The Denial of Death by Ernest becker | Notes & Summary
Relevance
Becker’s Pulitzer-prize-winning work attempts to capture the fundamental drive of the human condition that claims to explain a majority of our societal institutions, pathologies, and irrational behaviors.
He provides a psychological argument for our pan-cultural religious drive to merge with a beyond while standing out. He shows how our seemingly secular culture is just as illusory and structurally analogous to the religions we thought we have outgrown. Implicit in this argument is a rejection of truth as a highly held value in statecraft.
Amongst many other phenomena, Becker explains why we increasingly tend to deify our lovers and leaders, why genius and lunatics are indistinguishable, and why modernity has birthed so many pathologies.
Summary
Becker’s project can be divided into three parts: 1. an outline of a unique problem that faces all human beings the reconciliation of which informs our drives and motives 2. Common solutions we use to address this problem 3. And an analysis of society through the framework built upon 1 and 2.
The problem we face is two-pronged: the full comprehension of our inevitable death renders life meaningless because of our impermanence; the full force of life brings about the same dread of nihilism for it makes us feel insignificant, as if we have been blasted by sensory overload and cannot orient ourselves in the immense complexity. This problem of meaninglessness is what creates our heroic urges. A hero is someone who faces the annihilation of death and life, and answers by creating meaning through merging with an ultimate beyond (Agape) and through standing out (Eros). Death with its lack makes us feel impermanent, so we seek transcendence and permanence through Agape. Life in its totality makes us feel insignificant, so we seek individuality and importance through Eros. Both life and death deny any grounds for genuine meaning. Both Agape and Eros enables us to create distinctions between Good and Evil and carve out meaning in the world. But there is also a profound tension in this process as the twin urges, Agape and Eros, are often antagonistic to each other.
The first solution we have towards this problem are character defenses such as “ivy leaguer”, “Democrat”, “Banker”. This fulfills Agape because we merge into a cultural ideal, it grounds our existence and makes us feel “real”. This fulfills Eros because each character has a pre-determined set of rules and goals to strive for, it paints a path of individuation. These traits are usually narcissistic in nature and oppressive in the sense that we no longer get to choose our own paths forward.
The second solution we have are transference objects. Transference involves giving disproportionate special attention to an object (human or nonhuman), and the appreciation, in that object, the entirety of existence. This satisfies Agape because we can merge and identify ourselves with a local stimulus which represents all the power and horror of the universe. This satisfies Eros because we can simply look at the small signs coming from this object to direct our own paths of individuation instead of being burdened with interpreting the world ourselves. Thus, the surrender to the transference object is, paradoxically, a way to obtain control. By submitting to a powerful transference object, we identify with it’s immortality; by using it as the sole litmus of our actions, we are guided in our own individuation. “Transference heroics gives man what he needs, certain degree of uniqueness, a definite reference point for his practice of goodness, within a certain secure level of safety and control. But what makes it demeaning is that it is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one’s control.”
The power of this framework is that Becker provides a secular psychological explanation for our religious drives of Agape and Eros. The wain of institutionalized religion does not resolve our religious needs of heroism. Becker gives a revealing analysis of society, explaining in a satisfying manner why our seemingly secular culture is no different structurally than the religions we thought we outgrew.
Becker identifies the mass cultural phenomena ever since the downfall of religion of having lovers and leaders as transference objects. We create our own direction in the slightest perhaps even unintentional signs they give off (Eros) and we identify our own worth with their perceived Godhood (Agape). We deify individuals because of our own needs yet they always disappoint for no mortal can shoulder the burden of godhood.
