The Dilemma of Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who took seriously the idea that his field, as a social science, should be able to offer a comprehensive theory of human culture, providing broad and verifiable explanations of individual behavior and social life. He understood that human culture is a consequence of the human search for meaning, and that basic functions of culture include defining what our human situation in reality is and what meaningful and dignified living consists of—what we are, and what the right way of doing things is. But in The Denial of Death and subsequent works, he offered a startling new approach to understanding how culture actually fulfills these functions, and what society requires of individuals if they would contribute to cultural meaning and stability. And in providing this new approach to cultural anthropology, he explicitly relied—in an act of philosophical scholarship both rare and courageous in his social scientific tradition—on Kierkegaard’s anthropology of human existence as “a union of opposites,” as a synthesis of the fiinite and the infinite.

Stated with stark brevity, Becker’s central and most original thesis as presented in The Denial of Death is as follows. As animals to whom self-consciousness has been given, we humans are aware that we will die, and this awareness produces in us a basic anxiety, indeed a fundamental terror, about our vulnerability, the violent ways of nature, and the inevitability of death.Therefore, we devise all sorts of strategies for suppressing awareness of our mortality. This denial of death, says Becker, is one of the basic functions of culture. How does culture manage this? First, by explaining human existence to be part of an enduringly meaningful universe, thus giving each of us a sense that our individual lives are signif i cant and valuable; and second, crucially, by controlling our basic anxiety through the devising of “death-denying hero systems,” or “immortality projects,” that enable us to believe and feel that, through our participation in them, our lives transcend mortal perishing. In the summarizing words of Sam Keen, from his foreword to the 1997 edition of The Denial of Death: “We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrifficing 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.” Through participating in “culturally standardized hero systems” that assure us that our selves or our tasks are of imperishable value, we feel immortal, and render our terror of death unconscious.31

Unfortunately, Becker explains, our projects of immortalizing heroism tend to inflate one specific worldview, or group, or institution—this religion, this nation, this type of government—into the only vehicle of human connection with imperishable meaning. Thus, when human beings encounter alternate belief systems or worldviews, they are experienced as threats—first because each argues for an ultimate truth at least somewhat different from one’s own, and second because the very fact of a plurality of belief systems or worldviews indirectly reveals that one’s own “project” is merely a local and arbitrary construct, a “vital lie” of culture and character, built for protection against the terrifying realities of mortality.32 Because of this we are led, according to Becker, to try to defuse the threat that “otherness” poses to our own immortalizing hero systems, and we pursue this in various ways. We may attempt to convert others to our own beliefs. We may seek to accommodate other points of view, by looking for and finding aspects of them that seem compatible with our own. A cruder, but common, strategy is to denigrate others who do not share our belief systems, belittling and dehumanizing the “others.” Then, as a most thorough solution, we can wage war, attempting to vanquish or even annihilate those whose differences threaten to expose the artificial character of our own “system” for transcending death. Through humiliating, damaging, and defeating the enemy; through mass deportations; through ethnic cleansing and genocide, we can at once eliminate threats to our heroic self-esteem and prove that it is we who are living and fighting in the service of everlasting truth. This, Becker argues, must be understood as the principal source of human violence and war: the inability to tolerate people significantly different from ourselves because to do so would betray the arbitrariness and falsehood of our own death-denying immortality systems, take away our psychological protection against our basic terror, and force us to face our true situation as self-conscious creatures who know that we have to die.33

In The Denial of Death, Becker developed this thesis and its implications for psychoanalysis, addressing ideas of Freud and other humanistic psychologists, especially the (in his view) underappreciated Otto Rank. The critical power and sweep of its central arguments were quickly and widely acknowledged; the book became a best-seller and won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Becker had obviously uncovered one of the hidden main-springs of psychological and cultural life, and shaped a powerful new tool both for ideological critique and for analyzing and redefining psychological “health.”

