Your Kindle Notes For:
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life
Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski
Last accessed on Monday May 24, 2021
174 Highlight(s) | 43 Note(s)
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First, we human beings are driven to protect our self-esteem. Second, we humans strongly desire to assert the superiority of our own group over other groups.
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Becker explained how the fear of death guides human behavior.
Note:Is it the fear or realization of death that guides behavior?
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we dubbed terror management theory in order to build on Becker’s claim that people strive for meaningful and significant lives largely to manage the fear of death.
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The awareness that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in almost every domain of human life—whether we are conscious of it or not.
Note:Ok here it is "awareness" not "fear"
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it drives us so much that any effort to address the question “What makes people act the way they do?” is profoundly inadequate if it doesn’t include the awareness of death as a central factor.
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coping with the reality of death.
Note:Reality, not fear
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Such stories reflect the fact that all living beings are born with biological systems oriented toward self-preservation.
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Unlike bats and worms, however, we humans know that no matter what we do, sooner or later we will lose the battle against death. This is a profoundly unnerving thought.
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particularly important human intellectual capacities: a high degree of self-awareness, and the capacity to think in terms of past, present, and future. Only we humans are, as far as anyone knows, aware of ourselves as existing in a particular time and place.
Note:An ode to time and place: spatiotemporality
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We can ponder alternative responses to situations and their potential consequences and imagine new possibilities.
Note:Imagine = abstraction = counterfactual = subjunctive
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However, because we humans are aware that we exist, we also know that someday we will no longer exist.
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We pay a heavy price for being self-conscious.
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Terror is the natural and generally adaptive response to the imminent threat of death.
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the really tragic part of our condition: only we humans, due to our enlarged and sophisticated neocortex, can experience this terror in the absence of looming danger.
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To manage this terror of death, we must defend ourselves.
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Once our intelligence had evolved to the point that this ultimate existential crisis dawned on us,
Note:Why are we assuming crises?
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Since the dawn of humankind, cultural worldviews have offered immense comfort to death-fearing humans.
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the vast majority of people, past and present, have been led by their religions to believe that their existence literally continues in some form beyond the point of physical death.
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In all these cases, we believe that we are, one way or another, literally immortal.
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These cultural modes of transcending death allow us to feel that we are significant contributors to a permanent world. They protect us from the notion that we are merely purposeless animals that no longer exist upon death. Our beliefs in literal and symbolic immortality help us manage the potential for terror that comes from knowing that our physical death is inevitable.
Note:Is this, collectively or individually, healthy?
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two basic psychological resources. First, we need to sustain faith in our cultural worldview, which imbues our sense of reality with order, meaning, and permanence.
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the second vital resource for managing terror is a feeling of personal significance, commonly known as self-esteem.
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The desire for self-esteem drives us all, and drives us hard. Self-esteem shields us against the rumblings of dread that lie beneath the surface of our everyday experience.
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after being reminded of death, we react generously to anyone or anything that reinforces our cherished beliefs, and reject anyone or anything that calls those beliefs into question.
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five hundred studies and counting have demonstrated the many ways that cultural worldviews protect us from the terror that the knowledge of the inevitability of death might otherwise arouse. When confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support or uphold our beliefs.
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Because of their helplessness and vulnerability, fledgling humans are especially prone to anxiety, and separation from attachment figures, literally or figuratively, is the ultimate threat to them. Hence, he observed, it was vitally important for infants to develop “basic trust,” the sense that they are safe and sound, in the first year of life. And they could do this only through the seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent help of people who cared about them.
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we all need self-esteem—to feel that we are good and valued—and
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Most children are thoroughly ensconced in their worldviews by age five,
Note:? Religion, politics, etc by age 5?
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in command of himself,
Note:Autonomous
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children are much more troubled about death, and at a much earlier age, than most of us realize.
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A complementary death-denying strategy is the belief in a personal and personified savior.
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cultural beliefs would be fleeting and unsustainable without visible symbols and tangible icons that are imbued with extraordinary significance.
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inducing doubt about a central tenet of their worldviews brought the worm at the core closer to consciousness.
Note:How does this, or its reverse (denying deah) impact public health?
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cultural beliefs, values, and ideals would be hard to sustain unless they were physically reinforced by signs and symbols everywhere, from crucifixes and flags on public buildings to movies in which masked heroes vanquish planet-threatening bad guys.
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What time is it now for you, the reader? What does it mean that it’s some day of the week, some month, some year? Isn’t that all an illusory structuring of your conscious experiences provided for you by your culture to help you impose order and permanence on something chaotic and fleeting?
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We humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we believe in.