Becker sees culture as a set of ready made character defenses and transference objects for individuals to satisfy their twin urges. We “tranquilize ourselves with the trivial” unimportant rules that so occupy the minds of everyone because “normality is the refusal of reality”. In other words, to be sane and to play by society’s rules one needs to repress and ignore a great deal of reality. Remember, the problem consisted of fully understanding life and death in all its complexity and fullness — it is then that we go neurotic. We must be “protected from reality“ even if this protection usually comes at costly prices. Culture is necessarily illusory in that it is a secondary world of humanly created meaning. Our current secular society, as much as we try to ignore it, is not less or more mythical than one centered around religion. All of our symbolic systems exist to help us “earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakeable meaning… In this sense everything that Man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.”
Becker believes that institutionalized religion, specifically Christianity, is the best mode of satisfying our urges. God is the perfect beyond because he is abstract and therefore malleable and not so easily falsifiable. “Religion answers directly to the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong. It also takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand. We no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation — the powers that created us, not those into whose lives we accidentally fell.” Christianity is also ideal because it turns our self-hatred and guilt of our creatureliness — our original sin — as conditions for salvation.
The plight of the modern individual is characterized by the inability for any of the traditional immortality ideologies to satisfy one’s urge for heroism. As a consequence, neurosis is more widespread because our defense mechanisms have stopped working and we are faced with the nihilism of life and death. Modernity comes with two curses. Firstly, globalization and diversity in thought makes us less sure of the righteousness of our own views. Diversity in ideology is a threat to heroism because the hero must believe that he is on the one true path. Thus, it can be disheartening to see “authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views.” Secondly, our analytical ability has rendered us cynical, depriving our ability to have faith.
Becker also makes a surprising connection between polar opposites of our social hierarchy. He groups our cultural heroes: the Freuds, the Newtons, and the Musks right next to the members we most look down upon: the lunatics. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.” Both lunatics and creators are too analytical and real to play by the illusions of society, yet the only thing separating them is that the former has the intellectual and artistic capabilities to create new illusions of their own.
Analysis
1. The Problem:
1.1 The fear of Death
“Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”
The fundamental struggle that Becker points to is a unique dichotomy that only humans have to wrestle with: “Man has a symbolic identity, he is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life story, the ability to comprehend the cosmos and atoms and abstract concepts such as infinity. But, he is also worm food, his life is objectively meaningless and he will one day rot and disappear forever, it is a terrifying dilemma.“ This is why we are necessarily mad. In the quote above the first “mad” connotes universal existential madness, the lack of objective meaning in existence, the second an appearance of mental health, whether one appears to be ‘sane’ in the most conventional sense, the third a form of delusion, when someone represses and ignores part of reality. Essentially, it is saying that the universe is so objectively meaningless and complex that the only way to function and appear sane is to ignore and repress a large part of reality.
This dichotomy is hard to resolve, we are symbolic abstract thinkers but also just worm food, and we are reminded of our creatureliness every day. The anus, shit, periods, blood are psychologically problematic because it reminds us of our mortality, of our eventual demise, even if only on an unconscious level making it that much harder for us to reconcile our symbolic and corporeal selves.
“The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death,” lest we become mad men.
1.2 The fear of Life
It thus becomes confusing when Becker goes on in the next chapter to state that we have a fear of life as well. I had a hard time reconciling the two until I realized that the unifying theory behind the fear of life and death is the fear of meaninglessness and annihilation.
Let’s break this up:
Why do we fear death? Because we fear the abyss, the black TV screen. It is not so much the long void which we despise but rather that this void robs us of any ultimate objective meaning in life. Had I been told I would live forever, I would cease to ask the question if something is meaningful because if I were eternal then anything I find meaningful would have ultimate meaning. The clear subjectivity which the brevity of our lives imply rather than its inevitable absence robs us of the basis for eternal meaning and that is why I think we are truly afraid.
The second part is harder, why do we fear life and why do we fear existence, the seemingly opposite pole of the fear just discussed. In Becker’s words:
“We are rightfully afraid of the totality of the universe of our most grandiose selves, the reason being that there is just too much to take in. The feeling of overwhelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation. We also fear our own most grandiose selves, why are we here, who are we, what are we doing here, what is our mission. Our own existence is just as incomprehensible.”
