Episode #162 ... The Creation of Meaning - The Denial of Death 26:16

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But with episodes being released in between installments of this Creation of Meaning series, I'll make it quick, but I feel like there are a couple things I gotta prime the episode with right off the bat. First off, this is an episode in the Creation of Meaning series. Second, at the center of this series has been a main character, so to speak, a protagonist. And if you've listened to the other episodes in this series, then you already know who I'm talking about here. This is a person who believes that we're living in what seems to be a disinterested universe.

This is a person who is basically subsisting in Western modernity, living in a culture of complete and total abundance, and yet starving at an existential level. Starving for some real sense of recognition in this world of digital ontologies. Starving for identity. Starving for a system of meaning that will actually endure throughout their otherwise day-to-day conjugal visits with suffering. We all know who I'm talking about here. And while these are not funny problems to be having,

You gotta admit, there are at least pretty ironic problems to be having given the circumstances here. We are overpopulated and yet often feel completely alone. We have a million paths to follow in life and yet often feel completely lost. You allow yourself to get cynical enough, and it can all start to feel like some sort of cruel joke that's being played on you. But we're not going to think like that. Not on this podcast, and neither is our protagonist for that matter.

The way I see it, if living in Western modernity is such a serious problem to this person, then maybe philosophy can help us get a little bit closer to finding a solution to this problem. And just like anyone trying to diagnose and fix a problem in their life,

Probably a good idea to get different opinions from different experts with different specialties. And so far we've done this. We've seen the ambiguity of Simone de Beauvoir. We've seen the value pluralism and affirmation of Nietzsche. The obedience to a spiritual quest in the work of Kierkegaard. I mean, in many ways, the episodes on Chiron and his steering into the absurdity of existence, in many ways, those episodes could easily be part of this series as well.

So, if we're going to set out to write another chapter in this series, it might be a good idea to continue this trend of diversity and maybe step outside the box a bit. It might be useful to hear from somebody that's approaching this whole creation of meaning process from a bit more of a scientific perspective. In other words, what can our protagonists learn about their system of meaning they've been creating? What insight can they get?

from someone who's less of an existentialist philosopher and more of what people have called a philosophical anthropologist. Today we're going to look at the work of Ernest Becker, his later work. This episode in particular is on his book called "The Denial of Death." And there's a lot of different entry points into his work, but I think one of the best ones that'll help us get right into the thick of things to start off the episode here is by asking the question: Why do you even care at all about creating a system of meaning in the first place?

Why do you care? Where does that desire even come from? Why is our internal experience not like the internal experience of other animals, where they don't seem to sit around and agonize over whether or not their life has meaning? A squirrel doesn't sit around and agonize over what kind of squirrel they want to be this week.

You see a koala at the zoo. Like, do you really think that koala wants to be the Sir Isaac Newton of koalas one day? No, it doesn't care. Human beings seem to care. There seems to be a piece of whatever this homo sapien thing is that cares that our actions in this life at least count for something. But why? Becker is going to start to explain this phenomenon by pointing out what he thinks is a fundamental dualistic relationship that lies at the core of human existence.

And it is this duality and the tension that it produces that creates in us a problem. It is a problem that every one of us experiences and every one of us eventually has to try to find a way to solve. And that is the tension caused by the fact that we are on one hand biological entities and on the other hand symbolic entities. Meaning that on the symbolic side of our existence, mostly up in our head somewhere,

We're capable of doing some pretty incredible things up there. We create societies. We write symphonies. We see billions of light years away with our telescopes. We create gods. We're capable of contemplating the infinite, Becker says. We're capable of all this cool stuff. And then at the exact same time, on the biological side of our existence...

You can be contemplating the infinite one second and then take one wrong step off a curb and just get flattened by a Mormon on a bicycle. Or get some random illness nobody's ever heard of. Your brain could just stop working one day. You could get stuck in an elevator and starve to death. What Becker's saying is that there's so many ways to just die.

