The Word "Terror" in Terror Management Theory (TMT) - Is It A Problem?

In "terror management theory," the word "terror" is used more abstractly, referring to the existential dread or fear of mortality that humans experience. It's not necessarily about immediate danger or physical threats, but rather the anxiety and discomfort associated with the awareness of our own mortality. So, while it may not align perfectly with the common usage of "terror," it's used to convey the profound psychological unease that comes with confronting the reality of death.

Recently, I was talking to someone about death anxiety and terror management theory and my interests and art (book) surrounding these topics. The conversation was fairly straightforward. In the end, they didn’t care for the word “terror” in “terror management theory.” They implied that it was a poor choice of words and that it was too much—a kind of turn-off. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to me, but this time I wanted to defend it. I had to think about it for a while but came up with the first paragraph of the post about the word terror in TMT.

“Imagine you’re afraid of dying. Terror management theory says we deal with this fear by holding onto beliefs and values that give our lives meaning, like religion or cultural traditions, and by boosting our self-esteem. Basically, we distract ourselves from the scary thought of death by focusing on things that make us feel good about ourselves and our place in the world.”

Terror is defined as “a state of intense or overwhelming fear.” I’m not sure about you, but that’s a pretty good definition for the way I feel about my death (slowly trying to come to terms with it). We all feel terrified about dying. Specifically, we want to be remembered, and we want our lives to have meant something (personal significance). We are worried about those we leave behind, or that our lives didn’t really mean much while we were here. Those are very difficult ideas to assimilate and accommodate. We need to find meaning and significance, and if we’re lucky enough to find those, we need to hold onto them and reinforce them in our lives every day. We feel this way because we are humans and we have the unique knowledge that we are going to die.

Agreed Madness

It’s our “one month” anniversary today. We’ve been in New Mexico for 30 days, and man, time has whizzed by!!

Between unpacking boxes and running household errands, I’ve been slowly getting back on track to work on my book. I get excited about the thought of actually completing this work. It’s no longer a hope or dream; it’s close to becoming a reality.

“Man literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, and personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.”

— Ernest Becker, Denial of Death

These theories seem simple on the surface, but it takes some deep thinking and evaluation to really understand them and, moreover, to apply them to your life. My hope is that by sharing these ideas and concepts in a book, it will inspire people (especially artists) to engage with these theories and start to share them through their art.

I wrote a while ago about someone asking me if there was a movement in art around “death anxiety.” In other words, Becker’s and Solomon's (et al.) theories could form an entire art movement based on the theories dealing with death anxiety and terror management. This is what happened in existential psychology. There are people working on PhDs in terror management theory and have been for years; why not art? Not unlike impressionism, cubism, dada, etc.

In a lot of ways, all art does address these ideas, but rarely intentionally or consciously. It’s food for thought and a wonderful way to get people to engage with these ideas.

Importance of Creativity

"Both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions.

The only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life.

The creative person becomes, in art, literature, and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way to triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans through Shakespeare.

Otto Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, and his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create." Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Radical Mindfulness Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital

This is a book by Dr. James Rowe that I would recommend reading if you want to understand what I’m trying to address through my artwork and my life in general (my interests). He is addressing Ernest Becker’s theories and terror management directly. I’ve never seen anyone write about the results of death anxiety applied to politics and modern and historical problems directly. My book will address these theories in detail, but I’ve made it personal. I’ve explained how the theories have driven me both creatively and psychologically.

Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice, asking why inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, and species continue to exist. Specifically, Dr. James K. Rowe examines fear of death as a root cause of systemic inequalities and proposes a more embodied approach to social change as a solution.

Collecting insights from powerful thinkers across multiple traditions—including black radicals, Indigenous resurgence theorists, terror management theorists, and Buddhist feminists—Rowe argues for the political importance of seemingly apolitical practices such as meditation and ritual. These tactics are insufficient on their own, but when included in social movements fighting structural injustices, mind-body practices can start to transform the embodied fears that give supremacist ideologies endless fuel while remaining unaffected by most political actors.

Radical Mindfulness is for academics, activists, and individuals who want to overcome supremacy of all kinds but are struggling to understand and develop methods for attacking it at its roots.

Roger Ebert's Dying Words

Roger Ebert (June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. I used to watch and read his reviews of movies. Generally speaking, I agreed most of the time with his critiques. Sometime ago, I heard that Roger Ebert’s wife, Chaz, talked about Roger’s last words. He died of cancer in 2013.

“Life is but a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

— Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

Clem Snide released an album called "Forever Just Beyond." The lead track on the album, “Roger Ebert,” is especially arresting. The late film critic's wife, Chaz, recalled Roger Ebert's final words in a letter to her, which served as the basis for the lyrics. As the song puts it:

Did you know these were Roger Ebert’s dying words?

It’s all an elaborate hoax

It’s all an elaborate hoax

There is a vastness that can’t be contained

Or described as a thought in the flesh of our brain

It’s everything, everywhere, future and past

Dissolving forever in an eternal flash.

It’s all an elaborate hoax

It’s all an elaborate hoax

Chaz Ebert wrote, "The one thing people might be surprised about—Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him, and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I asked him, “What’s a hoax?” And he was talking about this world and this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once."

“Circles, Squares, and Triangles,” 3.75” x 5” acrylic and charcoal on paper.