Where does Kierkegaard fits into this analysis? In chapter 5, titled “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker enthusiastically presents elements of Kierkegaard’s “psychological expositions” in order to deepen and clarify his own arguments, asserting an essential congruence between Kierkegaard’s understanding of human nature and that offered in The Denial of Death. Throughout the chapter he pays tribute to Kierkegaard’s genius, calling him a “master analyst of the human situation,” a psychologist of “uncanny brilliance” engaged in an “unbelievably subtle” existential analysis that has given us “some of the best empirical analyses of the human condition ever fashioned by man’s mind.” Present-day psychiatry, he claims, “lags far behind” Kierkegaard in its theories of human existence. One reason for this is that Kierkegaard’s analysis exploits to the utmost “the basic insight of psychology for all times”: that a human being is a “union of opposites, of self-consciousness and of physical body”; that this conjoining of self-consciousness with a body subject to death and decay constitutes a paradox; and that “this paradox is the really constant thing about man in all periods of history and society.” Kierkegaard understands, says Becker, that being a “spiritual,” that is, self-conscious, animal— a godlike being, who nevertheless decays and dies—produces in us a fundamental anxiety, or dread, induced by our powerlessness to overcome the ambiguity of our ontological situation. Most impressively, Becker says, in Kierkegaard’s two great works of psychological exposition, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, he has analyzed in “a broad and incredibly rich portrait of types of human failure” variants of the two elementary ways that we flee from the truth about our situation and its attendant anxiety. These are: (1) our denial of the responsibilities of self-conscious freedom, through immersion in bodily experience or in the givens of society, and (2) our denial of our “animal limitations,” through soaring into fantasies of unlimited possibility, including the fantasy of preservation from death and destruction.34 Kierkegaard’s analysis of the many variants of these two basic types of flight from ontological anxiety, Becker states, enables us to understand how widespread is human denial of the human condition. Kierkegaard shows us how the fatalist, the determinist, the social conformist, the happy consumer, the hedonist, the dreamer or fantasist, the worshiper of technology—even the schizophrenic and the clinical depressive—can all be understood as living “vital lies” of denial with regard to human existence in its given structure as an uneasy conjunction of body and spirit (or, as Kierkegaard puts it, “of  finitude and infinitude”). Each of these types tries to escape the anxiety of the human ontological situation by fleeing either creatureliness (body) or self-conscious freedom (spirit). The dreamer and the technology worshiper defy their creaturely dependence on accidents, evil, and decay. The conformist and the happy consumer dissolve their freedoms into the “social hero-systems” into which they were born. The determinist and the fatalist deny, respectively, the fact and the meaning of freedom. The hedonist, through living for the immediacy of sensations, simultaneously flees spiritual responsibility and tries to take control over the meaning of existence.35 Each can be seen to be trying to escape the anxiety of being that union of opposites, a “spiritual animal”— either by blotting out self-conscious freedom or by denying creatureliness.

Kierkegaard has thus provided the anthropological basis, explains Becker, for recognizing how central to the human psyche are both experiences of basic anxiety and psychological defenses against it, and therefore for an appreciation by cultural anthropology of both the origin and ubiquity of death-denying hero systems. In providing this, he continues, Kierkegaard has given us something even more valuable, the “golden fruit of all his tortuous labors”: he has shown what authentic existence—existence without cultural heroism and the vital lies of character—would look like.36Becker approvingly describes, at the end of his chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” this true “health,” this au-thentic existence that would face into its basic anxiety, accept the paradox of its being, and accept the knowledge of death.