And it doesn't matter at all if you painted the greatest picture of all time and touched the lives of billions while you were here. You are always just one step away from someone having to go into your Wikipedia page and turn all the "is's" into "was's". These things happen all the time to people. And no matter how careful you are, nobody is safe from this process. How are we to reconcile the symbolic ability to contemplate the infinite and create things that are seemingly so meaningful

with a biological existence that is so obviously fragile and seemingly meaningless? How can we come to terms with the fact that we are absolutely without question going to die one day and then to live with a full awareness of that fact every day of our lives? The short answer is that effectively,

You can't. Becker's going to have more to say here by the end of next episode. But for the sake of introducing the thesis of the denial of death, human beings cannot function in the world while also having an awareness of their death constantly haunting them up in their minds. Becker thinks it would be far too painful.

See, once you become aware of your own mortality, if you don't do something about it, you're going to be living in a pretty uncomfortable place almost constantly. Philosophers describe this feeling in a number of different ways. They may call it ambiguity. They may call it nausea. Some call it an existential paradox. But regardless of what language you want to use to describe it, Ernest Becker is going to call this place being in a state of terror induced by the realization that we are limited animals with unlimited horizons.

He describes the state of terror every person finds themselves in here, quote, This is the terror of death, to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this, yet to die, end quote. For the sake of clarity, let's get to the bottom of something real quick. What is the specific problem that we're actually trying to solve when it comes to this terror that Becker says people experience?

Because it's not just a fear of death. In many ways, that'd be a much easier problem to solve, but it'd be missing out on most of what Becker is saying here. What induces this terror in people is not the act of dying. People don't fear the moment of their death. They fear the implications of death. What our death will say about our lives and the things we did or didn't do while we were here on this planet.

So maybe the more accurate way to describe what we fear is to say that we fear both life and death. And to Becker, the two adjectives that best describe what we fear about those two things, life and death, is that one, we fear impermanence, and two, we fear insignificance. So we don't just fear death to Becker. What we fear is the end of life having been insignificant. Now,

This fear of impermanence and insignificance. To Becker, this is going to animate and explain basically everything that we do in our lives as human beings. Because one thing's obvious to him: when you're confronted by how fragile your biological existence is, faced with how incomprehensible the universe is in terms of complexity, and along with it, faced with considering your own insignificance and impermanence in the grand scheme of things, one thing's for sure to Becker at that point:

You're not just going to sit around in a state of neurotic terror for your entire life. People are going to find something that makes them feel better. So what are the options at that point? Becker thinks there are thousands of them. Once again, the title of the book is "The Denial of Death." And what he's referencing there is that we live in a state of denial about our death, and we do so in a bunch of interesting, creative, sometimes covert ways. Which is just to say that some of the ways we live in denial of our death

are far more obvious than others. Some of them are very obvious. And there's a few of these very obvious ones in the honorable mention column before we get to the real meat of Becker's analysis of society. So let's get those out of the way here. First of all, religion. Organized religion is an obvious example to Becker of a method that people might utilize to escape this fear of insignificance and impermanence that may come along with their death. I mean, that's kind of the whole point of there being an afterlife.

Second honorable mention of obvious ways people avoid death, drugs. Drugs are something people do. But it really should be said, drugs are not the only thing in this category. The same mental process could be applied to any grandiose movement into some form of escapism where the goal is to numb yourself from the terror of existence. And you could really do that with anything. I mean, you could do that with Pop-Tarts if you try hard enough. Last honorable mention is the tactic of fully immersing yourself in mundane day-to-day tasks.

This is actually surprisingly common these days. The goal, Becker says, is keeping yourself busy all the time so that you never have to think too much about the meaning of life overall. Ernest Becker calls this tranquilizing ourselves in the trivial.

But as interesting as these examples would be to talk about, as a philosophical anthropologist, the real thing Becker wants to offer some clarity about is why society develops in the way that it does. And as far as he can tell, the vast majority of people facing this terror of impermanence and insignificance respond by engaging in a protest against their insignificance. They engage in what he calls a, quote, defiant creation of meaning, end quote.

