Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower

Happy 2025! I hope this year is a good year for you.

A couple of years ago, I read a book called Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower. I’ve written about it before here. It played an important role in my studies. It deals with our evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is something rarely considered when thinking about why we are the way we are. This book gives some very interesting and plausible explanations for our behavior.

They propose a provocative hypothesis that marries the Theory of Mind (TOM) with Mortality Awareness through the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) to explain one of humanity’s most perplexing characteristics: the denial of death. Their central argument is rooted in the paradox that human beings, uniquely aware of their own mortality, have also evolved mechanisms to suppress the existential terror this awareness entails. This duality, they argue, is a key to understanding not just human psychology but also the evolutionary processes that shaped our species.

The Evolutionary Conundrum of Awareness and Denial

Human beings possess an extraordinary ability to recognize that others have minds—a skill encompassed in the Theory of Mind. This capacity enables us to infer the intentions, beliefs, and emotions of others, facilitating complex social interactions and cooperation. However, TOM is not merely an interpersonal tool; it also turns inward, allowing us to imagine our future selves. This introspective ability inevitably leads to the realization of our own mortality. An organism's realization that it will eventually die marks both an evolutionary milestone and a potential psychological roadblock.

Varki and Brower posit that this acute awareness of mortality could have been paralyzing. A creature consumed by the fear of its own inevitable demise might struggle to survive, let alone reproduce. Natural selection, however, provided a solution: the cognitive ability to deny uncomfortable truths. This capacity for self-deception—what Varki and Brower term the "Mind Over Reality Transition" (MORT)—allowed early humans to sidestep the crippling anxiety of mortality while retaining the evolutionary advantages of self-awareness and social cognition.

Denial as a Survival Mechanism

The denial of death operates as an adaptive mechanism that balances the benefits of self-awareness against its existential costs. This balance is crucial. Without an understanding of mortality, humans would lack the foresight and caution necessary to avoid life-threatening dangers. But without denial, the dread of death could lead to apathy, despair, or an inability to take risks—all of which would hinder survival and reproductive success.

This interplay between TOM and MORT reveals an elegant evolutionary solution: our minds are hardwired to accept a paradoxical truth. We know, intellectually, that we are mortal, but we also possess the psychological mechanisms to compartmentalize, suppress, or distort this knowledge. This is not a flaw, but a feature that allows us to concentrate on the tasks of life—building relationships, raising children, creating art, and seeking meaning—without succumbing to the overwhelming presence of death.

The Role of Culture and Terror Management

While evolution provided the foundation for denying death, culture built the scaffolding. Varki and Brower’s ideas resonate strongly with Terror Management Theory (TMT), which suggests that cultural worldviews and symbolic systems are human constructs designed to mitigate death anxiety. Religion, art, philosophy, and even societal norms function as buffers against the existential terror of mortality. They provide frameworks that promise continuity—whether through an afterlife, a legacy, or the enduring influence of one’s creations.

“Existential Dread #9,” 9” x 12” acrylic and charcoal on paper.

This painting serves as a visual exploration of the TOM-MORT hypothesis. The abstraction invites viewers to project their fears and hopes, echoing the way denial itself operates. By obscuring the harsh edges of reality, the mind creates space for connection, creativity, and meaning. Yet, the tension in the painting suggests that denial is not absolute; the void beneath remains visible, demanding contemplation.

It’s both a personal and universal expression of the struggle with mortality. It asks us to confront the void while acknowledging the evolutionary and cultural scaffolding that has allowed us to thrive in its shadow. This piece does not offer resolution but instead invites the viewer into the complex interplay of awareness, denial, and the human condition—a visual testament to the insights into the mind’s delicate dance with reality.

These cultural constructs do more than soothe individual fears; they reinforce social cohesion. Shared beliefs about life and death foster unity, enabling groups to work together toward common goals. In this sense, denial of death is not merely a personal defense mechanism but a social glue that holds communities together.