What is the polar opposite of a black TV screen? It’s not the latest comedy or a panorama of a beautiful mountain top but rather complete static noise, that which cannot be reduced. If we think about meaning as our ability to compress, to make manageable the complexity of the universe, to reason abstractly and draw generalizations from unique particulars, then perfect static noise — in which no patterns can be found — leads us to the same conclusion as the abyss: meaninglessness. Absolute freedom and taking on the ultimate is a form of annihilation as extreme as our physical death. It reminds us of our creatureliness just as much as death does.
“We repress because it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world full of beauty, majesty, and terror.“
The fear of meaninglessness is the unifying theory of why we fear both life and death, and our path in life can be seen as a balancing act between the extremes of noise and void, of sensory overload and mental starvation.
Otto Rank, in his book Art and Artist, captured this duality well in the social sphere. He argued that one psychological variant of “death” was total conformity to the crowd when one completely loses one’s individuality. The psychological variant of “life” is the opposite but equally frightening feeling when we leave the comfort of the crowd. He believed that it is these equally fearful tensions that sway us in life.
Becker’s project here is structurally similar but more all-encompassing. Becker’s fear of life and death isn’t only commenting on Rankian social relationships but of meaning in general, and how both extremes tends to rob away any opportunity for meaning.
1.3 The Twin Urges of Man
One of the qualities of Man that fascinated Becker was how we have an instinctive sense to “be good”. But what is goodness?
In the preceding sections we have a clear definition of what “bad” is: the annihilation and nihilism from the threat of both life and death. Life in it’s fullness reminds us of our insignificance. This causes nihilism because we can’t handle the world’s complexity and would much prefer a Manichean stand between Good and Evil. Death when comprehended fully reminds us of our impermanence. This causes nihilism because we always seek ultimate grounds to stand on.
Thus the opposite of this innate sense of “bad” is what Becker coined the good. It is to obtain significance and transcend. Both of these activities help us create meaning in the world, the former reduces complexity, while the latter grounds our struggles in eternity. Both of these grants us a sense of direction, carving out Good from Evil. The former tells us what to approach and what to avoid e.g. money/fame/enlightenment, while the latter gives us a greater beyond, an ultimate good, to fight for e.g. country/god/family.
Thus, Becker states that we have two ways of pursuing this “Goodness”: The Christian motive of Agape, to merge and lose oneself in something larger, and Eros, to experience more life and develop self-powers, to develop the uniqueness of the individual creature, the impulsion to stick out in nature and shine. The transcendence of Agape is a reflex against the impermanence from death, and the uniqueness of Eros is a reflex against the insignificance from life.
This is why Becker condenses heroics into the transmutation of death and annihilation into transcendence, citing how our common cultural heroes e.g. Christ are the ones who have faced death with the utmost serenity and have emerged victorious. Heroism is thus “a reflex of death”, a narcissistic protest against our own insignificance through Agape and Eros. But the heroic journey is not one without it’s own paradox: “If he gives in to Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation.”
Heroism is the creation of meaning in the process of transcending (fighting for a greater beyond) and standing out (cultivating individual greatness).
2. The Solution
2.1 Character Defenses
By character defenses Becker means identity and narrative, the stories and labels we have put on ourselves “Ivy-leaguer”, “Democrat”, “African American” and also less categorical ones “I am in control”, “I am invulnerable”… Becker views the growth of a child as the abandoning of ecstasy, awe, and fear by building these defenses. “They allow him to feel that he controls his life and his death, that he really does live and act as a willful and free individual, that he has a unique and self-fashion identity, that he is somebody — not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet.”
Thus the author calls the character a vital lie because shedding it means risking death and madness. Our character is armor that helps us make sense of the world, to not drown in optionality. The tradeoff is that we are out of touch with what really drives us: our drivenness becomes second-hand; it is we who are fulfilling the ideals of this caricature we have constructed of ourselves in our mind. It is vital because as humans we can only comprehend so much complexity at once: Freud remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the common misery of life.
