Yesterday, I read Chapter 7, “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” from the book "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life," on my YouTube channel.
For me, this is one of the most enlightening chapters in the book. It’s where most of my project’s direction is derived from. Simply stated, it describes in detail the psychology of "othering" and the origins of evil. These are the ideas that my book and photographs explicate. This chapter describes, in detail, how we humans contort our psychological existential terror into derogation, dehumanization, demonization, and annihilation of the "other." These theories of death anxiety and terror management enlightened me to the point that I wanted to make a body of work and write a book about them, using art, creativity, and historical events to support my thesis.
“These photographs represent an esoteric conflict that’s rooted in our unconscious denial of death. That conflict is the psychological underpinning of the atrocities that happened on this land.”