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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
Humankind has always been restless
Never satisfied with our physical limitations we've always strive for more
With machines we conquer gravity and travel faster and farther than any other animal
We explore the heavens the last great frontier
And we manipulate our own biology through medical science
In defiance of nature we have manufactured the means to become rulers of the natural world
What is left to conquer?
And are we satisfied?
Since time immemorial we have battled our greatest limitation
One which seems to render our efforts to overcome and conquer
Insignificant
Every day we participate in a multitude of activities,
to distance ourselves from harm and death
But beneath the surface we are aware that these day-to-day strategies are doomed to fail
We will die eventually and all of this will come to an end
Human beings find themselves in quite the predicament
We have the mental capacity to ponder the infinite
seemingly capable of anything yet housed in the heart pumping
breath gasping decaying body we are godly yet creaturely
Death is the end of the self
It is perhaps the ultimate mystery
We may never know what death really is
and whether it marks the end of everything
or as many believe the beginning of something else
Yet we do know that death
is something to be avoided
What are we to do with death?
And why do we fear it?
If we don't even know what death is, then why should we fear it?
The fear of death is absolutely ubiquitous
it is hardwired into us
For all the things that we don't know about
what follows death
There are plenty of things we know about what precedes death to make it unwelcomed
and even seem like an evil interruption
and that is life itself
At a gut level my feeling is death is unacceptable
I did not sign that contract.
I looked at the small print and everything else and it is unacceptable.
That is just sort of a gut feeling in the sense that we love life
Death is an insult to our spirit
Added to that is of course the fear of the process of dying which is different
Of the indignity of it, of the loss of control
Of the pain associated with it
Others will say what they fear is leaving everyone behind
Or they fear that the sadness that they will cause others
In August of 1999 my life was forever changed because
I was given a diagnosis of infiltrating ductal carcinoma
which as medical people know is a very common form of breast cancer
I have gone into in advanced state of breast cancer with metastatic disease to the bone
And I'm basically in the battle for my life right now and I don't know what tomorrow may bring
The average prognosis for a person with metastatic bone disease is two to five years
I'm now in year three so according to medical
statistics I probably only have two years to live.
We have capacities to think symbolically, to make one thing stand for another
which of course is the basis of language
We have the capacity to project ourselves in time
and imagine things that have not yet happened
We have the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect
We have the capacity to reflect back on ourselves and
look at ourselves from a perspective outside of ourselves
All of these capacities play a central role in the system
through which human beings regulate their behavior
On the one hand we have these minds that are capable
of just really embracing the entire universe on all fronts you know
We can think of the old days, We can think of five million years from now
We can think about what it would be like to be tap dancing on the Great Wall of China
while we stand here by the golden gate bridge So we can ponder our
present circumstances in light of future possibilities and modify our behavior accordingly
All of that is tremendous and all of it is highly problematic because
it renders us as human beings uniquely aware of the inevitability of our demise
We then recognized that death happens to us
I have to live with the knowledge that I will die
All organisms have a life instinct, an instinct to live
Our species has as much of that as any other species
but we also have the intelligence to know that we're doomed
Our survival presents a problem for us because we have the kind of consciousness
that makes us aware from really a pretty early point in life that desire to live to feed and live
and survive is ultimately going to fail
That creates a cognitive problem for us
It creates a potentially enormous amount of anxiety that we have to do something with
The explicit awareness that you're a breathing piece of
defecating meat destined to die and ultimately no more significant than
well lets say a lizard or a potato
but is not especially uplifting
Fear is a response to danger
Animals experience fear
But animals live in the present moment when animals
experience fear they are experiencing the present danger
which is either a predator or fire or some threat to their life
and their response to that is the fight flight reaction they either fight the predator
or flee from the predator We also experience fear
when we're confronted by a present danger
we can anticipate future dangers and we can imagine future dangers
but the physiology is the same
fight flight reaction
Because the body can't tell the difference between the past and future
Anxiety is the anticipation or imagination of a future danger
So we are all anxious about the future because we
know we are going to die we just don't know when
We carry a burden of anxiety that no other species carries
Then one day the heart just quits
Yes he looked healthy
Since the beginning of recorded history and likely long before that
the awareness of our own mortality has haunted us
We've gone to great lengths to forget deny and overcome death
From the ancient myth of Osiris to the resurrection of Jesus Christ
History is rich with tales of the afterlife
and of men and women
kings and pharaohs rising from their graves and returning from the dead
In 1839
archaeologists discovered in a region that includes parts of modern day Iraq
Syria and Turkey
one of the oldest known and most profound literary works
Inscribed in a series of tablets which date back as early as 2000 BCE
we find the epic of Gilgamesh
the story of an ancient Sumerian king
who inspired by the death of a close friend
Embarks on a journey to find the secret of immortality
A chinese proverb instructs: treat death as life
In ancient China Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di spent his life hoping to avoid death
He commissioned doctors to concoct potions
and sent ships out to sea in search of islands where immortals supposedly live
Fearful that his efforts might ultimately fail
he enlisted more than half a million conscripts to build the magnificent underground tomb
surrounded by over seven thousand life-size terracotta soldiers in military formation
Upon the emperor's death living servants were also buried with him
In every corner of the world
myths of immortality and the means to achieve it
