Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

"Becker's philosophy ... is a braid wowen form four strands.

 

1. The world is terrifying. Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. We live in a world in which the routine activity for organism

 

2. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. That is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings-and with all this yet to die.

 

3. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming, we conspire to keep it unconscious. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality. Society provides a second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe a hero system that allows us to believe we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth.

 

4. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world , make it perfect. Our heroic projects that aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world-my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project."

 

(from the preface of Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death)