Implications for Understanding Human Behavior

The TOM-MORT hypothesis invites us to reconsider many aspects of human behavior through the lens of denial. It explains why humans are uniquely capable of both profound creativity and devastating self-destruction. Our ability to deny death enables us to take risks, innovate, and envision futures that might never come to pass. But it also blinds us to long-term consequences, fueling behaviors that threaten our survival, such as environmental degradation and warfare.

Understanding the evolutionary roots of death denial also sheds light on the psychological struggles of modern life. In a world where traditional cultural buffers are eroding, individuals are increasingly confronted with unmediated mortality awareness. The resulting anxiety manifests in various ways, from existential despair to compulsive consumption. Yet, the same cognitive flexibility that enables denial also holds the potential for growth. By confronting the void and integrating our awareness of mortality into our lives, we can find new ways to navigate the human condition.

Varki and Brower’s TOM-MORT hypothesis offers a profound insight into the evolutionary origins of death denial. It reminds us that our ability to deny uncomfortable truths is not a weakness but a survival strategy—one that has allowed us to thrive in the face of existential uncertainty. At the same time, it challenges us to recognize the limitations of this denial. In a world where our actions increasingly have global and long-term consequences, the time may have come to reconcile our evolutionary heritage with the demands of modern existence. Only by understanding the roots of our denial can we hope to transcend it, transforming the fear of death into a catalyst for living fully and responsibly.

Before Denial: A Primitive Painting

I’m exploring some ideas about figures. I have posted some abstract figures before, but I’m trying to work with ideas closer to the theories I’m exploring through art.

I had an idea that came from a book I read last year (and I’ve posted before about it) called “Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind,” a book by Ajit Varki. It is an expansion and adaptation of a Danny Brower manuscript that he left behind (he recently died).

The book presents a theory about how the human mind evolved and the obstacles it overcame that allowed us to be the way we are today. The theory is based on the idea that denial of reality is a factor in how the human mind evolved and how we became intelligent, creative, and innovative.

Varki and Brower believe that humans are the world's ultimate risk-takers, ignoring scientific facts such as the dangers of smoking and climate change. They believe that this denial mechanism became essential once our brain evolved a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves and others. They call it “full theory of mind” or “theory of mind” (TOM).

Denial offers a warning about the dangers inherent in our ability to ignore reality. Denial makes you doubt your own perceptions; it is gaslighting and disturbing, and the effects of it are hidden and unconscious. There are some very powerful theories in this writing, mainly about how humans became conscious, or the point where we realized that we would die. Varki follows through with a detailed analysis of the steps that it took to get there, or here, and the price we’ve paid for it.

We're Animals, With One Caveat

I’ve never considered or really pondered the fact that I’m an animal. You’re an animal, too. What does this mean, or why does it matter?

It plays a significant role in the theory that I’ve been working on and studying for this project. It demonstrates the need for humans to isolate themselves (psychologically) from other animals. It’s a critical part of believing in our illusions—illusions to alleviate our death anxiety.

It doesn’t surprise me, though. As I peel this onion of human behavior, each layer reveals something new. I see where all of this fits and why it is the way it is—we need it this way to get out of bed in the morning,

These are cultural constructs to convince ourselves that we're "more" or "above" the animals. But we’re not. The evidence is in the way we hide our bodily functions and how we eat; hiding our animality is very apparent in things like "bathrooms," "plates, cups, forks, spoons, and tables," as well as "making toasts with drinks." Think about it. Observe other animals; how do they handle these functions and tasks?

These are all cultural constructs to help us disguise or hide our animal nature—you’ll never see other animals doing these things. We even disguise our food with names like "steak" or "hot dog." Those words have no real meaning as they apply to food. They are simply used to disguise what we’re doing.

We even disguise sex, the most animalistic behavior of all. We wrap it in "love" and make it something special, rather than simply acknowledging that it's an act of reproduction—an evolutionary drive just like survival. And we do it just like the rest of the animals. This is one of the reasons there are so many taboos, rituals, and rules around sex in different cultures. Ernest Becker said, “The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms. This is one of the reasons that sexuality has from the beginning been under taboos; it had to be lifted from the plane of physical fertilization to a spiritual one.”

Because of its animalistic nature, it’s an act that most reminds us of our mortality. That’s why we create all of the celebrations around it: flowers, chocolate hearts, “love letters,” fancy dinners, lingerie, holidays, etc. We want to elevate it as an act of “love” way beyond what the “animals” do; we make it “special” because we’re “special.”

It’s a difficult topic to unpack in the context of death anxiety. However, at its core, it reveals our animal nature and what we’ll devise in order to never face it or even admit what it really is.

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“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.” Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

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If we accept that we are animals, we are reminded that we will die and become “food for worms,” as Becker said—just like all of the other animals.

If you’ve seen the movie "Elephant Man," the line spoken by John Merrick really solidifies this idea. He said, "I am not an animal! I am a human being. I am a man." I know he was saying this in reference to his birth defect and appearance (the way he was being treated), but the argument still stands about how we feel about denying our animality and how insistent we are to separate ourselves from all other living things.

There can be a religious component to this belief. I understand why that is as well. In order to have the illusion of (literal) immortality, which we desire, there has to be something that sets us apart. Some religions even go as far as telling man to "take dominion over all living things and all of earth" (paraphrased). It’s easy to see how humans can believe that they are above other life. There’s another component to this: "Man was created in the image of God." This escalates into an even bigger problem. If you ask most religious people if they believe they’re an animal, they will say, "No, I’m special, created in the image of God; how could I be an animal?" This is what I was referring to in my post about Becker’s hero system. This is the religious component of that theory. It’s an effective illusion if one can maintain it. Both Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernest Becker believed that religion was no longer a valid hero system because of advances in science and technology, and because of these advances, most people have “moved on.” That’s where Nietzsche’s infamous quote came from: "God is dead." This was the idea behind it. Religion acted as a buffer against death anxiety for most people for thousands of years, all over the world, in all kinds of religions. In the last 200 years, we’ve become much more secular and tend to look to culture for our defense against death anxiety. Here again, you can see where we have denied our animality with these religious tenets—placing ourselves above every living thing and the earth itself.

What’s the caveat? What makes us different from animals? We have consciousness, or awareness, of our mortality. Your dog or cat doesn’t know that they’re going to die. They’re completely in the moment of “now.” There are no rabbits talking about being the best rabbit alive! Animals exist with instincts to survive and reproduce. At times, they may have the fight-or-flight instinct and be very afraid, but once out of danger, they never think about it again. In our unconscious mind, we are constantly in fight-or-flight mode. William James said, “There is always a panic rumbling beneath the surface of consciousness.” That panic comes from the knowledge of our impending death. Other animals don’t have this; that’s really the only thing that makes us different. It fascinates me to look at how we live and act, denying the inevitable (our death) and trying to hide the fact that we are animals. We would show our animality if we didn't have this knowledge. We would be exactly the same as all of the other animals.

I’m slowly, but surely, putting these pieces together. These are the pieces of these theories that show us who we are and why we are the way we are: human behavior. I’m specifically interested in the reasons we commit evil acts and how our death anxiety is revealed through acts of genocide, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and “othering.” We have so much to learn about these topics. In the end, I hope to share a tiny piece about the role that art can play in disclosing ways to deal with these big topics.

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“Denial of death, or, in psychodynamic terms, repression of death anxiety, generally results in banal and/or malignant outcomes—for example, preoccupation with shopping or the need to eradicate people who do not share our beliefs in a self-righteous quest to rid the world of evil. Repressed death anxiety is often projected onto other groups who are declared to be the all-encompassing repositories of evil and who must be destroyed so that life on earth will become what it is purported to be in heaven.”

Sheldon Solomon author of “The Worm at the Core: The Role of Death in Life

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Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind

I just finished reading the book "Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind" by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower. It’s an amazing book that posits a profound theory about how the human mind evolved and the obstacles it overcame that allowed us to be the way we are today—intelligent, creative, and innovative. It’s all based on our denial of reality. “The potent combination of our powerful intelligence with our massive reality denial has led to a dangerous world…” (Denial page 221)

It seems that we’ve been asking the wrong questions about human evolution and the evolution of the mind. The questions put forth in the book are, "Why is there no humanlike elephant or humanlike dolphin, despite millions of years of evolutionary opportunity?" And, "Why is it that humans alone can understand the minds of others?" The theory in the book is directly related to my project—how death anxiety and the repression mechanisms we use came to be, and the functions they served in the history of human evolution.

This is not a book review; I’m just connecting the dots with my work and sharing some insights as they pertain to death anxiety and the denial of death. It gets to the core of my project about denial. It addresses why we are “wired” to deny reality and how that leads to malignant manifestations of death anxiety, which is the crux of my work and project.

It’s important for me to understand the origins of the denial of death and death anxiety. These ideas are the mainspring of my book. I’ve been trying to find answers to these questions for a while. Fortunately, I received an email from a person who shares similar interests (Thanks, Tim!). He recommended that I read the book. Sheldon Solomon mentioned the book on a podcast I was listening to, and I made a mental note to look into it but never got around to buying the book. I’m very happy that I finally did.

It’s given me a lot of fodder for my endeavor and answered a lot of questions for me. Not to mention, I learned a lot about the evolutionary origin of humans and the cognitive psychology and evolution of the human mind.

Varki makes it very clear that these are not falsifiable theories and that he speculates a lot about them. I like that he’s approached it in an honest and scientific manner. I respect that. It leaves the proverbial door open to being proven wrong and to making better “guesses” in the future. This is how science works.

Varki relates an interesting and sad story about how he met Dr. Danny Brower. It was Brower’s theory that piqued Varki’s interest. The book was born from a conversation that lasted less than two hours. How it all came about is too lengthy to go into here, but it was fascinating and sad.

One of the main topics of the book is the Theory of Mind (ToM) or as some might call it, “consciousness.” As the author points out, there are so many definitions of that word that it’s better to be more definitive. Some may call it “self-awareness,” and it is to a degree. As the author says, this is a continuum from rudimentary self-awareness to full ToM. ToM is the ability to infer and understand another's mental state—their beliefs, thoughts, intentions, and feelings—and use this information to explain and predict human behavior. The book explains why denial is a key to being human. Varki posits that we separated ourselves from the other creatures because we grasped self-awareness of ours and others’ mortality (ToM) and then just as quickly developed a way to deny that mortality. And that’s what my writing is about: the way we deal with death anxiety and what that can lead to (racism, bigotry, genocide, and crimes against humanity).

The theory posited in this book can be summed up this way: Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory. MORT is the evolutionary adaptation in response to gaining theory of mind (ToM) by simultaneously evolving denial of reality. There it is: a few words that describe the essence of a 300-page book. Obviously, the details are important, but that’s the ultra-condensed version of the book.

We deny reality—that reality being our mortality (among a lot of other things). In order for us to be so intelligent, we needed to develop a full theory of mind (ToM). What comes along with ToM is the awareness of death. If the animal has no mechanism to deal with that—to deny it—they will not survive. Varki believes that other animals have repeatedly crossed the barrier over millions of years, having full ToM but not the mechanism to deny mortality. This leads to an evolutionary dead end. The only animal that has successfully crossed over is us, (behaviorally) modern homo sapiens.

So how did early (modern) humans gain a full theory of mind and a denial mechanism at the same time—something that no other animal has been able to accomplish? Varki and Brower present the idea that a denial mechanism was starting to form before full ToM arrived. It came in the form of lying. The main drive was to create offspring before MORT, so lying was a great way to get the best partner to make babies. I'm not sure how they lied; perhaps they claimed to have killed the largest lion or provided the most meat; who knows, but as a theory, it makes sense to pre-MORT. The ability to lie to others led to the ability to lie to oneself. Self-deception led to denying reality, and denying reality led to full ToM and MORT.

What a great story of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology! It’s really put things in perspective for me. I know there are a lot of ideas in this theory that I’ll use for my book, connecting evolutionary biology and psychology to the actions of genocide and crimes against humanity. It ties in so nicely and explains so much of human behavior. It does give a great foundation for my studies and interests.