have been at the heart of people's most cherished beliefs
From magical elixirs to elaborate tombs furnished with spectacular treasures
there was no limit to humankind's imagination
and no possibility left unexplored
So how are things different today
While many of these antiquated methods still exist in some form or another
our technologies are advancing exponentially by the year
Yet our death anxiety is still as present as ever
In our efforts to combat death and the aging process
Scientists have now developed the means to reverse certain aspects of aging
while others claim to be on the verge of solving the problem of death altogether
Despite our technologies and desire for miracle cures
the reality of death has not changed
Infectious and parasitic disease will claim the
lives of approximately 18 million people this year
Heart disease and other circulatory diseases will kill 16 million
Another five million will die in traffic accidents
In total 54 million people alive at this very moment
will be dead in the next twelve months
Death anxiety pervades every bit of our human experience
In part we respond to that anxiety by trying to
feed ourselves in literal ways and secure our safety and survival in literal ways
but knowing that is ultimately doomed we use our consciousness our cleverness
our intellectual abilities to redefine the problem
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker spent his career
investigating the human problem of death awareness
Awarded the pulitzer prize in 1974
The Denial of Death is a culmination of his life's work
A synthesis of the wisdom of the ages
Once referred to as one of the few great books ever written
The Denial of Death formulates what has been considered to be a science of humankind
A broad theory that attempts to explain why we do the things we do
Ernest Becker appeared out of nowhere
Ernest Backer fairly early in his career
develop a sense that what he wanted to do was sort of bring together
a lot of the knowledge that was being accumulated in the different social
sciences and even outside even the humanities as well
That lead him into an exploration of the writings of the ages
He said I want to understand very broad questions
about what it is that underlies human behavior and Becker's position was
if you take that quest seriously then you can't confine your inquiry to any
particular discipline he said the big questions require wide-ranging
scrutiny and that no discipline should be disqualified from active consideration
What he insists is that the human species solve the existential problem of death
by utilizing the same intellectual skills that in an odd way
created the problem in the first place and that's our
vast intelligence and ability to think in abstract and symbolic ways
in the service of constructing and maintaining what he calls culture
To Becker, culture is a collective fabrication
a shared set of beliefs about the nature of reality
developed to help us deal with our death anxiety
Culture provides meaning and helps us to maintain a sense of security in an unsure world
An enormous fear in every culture and every time and
much of cultural arrangements
have to do with ways of coping with this fear
Our cultural conceptions of reality have evolved in order
to help us deal with our knowledge of our own mortality
All around the world we take part in activities designed to remember the dead
Remembrances is one way we deal with the brevity of life
Here one moment gone the next but never forgotten
With the advent of photography in the 19th century
families would often pose for photographs with the corpses of their loved ones
as if the dead was still living
Physical mementos with images of people were rare
The post-mortem photograph provided families a means
to remember their loved ones as they were in life
When we look at history at least
it seems very clear that from as long as it can be recorded and across cultures
and across vast amount of time and space that
death denial seems to be rather central to all cultural constructions
We cannot be human without living in culture we are meaning hungry creatures
As human beings we require meaning and whether we talk
about it or not we are always living within meaning
whether it had to do with family or some kind of work or country or goal
it maybe and usually is rather unspoken
Culture provides meaningful first of all by giving us a sense of where we've come from
Every culture that we are aware of does have some account of the origin of the universe
Some people believe that in the beginning of all life
A god created heavens the earth itself
This god then populated the earth with various creatures but give dominion to humankind
The fulani tribe in Mali believes that the earth was created out of a giant drop milk
I think that's quite nice in that the thought is that when God was
getting things going there had to be some sustenance for the original creatures
and so the earth started that way and then the yoruba in Nigeria believes that
originally the earth was just water and then at the moment of creation
God came and put a silver or some kind of metal plate on the water
and then on the plate he took a snail shell and turned it upside down
and filled it with dirt put that on the plate and then he put a rooster on the plate
next to the snail shell
and as the rooster peck the dirt out of the shell and it hit the water
that form the continents as we know them and I think that's quite beautiful
Buddhism does have a creation story
like the other great religions it is found in the Agana Sutra
they don't talk about a particular point of time when the universe began
Rather you get both in hinduism and buddhism the idea that
the universe has been going on for unimaginably long period of time where
world systems are created and destroyed and you
really can't trace it back to the very beginning
While creation stories provide the members of a collective with a sense of meaning
it is roles within those cultures that give individuals
a specific and personal sense of importance
Culture helps us out by essentially giving each of us a
road map that gives us prescriptions of acceptable action
All cultures have social roles with associated standards of
valued conduct the satisfaction of which allows you
to perceive yourself as a significant individual
But it's only through a culturally constructed sense of reality
that we know what it means to be a valuable or an important figure
So in american culture you can stuff a rubber ball through a metal hoop
You're a genius and we can pay you many millions of dollars
But there is other cultures in which that would be considered quite worthless
It would be better if you could throw a sharp stick through a fish's head
And so cultures really gives us opportunities so feel valuable
Many people feel connected to the eternal through their religion
From the ancient egyptians to the modern day
the idea of an eternal soul has inspired us
Provided a sense of security and soothed our anxiety
After all if the soul will live forever
then what need is there to fear death?