They set out on a hero's journey. He calls them cultural heroes, seeking out significance and permanence throughout their life all along the way, acting out what he calls an immortality project. Now, an immortality project is exactly what it sounds like. This is a project where the goal is to make you immortal, or at least a piece of yourself immortal. Let me explain. When the protagonist of this series creates a system of values and has a set of projects,

The only reason that person even cares about creating a system of values is because they want to get rid of that feeling of existential dread where everything seems insignificant and impermanent. In other words, they run from the fragility of their biological existence and then retreat purely into the symbolic side of their existence, the hope being that by carrying out their set of projects, their actions will immortalize their symbolic selves within human culture.

The purpose of life to Becker then becomes to try to find a way to use your efforts in this life to serve society and leave a lasting impact long after your biological existence ends. This is as true of the Nobel laureate trying to find a cure to some disease as it is about the single mother of seven who just wants to make sure her kids go on to have a better life than she did. This is why people create great works of art.

This is why people run marathons. This is why people do anything at all other than just sit around and get Cheeto fingers and fuse into a beanbag all day. And don't get me wrong here. Becker would no doubt be a fan of this self-aware, self-realized version of this defiant creation of meaning that we've been engaged in. He knew that he was writing this analysis of people living in the post-religious, post-God-is-dead world of Western modernity. He wouldn't be ashamed of using similar words to what other existentialist philosophers have used in their work.

For example, when somebody becomes one of these cultural heroes engaged in an immortality project, part of what they're seeking, he says, is what you could call a type of power. And willing ourselves towards that power starts to sound almost like overcoming resistance.

He says, quote, But here's the thing to remember. The implications of what Becker's saying about our denial of death go much further than just the individual, right? Because if what Becker is saying here is true of the individual...

then it might be able to give us some level of insight into how we should be thinking about human culture overall. Human culture, to Becker, can be thought of as the conglomeration of millions of different immortality projects all working together. Human civilization can be seen in many ways as the reflexive response to our awareness of our own mortality. This is the collective game that we're all playing together.

And think of what makes this game even work at all. Our societies rely on the fact that we aren't all going to be sitting around worrying about the fact we're going to die one day and that nothing really means anything on an objective level. So human culture provides people with ready-made, pre-molded societal roles to fall into. These roles pull them out of the unproductive state of neurotic terror they'd otherwise be in, and then these roles give people the illusion of significance and permanence.

What Becker is saying is that we learn to identify ourselves and our values based on the categories that our culture gives us to work with.

Where else would we get them? We don't just pull random categories of identity out of thin air. We say things like, "I'm a homeowner." "I'm a ballet dancer." "I'm a Democrat." "I'm a Republican." "I'm an entrepreneur." "I'm a blue-collar worker." We say this stuff, but what you really are though is a collection of illusions. Illusions you appropriate from the culture you live in that make you feel significant and permanent because they allow you to attach yourself to cultural ideals.

Let me give an example of this. Imagine I decide to fall into the societal role of a mime. Born and raised into a family of people that talked way too much, and I rebelled against my stepdad, and the mime life chose me. That becomes the cultural ideal that I embody. Now, Becker would say, falling into that pre-molded, socially accepted role brings me a lot of comfort.

For one, I feel significant and individuated because now I'm not just some random shapeless being. I'm a mime now. I provide a service to culture at large. I mean, people love me. People love me. When I go out into the streets and I start miming, making everybody feel a mixture of impressed but slightly uncomfortable, that's money in the bank right there for me. I have an identity now.

More than that, though, being a mime answers a lot of questions I might otherwise have about my existence. For example, I can model myself after these similar values, projects, and rituals of all the other mimes that have carved out a path for me. When people talk about me at my funeral, when all my mime friends are clocked out for the day and they can actually start talking, they will always remember me as a mime. He was a good mime. Salt of the earth mime he was.

And like all the mimes who came before me and all the mimes that are yet to be born, I become one small, individuated, significant part of some sort of continuum of the cultural ideal of a mime. There's permanence to that. I become part of something bigger than just me there.

