As I write on the psychology of "othering," I can’t help but wonder if there are solutions to our dilemma (crisis may be a better word). Is there a way to fight existential terror besides keeping our self-esteem up by clinging to our cultural worldviews (illusions)? I believe there may be some hope in replacing our anxiety-repressing "immortality projects" with practicing humility and gratitude.
The first time I heard the phrase “a quiet ego” was when I read Dr. Pelin Kesebir’s paper on humility and death anxiety. Kesebir, P. (2014). “A quiet ego quiets death anxiety: Humility as an existential anxiety buffer.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Five studies tested the hypothesis that a quiet ego, as exemplified by humility, would buffer death anxiety. Humility is characterized by a willingness to accept the self and life without comforting illusions, and by low levels of self-focus. As a consequence, it was expected to render mortality thoughts less threatening and less likely to evoke potentially destructive behavior patterns.
In line with this reasoning, Study 1 found that people high in humility do not engage in self-serving moral disengagement following mortality reminders, whereas people low in humility do.
Study 2 showed that only people low in humility respond to death reminders with increased fear of death and established that this effect was driven uniquely by humility and not by some other related personality trait.
In Study 3, a low sense of psychological entitlement decreased cultural worldview defense in response to death thoughts, whereas a high sense of entitlement tended to increase it.
Study 4 demonstrated that priming humility reduces self-reported death anxiety relative to both a baseline and a pride priming condition.
Finally, in Study 5, experimentally induced feelings of humility prevented mortality reminders from leading to depleted self-control. As a whole, these findings obtained from relatively diverse Internet samples illustrate that the dark side of death anxiety is brought about by a noisy ego only and not by a quiet ego, revealing self-transcendence as a sturdier, healthier anxiety buffer than self-enhancement. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2019 APA).
Sheldon Solomon addressed that just being conscious of these theories would help us a lot. He said, "If we can drop back as a species and consider collectively the extent to which maladaptive manifestations of death anxiety bring out the worst in us, that would give us the capacity to nudge our species in a slightly more productive direction. The only way to get out of it is a wholesale recognition of these ideas.
The thing that renders us unique as human beings is that we’re smart enough to know that like all living things, we too will die.
The fear or anxiety that is engendered by that unwelcome realization, when we try to distance ourselves from it or deny it, that’s when we bury it under the psychological bushes as it were, it comes back to bear bitter and malignant fruit. On the other hand, there are folks who have the good fortune, by virtue of circumstance or their character or disposition, to really be able to explicitly ponder what it means to be alive in light of the fact that we are transient creatures here for a relatively inconsequential amount of time.
I buy the argument theologically, philosophically, as well as psychologically and empirically, that can bring out the best in us, and that our most noble and heroic aspirations are the result of the rare individual, who’s able to live life to the fullest, by understanding as Heidegger put it, that we can be summarily obliterated not in some vaguely unspecified future moment but at any second in our lives."