Because of the soul is an immortality ideology
I had an interesting conversation some years ago with Paul Tillich
the great protestant theologian and Tillich told me that
almost from the beginning the more brilliant theologians
always had a sense of the symbolic of the idea of the eternal
rather than a literal sense of eternal life
That literal sense of eternal life was in a way given to the masses by the church
as part of its way of controlling them
whereas the brilliant thinkers and outstanding theologians
had a different sense closer to what I call the symbolic
Our experience of the world is embedded within symbols
We've excelled in this world because we've been able to make one thing stand for another
Language for example enables us to communicate
work together to achieve goals and plan for the future
Symbols also serve as concrete manifestations of our most cherished beliefs and values
They are tangible representations of abstract ideas and meanings
Without symbols it would be difficult to sustain our faith and ideas
When the literal world fails us we turn to the symbolic
In the case of death if the battle cannot be won in the physical world
then perhaps we can gain a sense of victory in the symbolic
On comes Darwin and the enlightenment and science
and then we have people starting to think more seriously about the idea that
maybe this is all there is
that it is just we are just these physical materials that will decay and die and that's it
What happens then right when you don't have that literal immortality thing how do you cope
Instead of simply trying to live on in the physical world
We take that whole dilemma and we move it to the symbolic level
We invest ourselves in symbols that we get from our culture and from religion that
come to represent us we identify with them and we see ourselves in them
And instead of trying to live on literally physically
We try instead to make sure that our symbols of immortality
our culture our religion are seen as powerful and durable
and that through their endurance we feel that something of ourselves lives on with them
One aspect of it is a collective sense of immortality
If you can get a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself
that you feel is immortal that you feel will transcend your individual death
Then that's a symbolic kind of immortality
But also other individual ways and we all know this
Americans certainly know this that we're gonna
write the great book or do the great documentary
We try to figure out in what ways our culture
defines the good life and we try to excel at it
I distinguish myself and I stand out as special and when I do that
I have got a comparative gap between myself and other people and in my mind I sort of see
those other people is merely mortal and I see myself as
somehow transcending the limit of mere mortality
I look around me and everybody represents just the way
human beings naturally are but I'd become supernatural
So I try for heroism as a way of making myself
believe I can transcend the limits of my mortality
Our symbolic attempts to conquer death permeate every aspect of our lives
We live in a world shaped by our imagination
where brick and stone isn't just brick and stone
but a symbol of achievement, triumph and of permanence
The urge for immortality manifest itself as creativity
So there comes our urge to build our urge to make a mark in the world
Our urge to show that we have been here you know carve our name even on a tree
Just to let it be known that we are here and that we matter
Culture as a whole is basically an inexhaustible survey of immortality symbols
Our law makes you feel that culture is stable and will last forever
Architecture we build monuments we build religious
buildings out of what historically have been the most enduring
materials know to human beings
American utopianism at the moment tends to be consumer utopia
It is associated with money and the ability to command
the wills of other people by paying them something
which in effect is magnifying your own self
It is magnifying your own strength
If you can potentially make anyone of the world do your bidding because of your checkbook
In effect you have everyone in the world extending
your power you have millions of hands and arms
Wealth is a kind of symbolic barrier against death
and I think unconsciously we are thinking if
I have enough of it it isn't going to get me
I can buy my way clear of this
The tragic flip side of this experience is that if you don't have money
You are in effect surrendering your ability to choose or to control other people
Or to put it another way you are radically vulnerable
The ultimate state of being without money is to be a slave
When you don't have a zillion dollars whose fault is it in the US today
It is your fault you feel like a piece of crap
It is not surprising that a third of the american population is depressed
If our immortality depends on the endurance and
durability of our symbols and symbolic systems
What happens when those symbols fall or fail us
Once again our symbols and our efforts to become something more than we are
Are shown to be just as fleeting as life itself
We experience a sort of symbolic death
I am deeply and truly sorry for pain and hurt and anger
and confusion that were the result from all of these
On a social scale the loss of jobs relationships and our sense of self worth
in our day to day lives are all experienced as a sort of social death
An overwhelming sense that we have not achieved the standard set by our culture
In effect to be in a state of social death is to be without money
and without the ability to have an influence on other people's behavior
and in turn to be totally vulnerable to the wills of the people around you
And therefore from my point of view social death is analogous to and in many
ways just as disturbing and terrifying as real death
and it's not surprising to me at all if you look around the world again and again
you see people threatened by social death responding with the kinds of
virulent emotional reactions
That you would associate with a more explicit threat to life and limb
Which is to say either deep depression or volatile aggression or a kind of berserk violence
It has been alleged that Mr Raser phoned a third party on January the 4th
And said something similar to quote "they have taken my job, they've taken my life
I have nothing to lose I don't have anything to lose
I'll take my guns and whack a bunch of people"
Robert shot the other members of the family and then took his own life
Death imagery can still haunt us and we try to constantly
transcend it with affirmations of life or experiences of life imagery
When we have meaningful kinds of connections with other people
movement growth development in our lives, challenges and integrity
a feeling of belonging to some larger and more meaningful whole
that's what it takes to make us feel fully alive and vibrant
Like our lives count for something
And it can for instance include
the producing and raising and nurturing of children
Which are both a source of love and affection for us
but also a symbol of the human future and the process of
larger human connectedness
And that's why after large-scale destruction after the holocaust or after Hiroshima
many people sought to marry and have children because they wanted to reassert life
feelings of life, images of life
and these were absolutely crucial
In August this year I'm going to be having a double mastectomy
Done with full reconstruction the same day which is
going to amount to several hours of surgery
