Ligotti on Terror Management Theory

 —Be that as it may, there is a school of psychology that has us all figured as morbid citizens. Known as Terror Management Theory (TMT), its principles were inspired by the writings of the Canadian cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who was one with Zapffe in wondering why a “damning surplus of consciousness” had not caused humanity to go “extinct during great epidemics of madness.” In his best-known work, The Denial of Death (1973), Becker wrote: “I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right.” Zapffe concluded that we kept our heads by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” Becker stated his identical conclusion as follows: “[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.” Outlawed truisms. Taboo commonplaces.

Synthesizing and expanding Becker’s core ideas, three psychology professors—Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski—presented the concepts of TMT to the psychological community in the mid-1980s. In its clinical studies and research, TMT indicates that the mainspring of human behavior is thanatophobia, and that this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To subdue our death anxiety, we have trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persist—if only symbolically—beyond the breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day, and to perpetuate our sanity we apotheosize it as the best world in the world. Housing the most cyclopean fabrications are houses of worship where some people go to get a whiff of meaning, which to such people means only one thing—immortality. In heaven or hell or reincarnated life forms, we must go on and on—us without end. Travesties of immortality are effected day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn out a product made in its makers’ image, a miracle granted by entering into a devil’s bargain with God, who is glorified with all the credit for giving us a chance to have our names and genetics projected into a time we will not live to see.* However, as TMT analyzes this scheme, getting the better of our death anxiety is not as simple as it might appear. If we are to be at peace with our mortality, we need to know that what we leave behind us when we die will survive just as we left it. Those churches cannot be just any churches—they must be our churches, whoever we may be. The same holds true of progeny and its stand-ins. In lieu of personal immortality, we are willing to accept the survival of persons and institutions that we regard as extensions of us—our families, our heroes, our religions, our countries. And anyone who presents a threat to our continuance as a branded society of selves, anyone who does not look and live as we do, should think twice before treading on our turf, because from here to eternity it is every self for itself and all its facsimiles. In such a world, one might extrapolate that the only honest persons—from the angle of self-delusion, naturally—are those who brazenly implement genocide against outsiders who impinge upon them and their world. With that riff-raff out of the way, there will be more room on earth and in eternity for the right sort of people and their fabrications.

That said, promulgators of TMT believe that a universal dispersion of their ideas will make people more tolerant of the alien worldviews of others and not kill them because those worldviews remind them of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be. The paradox of this belief is that it requires everyone to abandon the very techniques of terror management by which TMT claims we so far have managed our terror, or some of it. As usual, though, there is an upbeat way out for terror management theorists in that they argue “that the best worldviews are ones that value tolerance of different others, that are flexible and open to modifications, and that offer paths to self-esteem minimally likely to encourage hurting others” (Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg et al.). Of course, this is just another worldview that brandishes itself as the best worldview in the world, meaning that it would agitate others with a sense of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be and cause them to retaliate. But terror management theorists also have a backup plan, which is that in the future we will not need terror management and instead will discover that “serious confrontations with mortality can have positive, liberating effects, facilitating real growth and life satisfaction.” There is no arguing that humanity may someday reap the benefits of a serious confrontation with mortality. While waiting for that day, we still have genocide as the ultimate insurance of our worldviews.

*The human instinct to have one’s own “way of life” outlast those of others is risibly skewered in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Faced with the extinction of humanity at the hands of a doomsday device created by the Russians and programmed to be tripped by a nuclear attack from the United States, American politicians and military officials, at the urging of ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, plan to survive by living in mineshafts for the next hundred years, after which they would emerge and, in Strangelove’s estimation, “work their way back to the present gross national product within, say, the next twenty years.” Worried that the Russians could have the same plan, Gen. Buck Turgidson, with all the foresight one would expect from a man of his position, speculates, “I think we should look at this from a military point of view. I mean, supposing the Russkies stashed away a big bomb, see. When they come out in a hundred years, they could take over!” Another general agrees with Turgidson, who rambles on, “Yeah, I think it would be extremely naïve of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policies. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge!” The goofball insanity played out in this scene has had audiences soaking their drawers since Kubrick’s film was released in 1964. The characters seem to be such funny little puppets as they draw up a survival plan, the success or failure of which they will not live to see. All they request is the hope that succeeding generations will carry on the same goofball insanity that they did. In Zapffe’s terms, Dr. Strangelove is a work of artistic sublimation. Its audiences can bust a gut watching it and still go on propagating to secure the way of life it parodies. Should the events of this movie ever be realized, those who emerge from the mineshafts will yelp with glee at its goofball insanity no less than those who went in. George Santayana’s epigram “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is one big hoot. Only by repeating history every second of every day can human beings survive and breed. How out of keeping with this fact is the idea that anyone among us would not want to be doomed to repeat history. Or that any mortal could possibly learn anything from it that would change our “way of life.” That would be the doomsday scenario, the prologue to a melodrama that ends with the entrance of the Last Messiah.

From: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti