"An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful that hasn't been seen before?"- Francis Ford Coppola, interview in 99u, 2011
ERNEST BECKER: ESCAPE FROM EVIL
Immortality and the pursuit of a perfect world. According to Becker, the majority of the bad things that people do—to both other people and the earth—are motivated by these aspirations. Starting with hunter-gatherer man, Becker illustrates how the notions of sacrifice and scapegoating were utilized in pre-civilized civilizations to try to please the gods. These were the first attempts by man to manipulate nature and force it to perform what man desired. Some would eventually assume the position of chief or shaman and serve as the intermediary for the people to seek the god's favor.
From ancient shamans and chiefs; kingship, religious states, and eventually money, all took turns in being in the service of man's attempts to fend off death. Becker looks at genocide as the technological amplification of ancient scapegoating--sacrificing the lives of some to appease the gods. He elaborates on how modern society still clings to those who they see as heroes to save them from their fears and the threats of death.
In the leading paragraph of his conclusion, Becker summarizes his points most succinctly.
"If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system that embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once its peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. They would argue and propagandize for the nonabsoluteness of the many different hero systems in the family of nations and make public a continuing assessment of the costs of mankind's impossible aims and paradoxes: how a given society is trying too hard to get rid of guilt and the terror of death by laying its trip on a neighbor. Then men might struggle, even in anguish, to come to terms with themselves and their world."
When Becker speaks of expiation, he is speaking of the guilt that he believes many feel for the very act of existence. He argues throughout the book that people have sought to alleviate this guilt in many ways, through blood sacrifices, scapegoating, and projection. Becker argues that men do not kill out of hate, but out of heroic bloodlust. It is because men kill with lust that he believes the evil that men do is less likely to be corrected.
EVIL IS A VICIOUS CIRCLE: RID THE WORLD OF EVIL WITH EVIL?
It's because humans cannot accept their animal nature, their insignificance, and oblivion after death that so much evil comes into the world. As he says, "man is not human." Examine the war on drugs, its desire to create a utopian society with no perceived weakness through reliance on substances, and its subsequent effects. It has left a wake of shattered lives, and no progress has been made at all.
Consider the appeal of Trump, a man who truly embodies the hero system Becker wrote about in his book. As the hero for the downtrodden in America, Trump represents a strongman who can vanquish evil from the land. With his demonization of outsiders and reckless promises, we see parallels to when Becker wrote about the need to "fetishize evil," to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. Trump believes evil is in the Mexicans, the Muslims, Hillary Clinton, and the media. Trump’s supporters feel that now evil can be located, named, and vanquished. And Trump is the hero to do it. Becker's book, written before his death in 1974, argues that it's this very process that results in most of the evil in the world.
"Men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world." This can be leveled as criticism of the left as well: their purity tests, thought policing, and other extreme measures are being used in the service of purity and goodness. The left has killed millions in the past to achieve these ideological aims, and no doubt they will again. No matter which side you look at, when people take violence into their hands "to make the world a better place," they will continue to perpetuate the evil they claim to be eliminating.” (from Ian Felton’s book review).
“Uprooted-Colorado Fern”—a whole plate, palladium-toned, photogenic drawing on waxed vellum paper.
“Uprooted-Colorado Fern”—a cyanotype photogram.
“Uprooted-Colorado Fern”—a cyanotype photogram.