I am trying to keep myself busy doing other things rather than just focus
every day on the fact that My God in a few weeks
that I am going to have my breasts cut off
I'd just can't let it take over my life
I just refuse and that's why I'm having the surgery so that I'm saying back to the cancer
No you can't have me yet
I'm not ready to go
I see it as a challenge
Cancer may kill me but it's never going to kill my spirit
Striving for immortality nurtures and maintains us
The byproducts of immortality striving can uplift us through our darkest days
There is nothing you know there's nothing wrong with that
We are in a tough situation and you know that helps us through and that's fine
And a lot of great things have been done
For immortality purposes Van Gogh painted those paintings and we're you know
If we enjoy his paintings then we profit from that
So a lot of our immortality striving
has led to a lot of great things
in terms of advancing human happiness and enjoyment of life and that sort of thing
You would think that striving for immortality would be an endlessly good thing
The more of it the better
But at the same time our immortality ideologies
often get us into trouble and create problems
As the tragic history around us keeps traumatizing
The drive toward immortality is very likely to turn into a rage for survival
What I would call survival greed survival rage
One of the easiest ways to make yourself feel more than mortal
is to stand as the conqueror of someone else
So there's a tendency to want to lift yourself up by elbowing other people down
And that can be done in socially acceptable ways sports teams or whatever
Getting the promotion at work over your colleague
But it also can manifest itself in violence
If culture help us deny or stave off death
Then the existence of other cultures or even differing others within our own culture
can pose a threat to our psychological and emotional stability
Tolerance is an ambitious goal given the differences we encounter everyday
If ultimately there can only be one truth, then the other supposed truths must be wrong
The existence of other conceptions of reality forces us to question how own belief system
and therefore our claims to immortality
If I believe that God created the earth in six days before taking a well-deserved break.
and then I run into somebody like the Fulani folks in Mali who
think that earth was created out of a giant drop of milk
Well if he's right ... I've got a problem
What we generally do when this happens is to engage in a host of what turned out
to be rather unsavory behaviors that serve a defensive compensatory function
that allows us to restore our own psychologically equanimity
by bolstering our faith in our particular perspective
so the first thing that we normally do what we run into somebody different
is to just dismiss them ... as an inferior form of life
Sure they african dude believes that god created the earth out of the giant drop of milk
But you know these are ignorant savages worshiping piles
of sticks and mud and they do not have email and cable television
And by derogating them we sort of defuse the threat
but they keep you know but they're doing okay
they are no less happy than we are, how can that be?
so usually derogation is not enough so we try to assimilate others into our worldview
Because if we can sell our worldview to them and they buy it
that's a very strong validation that we are right
So the most obvious example of this is of course missionary activity
There are these african civilizations they are doing quite fine thank you
and we march in and we give it one of these you're catholic now play bingo
and then in a couple of minutes destroyed thousands
of years perfectly viable indigenous cultures
You convert them and if you successfully do that
and that's been successfully done many many times
Then you get even increased faith that your way is the right way your god is the right god
The whole cold war was really a massive feud between
two death denying ideologies, capitalism and communism
to extend their sphere of influence throughout as much of the world as possible
Sometimes what we can do is if there's an alternative worldview that is implicitly
suggesting that yours may not be the best or yours may not be absolutely true
you can sort of incorporate certain aspects of that alternative worldview into your own
and thereby defuse the threat and we like to use the example of the hippie subculture
that developed in America in the mid sixties
What mainstream America did was they incorporated some of the appealing aspects of the
hippie subculture into the mainstream culture and cut off the really threatening aspects
One of the things that the hippies started doing was they started wearing blue jeans
Blue jeans before the hippies came along was
something that was worn by certain population of workers
in this country but they say you know what appearance is bullshit
We're gonna wear blue jeans
And that had some appeal
So what mainstream America did is OK when this is going to get popular
Fine now we are going to have designer blue jeans
It can become a status symbol which completely is contrary
to the original message of why the hippies started wearing blue jeans
Another example is granola bars I think is a good example granola bars is
getting back to nature simple foods non processed foods
Now when you go to a store you buy a chocolate covered
granola bars with like five hundred ingredients
These are methods of coping that originate in our subconscious
They linger beneath the surface of our actions
However what happens when these methods fail
and the threat to one's immortality is not sufficiently diminished
For one's culture to continue serving its death denying function
The threat must be dealt with at any cost
It's a fight or flight reaction
The derogation assimilation and accommodation of others
though potentially intense direct and brutal
Are no match for the horror which results from the
fourth means of dealing with differing others
Annihilation
Who's right Let's see who's right
You know my god is better than your god and we will kick your ass to prove it
As we look at human history especially last several hundred years,
A major cause for world conflict are religious differences
Ultimately most armed conflicts are ideological in nature
Sure there are political and economic issues we don't
want to be simple-minded about that and yet when
you look at most of the protracted conflicts that often go over the course
of centuries or thousands of years what you find is that they invariably come
down to people who deny the right of other folks to even exist
And our argument would be that that's because people are psychologically intolerant of
other individuals who don't share their death denying illusions
A 1993 study estimated that as many as one hundred and seventy five million lives were
deliberately extinguished during the twentieth century due to politically motivated carnage
As we are beginning to see political and social conflicts
have deep psychological motivation
However these motivations are not exclusive to
world leaders dictators and military strategists
They reside in each of us along with the potential for limitless violence
I think that what we see in the middle east is an obvious
example where you have the palestinian saying we
want to push the israelis into the ocean yet the israelis responding you
know with the quaint phrase "the only good arab is a dead arab" and you know that's
