Books & Articles "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker

[NarrowJ]

My friend's dad recommended this book to me after having a pretty deep conversation with him about death and what happens when you die, so on and so forth.

Becker tells us that the most fundamental problem of mankind, sitting at his very core, is his fear of death. Being the only animal that is conscious of his inevitable mortality, his life’s project is to deny or repress this fear, and hence his need for some kind of a heroism. Every grandiosity, good or evil, is intended to make him transcend death and become immortal.

To prove his thesis, Becker resorts to psychoanalysis. The depth and breadth of his understanding of psychoanalysis is truly amazing for someone who doesn’t call himself a psychologist. He wants to put psychoanalysis on a different foundation from which Freud put it on: The primary repression is not sexuality, as Freud said, but our awareness of death.

To be honest, Becker's thought process that man lives by lying to himself about himself, left me depressed, cynical, and pessimistic.

The solution that Becker suggests towards the end of book for ridding man of his vital lie is what he calls a fusion of psychology and religion: The only way that man can face his fate, deal with the inherent misery of his condition, and achieve his heroism, is to give himself to something outside the physical – call it God or whatever you want.

A rather disappointing solution, even though he is not talking about any traditional religion. How can we cure ourselves of our vital lie with an illusion?

In the end, the only practical solution might be what most people do (but not everyone can do) and what Kierkegaard called tranquilizing with triviality. Numb yourself with the banalities of life to forget the insignificance of your existence. Go to school, get a job, pay mortgage, raise children... Fret over every little thing you can think of: your promotion at work, the car you drive, the cavities in your teeth, finding love, getting laid, your children’s college tuition, the annoying last five pounds that are defying your diet program... Act like any of these actually mattered.

Anyone else read this book? If so, what did you think? Did it drum up those repressed fears of death and your imminent eternal loss of consciousness and experience?


J.J.

 

[Drck]

Didn't read the book but definitely good topic. I tent to agree with what you wrote (Becker tells us that the most fundamental problem of mankind, sitting at his very core, is his fear of death).

When you think about it, most of the religions are in essence about death... Christianity invented eternal life in Heaven for good people, and eternal life in Hell for bad ones. Note the word 'eternal', it simply states that after death we will live forever and ever. There is a God who will be judging people for their deeds...

Buddhism invented Nirvana, which is simply a different world for Heavens - perhaps also eternal Life when the particular person no longer has to suffer Death of this World... There is no God and there is no judgement - except there is Karma, and after death each person will go to a particular world based on his good or bad deeds, there is reincarnation, rebirth.... So in very essence, Christianity and Buddhism are quite similar, just different traditions and different description of the same process...

New Age stuff invented some universal level of consciousness, or whatever they call it, and so on. You die and your little consciousness that you call "I" will join some sort of big consciousness, perhaps self-aware Universe...

Who is right? Who knows, I have no clue, maybe all of them are wrong. What if we are just living organisms, we are simply born and one day we die. What if there are no Heavens or Nirvana, what if there is no universal level of consciousness? What if our life has no purpose at all? We just die and that is it, no judgments, no rewards for good or bad deeds, no reincarnation, simply Nothing...

Just accepting this idea is very depressing, because in a sense you are accepting that this whole world doesn't make any sense and it doesn't have any purpose. We humans and other organisms are just by-product of chemical reactions on some insignificant planet, and perhaps there are many similar insignificant planets throughout this Universe... Who knows?

Most people can't even accept that idea. They will fight you, they will do everything to prove you wrong, they will wish you Hell just so they can prove you wrong. Life has to have some purpose, there must be something much better than this life on this planet, they think. There must be Life after we die, and since this life is quite miserable, the other Life must be pure Happiness. At least for them, not for you...

But if there is such great Life after death, why do people fear death at first place? According to religion, they are supposed to go to much better place, so they should be happy about leaving this world. Maybe all the anxiety from death is a simple Fear, Fear that everything they believed for so long is simply wrong...???