A common theme of these character defenses is that they overcompensate for Man’s real insignificance, and thus the character defenses are all narcissistic in nature. “He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe, he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.” It does not come without a price: “We repress our bodies to purchase a soul time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. Life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.”
You can see how this is a reflex against both a terror of life and a terror of death. Against the latter, character traits make us feel significant and real (in the metaphysical sense), like we are someone. Against the former, character traits help reduce the complexity of the world such that you can fulfill the ideals of this caricature instead of trying to navigate the untamable terrain of reality.
2.2 Transference Objects
Transference involves giving disproportionate special attention to an object (human or nonhuman), and the appreciation, in that object , the entirety of existence. We encapsulate all of our fears as well as dreams into this object and have it become the litmus with which we measure our own worthiness. Fundamentally, it is the taming of terror of both life and death: the power and horror of the universe all distilled in one place, a localized stimulus.
The first reason we transfer is Agape, our drive for immortality from the reflex against the fear of death. We identify with this seemingly all-powerful entity which gives us a greater beyond to merge into and thus something to fight for — a classifier between Good and Evil. This urge, Becker argues, originates from childhood when the child, trying to reconcile it’s own mortality, identifies with the parent’s apparent omnipotence: “If I am like my seemingly all-powerful mother, I will never die”. But as adults we seek a much broader sphere of beyonds and transference objects to merge into: a successful friend, a company, a leader, a lover, a creed…
The second reason for transference is Eros, our drive for individuation from the reflex of the terror of life. We seek signs of how we should grow as individuals and the signs from the transference object gives us direction. Few among us are strong enough to figure out who we want and ought to be by ourselves, through our own understanding of the world. Thus, the surrender to the transference object is, paradoxically, a way to obtain control. Instead of trying to make rational sense of the awe of the universe, to forge our own maps of meaning, to determine our own “good” and “evil”, it is much easier to make a single local stimulus, usually a person, the judge of our goodness and badness. “What is more natural, than to dispel this unspeakable mystery by addressing our performance of heroics to another human being … If it is bad, we know that it is bad by his reactions and so are able to instantly change it.”
By submitting to a powerful transference object, we identify with it’s immortality; by using it as the sole litmus of our actions, we are guided in our own individuation.
We gain assurance in our transference object’s power (lover’s occupation or attractiveness, leader’s effectiveness…), and we create a system of morality from it’s judgement (whether they are pleased with us). Make no mistake, Becker did not intend transference to be seen as an illness which only the foolish and weak use. Like Girard, he is merely pointing out a hidden truth underlying our behavior. He argues that transference is a natural function of heroism, and a “necessary projection in order to stand life, death, and oneself.”
“Transference heroics gives man what he needs, certain degree of uniqueness, a definite reference point for his practice of goodness, within a certain secure level of safety and control. But what makes it demeaning is that it is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one’s control.” The beauty of this theory is that it has such strong explanatory power: the jury of individuals in our minds judging our actions, the mimetic rivals we form can all be seen as a function of an individual’s inability to make sense of the full complexity of the world and the instinctual desire for direction nonetheless.
The question isn’t how do we stop our transference, but rather “what are the best beyonds, healthiest illusions, most productive immortality projects one can surrender to?”
3. Cultural Commentary
I have summarized Becker’s explanation of the problem of the terror of life and death — why people crave to be heroes — as well as the solution: character defenses and transference objects. It is now profitable to examine the world in this Beckerian framework.
In this examination we will see how we are no less religious than cultures of old. The fundamental structure of Christianity: to define good and evil in the personal sphere and designate eligibility for immortality based on the judgement of an omnipotent other may be more pervasive today than atheists would care to admit. We are using secular means to fulfill religious needs.