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Your understanding of what the “right” things to do are, what social roles are of value, and how to properly fulfill your own role depends on your worldview.
Note:RELATIVISM!
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self-esteem is the feeling that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe.
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How others react to our behavior tells us how well we are meeting the standards of our culture and, ultimately, whether we really are the valued people we want to be.
Note:Looking-glass self
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Living up to cultural roles and values—whether we are called “doctor,” “lawyer,” “architect,” “artist,” or “beloved mother”—embeds us safely in a symbolic reality in which our identity helps us transcend the limits of our fleeting biological existence. Self-esteem is thus the foundation of psychological fortitude for us all.
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strong evidence that self-esteem keeps the physiological arousal associated with anxiety in check.
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Self-esteem takes the edge off our hostile reactions to people and ideas that conflict with our beliefs and values.
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self-esteem protects us from deeply rooted physical and existential fears.
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we combat mortality by striving for significance.
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Research has borne out the fact that we strive for higher self-esteem in the face of mortality.
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When people lose confidence in their core beliefs, they become literally “dis-illusioned” because they lack a functional blueprint of reality.
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Falling short, whether due to your ascribed place in society, your own failings, or unrealistic cultural expectations, is the second cause of struggles with self-worth.
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self-esteem plummets when cultures embrace standards of value that are unattainable for the average citizen.
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American society, in particular, puts great value on attributes and achievements that are unreachable for most individuals.
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Given such unrealistic standards of value, it’s no wonder that shaky self-esteem is the norm in the United States.
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Navigating through the ups and downs of life requires a delicate balance between self-deception and honest objectivity.
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research confirms that low self-esteem is associated with delinquency and violent antisocial behaviors.
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Some people, however, never develop a secure sense of self-worth in childhood and come to rely on excessive boasting and extreme defensive distortions to try to dampen existential dread. This leads to an inflated but fragile self-image that provides momentary security but requires constant reassurance and is vulnerable to the slightest challenge.
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self-esteem is our symbolic protection against death.
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By placing our psychological eggs in many different baskets, we increase the odds that we’ll have durable ways to feel good about ourselves.
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And as their ability to communicate through language improved, our ancestors became more self-aware. “The human being inventing [symbols],” Nietzsche contended, “is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself.” This stimulated the development of even more sophisticated language, and so a dynamic cycle of language and increasing self-consciousness was born.
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fear of death, argues biologist Ajit Varki (working in collaboration with the late geneticist Danny Brower), would “be a deadend evolutionary barrier, curbing activities and cognitive functions necessary for survival and reproductive fitness.”
Note:What if we were too busy living to fear death?
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People terrified by the prospect of their own demise would be less likely to take risks in hunting to increase the odds of landing big game, to compete effectively for mates, or to provide good care for their offspring. So our ancestors made a supremely adaptive, ingenious, and imaginative leap: they created a supernatural world, one in which death was not inevitable or irrevocable.
Note:Important hypothesis here!
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Pascal Boyer and Paul Bloom propose that supernatural beliefs originated because humans are predisposed to attribute mind and intention to living things.
Note:Seems more like anthropomorphism
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Upper Paleolithic Revolution, or the Creative Explosion. This era was marked by the simultaneous appearance of art, body adornments, burials, and elaborate grave goods in many different societies.
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Rituals, art, myth, and religion—features of every known culture—together made it possible for people to construct, maintain, and concretize their supernatural conceptions of reality. By making the incredible credible, Becker explained, humans “imagined that they took firm control of the material world,” which “raised them over and above material decay and death.”
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in the face of nature’s indifference, our ancestors had to do something to enhance their chances for survival.
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Some combination of dance and song in turn likely formed the earliest rituals.
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the essence of ritual is wishful thinking in action.
Note:Subjunctive - contrary to fact
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by holding up their end of the deal with the gods through ritual sacrifices, humans gained a sense of control over life and death,
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RITUALS ARE THE BEHAVIORAL bedrock of human culture.
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Rituals, then, help manage existential terror by superseding natural processes and fostering the illusion that we control them.
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supernatural escapades serve to manage existential terror.
Note:Again, is this healthy management?
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“Without art,” mused George Bernard Shaw, “the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
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Living in and around monuments constructed for ritual and religious purposes may have encouraged people to learn to farm, which would not have occurred as readily if they continued to maintain a more nomadic lifestyle.
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Wonder what Harari would say.
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Burying the best grains (along with other grave goods) with the corpses was the first planting of seeds; the decaying flesh may incidentally have provided fertilizing nutrients for the seeds.
Note:Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
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What happens after I die?