not the basis for any rational political discourse you know that's the histrionic ranting
of the kind of fundamentalism that I think betrays the utterly
psychological nature of these kinds of concerns
We are the palestinians we have our rights and this is our country
Enter the team of Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski and Jeff Greenfield
For the last twenty years this trio and their colleagues have been
conducting empirical laboratory experiments to substantiate
the claims of Ernest Becker about the effects of death denial
They've conducted over one hundred and fifty studies
in support of what they called Terror Management Theory
These groundbreaking studies display that when reminded of death
test subjects do indeed react aggressively towards those who are
different and positively towards those who was similar
In a sense we are many Gods
In the early nineteen eighties when we started
speaking in public about Becker's ideas
some folks were intrigued some folks were horrified
You are an assemblage of blood and guts
and organs that should a knife impact upon your belly at an unfortunate angle would
spill out on the pavement just like you see those squashed animals on the side of the road
But what most people said is look
we don't know what to do with these ideas it's like poetry
it may be interesting but there's no way that you can actually test them
And this is where our training as experimental social
psychologist was actually put to good use
Terror Management Theory came out of the writings of Ernest Becker
His writings answer some questions that we have been asking in our own work
We are social psychologists and we are very focused on the empirical research
What we said is well okay let's try and think about ways to taking all of these ideas
and let's really boil them down to some basic statements about the nature
of reality that we can then use to generate hypotheses and go out and actually test them
The first component of terror management theory states that individuals need to
sustain faith in a meaningful worldview
The second component states that individuals need to feel as though they are valued
protected members objects of significance within this world view
Psychologist will generally call this self esteem
And if we can sustain these two psychological constructs
then we can function relatively securely in the world
And if these constructs are threatened
then we are going to feel anxiety and have a need to defend those constructs
So we develop what we call the mortality salience hypothesis
and all that says is look if culture serves a death denying function
then if you remind people that they're going to die
that should momentarily really increase the need for the death
denying aspects of their particular beliefs about reality
and that should be reflected by their reactions to other
individuals who either bolster or support those beliefs
or who undermine those beliefs by either being
hostile to them or merely different from them
The very first study that we did was with municipal court judges in Tucson Arizona
Judges have a kind of a clear set of values that
are part of their worldview and that is to uphold the law
So what we thought is that if we make some judges think about their own death
they should become more punitive toward a law breaker
So half the judges on a random basis
were given questionnaires that ask them about their own death
Half were not given such a questionnaire
And then we have them actually look at an actual court case the most common case
in municipal court in Tucson is solicitation of prostitution
They were simply asked to recommend the bond for the prostitute
What we found is the judges who were reminded of their own death
before setting bond for the alleged prostitute
recommended a bond of four hundred and fifty five dollars
The control judges who were not reminded of their own death
set a bond an average bond of fifty dollars
In another study Christian test subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire
intended to determine how people form impressions of others
But the subjects didn't realize is that the
researchers were actually making determinations about them
Embedded within some questionnaires were questions
specifically formulated to make the reader think about his or her own death
The students were then asked to give their impressions of two fictitious individuals
Who on paper shared similar personality traits but differed in religious affiliation
The hypothesis was that after the christian subjects thought about their death
They should be especially positive in their reactions to a fellow Christian student
And especially negative toward the Jewish student
And that's exactly what we found
The students who did not receive death reminders showed no preferences in their evaluations
These results were important indicators that attitudes towards
others change when one is confronted with one's own death
However the results did not speak to behavioral changes
And so one example of a study that we've done to test this idea
was a study in which we wanted to see if reminding people of their own death
would make them more reluctant to use cultural symbols or icons in inappropriate ways
For this study subjects were asked to participate in what they were told
were research experiments designed to explore both personality and creative problem solving
Once again subjects completed personality questionnaire
some of which contain death reminders
When they are done with that, they come out then
we describe the two tasks for them and their job is to try to complete the tasks
The first task required subjects to sieve sand
from a jar also containing water and black dye
Various items were available to help complete this task
We set it up so that the only object they could use to successfully
achieve the goal of sifting the sand out was a little american flag
And so what they would have to do is secure the
american flag with a rubber band on an empty jar
and then pour the black dye through the american
flag which of course ruins the american flag
For the second task subjects were asked to hang a crucifix on the study room wall
Again various items were available to help them do so
In order to do that the only object that they can
use to successfully hammer the nail into the wall
so that they can hang up the crucifix was the crucifix itself
Those students who had received death reminders
tried more alternative ways to complete their tasks
They were more apprehensive to desecrate their most cherished cultural icons
and took twice as long as those who were not
reminded of their death prior to the experiment
Now that the terror management team had establish that changes in behavior
occurred when people thought about their own death
they were prepared to conduct what was to become their most striking and ominous study
If it could be determined that thinking of death cause behavior patterns to change
Could it not also be determined that these behaviors
might in fact be aggressive toward other individuals
The problem with measuring any type of aggressive behavior in a laboratory
situation is the ethical concerns that it brings up
We can't exactly have people punching one another hitting shooting
stabbing that's frowned on ethically and so what we did was we
devised a measure where we could safely assess intent to
harm another person and we did that by using hot sauce
You know Becker argued that we got into this partly because
we thought that this could help explain real world
prejudice and aggression against different others