3.1 Leaders as Transference Objects
Nowhere is the transference object better exemplified than in the crowd’s fascination of the leader who holds or symbolizes power. Freud described the cult like worship of leaders as a form of hypnosis, and the desire to be hypnotized as a pillar of our disposition: “People have a longing to be hypnotized precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence; people have an inner urge to merge themselves with power figures.” The reason we have this urge is that “beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can’t do much with this power instead endow certain persons with it. The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order, and combat them.” This is why Freud describes Man as not only a herd animal, but a herd animal led by a chief. Therefor, the state that is truly unnatural is when people repress their deep-seated erotic longings of transference, and the natural state is the cult-like behavior of group dynamics. “Erotic” is not used figuratively here as Freud views transference as a form of fetishization: and how can it not be when “the awe and danger of the entire universe along with one’s promise of individual and transcendent heroism is encapsulated within an object or person … The chief is a dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered.”
The leader, usually of narcissistic disposition, seduces us with the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person”: they do not share our conflicts, we admire their equanimity where we experience shame and humiliation. The use of transference leads to the deification of the transference object “the constant placing of certain select persons on pedestals, the reading into them of extra powers” we participate in their immortality and so we create out of Man an immortal for our own sake. Groups need heroes for immortality as well, which explains the genuine uncontrolled emotional outpouring of the dazed masses when their leader dies: it is not the Man that will be missed but “one’s bulwark against death”. It is this power and seeming control of the universe that one seeks to merge with, but in doing so the group enslaves the leader as much as the reverse: the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him since he had to be a reflexive function of the group’s desires to qualify for leadership in the first place. We see a convergence between Girard and Becker: the leader, who represents a Pandora’s box of both good and evil, is often used as a scapegoat, a target of hate and aggression to release tension. If the leader is the symbol of power, then he is held responsible for all vices of the group as much as the virtues, he is simply a product of the masses which he leads. “They follow him bravely into hell only for the pleasure of killing him and revenging themselves”.
3.2 Lovers as Transference Objects
It is not only leaders which we make our transference objects but also romantic interests as well. Becker argues that with the decline of religion individuals tend to pursue their urge of cosmic heroism with lovers. The lover becomes the transference object, the encapsulation of power and immortality, and most importantly the designator of good and evil. The goal to make the lover pleased becomes ones sole motive just as the faithful Christian aims to please god, for similar motives too: to gain immortality and direction. The weaker and less in control the individual feels, the stronger the transference. Yet, Becker argues “when you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres.” No human can take on the burden of godhood, sooner or later imperfections will emerge, and if the lover is your all, then any manifested shortcoming becomes a major threat to your very existence “She Lessens = I die”. You have failed in heroism, Agape and Eros are not satisfied, meaninglessness prevails, all because your husband only had the second highest bonus in his company! This might sound implausibly overdramatic, but I think there is a critical degree of hidden truth with high explanatory power.
3.3 Culture as Ready-Made Heroics
According to Becker, “people need a beyond, but they reach first for the nearest one,” they play it safe choosing the beyond of standard transference objects “lover”, “boss”, “friends” and accept whatever cultural heroics is in vogue “good provider”, “caring mother’ … By participating in society, these participants while seemingly inconsequential “earn their species immortality as an agent of procreation, or a collective or cultural immortality as part of a social group.”
In this lens, culture is a symbolic system to help individuals obtain immortality, a blueprint for ready-made transference objects and character defenses: a set of customs, rules, statuses, behaviors that collapses the secular into the sacred. Most people subscribe to this entirely, and everyone at least to some extent, you cannot escape cultural games unless you live alone in a cave. And Becker isn’t scorning such an act, but merely pointing out that most people “tranquilize themselves with the trivial” by keeping their minds on the small problems that society sets out for them “wearing the standard uniforms — but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or a red boutonniere, but not with head and shoulders”. Suddenly, the seemingly unjustified frustration shown when one does not receive enough “likes” on Instagram makes perfect sense: social media has been deified, it has become a game of cosmic heroism in which winning is correlated to popularity. The dissatisfaction from the lack of approval isn’t vain at all: their quest for immortality has been compromised and they are one step closer to death.