The authentic person, Becker states, is the one who opens up to and em-braces his or her true human situation—which means, most important, breaking away from the “programmed cultural heroics” designed to protect against awareness of mortality, and fully acknowledging creatureliness and the fragility of existence. Authenticity, writes Becker, requires letting aware-ness of mortality penetrate consciousness to the point where one’s habit-ual sense of self, as constituted and sustained by all the fragility-and-death-denying emotional character armor built up since childhood, is “destroyed, brought down to nothing.” In this psychological process, a person honestly and courageously accepts the nothingness implicit in all f i nite being, aban-dons all dependence on personal, cultural, and worldly assurances of en-during meaning, assurances equally empty. And in this extremity of honesty and courage, a transformation occurs. By dying to all “f i nite being,” the self begins to be able “to see beyond it,” and learns “to relate itself to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made f i nite creatures.” The self discovers in the dark night of its abandonment of reliance on f i nitude that there is, after all, a legitimate focus of its search for enduring meaning: one can, in hope and courage, aff i rm that “one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator,” to a transcendent ground that guarantees one’s personal signif i cance within “an eternal and inf i nite scheme of things.” But this aff i rmation is faith. Faith is that opening and reaching out to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, whereby one links one’s “secret inner self” to “the very ground of creation.” This, states Becker, is the culmi-nation of Kierkegaard’s anthropological analysis and his ultimate message, with which Becker here concurs: human authenticity, with its full emotional acceptance of mortality, is based upon and impossible without that religious faith through which “the invisible mystery” at the heart of a creature “attains cosmic signif i cance by aff i rming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation.”37

In his approval of Kierkegaard’s account of genuine religious faith and its role in authentic human living, Becker appears here to have fully embraced Kierkegaard’s anthropology, which affirms precisely that human existence is a union of the finite and the infinite, of time and eternity. If a human being is capable of affirming the connection between his or her own “invisible mystery” and “the invisible mystery at the heart of creation,” then human consciousness is necessarily both immanent and transcendent.

Kierkegaard himself is eloquently detailed on the matter. “A human being,” he explains,

is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that [in self-consciousness] relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. . . . [From this may be derived] the formula for faith: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power [God] that established it.38

A self can, Kierkegaard states, through willing to be itself, “rest transparently in God” because human consciousness is the site where eternal being enters time. Each “moment” of conscious experience, of self-presence, is “that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other”; human temporality is that flow of conscious presence “whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.” Therefore, human beings experience anxiety (angst): anxiety proclaims our concern over the possible uses of our freedom in the task of bringing our fragile, sexed, mortal lives into attunement with the eternal ground of our being.39 This is an anthropology that serves as a sharp rebuke, and a therapeutic antidote, to modern immanentist anthropologies, and through his analysis and embrace of Kierkegaard Becker appears to be in a position to usefully exploit it in his own social science. He seems ready to recover a conception of human nature that accounts for our native orientation to transcendent meaning by affirming—along with Jaspers, Scheler, Marcel, Levinas, Lonergan, and Voegelin—that human existence is life in the In-Between of immanence and transcendence.

In fact, though, we find neither the articulation nor the development of such an anthropology either in subsequent chapters of The Denial of Death or in its successor and companion volume, Escape from Evil, Becker’s final work. Kierkegaard’s ontology of human existence is nowhere to be found in their often brilliant discussions of psychology, religion, culture, and the human sources of violence and evil, which instead consistently portray human beings, in typical modernist fashion, as purely immanent animals who just happen to have the productive and ennobling, but also tragic and self-torturing, appurtenance of self-consciousness.

This divergence from Kierkegaard may be seen even in the chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” where some of Becker’s conclusions about the import of Kierkegaard’s analysis clearly deviate from those drawn by the philosopher himself. For instance, at one point Becker states that, in Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety, “the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death.” In another place, he indicates that, for Kierkegaard, the “prison” of inauthentic character is “built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror.”40 Neither of these assertions accurately portrays Kierkegaard’s own understanding.

For Kierkegaard, the basic anxiety of consciousness is not over the fact that one is finite and mortal. It is a response to the fact that one is finite and transcends finitude—that one participates in time as a fragile, sexed, and mortal creature and participates in the eternal, nonfinite being that transcends mortality. Human inauthenticity, the “sickness unto death” with which we are all infected, is not simply the result of shrinking from mortality, but of our despair over the task of accepting and reconciling both dimensions of our nature, the temporal and the eternal. The basic anxiety that belongs to the “sickness unto death” is not simply the terror of annihilation and its indignity, but anxiety that wells up from the recognition that we are responsible both for facing up to our creatureliness and to the claims of the eternal upon us, claims that transcend the transitory domain of physical death.41Becker misconstrues Kierkegaard by overstressing one side of his account of the origins of anxiety: the threat of meaninglessness posed by death. Kierkegaard himself emphasizes that an equal, if not greater, source of anxiety and despair is the threat of mismanaged participation in eternal being.