But it was inspired by real incidents in which people have used
hot sauce to physically attack other people
There was a case where a cook was angry at police
and spike a couple of cops food with hot sauce
More significant unless humorous and there are numerous cases
in which parents have used hot sauce to punish their children
Which is a form of child abuse
But in the lab what we thought we might be able to do is at least
get some indications of an intention to hurt someone else
simply because you've been reminded of your death
and they're threatening an aspect of your worldview
In this paradigm the subjects come in and they are told that
the study concerns personalities and food preferences
Subjects are once again given the set of supposed personality questionnaires
Some included the death reminder and others did not
Then in what subjects were told was an unrelated study
they were asked to allot a variable amount of extremely hot sauce for a
participant of dissimilar political background to taste and rate
Those who had received death reminders prescribed more than twice the amount of
hot sauce as those who did not receive the death reminders
This has profound implications
These studies show that reminders of death play an influential role
in the human psyche and can inspire us to act aggressively
While hot sauce itself might seem benign,
the implications of these studies are frightening
What happens when the means of aggression is not
hot sauce but rather a gun or another weapon
And what might be the result if the issue at hand was
whether or not to provide food aid to a starving country
Would we act differently if their culture post a threat to our psychological equanimity
Many people function day to day seemingly oblivious to the effect death has upon them
Most would claim that they don't think about death at all
The industry world has sterilized itself to the point
where we hear about death but rarely see it first hand
But does this mean that we are immune to the effects of death
When a lot of people hear about this theory for the first time the initial reaction is
you know I don't think about death all that much
And if I don't think about death all that much how could death be
playing such an important role in our lives
How could it be affecting me in these powerful ways?
How could it affect ongoing behavior when I almost never think about that?
People do think about death and are reminded of death quite commonly
Any major city newspapers has got a murder story pretty much every day
If you watch the news, if you watch television you see stories of murder and death
pretty consistently so reminders of death are actually quite common
The other point is that we do agree that we don't
think about death all that much consciously in our daily lives
You know the essence of Freud's ideas about the
nature of the psychological apparatus is that
most psychological activity is quite unconscious
We repress our concerns about death
inner thoughts of death
but it is underneath
it's outside of consciousness then how do you get at that
That sounds like this is sort of untestable
It is not untestable
Psychologists have recently developed technology
to present material to people without their awareness
that they're being exposed to the material and we call this subliminal priming
Utilizing this method the terror management team spearheaded
by Jamie Arndt at the University of Missouri at Columbia
developed what they call the subliminal death prime
We had folks come and stare at a computer screen
and do what they call lexical decision task it's just words are
flashed on a screen and people are supposed to look at them and push a button
if they're similar so if you know if you see like shoes and pants
those are similar items and if you see like
taco and sneaker you know those are dissimilar items but really that's just
an excuse to get them to look at the screen
because in between those words very rapidly at like twenty-one milliseconds
are either flashed the word death
or the word field because those words have the same of number letters in the same
frequency of occurrence in the english language
and in fact when you do that nobody knows that
it has happened that's what makes these studies amazing
if we show people afterward if we say hey we flashed
some stuff that you couldn't see here's four
words can you tell us which one was flashed people cannot pick out the
one that they've seen reliably so we know that it's quite
quote unconscious
and yet they show the same hostility towards someone who is different than
themselves and the same affection toward someone who is similar when we asked them
to explicitly to ponder their own demise
Many cultures have different methods for dealing and examining death
Exploring deaths denial offers just one example but it is applicable cross-culturally
these results have been replicated in test throughout the world implying that fear
of death is most likely a universal influence
regardless of the specifics of various cultures or customs
I think these ideas about death and symbolic immortality
about denial of death and Becker's work extend cross culturally
They are all primal ideas and all primal human experiences are universal
World events can sometimes serve as a window
through which we can confirm the veracity of these ideas
Today our fellow citizens our way of life our very freedom came under attack
And a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts
I saw the first tower kind of smoking and I saw the second plane
maneuver around behind and hit the second tower
Holy fuck oh my God oh my God (some kind of God to have let something like this happen)
my first reaction I think like a lot of people is what is this, this can't be real
And then when I got past that that this is actually happening
My first response was anger I was angry I'm a new yorker from New York
I did think of pearl harbor but I thought that
we had denial of death in the sky over manhattan
There is no question that what's happening there is a clash of world views
I think that what we've seen in response to those
attacks is a lot of anxiety and a lot of anger
First of all it reminds us of our mortality
We usually keep that buried day to day in the symbolic system and this kind of brought it to the fore
The other threat is the threat to our culture that what
allows us to know you know what walk around day to day feeling okay is
that we're americans and we are part of this strong powerful and good nation
and that's a big part of what protects us from our mortality concerns
and now that's being threatened by not only killing
a lot of americans but attacking major symbols of our culture pentagon
world trade center obviously on purpose
The events of September 11th 2001 reminded millions
of people of their mortality in very direct ways
In the span of only a few hours the cultural worldview collectively
maintained by the united states was agonizingly damaged
The ripple effect spread throughout the world
Just like the terror management theory experiment carried out in an enormous scale
All the conditions were in place for the subjects
to first reinforce their shared cultural world view
In the united states examples of this became quickly apparent
Our country is strong a great people has been moved to defend great nation
Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings
But they cannot touch the foundation of america
I'm just going out here to support my country
Let everybody know this is one nation under God
How long have you been out here?