The next insight from Becker is that “normality is the refusal of reality”; in other words, to be sane and to play by society’s rules one needs to repress and ignore a great deal of reality, focusing only on the games laid out to obtain heroism. Neurosis, is a relatively mild mental illness not caused by biological factors involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior…) but not a radical loss of touch with reality. It is roughly the technical definition to the more colloquial “crazy”. The key insight that Becker highlights is that neurosis is only made distinct from normality if the neurotic can no longer play by the common rules of society. Wouldn’t our sexual norms, atheistic beliefs, cultural mannerisms, and political ideologies be considered crazy by the standards of any ancient civilization? Evidently, neurosis is relative to culture. Furthermore, it is the neurotic rather than the normal who sees reality more clearly: one is neurotic precisely because one sees through the pointless rules and games of society. The neurotic does not have the luxury of naivety to fully buy into the beyonds that society offers and suffers from stress due to the lack of support, and the normal is “sane” precisely because he participates in the games of society as if they were not games.
“The proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agents office at the height of the tourist season… The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are ‘right’ for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous. Man has to be protected from reality,” but this protection is quite costly: Becker attributes the great atrocities of history as the “immense toll that Man’s pretense of sanity takes as he denies his true condition.” We are selfish in that we seek to protect ourselves from mortality by preserving our immortality projects even at the cost of our own lives as the Kamikaze pilots exemplified. Thus, the major conflicts of history were battles of immortality ideologies “the root of evil is the desire to transcend and bond with a beyond.”
Becker’s final point on culture is that it is illusory, although not in a totally derogatory sense due to its necessity. Indeed there is a great deal of falseness and denial in our cultural projects, but Man needs a second world of humanly created meaning, a new symbolic reality. Illusion is creative play at its highest level, and to lose our illusions and culture is to die, to be reduced to the animal dimension. “Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor.” Thus, our current secular society, as much as we try to ignore it, is not less or more mythical than one centered around religion. All of our symbolic systems exist to help us “earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakeable meaning… In this sense everything that Man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.”
Becker argues that the quality of cultural play, of creative illusions, varies between societies and that history is a succession of immortality ideologies. The plight of the modern individual is characterized by the inability for any of the traditional immortality ideologies to satisfy one’s urge for heroism. As a consequence, neurosis is more widespread a problem because of the absence of any convincing paths to apotheosis, citing the evidence that a French mental hospital got cleared out immediately at the time of the French Revolution: “All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity.”
3.4 Religion
Let us now examine what Becker claims is the most effective cultural mechanism for heroism by far: Religion, specifically Christianity. In the previous section we discussed why romantic heroism is doomed for failure: because to make someone the transference object is to burden them with godhood. Sooner or later, their flaws will be apparent and each deviation from perfection will be a threat to your very existence. Thus, Hegel argues, God is the perfect spiritual beyond precisely because he is abstract, because he does not manifest. Abstraction grants malleability, enabling God to be many things to many different people with different needs, something a concrete individual can never be. The first great strength of Christianity, Becker argues, is it’s ability to grant everyone immortality through so abstract a concept: “it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven.” It promised immortality not through anything concrete, for nothing in reality could take on the burden of godhood, but through the abstract and invisible realm of God. To put it in aesthetic terms: the lack of falsifiability of the Christian system rendered it much harder to falsify and more easy to believe. Current ideologies do not share this trait: it is much easier to determine when a communist state has failed in its stated goals than for one to disprove God’s existence. The second great strength of Christianity is it’s dealing of sin. Becker painted the similarity between the sinner and the neurotic: both are hyper conscious of the very thing they are trying to deny, namely creatureliness, miserableness and unworthiness. The neurotic is stressed due to his true perceptions of the human condition just as the sinner is ashamed in his own human failings ie. nudity. But the differences end there “Traditional religion turned the consciousness of sin into a condition for salvation; but the tortured sense of nothingness of the neurotic qualifies him now only for merciful release in lonely death. It is all right to be nothing vis-a-vis God, who alone can make it right in his unknown ways; it is another thing to be nothing to oneself who is nothing.”