Note:Cant language create a concept for which there is no "after"?A square-circle is as much a logical contradiction as "afterlife"
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all human societies, even the most primitive and technologically impoverished ones, have sophisticated creation myths, ideas about the structure of the universe, and explanations for what happens after death.
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Myths provide the narrative justification for rituals and, embellished by art, form religion, which serves to regulate all aspects of social behavior.
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Religions delineate how we should interact with and treat each other by providing a purposeful, moral conception of a life in which individuals’ souls can exist beyond their physical death.
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religion gave our ancestors—as it gives us—a sense of community and shared reality, a worldview, without which coordinated and cooperative activities in large groups of humans would be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.
Note:Maybe then, but now i can ask if religion is helpful got the species
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Emile Durkheim and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that the only reason religion originated and flourished was that it fostered social cohesion and coordination.
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spiritual belief systems thrived because they quell existential terror (and we will present evidence in support of this claim in the next chapter).
Note:What if some are busy living and not terrified of death
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products of human ingenuity and imagination were essential for early humans to cope with a uniquely human problem: the awareness of death.
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humans do not have agriculture, technology, and science despite ritual, art, myth, and religion; rather, humans developed agriculture, technology, and science because of them.
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psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs, “reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting…phantasies.”
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They deployed them to develop the belief systems, technology, and science that ultimately propelled us into the modern world.
Note:When?
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When it comes to efforts to transcend death, not much has changed in the last forty thousand years.
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Historically, people have aspired to become immortal in two often overlapping ways. One path is literal immortality, which is the promise either that one will never physically die, or that some vital aspect of the self will survive death.
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A second means of achieving immortality is to assure that some aspect of one’s identity, or some legacy of one’s existence, will live on after death. This symbolic immortality promises that we will still be part of something eternal after our last breath, that some symbolic vestige of the self will persist in perpetuity.
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As Rank’s translators put it, “the soul was created in the big bang of an irresistible psychological force—our will to live forever—colliding with the immutable biological fact of death.”
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Regardless of the differences, all soul concepts render the prospect of immortality feasible because souls are
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in fact, people believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a
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famous person is among the passengers, because proximity to a famous person confers upon you some magical sense of your own immortality.
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From this perspective, all economic activity, and human behavior in general, results from considering the costs and benefits (although not always consciously) of existing options and choosing the best—that is, the most useful—alternative.
Note:Ideal rational being theory
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money originated in religious rituals as consecrated tokens with immortal connotations.
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Originally, then, people didn’t want money to buy stuff. They wanted stuff to exchange for money. Money was a tangible repository of supernatural clout. It still is.
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The Bible explicitly linked work to both sin and death.
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Adam Smith observed that people pursue wealth not to “supply the necessities of nature” so much as to procure “superfluities” that satisfy the fundamental psychological imperative to be thought well of by others: “It is not wealth that men desire, but the consideration and good opinion that wait upon riches.”
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for many people the connection between fortune and immortality is fundamentally anchored in religious belief.
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the early Protestants, especially the Calvinists, sought wealth as a sign of God’s benevolent intentions toward them. Those who were not Chosen were (and still are, in many Calvinist minds) condemned to poverty.
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studies have shown that people who view death most negatively are most attracted to high-status material possessions, especially if they have shaky self-esteem.
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expanding consciousness gave rise to potentially debilitating and demoralizing terror. Such fear would have rendered our ancestors quivering piles of biological protoplasm on the fast track to oblivion save for their ingenious construction of a supernatural dimension of reality in which death was literally and symbolically averted.
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However, the supernatural cultural scheme of things that we humans embrace to manage existential terror is nevertheless ultimately a defensive distortion and obfuscation of reality to blot out the inevitability of death.
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this “necessary lie” about the nature of reality invariably sows interpersonal strife and undermines our physical and psychological well-being. Next
Note:Its not healthy
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Cultural worldviews and self-esteem help manage this terror by convincing us that we are special beings with souls and identities that will persist, literally and/or symbolically, long past our own physical death. We are thus pervasively preoccupied with maintaining confidence in our cultural scheme of things and satisfying the standards of value associated with it.
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Only humans, however, hate and kill other humans with righteous exuberance for symbolic affronts:
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Our longing to transcend death inflames violence toward each other. While our cultural scheme of things keeps a lid on our mortal dread, others cling to very different sets of beliefs to manage theirs. Acknowledging their “truths” inevitably calls ours into question.
Note:Would it benefit public health to embrace relativism?
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“One culture is always a potential menace to another,” Becker observed, “because it is a living example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to one’s own.”
