In ancient times, those who learned from corpses were dubbed necromancers, in much the same way that those who wished to manipulate resources were decried alchemists. In time, genuine research took as a field, and alchemists served as precedents to chemists. Death, and how desperately we avoid it, can teach us much, and so necromancy serves as the precursor to Necrology as a study.
A name and a vague comparison are useless alone, so I will present what this research helps us understand.
In the start of the 20th century, there was mass protest of working conditions within the northeastern united states. This protest caused zero political change or influence. As protestors, primarily women, made rallies and gatherings, police forces subverted them at every step. It was a relatively typical case of power subverting those calling for change, and progress was unlikely.
The history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is fairly well documented. Any could do a better record of it than I could, but as a short summary: A factory fire caused by the stupidity of authority left 150 corpses, 120 of them women, thrown onto the streets of New York. Following this, massive worker rights changes followed.
Necrology is the understanding of why this isn’t just a horrifying incident, but a Shakespearian tragedy. A decade of loud, inconvenient protest moved nothing. A disaster caused by what the protests were trying to prevent left the scent of death on the streets of New York. Immediately, change followed, and even set the pace for the move that after 80 years would allow women to vote.
In North Korea, for over 2 months at the time of this writing, testing of nuclear weapons has ceased. Decades and administrations did nothing to stop this abhorrent research. Sanctions, threats, jokes, and isolation were repurposed into propoganda. When did it end?
When the stench of corpses in the street was so bad that even disorganized, propogandized citizens were willing to organise. When walking the distance it took to gather was no longer too large a price, when the time investment was no longer too large to spend, the protests began. Too afraid of assassination, KJU has ceased a dynasty’s efforts.
The first dictator then president of Ghana, J J Rawlings, democratised not out of culture, but out of desperation for political survival. The dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, is getting deposed under similar standards to what KJU is experiencing. Vladimir Putin has expressed plans not to run next election in a country tired of death, and now willing to scream in constant protest.
These are people who have fostered the cultures of violence and control in their political spheres, not only getting deposed, but deposing themselves, out of sheer need for political survival, in jeopardy due to the loss of lives of those they believed had no power.
Power is the capacity to influence the survival of individuals in an environment, your own survival included.
Power is a resource, which one can liquidate for resources, or attain through exchange of other resources.
The more survival is risked, the more someone will liquidate for survival. This can be either to lose base resources to gain power to gain survival, as with protestors, or to lose power to gain survival, as with dictators.
This is the first premise of Necrology.