Becker would be the first to admit that while the Christian ideals were inspiring and perhaps even the best symbolic structure ever to grace mankind, in execution many atrocities were performed in its name. Regardless, this paragraph condenses why he believes that religion in general is so effective and healthy a symbolic structure: “Religion answers directly to the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong. It also takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand. We no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation — the powers that created us, not those into whose lives we accidentally fell. Our life ceases to be a reflexive dialogue with the standards of our wives, husbands, friends, and leaders and becomes instead measured by standards of the highest heroism, ideals truly fit to lead us on and beyond ourselves. In this way we fill ourselves with independent values, can make free decisions, and, most important, can lean on powers that really support us and do not oppose us. The personality can truly begin to emerge in religion because God, as an abstraction, does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers necessary for independent self-justification. What greater security than to lean confidently on God … If God is hidden and intangible, all the better: that allows man to expand and develop himself.”
3.5 The Failures of Modernity
In contrast, the modern times are cursed with two conditions which prevent fulfilling heroism. Firstly, if the 21st century is that of globalization and convergence towards cultural oneness then we have two options as differing cultures collide: we can tighten our grip on our own cultures and immortality projects, or slowly withdraw from strong group ideals to avoid conflict. Fortunately, we have chosen the latter as the former leads to conflict on an apocalyptic scale. Yet this move to slowly chip away at religion and nation-centered group cultures is not without it’s own tradeoffs. Diversity in ideology is a threat to heroism because the hero must believe that he is on the one true path. Thus, it can be disheartening to see “authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views”; to witness a plethora of individuals each thinking that they have the unique formula for triumphing in life, casts doubt on whether one should be so sure of one’s own path. To give a concrete example, in the lack of ready-made world-views, religion becomes a personal matter; so much so that faith itself seems neurotic. “The church and the community do not exist, or do not carry much conviction. This situation is what helps make faith fantastic. In order for something to seem true to Man, it has to be visibly supported in some way — lived, external, compelling. Men need pageants, crowds, panoplies, special days marked off on calendars — an objective focus for obsession. Otherwise the neurotic is brought back to the point of his departure: how is he to believe in his lonely, inner sense of specialness.”
Secondly, modern man’s development in analytical ability has rendered him cynical, depriving him the ability to have faith, collapsing the sacred into the secular; “he has been disinherited by his own analytical strength.” “The characteristic of the modern mind is the banishment of mystery, of naïve belief, of simple-minded hope.” We can tell the difference between fiction and reality and that will bring our very fall for the ability to distinguish truth and see through lies is the very quality of the neurotic: “the characteristic the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.”
It is precisely the ability to be careless, to mistake appearance for essence, to throw oneself into the nonlogical fantasy that is missing in modern man. That is why Otto rank prescribes “the need for legitimate foolishness” as the antidote to neurosis, to the modern wave of nihilism. “Childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.”
If we must live in illusion to be sane, we must ask: what is the best illusion to live in? Because certainly all illusions are not created equal: for better or worse, a great arch of our time has been the realization that just as there are pointless sacrifices in unnecessary wars there are ignoble heroics in societies: the demeaning display of consumer goods and digital immortality pales in comparison with the promise of companionship with God. Becker replies, in a Buddhist-esque manner due to the definition of truth as what leads to successful practice, that the “best” illusion must be differentiated in metrics directly meaningful to man. He argues that it must be that which allows participants to maximize freedom, dignity, and hope as these are the three elements to transmute neurosis into creative living.