For Kierkegaard, then, a human being is truly a “union of opposites,” a uniting of animal being with the “immortalizing presence” that makes of that very being a paradox. For Becker, on the contrary, a human being is not really a synthesis of temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, but merely a creature that happens to be “self-conscious”—a creature burdened with a secondary or ancillary capacity to have ideas or thoughts, including thoughts of mortality and timelessness. Despite his justified admiration for and use of Kierkegaard’s analyses of existential failure, which offer profound support for Becker’s insight into the extent to which the denial of death—as one pervasive form of the denial of the human condition—shapes human life and culture, Becker does not really take advantage of Kierkegaard’s anthropological exposition. To do so would require a radical break with the immanentist subject of modern social science, for whom transcendent being can be only a mental invention or projection—and this break Becker is not able or willing to engage in.42 Thus, his embrace of Kierkegaard in The Denial of Death involves Becker in a sort of philosophical confusion, or dilemma, that he is unable to resolve. He recognizes Kierkegaard’s genius as a “master analyst of the human situation” whose insights both reveal the origins and extent of death denial and explain what it means to live a life without such denial. He cannot, however, incorporate either Kierkegaard’s actual anthropology or his explication of the authentic life of faith into his own psychological and cultural critique, because immanentist assumptions about human nature and human knowing prevent the Kierkegaardian insights from taking hold.43

Becker’s dilemma is perfectly represented in his approach to the notion of immortality. He shares with Kierkegaard a passionate, derisive criticism of those who are certain of their personal immortality, as if eternal being were their possession, and who often bolster that sense of certitude and possession through the denigration and victimization of others. The idea of immortality is seen by both thinkers as a perennial source of self-delusion, smug egotism, false heroics, and injustice. For all this, though, the symbol immortality clearly has, for Kierkegaard, an authentic and justifable meaning and function. It is one of the symbols we use to make sense of our experiences of eternal and nonfinite being, to stand for the questions and hopes and images that arise from our mysterious participation in transcendence.44 However, in Becker’s Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, notions of immortality are always linked to inauthentic and self-deluded human yearnings to escape mortality. While Becker acknowledges that human beings subscribe to what he calls “immortality ideologies” because of a love of and longing for fuller life, for him any thoughts of imperishable meaning are always in part a “reflex of the death-anxiety,” so that the notion of immortality is always, for him, both a promise and a lie.45 To be true to his own insights into authentic existence in “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker would have to acknowledge legitimate and salutary—as well as self-delusory and destructive—functions of the symbol immortality. Correspondingly, he would have to incorporate into his work a careful distinction between, on the one hand, the false heroics of inauthentic religious faith, which seeks primarily self-righteous certitude and self-inflation, and, on the other hand, the genuine heroics of authentic faith, which accepts the human condition as it is and stands open to the risks and mysteries of participation in transcendent meaning—the faith exemplifled by Zen masters, Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr [???]. But these distinctions are not developed, and Becker’s cultural anthropology—with its bold embrace of ideas that challenges the narrow conventions of contemporary social science—leaves human beings still only groping for transcendence, rather than struggling with the mystery of its presence.46