Since the planes crash in the world trade center Tuesday
We show our strength right
We buy american flags
American flags are off the racks
Also you see christians and religious people are turning to their religion
As terror management theory would have predicted in the laboratory setting
What was to follow would be an aggressive reaction against the threatening other
I think we should go over there and kick ass and take names later
Near Tucson we saw a man killed
because he was wearing a turban
And in fact he was from India and he was a Sikh
He had absolutely nothing to do with this
Some angry american killed him
And it is frustrating right because you can't find Osama Bin Laden
He has been vilified he is the evil
He is who we want to get retribution from but he is hard to get at
So you see the scapegoating the over-generalization
That urge for revenge and that urge to be protected
and call on our superior forces to go and annihilate and so forth
those are very strong emotions and I don't think
we should discount them but it doesn't mean that
that should be the basis on which we act
We are confronting something that we don't know how to deal with
We're confronting people who use their death against us
Somebody who says
there's something more important than my life is unstoppable
Once we have move that struggle for survival
beyond the physical level to the symbolic level
I am willing to give up my life lots and lots of life
To make a heroic sacrifice to see my immortality system prevail
Apocalyptic violence that really means
violence in the service of not just achieving a political goal
there may be political goals
but beyond any political goal these are more amorphous sense of bringing
an end to the present world because it is too corrupt
and that can be justified because one is doing it in the service of a
spiritually pure world
From the terror management theory research
we see why Ernest Becker's work has been called a science of evil
his ideas have given us a means by which we can scientifically examine the root
causes of human aggression and violence
Becker writes that humans cause evil
by wanting to triumph over evil
in the quest for immortality
Our most oppressive and violent and brutal behaviors
are Becker says are responses to our death anxiety
The core problem from this perspective is that we've got to invest in this worldviews
and then we have got to defend them
And in defending them we often end up hurting others
The groups of people that we have to make other to make victims
to make not truly human
The ways we have to humiliate or brutalized them torment them destroy them
Hitler was very big on that that the Jews are animals and the Gypsies are animal
You know you compare them to vermin
But we Aryans we're not we're the true humans and we are going to live on in greatness
And he was unfortunately able to sell that message
The most brutal and primitive style of coping with death is to dream that you can master it
by killing or destroying other people
It is an opportunity to confront death
and to escape it while inflicting it on someone else
Soft people don't make it in this world
You can either be the victimizer or the victim
and I choose to be the victimizer
We commit the greatest evil
by trying to escape from evil
by trying to create a paradise on earth
We are literally looking for things to label evil
so that once we've done that
we can fight them
You know even in the cold war Ronald Reagan referred to
Russia as the evil empire
and in Iran they refer to us as the great Satan
Today our nation saw evil
We will not rest
until this evil is driven from our world
And I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards
We demonize folks
and we see them as the all encompassing repositories of evil the removal of
which would make life on earth as it is on heaven
So more people have been killed
in the name of God and country
than by all the serial murderers
Jeffrey Dahmer types put together this is a just a drop in the bucket compared to
how much killing is going on
out of loyalty patriotism
love for god and country
The toll in human lives is almost too staggering to consider
Violence seems to be an inherent part of who we are
Our propensity to destroy others and the world around us begs the question
Are we a viable form of life?
We are the inheritors now
of a species who has made a habit of warfare
They gave me a gun and they said
that's the enemy over there
if you don't shoot them they are going to shoot you
Our unit basically is a search and destroy unit
Not all units have that clear-cut order
Orders are very simple
Search and destroy
I remember a sergeant telling me well
when you get over there you are going to be able to kill a lot of Vietcong
Now you got to wonder because nobody had ever used that word
Kill
No matter how gung-ho you are it is still hard to kill that first person
I was on the ground hiding when he came up on us and I stood up and shot him
That look in his eye, you'll never forget it
And then he went down
I got sick
That first time
Across economic political and geographic boundaries
Death anxiety is a psychological common denominator
No one is immune
Cross-culturally and internationally we see the
effects and reactions that this anxiety brings
Yet the prognosis for our future is not altogether bleak
If death is unavoidable
how are we to remedy the situation in which we find ourselves
Questions are more common than the answers
Is the medical field offering any hope?
Is there any possibility that we will someday eliminated death?
And what would this mean for our world?
Will we rid ourselves of fear if we rid ourselves of death?