So if one accepts that our Life has no purpose whatsoever, that we simply die and that is it, you can clearly see all the lies as Becker suggested. Billions of people want to 'escape' the death through many different activities, through religion, through imagination, through Nirvanas and Heavens, through worshiping different Gods or devils, through universal consciousness and so on. They suffer high anxiety because of that, and the fear of death may paralyze many of us in living good and healthy Life. People just want to know what will happen in the future, they want to have some organized life (work, school, family), they want to believe in something solid (God, Heavens, Karma,...), they want things in their Life matter as you write, perhaps because they want to feel important and significant...

It is definitely very depressing to accept such idea, it is pessimistic because no matter what you do nothing really matters, and there is no escape... I'm not saying that this conclusion is correct, we as humans simply don't know, but if it is correct you can clearly see that most people live in delusions, in huge lies... You can't even talk to most people about it, they don't want to understand, and even if they try they would call you weird...

Unfortunately today's science doesn't make any clear findings or conclusions either, we are simply not advanced at all, we are only at the beginning of true discoveries. According to latest theories of our best brains, our whole universe (including us humans) may perhaps be just some holographic projection, and things that we perceive as reality - such as time or matter - may not even exists outside of our perception... But even those best brains don't even understand what we are really dealing with...

So what is the solution, if any? IMO simple maturity will do it. You can still be positive, you can still find some sense and purpose in this life, you can still help others to lesser suffering. You can even believe in God with no problems, while knowing that God is rather personal belief and product of imagination than objective reality. You simply accept the world as it is, while being open to another possibilities...

Anyway, if nothing else, hopefully Chasing girls will take care of it

 

[Rage]

I’m familiar with the book and its premise and have read from it and the reviews of it (though haven’t read the book in its entirety). Remember seeing this one in Chases recommended list too.

I wasn’t too shocked by it/didn’t have much existential crisis when I first read the thesis and main points though. Didn’t; but wondered then about why I didn’t (because most people would I think).

I reflected a bit on my early childhood. My parents are both from Bangladesh and part of a large and close knit matriarchal society. They know like several hundred people by name (something that I find in some emotional respect rather ridiculous though logically I understand it and understand just as they would explain to me that it’s just the culture).

From when I was very little I’d hear of people, friends, family and random Bangladeshi people die. “He died, she died, oh this random Bangladeshi person died, oh x person’s sister’s nephew died”… and my parents kept nothing from us talked about it, discussed it, and how in vivid detail each of the deaths happened… and told us we will all die and all may die tomorrow and nothing was in our power and we were that minuscule in ratio to the universe and god and the world that encompassed us.

And I was like 4; since my earliest memories I recall this. But because I was raised this way with this paradigm, it never bothered me or upset me or frightened me, because it had been accepted and understood that this was just the way that things are and were and always will be (though I guess the promise of an afterlife reassured me some as a kid).

Personally I do think it’s bad for parents to lie to kids and tell them that santa exists or that x person didn’t die they just went away somewhere or whatever. People don’t want to face uncertainty/hardship/their own mortality… the darker realities that compose life: people don’t wanna think about them, they want to be distracted and told everything will be ok.

But uncertainty/hardship/your own mortality: all the dark stuff; is what you must accept and embrace and acknowledge as a formative, cogent part of life if you ever want to have a chance at big achievement, growth and higher ends.

From https://www.girlschase.com/content/purpo ... point-view the meaning of life is unknowable. Our purpose of life is our hierarchy of needs and fulfilling those, sure… there is the idea of trying to build something that lasts after you die, denying death/conquering death in that respect… like a contribution to history or to science or whatever. Chase had told me that that too though ends up being just a memory or concept or idea of a person (not the person themselves in their essence) and even those memories inevitably fade too concerning the extremely few men that make it into history (in several millennia they are irrelevant).

