Statistical Societies of Interchangeable Lives

This article proposes an understanding of the structure of the social bond based on statistics and risk calculations about death and disease rates. These calculations predict with almost mathematical certainty that a specified impersonal portion of a given population will develop a mortal disease, such as cancer, or suffer a fatal accident, such as car or plane accidents. Consequently, every individual member of that population who actually dies of those causes, dies in the place of all the other members of the same population who could have probably died in her place but actually did not; thus, she offers to all of them the gift of death. All members of a population/society (statistical populations are the societies of modernity) are, therefore, tied together within a sacrificial bond of health and disease, life and death. This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.