The Denial Of Death

The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.”

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles – my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.

The best we can hope for society at large is that the mass of unconscious individuals might develop a moral equivalent to war. The science of man has shown us that society will always be composed of passive subjects, powerful leaders, and enemies upon whom we project our guilt and self-hatred. This knowledge may allow us to develop an “objective hatred” in which the hate object is not a human scapegoat, but something impersonal like poverty, disease, oppression, or natural disasters. By making our inevitable hatred intelligent and informed we may be able to turn our destructive energy to a creative use.

In the end, Becker leaves us with a hope that is terribly fragile and wonderfully potent. “It is,” he says, “the disguise of panic that makes us live in ugliness, and not the natural animal wallowing. And this means that evil itself is amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the sway of reason.” If, in some distant future, reason conquers our habit of self-destructive heroics and we are able to lessen the quantity of evil we spawn, it will be in some large measure because Ernest Becker helped us understand the relationship between the denial of death and the dominion of evil.

I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man’s knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure.

Many thinkers of importance are mentioned only in passing: the reader may wonder, for example, why I lean so much on Rank and hardly mention Jung in a book that has as a major aim the closure of psychoanalysis on religion. One reason is that Jung is so prominent and has so many effective interpreters, while Rank is hardly known and has hardly anyone to speak for him.

One such vital truth that has long been known is the idea of heroism; but in “normal” scholarly times, we never thought of making much out of it, of parading it, or of using it as a central concept. Yet the popular mind always knew how important it was; as William James – who covered just about everything – remarked at the turn of the century: “mankind’s common instinct for reality . . . has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.” Not only the popular mind knew, but philosophers of all ages, and in our culture especially Emerson and Nietzsche – which is why we still thrill on them: we like to be reminded that our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic.

We like to speak casually about “sibling rivalry,” as though it were some kind of by-product of growing up, a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven’t yet grown into a generous social nature. But it is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an objective of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life. This is the reason for the daily and usually excruciating struggle with siblings: the child cannot allow himself to be second-best or devalued, much less left out. “You gave him the biggest piece of candy!” “You gave him more juice!” “Here’s a little more, then.” “Now she’s got more juice than me!” . . . An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn’t come off second-best. Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribute to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, custom and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

What I have tried to do in this brief introduction is to suggest that the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child’s need for self-esteem as the condition for his life. Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a “religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives.

Zilboorg points out that this fear [of death] is actually an expression of the instinct of self-preservation, which functions as a constant drive to maintain life and to master the dangers that threaten life:

“Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant. The very term ”self-preservation“ implies an effort against some force of disintegration; the affective aspect of this is fear, fear of death”

In other words, the fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function.

Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally. AS the human infant is in an even more exposed and helpless situation, it is foolish to assume that the fear response of animals would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value. The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invests reasons for anxiety even when there are none.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are drive by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name.They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days – that’s something else.

In order to understand the weight of the dualism of the human condition, we have to know that the child can’t really handle either end of it. The most characteristic thing about him is that he is precocious or premature; his world piles up on him and he piles up on himself. He has right from the beginning an exquisite sensory system that rapidly develops to take in all the sensation so this world with an extreme finesse. Add to it the quick development of language and the sense of self and pile it all upon a helpless infant body trying vainly to grab the world correctly and safely. The result is ludicrous. The child is overwhelmed by experiences of the dualism of the self and the body from both areas, since he can be master of neither. He is not a confident social self, adept manipulator of symbolic categories of words, thoughts, names, or places, – or especially of time, that great mystery for him; he doesn’t even know what a clock is. Nor is he a functioning adult animal who can work and procreate, do the serious things he sees happening around him; he can’t “do like father” in any way. He is a prodigy in limbo. In both halves of his experience he is dispossessed, yet impressions keep pouring in on him and sensations keep welling up within him, flooding his body. He has to make some kind of sense out of them, establish some kind of ascendancy over them. Will ti be thoughts over body, or body over thoughts? Not so easy. There can be no clearcut victory or straightforward solution of the existential dilemma he is in. It is his problem right from the beginning almost of his life, yet he is only a child to handle it. Children feel hounded by symbols they don’t understand the need of, verbal demands that seem picayune, and rules and codes that call them away from their pleasure in the straightforward expression of their natural energies. And when they try to master the body, pretend it isn’t there, act “like a little man,”k the body suddenly overwhelm them, submerges them in vomit or excrement – and the child breaks down in desperate tears of his melted pretense at being a purely symbolic animal.

I mark words in the books I read which either (A) I have not come across or (B) I am familiar with but need a refresher.

• Tincture: A small amount or trace of something; often a liquid medicine made by soaking substances in alcohol.
• Ontological: Relating to the nature of being or existence.
• Palliative: Something that eases symptoms or discomfort without curing the underlying problem.
• Apotheosis: The highest point of something; often used to describe someone or something being elevated to divine status.
• Kierkegaardian: Pertaining to the ideas of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, especially those about individual experience, faith, and existential angst.
• Sacrosanct: Regarded as too important or holy to be interfered with.
• Transmoral: Going beyond traditional moral boundaries; relating to morals in a broad or unconventional way.
• Subjunctive: A grammatical mood used to express wishes, possibilities, or hypothetical situations.
• Sagacious: Wise and showing good judgment.
• Polemics: Strong verbal or written arguments against a particular opinion or doctrine.
• Abated: Reduced in intensity or amount; lessened.
• Edifice: A large or imposing building; sometimes used metaphorically for a complex system or organization.
• Erudition: Deep, extensive learning or scholarly knowledge.
• Engendered: Caused or brought about; produced.
• Dictum: A formal or authoritative statement or saying.
• Neuroses: Mental or emotional disorders involving anxiety or obsessive behaviors.
• Vicissitudes: The unexpected changes or ups and downs in life.
• Equanimity: Calmness and composure, especially in difficult situations.
• Frenetic: Fast-paced, energetic, and often a bit chaotic.
• Lurid: Shockingly vivid or sensational, sometimes in a gruesome or exaggerated way.
• Modicum: A small, modest amount of something.
• Witticism: A clever or funny remark.
• Precocious: Showing advanced abilities or maturity at an unusually early age.
• Picayune: Trivial or of little importance; petty.
• Abject: Extremely bad or severe; completely without dignity or hope.