So everyone comes and goes, dies and is forgotten; for myself it’s just been facing that, acknowledging that, thinking about it a bit every day and realizing that all that darkness needs to be accepted and embraced to achieve what I want in life… which I think in accepting and embracing is the only way you kind of make peace with it and can be content and fulfilled.

I try to do that… and to try and create some influence on other people; do good for other people so that lasts after I die too (my good deeds/influence/contributions etc. ; I like to write a lot in aprt because that’s something that can be read after you go).

That’s about it… we all go eventually huh? Guess it just comes down to that.

Oh one last thing that does come to mind. I think I had sleep like a week or two ago where it was a dead sleep. And woke up from that and it was like waking up from death.

And I realized that it’s funny because we think about death and how horrible it would be to be dead… but when we die and then are dead (if an afterlife doesn’t exist), it’ll be just nothingness, no consciousness, blank state existence, of nothing! So we won’t feel bad or good or have an opinion or thought or emotion or any feeling or sensation of any sort! Just not exist… (dead you won’t really give a shit that he’s dead).

And that’ll just be how things are then, just a different state of being and not a future I can get myself to worry about much now.

Bunch of scattered here all together, but just what came to my mind about the book

Cheers,

-Gem

 

[Howell]

This book is a highly accessible summation of post-Freudian psychology, and it is full of useful tools for understanding subconscious happenings. What follows is a brief critique:

One of the core assumption of the book seems to be that man is separate from nature and individuation is a process invariably accompanied by an increased feeling of not belonging.

However, this seems to me an illusion of our own peculiar cultural assumptions (about time and what it means to be a man in the world).

I've meditated on this a fair bit, and I've come to the tentative conclusion that the problem of individuation is only real if by individuation you mean separation. I think it's far more pragmatic to view individuation as differentiation though, in the same way that a leaf is differentiated from the rest of the tree, but is still part of the tree. We grew out of the world, and are a part of it, after all, even though we walk around and don't have any stems attaching us to the ground.

The problem of alienation is only a problem if you haven't realized that you are what the universe is doing at this particular place in time.

People feel alienated from the world because their conscious attention is trained to ignore what the rest of them knows so well.

But we seem to use reverse psychology on ourselves: we tell ourselves that we really want to get "back to nature" but that it's woefully impossible. This is a denial deny death. The irony of the book is that it practically glorifies the struggle for immortality (by making it seem like an inevitable tragedy), by describing its brutality with extreme vividness:

Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.

When he says it this way it doesn't sound so bad! This language is unmistakable: it's drama clothed in scientific realism!

At least for me, reading the book made me want to be more individuated, and I took a sort of "I'm being a realist and facing the facts" sort of pride out of it (which I later realized was simple egotism and a sort of put-down attitude towards life).

My solution to this problem was to reframe how I viewed individuation (from separation to differentiation -- a shift that also allows for greater tolerance) and live as though I'm immortal until I'm not. It seems the only sane thing to do.

For, if you are struggling to be somewhere, it implies you aren't there already. But we're so obsessed with putting everything off, and pretending like all change must be gradual change, and that enlightenment/immortality, "sure, a few truly great and devoted people could achieve it, but I (little I) could never do that!"

This attitude is, of course, the fetishizing and pedistilization of enlightenment, immortality... what have you -- and just a way to put it off. Which is totally fine, but it's still useful to recognize it for what it is.

-----

In the last 100 years, there have been so many theories of what motivates man at the very core. Survival, fear of death, anxiety, meaning (whatever that means), libido, the spectrum of love... the list goes on.

They all can be right depending the situations you're applying them, but they're all wrong if you think you've found THE answer. Because beliefs do not describe what is happening. Beliefs are just tools for actions; they're about how you interpret what is happening.

So to develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce. And if we are true pragmatists, that is for us its sole significance.

-Howell

P.S. This whole discussion makes me think of the parable of the blind men and the elephant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant