“Homomortalis” The eternal man.
Ernest Becker - 1924 - 1973
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker asserted in his 1973 book The Denial of Death that humans, as intelligent animals, are able to grasp the inevitability of death. They, therefore, spend their lives building and believing in cultural elements that illustrate how to make themselves stand out as individuals and give their lives significance and meaning. Death creates an anxiety in humans; it strikes at unexpected and random moments, and its nature is essentially unknowable, causing people to spend most of their time and energy to explain, forestall, and avoid it.
Have you ever wondered why human beings can’t stop killing each other? Why is there war? Why is there genocide? Those are the most violent acts of death denial (death anxiety quelled). If your beliefs are challenged or threatened, you will lash out or attack those that are threatening your system of beliefs that are keeping the death anxiety at bay. There are many other ways this anxiety manifests itself; wealth, material stuff, physical fitness, sports, heroes, etc. Most of us have what Becker calls immortality projects. Work we do so that some part of us lives on after we die. Please take a few minutes and watch Dr. Sheldon Solomon’s video at the bottom of this page. He explains Terror Management Theory very well.
I’ve contemplated what I’ve spent over 30 years doing, photographing marginalized communities and ideas, and never really understanding WHY I was doing that. Does that ring true for you? Graduate school provided a method for me to connect the dots about who I am and my work. However, that did not answer the bigger question for humanity. Why do we have marginalized communities and ideas?
Have you ever considered what meaning or purpose your life has? Of course, you have. We all have had those moments of self-reflection, or as Socrates would say, “self-examination”. Did you find any answers? I bet you had a difficult time finding good reasons for your existence. And I’m sure this topic rarely comes up in conversations that you have on a day-to-day basis. I feel confident that I have some answers, or maybe a better way to say it is that I’ve found some very powerful theories that have explanatory power.
That’s what I’m most interested in - exploring and trying to answer the question(s) of human behavior and belief. Why do we do the things we do? And, moreover, what can we do (if anything) to control or mitigate the bad stuff.
We have an epistemic crisis going on right now in the world. People are so influenced by social media and the press, they cannot, or refuse to, think critically. Most have no clue about what they believe or why, they only repeat tropes as they hear them. Confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, cognitive dissidence, all in full effect today; look around.
Dr. Sheldon Solomon sums it up like this, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else. It’s a mainspring of human activity: activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death; to overcome it by denying, in some way, that it is our final destiny.”
How do you deal with your impending death?