nor metaphysical speculation, but a state-of-being within the modern mode of existence; it is an all pervasive ethos of “death- friendliness,” a seemingly inescapable system of hatred, competitiveness, aggressiveness, and violence (both direct and systemic), that modern man finds himself thrown into ( befindlichkeit ) and made the victim of.

The worst aspect of this dungeon of death- friendliness it that it deprives the imprisoned from the possibility of fathoming that another existence based on Eros and Agape, Taqwa (Piety) and Tawhid (Unicity), is even possible. He abandons his longing for an alternative state of existence and reconciles himself to the reified daily chaos-catastrophe. He accepts his fate – a negative fana' (passing away, melding) into that which is the case.

This pervasive state-of-being redefines the meaning of human life by aggressively dictating man's coordinates of life; his ultimate worth is as a “consumer,” a “a producer of surplus value,” a “cog-in-the- machine,” a “functionary” of a system that allows no true liberating self-determination but regulates by way of law, custom, culture, and duty – a lifeworld divorced from his own existential, ontological, and eschatological concerns.

For Allama Jafari and others within the Primordial School of Social Theory, the “dungeon of necrophilia,” the “iron cage,” the “Golgotha history,” and the “history as slaughter bench,” cannot be the last word within the poetic epic of human existence. It is the goal of Allama Jafari, as Seyed Javad Miri discusses, to help build a framework or roadmap from which humanity can find a way out of this twisted maze of confusion and spiritual nothingness that we've weaved ourselves into.

If we are going to find another way-of-being within the world, we must rethink our dominate mode of reason and how it is deployed with the social sciences. It must take into account the spiritual and metaphysical nature of human existence, and not define that which cannot be calculated as absurd, mere speculation, obscurantism, or irrational wish fulfillment.