Becker’s dilemma is that of a scientist who knows that the data he has isolated are of profound importance, but who can only interpret them in terms of a familiar but faulty theoretical paradigm. The data pertain to the desire to invest human life with imperishable meaning. Relying as he does on the faulty theoretical model of the modern, immanentist subject—who does not participate in eternal reality but merely has ideas about it—Becker interprets this concern as signifying primarily a denial of mortality. However, what our concern with imperishable meaning signifies primarily is awareness of existing in-between finite being and transcendent divine presence. Becker is not wrong to insist that the human fascination with transcending death is an important key to establishing a new and profound cultural anthropology. But it does not unlock for him the anthropological theory our age needs: one that breaks completely with the immanentist model of consciousness and history, and reestablishes at the core of psychological and social science the fundamental insight that human existence participates in the understanding, freedom, and creativity of divine transcendent being. Becker had amassed many of the clues—especially in Kierkegaard’s psychological expositions— that would have allowed him to make this breakthrough. Why were they not sufficient? What would have enabled him to do so?

Our account of differentiating consciousness indicates at least part of the answer. The history and significance of human grappling with transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning is a given presence in consciousness—that our longing for transcendence is not an act of desperation, as Becker proclaims, but rather the natural longing to clarify what we already experience.

A psychology or cultural anthropology (or any other science, or philosophy) that truly addresses the needs of our times requires above all a critical appreciation of the differentiating process, without which science cannot understand what it itself is: the uncovering of one of the realms of meaning—the realm of systematic explanations of things, of their intrinsic properties and uniform interactions—by a human consciousness whose questioning is created and drawn by the ground of being, the divine partner whose presence both permeates the finite world and illuminates that very consciousness with the revelation of divine transcendence.

from the book Transcendence and History The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity by Glenn Hughes

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

Terror Management Theory and self-awareness

 The juxtaposition of what humans were born into and what they naturally desired created certain existential dilemmas with which they had to contend. Irvin Yalom (1980) delineated four ultimate concerns and proposed that the individual’s confrontation with each of these “givens of existence” constituted a major existential conflict. These four concerns are death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Human beings wish to continue being, yet they are inevitably finite (death). They wish for ground and structure, yet there is no universal design or plan for human life other than that which humans create, leaving people responsible for creating themselves and their world (freedom). They wish for communion with others and to be part of something larger than themselves, yet they are born alone and ultimately die alone (isolation). They desperately seek meaning, yet there is no preordained, inherent meaning to the universe (meaninglessness). According to Yalom, each of these clashes between the structure of existence and the wishes of the self-reflective human being spawns conscious and unconscious fears and motives. Existential psychology is the branch of psychology that investigates how these fears and motives affect humankind, and how they interact with the other needs and desires that are essential to human existence

For most of the still brief history of psychology, the existential subdiscipline was synonymous with existential psychotherapy; its concepts and theories were scattered in a piecemeal fashion within the existing literature; and it had little interaction with empirically oriented psychological science (Jacobsen, 2007). The methodology of existential psychological research was qualitative and descriptive, with a particular emphasis on phenomenology. Notwithstanding the rich insights these methods are capable of yielding, causal inferences regarding the effect of existential realities on human motivation can be made only through rigorous experimental research. This is why terror management theory’s application of experimental methods to existential psychological questions has been an invigorating contribution to existential psychology, resulting in the prolific subfield of social psychology known as experimental existential psychology (see Greenberg, Koole, & Pyszczynski, 2004; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, & Koole, 2010).

Terror Management Theory

Terror management theory was inspired by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s (1971, 1973, 1975) attempts to integrate and synthesize what he viewed as the most important insights into the human condition provided by the social and natural sciences, as well as humanities. Building on the work of thinkers as diverse as Freud, Rank, Mead, Fromm, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre, Becker built on the premise that the idea of death is unbearable to a self-aware animal: “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” (1973, p. 87). To Becker, the terror inherent in this knowledge haunted humans like nothing else and was a mainspring of human activity: “Of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death” (1973, p. 11). In his view, a major function of individual character and societal institutions was to deny one’s mortality and avert this terror. He viewed human striving for a sense of value and unshakable meaning as the primary defense against the terror-inducing awareness of mortality, and he conceptualized this striving as taking place within the context of the cultural worldviews to which people subscribe. To Becker, participating in and contributing to a cultural system that imbues existence with order, purpose, and permanence provided the individual with a feeling of outliving or outshining death and the psychological equanimity that this produces.

