To begin this deep fucking topic (which I believe is extremely important for your own personal development) it is important to introduce you to one of the most influential anthropologists in the world. Ernest Becker.
Bare with me here, he’s fucking important and has some invaluable points you should be applying to your life.
I’m here to break it all down for you and give you the no bullshit approach like always!
Grab your coffee, beer or glass of wine and enjoy!
To begin, a little about the man himself. Ernest Becker was an academic outcast. In 1960, he got his Ph.D. in anthropology; his doctoral research compared the unlikely and unconventional practices of Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis. At the time, Zen was seen as something for hippies and fucking drug addicts, and Freudian psychoanalysis was considered a quack form of psychology left over from the Stone Age.
Swiftly moving on, Becker died in 1974. I know tragic stuff right, but his book The Denial of Death, would win the Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most influential intellectual works of the twentieth century, shaking up the fields of psychology and anthropology, while making profound philosophical claims that are still influential today.
The Denial of Death essentially makes two points:
Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly. Dogs don’t sit around and worry about their career. Cats don’t think about their past mistakes or wonder what would have happened if they’d done something differently. Monkeys don’t argue over future possibilities. just as fish don’t sit around wondering if other fish would like them more if they had longer fins (get it 😏).
As humans, we’re blessed with the ability to imagine Ourselves in hypothetical situations. To contemplate both the past and the future. To imagine other realities or situations where things might be different. And it’s because of this unique mental ability, Becker says, that we all, at some point, become aware of the inevitability of our own death.
Because we’re able to conceptualize alternate versions of reality, we are also the only animal capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it.
This realization causes what Becker calls ” death terror, a deep existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do.
Becker’s second point starts with the premise that we essentially have two “selves.” The first self is the physical self the one that eats, sleeps, snores, and poops. The second self is our conceptual self our identity, or how we see ourselves.
Becker’s argument is this: We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability. On some unconscious level scares the shit out of us.
Therefore. in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence our conceptual self will last way beyond our physical self.
That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist.
Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death.
All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality proiects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived. if not more so. And that’s the whole point.
Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.
Religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation are the result of people’s immortality projects. Becker argues that wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people’s immortality projects rub up against another group’s. Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group’s immortality project against another’s.
But, when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror-that horrible, depressing anxiety creeps back into our mind.
Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as Becker points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single fuck is to achieve a quasi spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence. In that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in various forms of entitlement.
Becker later came to a startling realization on his deathbed: that people’s immortality projects were actually the problem, not the solution; that rather than attempting to implement, often through lethal force, their conceptual self across the world, people should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of their own death. Becker called this «the bitter antidote,” and struggled with reconciling it himself as he stared down his own demise. While death is bad, it is inevitable.
Therefore, we should not avoid this realization, but rather come to terms with it as best we can. Because once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death the root terror, the underlying anxiety motivating all of life’s frivolous ambitions we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.
Now. I bet you’re feeling overwhelmed, I know I was. So take a breath.
If you’re gonna take anything from this let it be “while death is bad it’s inevitable”
Have your coffee and enjoy the sense of psychological freedom that comes from this realisation!
Oh this blog is long so for the sake of your sanity I’ve broken it down into two parts, the second will be posted Monday because who doesn’t like reading about mortality on a Monday eh! 👍🏻😂
Till then motherfuckers have a beautiful day!
Love from Lee ❤️🤝🏻
Tactical Psychology 