Ernest Becker and The Denial of Death

 

Nonexistence Does Not Scare Me

Why religion helps us face the fear of death.

L.S. Dugdale, MD

The Lost Art

Posted October 5, 2021 

KEY POINTS

Fear of death, Ernest Becker argued, motivates us to steel ourselves against it.

People across the spectrum of religiosity may find support for their existing belief systems.

With the accompaniment of those trusted and loved, each person walks courageously toward mortality.

I never found Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death,  compelling. It was the much-touted book for which he won the Pulitzer. 

I was intrigued by Kelsey Osgood’s recent characterization in Plough of Becker’s thesis.

His premise is somewhat straightforward. Fear of death animates human survival. Or, as Osgood summarizes, “nearly the whole enterprise of society is a stage upon which humans play out elaborate, mostly meaningless dramas, all designed to distract from the fact that…we will return to the earth.”

We do what we do – some combination of  striving, building, creating, procreating, and self-anesthetizing – to defend against the knowledge of our mortality. Fear of death, Becker argued, motivates us to steel ourselves against it.

Becker contended that we humans esteem as heroes those who face death well. “We admire most the courage to face death...When we see a man bravely facing his extinction, we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine.” For Becker, there existed two heroic systems by which people principally address their fear of death – the psychoanalytic and the religious.

Over and over, Becker said that people need something beyond themselves that exists entirely independently, some entity that gives credence to both the body that will decay and the spirit that will endure. There is only one thing that fits that description, and that is religion.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-lost-art/202110/nonexistence-does-not-scare-me