TMT was initially developed to answer three fundamental questions about human nature: Why do people need self-esteem? Why do people need to believe that out of the multitude of ways that people construe reality, theirs happens to be the one that is ultimately correct? And why are interpersonal and intercultural relations so frequently ridden with conflict and violence? Becker’s ideas offered potential answers to these and many other questions. TMT was an attempt to simplify Becker’s ideas and integrate them with existing knowledge within the fields of social, personality, developmental, cognitive, and motivational psychology in a way that would generate testable hypotheses about the functions of self-esteem and culture. TMT posited that knowledge of inevitable mortality, when combined with the biologically rooted craving for life, creates a potential for paralyzing terror. To function effectively in the world, people must keep this terror at bay. Protection from this terror is provided by self-esteem and faith in one’s cultural worldview (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991). These two psychological entities function to buffer death-related anxiety. Later research revealed close interpersonal relations as an additional component of the anxiety-buffering mechanism (Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2003).

TMT posits that awareness of the inevitability of death is a powerful motivating force that influences the human needs for meaning, self-esteem, and close relationships. The precursors of these motives probably initially evolved because they solved practical problems of living that increased our ancestors’ chances of passing on their genes by staying alive, mating, and caring for their offspring. However, once human intelligence had evolved to the point that awareness of death emerged, the need for protection from the fear that this awareness created led people to develop systems of meaning and value that provided protection from this fear. From this point on, people no longer simply needed meaning systems that helped them procure the necessities of life—now, their meaning systems also needed to help manage their potential for existential anxiety. The value of accuracy and practical utility of the meaning systems was usurped by the value of death transcendence, and from this point on the pursuit of truth and protection were often in conflict with each other.

Well over 400 separate studies conducted in over 20 countries have tested and supported hypotheses derived from TMT. These studies helped expand the theory beyond its initial focus and applied it to topics as varied as religion and spirituality, legal decision making, nostalgia, human sexuality, fascination with fame, creativity, materialism, and psychopathology. The fact that existential concerns have been shown to affect human behavior across so many domains suggests that existential anxiety is a central motivating force for the human psyche. In the next sections, we provide an overview of TMT findings that support this claim; however, we first describe the logic of the methods commonly employed in TMT studies.

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MATERIALISM

Materialism, or the importance a person attaches to worldly possessions (Belk, 1985), has frequently been recognized by scholars as a way to secure meaning and transcend death. Irvin Yalom, for example, wrote that accumulating material wealth can become “a way of life which effectively conceals the mortal questions churning below” (1980, p. 121). Others contended that underlying the American ideology of affluence is the pursuit of secular personal immortality through material means (Hirschman, 1990). It has also been suggested that achieving immortality is a significant motivating force for collectors (e.g., Pearce, 1992).

Research inspired by TMT provides empirical support for this general line of thinking. Kasser and Sheldon (2000), for instance, demonstrated that participants primed with mortality thoughts not only reported higher financial expectations for themselves 15 years in the future but also became greedier and less environmentally sensitive in a forest-management simulation. Another study (Mandel & Heine, 1999) revealed that subtle reminders of mortality increase preference for high-status products such as Lexus automobiles or Rolex watches. Rindfleisch, Burroughs, and Wong (2009) similarly showed that the strong connections materialistic individuals form with their brands serve to buffer against existential insecurity. These and other parallel findings suggest that people often seek protection from existential anxiety in the sense of value and self-esteem provided by material objects.

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Human beings require meaning, both to navigate through the mundane tasks of daily life and to imbue their lives with purpose and transcendent value (Frankl, 1963). To live without meaning, values, or ideals is distressing (Yalom, 1980), and many people are willing to live and die for their ideals and values. TMT posits that believing that things are as they are supposed to be—that the mundane ways of life make sense, and that human existence fits into some overall meaningful pattern—provides the coherence, structure, and security that protect people against death anxiety. Indeed, cultural worldviews and personal relationships can succeed as existential anxiety buffers only to the extent they provide the individual with this sense of meaning.