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It is deeply disturbing to have one’s fundamental beliefs called into question. Take our meanings and purposes away, characterize them as juvenile, useless, or evil, and all we have left are the vulnerable physical creatures that we are. Because cultural conceptions of reality keep a lid on mortal dread, acknowledging the legitimacy of beliefs contrary to our own unleashes the very terror those beliefs serve to quell. So we must parry the threat by derogating and dehumanizing those with alternative views of life, by forcing them to adopt our beliefs and co-opting aspects of their cultures into our own, or by obliterating them entirely.
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no symbol is sufficiently commanding to completely overcome the terror of death.
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“others,”
Note:Paul Beatty in Slumberland: I hate you, the jews, and all the other others.
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This tendency to belittle others is particularly pronounced in the wake of death reminders.
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And death reminders cause us to see members of such out-groups as less human and more animalistic.
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cultural worldviews gain strength in numbers. For beliefs to serve as effective bulwarks against existential terror, people must be absolutely certain of their validity.
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the more people who share our beliefs, the more sure we feel that they are correct. If just one person believed that God spoke to Moses in the form of a burning bush, antipsychotic medication would be sought to relieve this poor soul of his florid delusion.
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Since our sense of being more than mortal animals is dependent on these unassailable truths, our desire to have them validated is especially strong when death is close to mind.
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studies show that proselytizing is prophylactic: if I learn that you have adopted my beliefs, I feel more confident of their validity and consequently don’t worry so much about my own death.
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Consider the counterculture movement in the United States in the 1960s, when young people began to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Sparked by support for the civil rights movement and opposition to the escalating war in Vietnam, the “hippies” railed against the militaryindustrial complex and the greed, materialism, sexism, racism, and sexual repression that went with it.
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When existential terror is aroused, we fortify our cultural scheme of things by encouraging others to conform to socially sanctioned cookie-cutter molds.
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People in the ancient world often used animals as a tangible locus of their death anxiety. For example, on the ancient Hebrew Day of Atonement, two goats were chosen by lot: “the Lord’s Goat” was offered as the blood sacrifice for the sins of Israel, and the second, “Azazel,” or scapegoat, was cast out into the wilderness bearing the sins of God’s people.
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FINDING EVIL OTHERS provides a focus for disposing of residual death anxiety, this strategy usually backfires by increasing the actual threat posed by the others.
Note:A public health issue then?
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How can people maintain their sense of being significant contributors to a meaningful world while having their homeland appropriated and being forced to relinquish traditional beliefs and adopt an alien way of life?
Note:#beliefsmatter
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Death fears inflame violence toward others with different beliefs, especially those whom we designate as evil.
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This was the first direct evidence that fear of death magnifies the desire to physically harm those who challenge and insult our beliefs,
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We have now seen how “man’s inhumanity to man” stems from humankind’s fundamental intolerance of, and propensity to humiliate, those who subscribe to different cultural worldviews. This is compounded by the need to dispose of residual death anxiety by projecting it onto “evil” others.
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the “natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”
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Confidence in a cultural scheme of things and our own self-worth banish the dread. But when someone “different” challenges our core beliefs or sense of significance, we want to derogate, dehumanize, assimilate, demonize, humiliate, and destroy them.
Note:Public health
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Perhaps, once we fully recognize the central role that mortal terror plays in persistent strife, human ingenuity can also find ways of counteracting the destructive potential our fears can, and do, unleash.
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Our bodies and animality are threatening reminders that we are physical creatures who will die.
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We human beings often hold spiritual beliefs that enable us to view ourselves as different from, and superior to, all other forms of life. The best-known example of this outlook comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition:
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All human cultures have obscured their kinship with animals by disguising themselves; in so doing, they show that they belong to the world of culture, not the world of nature.
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In short, when we are cropped, depilated, pierced, tattooed, and enhanced, we’re not animals anymore.
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Why be ambivalent about something so pleasurable? According to Ernest Becker, it is because “sex is of the body, and the body is of death.” That is, sex is a potent signification of our creaturely, corporeal, and ephemeral condition. Sex is first and foremost a glaring reminder that we are animals; next to urination and defecation, it is the closest human beings come to acting like beasts.
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BEING AN EMBODIED ANIMAL aware of death is difficult indeed. We simply cannot bear the thought that we are biological creatures, no different from dogs, cats, fish, or worms.
Note:We CAN be a different kind/sort of animal...like one who reads this book and reflects on their knowledge and memory, PRIOR to or WHEN behaving!