3.6 The Artist and The Lunatic
One last discussion remains which truly showcases the unintuitive truths revealed by Becker’s theory. The topic has to do with the character of artists; while the term certainly encompasses the “artist” in the most literal sense, Becker used the term more broadly: to identify those who create new symbolic systems that change our perceptions of reality. Therefor, the commentary is just as applicable to a Thiel, a Newton, a Marx, a Mao, a Zuckerberg as a Davinci.
For artists, existence is problematic. They cannot abide by the shared societal meanings because they see through it. Existence is a problem, and when you no longer accept the collective solution, you must fashion your own. “The work of art is, then, the ideal answer to the problem of existence… not only the existence of the external world, but especially one’s own.” One is forced into the terrifying isolation outside the herd, to fashion one’s own uniqueness.
The work of art (or more generally, “symbolic system”) is the artist’s private religion, it is the object of transference, the personal “beyond”. This becomes an immense problem, because just as no romantic partner can be worthy of the perfection to warrant immortality, neither can an artificial piece of work. Paradoxically, the more critical, game-changing, and unique of a work you produce, the more guilt you tend to have. “What right do you have to play God? Especially if your work is great, absolutely new and different, you wonder where to get authority for introducing new meanings into the world, the strength to bear it.” When your beyond is your own creation, and you know how ephemeral and imperfect you yourself are, the work is hardly a secure immortality symbol. “In his greatest genius man is still mocked.” In other words, the quality of the work is both the symbol of immortality as well as the arbiter of worthiness of the artist, yet every creator knows the imperfections of their own system, and is anxious without an “other” to lean on since the very condition of his creativity is the rejection of safe “beyonds”.
Freud announced his agnosticism while constructing his own religion. Yet he could not find anyone to offer his work to that, due to his agnosticism, was anymore secure or immortal than he was. Even humanity as a whole was insufficient as “the spectre of the dinosaurs still haunts Man and will always haunt him.” Essentially, to create something truly unique, you need to see through the illusions of the herd, stand on the shoulders of giants at heights previously unimaginable. But by creating your own empire and seeing the masses idolize you as their immortality symbol while knowing full well of your imperfections and creatureliness, it dissolves the hope that any person, creed or organization can truly be immortal. If you are the best yet still so fragile and ephemeral, there can be no possibility for true transcendence.
Becker’s analysis fascinates because it groups our cultural heroes: the Freuds, the Newtons, and the Musks right next to the members we most look down upon: the lunatics. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.” The difference between the artist and the neurotic boils down to talent. The neurotic cannot take in the world and accept the clearly-false cultural narratives yet he still needs to be a hero, so he does it in fantasy. Caught in a vicious and compounding cycle of illusive self-glorification, the neurotic eventually can no longer justify his own heroism in merely symbolic fantasy and is left feeling more unworthy and inferior which only strengthens the desire to be a hero. How many times have we seen a crazy homeless person in a seemingly justice-fueled rage against an imaginary enemy? The creative on the other hand, takes the same senseless world and uses creative powers to form an objective interpretation of it, fueled by a similar clinical obsession. “In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call ‘cultural routine’ is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy.” It is frightening, saddening, infuriating, and yet beautiful all at once that the lunatic and the world renowned creative is separated by only a few degrees of “talent”.
A final telling anecdote of Freud and Jung sheds light on the costs of fabricating one’s own religion, the cost to becoming an artist. Both men, could not bring themselves to visit Rome, literally fainting at the thought of buying tickets. Becker’s analysis is intriguing: “They were innovators who tried to give a whole new meaning to creation and history, which meant that they had to support and justify all previous meanings and all possible alternatives ones on their shoulders alone. Probably Rome epitomized these meanings in herself, her ruins and her history, and so she made their legs quiver.” It is surprising then that Jung, who relied on god, also fainted with this burden of life; it seems that no beyond prevents creatives from exhausting every last bit of themselves in the creative process. The beliefs and powers one relies on seems to only change the quality of work and life an individual can achieve.