Supporting the notion that maintaining a meaningful view of reality is essential for protection against existential anxiety, research finds, for example, that reminders of mortality increase distaste for apparently meaningless art, particularly among those who dispositionally prefer unambiguous knowledge (Landau, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Martens, 2006). Similarly, Vess, Routledge, Landau, and Arndt (2009) documented that death reminders bolster perceptions of life’s meaning among participants with a high personal need for structure—those who are inclined to prefer simple and unambiguous interpretations of reality. Furthermore, death thoughts are found to lead people to imbue everyday actions with more meaning and to judge their current actions to be more meaningfully connected to their long-term goals (Landau, Kosloff, & Schmeichel, 2010). The desire to see the world as a just and orderly place (Lerner, 1980) can also be considered a manifestation of the fundamental need for meaning, structure, and comprehensibility. In line with this, Landau and colleagues (2004) found that for participants high in need for structure, reminders of mortality increased preference for narratives that suggest a just world and a benevolent causal order of events in the social world (see also Hirschberger, 2006).

This body of research, taken together, suggests that thoughts of death intensify the desire to see the world as a meaningful, structured, and ordered place, particularly for people who are predisposed to simpler interpretations of reality. Mortality thoughts also seem to intensify the need to find meaning on a larger scale, a so-called cosmic meaning—the sense that “life in general or at least human life fits into some overall coherent pattern” (Yalom, 1980, p. 423). In Becker’s words, “man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level” (1973, p. 196). The belief that there is some superordinate design to life and that each individual has some particular role to play in this design can thus be an extraordinary source of existential comfort.

Historically, religions have been the major sources of cosmic meaning, and despite the increase in popularity of atheistic worldviews (e.g., Dawkins, 2006; Harris, 2004; Hitchens, 2007), this is true for the vast majority of people today as well. Religions, typically, offer a comprehensive meaning schema, according to which the world and human life are part of a divinely ordained plan. This plan includes stories about the origin of the universe, clear moral guidelines, and theodicies that help people explain and endure suffering—all of which make the inevitability of death easier to handle. American historian and philosopher Will Durant talked about the “eternal hunger of mankind for supernatural consolations” (1932, p. 36), and TMT argues that this hunger stems largely from existential anxieties, and particularly the need to deal with the overwhelming reality of death (for a comprehensive review of the terror management function of religion, see Vail et al., 2010).

Religions, unlike any other institutions, are capable of promising literal immortality to their believers—in the form of heaven, reincarnation, or some other form of afterlife—which can be a powerful tool in mollifying death anxiety. Research shows, for example, that among those who believe in an afterlife, reminders of death increase this belief (Osarchuk & Tatz, 1973). Further support for the anxiety-buffering effects of belief in afterlife is provided by Dechesne and colleagues (2003), who found that exposure to scientific-looking evidence about the existence of life after death eliminates the typical increased worldview defense and striving for self-esteem that is produced by death primes. Mortality reminders have also been demonstrated to intensify faith in supernatural agents. Norenzayan and Hansen (2006) found that after the activation of death thoughts, North Americans, particularly those who were religiously affiliated, displayed stronger belief in God and divine intervention, even showing greater belief in spiritual entities associated with religious faiths other than their own.

Research also suggests that different orientations to religious faith have different psychological consequences. Whereas a fundamentalist orientation has been shown to be associated with a variety of socially undesirable tendencies, an intrinsic orientation appears to be especially effective in managing death-related fears. Religious fundamentalism refers to the belief that there is one absolute truth and that all other belief systems are wrong and evil. A large body of research has found religious fundamentalism to be positively associated with racial prejudice (e.g., Altemeyer, 2003; Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992; Laythe, Finkel, & Kirkpatrick, 2001), religious ethnocentrism (Altemeyer, 2003), and support for militarism (e.g., Henderson-King, Henderson-King, Bolea, Koches, & Kauffman, 2004; Nelson & Milburn, 1999). These attitudes are mediated by the absolutist authoritarian structure of the fundamentalist’s belief system (Laythe et al., 2001). A rigid black-and-white orientation to truth is likely to make beliefs that deviate from one’s own especially threatening and thus encourage more vigorous attempts to assert the correctness of those beliefs—derogation of and violence toward those with different beliefs are ways of bolstering confidence in the veracity of one’s own beliefs.