Now replace mime with any societal role that people may fall into, any illusion that people create just to manufacture significance and meaning. What our lives become is a collection of convenient illusions that make us feel once again bigger, more in control, more durable, and more important than we actually are. But Becker would want to be clear about something here. Whether or not there actually is any level of ultimate cosmic importance to these illusions we come up with,

We definitely need these illusions. Becker uses the word illusions, but the interesting thing is that he's not saying that word as a pejorative. He also calls these illusions necessary lies, or a quote, "...necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation."

End quote. And what he means is that we need these lies because, again, if we didn't have them, people wouldn't be able to function, society wouldn't be able to continue, and most of us would live in a state of constant neurotic terror. We need illusions. Look, there is nothing about being a homo sapien that guarantees you any hope of being able to comprehend the complexity of the universe. There's no promises there.

Which is also to say that the natural state of the universe may be way too much for our monkey brains to handle. It most likely is. And because of this, we need to be able to take the overwhelming level of natural complexity and break it down into supernatural illusions that are, yes, human constructions, but are at the very least comprehensible and meaningful to us. Now,

You can imagine somebody hearing Becker's analysis here, and they might start to feel a little bit hopeless about their own personal situation. They may think, Becker's right. All these ways that we immerse ourselves in culture and create systems of meaning, they're all just illusions. Human constructions by people afraid of their own insignificance and impermanence. This person may say, my problem is going to be, and to be fair, this sounds like me about 15 years ago, if I'm being honest. This person may say, my problem is that I'm just too dang smart for everyone.

I'm too smart. I am just always going to be able to see through the illusory nature of these cultural ideals. And so what naturally goes along with that is that nothing will ever feel meaningful to me. It is effectively impossible for me to ever be a happy person.

Becker would have seen this coming. He talks at one point about how in Western modernity, we think of it as such a valuable skill to have a really good BS detector. My words, not his. The point he's making, though, is that with so much information out there to sort through, we all want the ability to separate the legitimate ideas from things that are merely illusions or just downright false. The

The problem is, if you start to get too good of a BS detector, and now you start to see the illusions and the narratives that underlie every single one of these cultural hero journeys that somebody might engage in, at that point you can start to ask the question, how do you not just see through the story that you're telling yourself every day, and end up right back where you started in a place of terror or neuroticism? Becker would no doubt look at 17-year-old Uncle Steve, who's convinced that he's never going to be a happy person, and he'd say, okay, listen for a second.

You do currently interface with the world around you based on a set of constructed illusions. And you do currently have meaningful activities that you engage in every day that you've for some reason decided it's okay for you to live by, at least for now.

Look, you are not accessing the unbridled complexity of the universe. You're a dancing monkey just like the rest of us. And maybe take some of that overflowing intelligence that you have, all that neurotic energy, and apply it to something that's actually going to be productive for you. Get better at the skill of compartmentalizing the illusions that give you the life you want to have.

Get better at seeing these illusions as tools and then use those tools to build a shelter for yourself that's going to be sturdy. Something that's going to last over the years. Something that's going to survive a couple storms along the way. See, when your culture or the place you arbitrarily fell into your cultural roles is all that you've ever known,

When you're so far down the rabbit hole of mistaking your own personal set of illusions, your heroic project, for the reality of the universe, Becker thinks it becomes so easy to miss out on just how similar the function of religion and the function of culture really are. And it's right in front of your eyes. He says that normality is the refusal of reality, meaning to Becker that all of culture is supernatural.

Think about it. Culture is a human construction, obviously. And it's made up of various illusions that make people feel better about their impending death and cosmic insignificance. Not unlike religion. People say stuff in Western modernity all the time, like, look at these religious people.

What, they get a Groupon for a lobotomy together? Like, these people truly believe they're going to be drinking margaritas up in the clouds with Winston Churchill one day. And all of this is so obviously just because of the fact they're terrified that they're going to have to die soon. But Becker would say, look at culture for a second. Look at what you blindly immersed yourself into. Religion certainly gives people a stable identity to hold on to. So does culture.

Religion gives people a purpose and a moralistic path towards getting to that purpose. So does culture. Religion gives people an oversimplified version of reality so that it's easy for them to understand. So does culture. Religion gives people hope of an afterlife. So does culture. You know, the secular version of an afterlife is just called a legacy.