Just make death go away
You know the kind of cryogenic thing let us just make death just disappear
This idea that you can freeze dry yourself
and be reconstituted like a frozen burrito at
some point some vaguely unspecified future
I just find highly unfortunate
Not only would it not remove our anxiety about death
but it might make it even worse
If you are ten years old and you slip and fall down a mountain
That's tragic because you're losing like sixty years of your life
but what if you are expected to live for five hundred thousand years
and you fell down a mountain that would be even more grotesque
So you might be able to banish death but you could never banished chance
And to the extent that stuff happens that's just not going to work
Are we doomed to repress our death anxiety
and suffer the consequences of our death denial?
Can we face death head on and at the same time
avoid creating what can often can be destructive illusions of immortality?
We are animals and we are on this hunk of earth
Hurtling through space
There's no meaningful to life
There's no purpose
It's completely absurd and pointless
And we are just creatures going around, trying to have sex and eat and have shelter
And the only thing for sure is that we are going to decay and die
Just as our ancestors did and just as our progeny are going to and that's it
Does that sound good? Doesn't sound too good
Let's just banish illusions
and let's just see things as they are
that's also quaint but no can do because the
very act of perception is ultimately an interpretative affair
We used to think that people perceive like cameras or xerox machines
Illusions are the explanations we come up with to give meaning to our own experience
It doesn't mean we are lying
It doesn't mean we have made a big mistake We can't just look at the world
and know what is going on,
tell the difference between good and evil, see what is valuable and not valuable
We are creating illusions all the time
We don't just use illusions to hide the facts from us
We sometimes use them to better explore the facts
Yes we live in a world of illusion, constructed reality
and one in which we continually search for meaning
but these constructs can be nurturing and life-sustaining
Minimizing suffering while promoting individual freedom, dignity and hope
They don't have to be destructive
A life-sustaining illusion can sooth the empirical realities of life and death
But at the same time must provide the courage to resist oppressing
by taking the lives of others to justify itself
How can we bring ourselves wherever in the world we might be
to a place where through our actions and constructs
we practiced tolerance and kindness
and possibly reach a point of acceptance or even respect
recognizing that these are not signs of weakness and despair
but rather manifestations of strength and resolution
We need to examine the kinds of illusions that we are pursuing
The things that our culture has defined as heroic that we find meaningful
Psychologically speaking we don't have a set of
values in place that renders it acceptable
to just be a person of integrity
If you're not rich if you're not famous
if you're not thinner than a piece of linguine and permanently young
Then you've got a problem here
A good culture provides opportunities for people to feel good about themselves
And but finally it does that without unduly harming other
people either outside or inside of the culture itself
Another thing that could be done is to think about the development of cultural
constructions that have more direct and realistic confrontations with mortality
It's not unknown to human history as you know
People are afraid to die
We're all afraid to die
But there are two ways to go with that
One way I think we can see quite clearly in buddhism
but we find it in all the great religions
is to do something with that fear of death
to use that not to repress it but to bring it to consciousness
and to use that as a way of helping us live more intensely
Usually we think of life and death as opposites
Either you are alive or you are dead but from this point of view you can see
that they're more like the two sides of the single hand
In Heidegger's words we are being toward death
Or Juan Matus say keep death on your left shoulder
Keep reminding yourself that the medieval monk
would have even a skull on their writing desk
Or in Tibet and those areas the skull cups that you
drink out of is to remind you of your mortality
Is to remind you of death so that it doesn't go into the thing of unconscious denial
I think we get in trouble culturally from unconscious
denial of death not from conscious efforts to position ourselves against death
Trapeze was something as a kid I have always wanted to do
It was a dream, it was a fantasy It is a kind of an anomaly
I wrote fourteen books and neither Harvard nor Princeton
where I both had advance degrees took any
notice of me until I could hang upside down
It's many things it's a joy it's a discipline
I also understand having read Becker that there's a place where it's my defense
If not against of death
It's against old age
So this is my this is a form of denial for me I'll admit it you know I mean I'm seventy
I'm not going gentle into that I'm going to keep denying it as long as possible
I think it's a healthy enough thing
I think there is a relationship between the amount of death anxiety
or death panic it maybe for some people
And the degree of unlived life inside of them
If you have a sense that you haven't really lived
That you haven't really done what you could do in life
There is a terror of dying before you ever really lived
Well the surgery was not without some complications
but I think I've recovered very well from it
Although my own illness is classified as incurable
I prefer to think of myself as incurably alive
And I think the real difference between me and other people
is that I no longer have the luxury to procrastinate my life away anymore
I mean through tremendous personal growth looking at my life
I've been able to overcome some great odds
I think I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life
In the words of Jean Paul Sartre
everything has been figured out except how to live
So perhaps the better question is not what are we to do with death
But what are we to do with life
Why if we can enjoy life with the fullness like no other organism
Do we often falter?
Life exists in individual moments
And it is up to us to make sure that those moments are vital interconnected and vast
That our process of living of contributing to
the collective experience of life is embracing
nurturing
and meaningful
To create a masterpiece out of life
A life we would willingly repeat if we had to live it again and again for all of eternity
This is what we can strive for
Marcel says that hope only begins at the point where all of our calculations fail
When people want to say well we have this kind of immortality that's a prediction
I think those things get us in trouble but I think hope is to realize that
I didn't come here by my own will and I won't leave by my own will
So whatever it is that brings me into existence if I find existence good
I have to say it's good
It's good
It has to be good even in spite of my death
I believe Paul Tillich had it right Paul says that
"You don't conquer the anxiety about dying
You meet it with courage"