Intrinsic religious orientation, on the other hand, seems to have more benefits and few costs. Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis (1993) report that intrinsic religious beliefs are associated with lessened death anxiety and heightened existential well-being. Research also shows that people high in intrinsic religiousness do not engage in some forms of worldview defense after reminders of mortality, and experience lessened death-thought accessibility following mortality salience if they are given a chance to affirm their religious beliefs (Jonas & Fischer, 2006).

Becker (1973) notes the distinctive human need “to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms” (p. 231). While religions can effectively address this need for some people, others prefer less clearly structured forms of spirituality. Spirituality can be defined as a “personal quest for understanding answers to ultimate questions about life, about meaning, and about relationship to the sacred or transcendent” (Koenig, McCullough, & Larson, 2001, p. 18). The idea of the sacred is considered to be the distinctive core of spirituality (e.g., Pargament, 1999), and it has been frequently proposed that people fervently desire to live in a “sacralized cosmos” (Eliade, 1959). By providing a sense of transcendence, boundlessness, ultimate value and purpose, the sacred can alleviate the pain accompanying one’s awareness of creatureliness, powerlessness, and ultimate finitude. Supporting this notion, studies show that construing different aspects of the world (e.g., nature, children, music) in sacred terms can protect the individual against death anxiety and its possibly destructive effects such as outgroup hostility and materialism (Kesebir, Chiu, & Pyszczynski, unpublished data).

The human predilection for a sacred, magical, divinely inspired view of reality can also manifest itself in the affection for charismatic leaders, for hero worshipping, and the fascination with celebrities. The word charisma, for example, originates from a Greek word meaning “divine gift,” or “talent from God,” and studies find that reminders of death intensify preference and support for charismatic leaders who proclaim the superiority of one’s ingroup (Cohen, Solomon, Maxfield, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2004). Cultural heroes, as well as famous people who represent individually and collectively held values, tend to be perceived as symbolically and literally immortal, which might help their admirers to transcend death and insignificance by proxy. In support of the existential function of famous people, Kesebir, Chiu, and Kim (unpublished data) demonstrated that after mortality reminders, participants expect famous people to be remembered for a longer time in the future, and this effect is qualified by how much the famous people represent cultural values. Similarly, the more a famous person was perceived to represent her culture’s values, the less likely people thought that a plane she boarded would crash. These findings suggest that charismatic, heroic, or famous people might occupy a demigod status in the eyes of their fans, and in so doing provide them with meaning and existential stamina.

In this section, we have argued that humans harbor a potent need for an all-encompassing sense of meaning, an underlying reality that transcends everyday life, and a sacralized, magical cosmos—a need that is, at least partially, driven by existential concerns. This concludes our discussion of how existential motivation influences the human experience on the four dimensions of living. Our review suggests that on all the four dimensions—the physical, social, psychological, and spiritual—knowledge of one’s mortality and accompanying existential concerns intensify people’s striving for special meaning, value, and security. An inevitable fate of nonexistence, a realization that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” (Nabokov, 1999, p. 9), is extremely difficult to accept, which renders the quest for assurances of invulnerability a primary human motive. As we have seen, a broad array of human behaviors—from self-esteem striving to outgroup derogation, from materialism to spirituality—serve to provide protection against existential dread. The breadth and depth of phenomena that have been subjected to research by TMT and shown to be affected by existential concerns testifies to the prominent role that existential motivation plays in human life. There remains, however, one last behavioral tendency that can be induced by existential motivation we have not yet explored.

The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation

OXFORD