And whether you're a religious zealot or just a cultural hero carrying out a set of projects you've come up with, you are more or less scratching the same itch at the root of human existence. He says, quote, "...it doesn't matter whether the cultural hero system is frankly magical, religious and primitive, or secular, scientific and civilized. It is still a mythical hero system in which people serve in order to get a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning."

End quote.

So no matter how secular or scientific something may seem to be, ultimately, it's just a part of our religion of Western modernity. As he says, it doesn't matter if it's a totem pole, a temple, a skyscraper, or a family that spans three generations. All of these are monuments to the same cultural, heroic, religious process that people are engaged in.

Now you may come away from this feeling like Becker's being a little bit unnecessarily hostile towards this whole process that's going on with culture. I mean, seriously, what if I like totem poles? What if I like skyscrapers? In other words, what is the problem really with people finding a purpose for their life by immersing themselves in a culture and then providing a service that makes society better for the people around them? Don't we want more of that to happen? Instead of people just tranquilizing themselves with the trivial or drowning themselves in drugs and entertainment?

Becker would no doubt say yes. And he's not common at anyone with any kind of hostility here. Remember, Becker is an anthropologist and ultimately a scientist. It may feel a little bit abrasive when somebody not only tells you what you're doing, but then tells you why you're doing it. Almost like they're your therapist. But understand the intent of the therapist is never to make you feel bad or to make you feel dumb.

The hope is that by understanding what drives you at a fundamental level, you can at least be a little more aware of what's going on and a little more capable of being with whatever it is that you're going through. You know, you can go your entire life hating things about yourself and how you interface with people in the world around you. You can spend your entire life thinking that you're broken, that there's this part of yourself that needs to be fixed and until it's gone, you're never going to be able to fully live.

But just like this latent fear of death, this terror and pain that resides just under the surface, the way that I read Becker is that it seems like what he's trying to do is to show us what is going on. And that even if we have to live with this trauma, this fear of death for the rest of our lives, at least by showing us it,

we can maybe learn to just be alongside it. Or at the very least, not be boiling in your own soup all the time. Now, a big part of what he's trying to show us is something about ourselves that's going to be extremely important for the rest of his work that we're talking about next time. Something about ourselves that if you just approach the study of human beings from a place of complete Enlightenment-era scientific value neutrality, you might miss out on something very important about our existence, and that is this.

that there seems to be a part of whatever a homo sapien is that is undeniably religious. Now remember back to the beginning of the Kierkegaard episode. Use whatever language you want here. If you don't like the word religious, use the word anthropomorphic. Use the word spiritual. Use the word human if you want. But Becker's going to say no matter what words you decide to use, recognize the fact that there is a part of being whatever kind of creature we are that cares about our actions being meaningful and counting for at least something.

That is an impulse well documented in our religious traditions. Part of being the type of creature we are is the tendency to turn to oversimplified illusions that make us feel more comfortable. Well documented in religion as well. The protagonist of this creation and meaning series, and many other people like them, may find themselves having a hard time connecting the things that they do in their life to anything that's meaningful and enduring.

They may fancy themselves a rational, scientific kind of person that remains neutral and unbiased and checks their values at the door when giving their analysis of the world. But to not acknowledge the religious side of human existence only may serve to hurt you. Or as Becker theorizes, maybe a totally value-neutral scientific approach towards understanding something as value-laden as human behavior has been sabotaging the entire process.

Maybe what we need is something more like a humanistic science. Something that can understand not just why people create the immortality projects they do, that go on to do so much great stuff in the world, but also something that can understand why people do the horrible things they do. Why they hurt people. Why they hate people. How it could be that a person whose contribution to society helps others and saves lives all the time...

But they're also simultaneously a kind of person who will, quote, kill out of joy, as Becker says. Next episode, we're going to talk about the dire consequences of this denial of death. It's not all good stuff. This is an important message in the later work of Ernest Becker that he never got to send out during his lifetime.

Cancer may have taken the biological existence of Ernest Becker, but his symbolic existence lives on through what many call the greatest work he ever produced, the book we're talking about next time, Escape from Evil. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.