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human beings use two distinct kinds of psychological defenses to cope with thoughts of death. When we are conscious of death, our proximal defenses are activated. These are rational (or rationalizing) efforts to get rid of such thoughts. We either repress these uncomfortable thoughts, try to distract ourselves, or push the problem of death into the distant future. In contrast, unconscious thoughts of death instigate our distal defenses. These defenses have no logical or semantic relation to the problem of death. Prescribing harsher punishment for criminals, derogating others who repudiate our cultural values, or attempting to boost our self-esteem has little or no direct bearing on the brute fact that we will someday die.
Note:One assumes these defenes run along a continuum of healthy and not
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proximal defenses enable us to depose death thoughts from the forefront of our mind, and distal defenses keep unconscious death thoughts from becoming conscious.
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distal defenses keep death thoughts from flooding consciousness. Throughout our lives, proximal defenses help us deal with occasions when death stands at the front and center of our minds.
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unconscious death thoughts instigate distal defenses.
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while some proximal and distal reactions are good for you, others foster sickness and even death.
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Research confirms the potentially beneficial effects
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In situations like these, proximal reactions to banish death thoughts from consciousness also serve to enhance physical well-being.
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So, vowing to slow down on the way home just after watching gory traffic accidents in a driving safety class is an effective proximal ploy to push conscious death thoughts into the unconscious. That’s good. A few stiff drinks to muffle self-awareness before hitting the road would serve the same proximal function. That’s not good.
Note:What about believing you are eternal, bound for everlasting wish fulfillment? Healthy or nah?
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Being “comfortably numb” from drugs and alcohol is a great way to banish death thoughts from consciousness, but not so great for staying healthy and alive.
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Once those thoughts of death have faded from consciousness, your reactions depend on the values from which you derive self-esteem, and on your core cultural beliefs.
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research shows that unconscious death thoughts tend to boost ideologically driven medical noncompliance.
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UNDERSTANDING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN proximal and distal defenses will hopefully help psychologists and health-care practitioners develop more effective strategies to promote physical well-being.
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The best way to go, then, for health campaigns that make people think about death is to capitalize on both healthy proximal and distal reactions. This can be accomplished by fortifying a sense of personal efficacy of desired behavior, such as getting tested for AIDS, while also appealing to the self-esteem-enhancing implications of responsible behavior, such as emphasizing that people generally frown on indiscriminate sexual promiscuity and value engaging in safe sex.
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according to the World Health Organization, health “is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
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phobias often entail projecting fears of big, uncontrollable concerns, like death, onto smaller, more manageable problems, like spiders.
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PTSD victims often enter a protracted dissociated state that clinicians call psychic numbing
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Although almost everyone experiences some anxiety in response to life-threatening traumas, most people don’t dissociate to a maladaptive extent or develop PTSD.
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regardless of the cause, depressed people no longer confidently subscribe to their cultural scheme of things or believe themselves to be valuable members of their culture.
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Clinical studies find suicidal children are more likely than nonsuicidal children to view death as a continuation of life in which long-standing wishes may be fulfilled.
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Early Christianity had an annual commemoration of eager and willing martyrs to celebrate their “birthday to immortality.”
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once individuals relinquish their intellectualized galactic view of existence, there are virtually always aspects of life that do matter to them.
Note:Framing...perspective...Heidegger
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Love doesn’t eliminate all divides between people, but it allows one to value and be valued, and to feel connected to another person who is in the same existential boat that you are in,
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self-esteem buffers anxiety in general and anxiety about death in particular.
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development of the human neocortex spawned symbolic thought, self-awareness, the capacity to reflect on the past and anticipate the future, and the knowledge of our mortality.
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Epicureans argued, bad things can only happen to those capable of sensation. Dead people are devoid of all sensations, just as we all were before we were conceived. Being dead is thus no different from never having existed.
Note:Nice little modus ponens
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This, Epicurus proposed, will in turn make “the mortality of life more enjoyable.”
Note:Imagine a football game that never ended
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Indeed, looked at in a certain way, our awareness of death yields a keener appreciation for life.
Note:And publically healthier?
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“It is from some obscure recognition of the fact of death,” wrote Scottish essayist Alexander Smith in 1863, “that life draws its final sweetness.”
Note:A jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces is bitter
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Epicurean efforts to eliminate death anxiety on rational grounds have been spectacularly unsuccessful to date.
Note:See Baldwin
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We are animals, and like all living creatures, we are biologically predisposed to resist premature termination. Any life-form that readily acquiesced to death would be eradicated from the gene pool in exceedingly short order. We have a variety of bodily systems that keep us going, including a limbic system that generates terror when our existence is threatened. And we need this fear to survive in a dangerous world. At the same time, our cerebral cortex makes us aware of our perpetual vulnerability and inevitable mortality. We must therefore continually manage the potential to experience that terror.
Note:Hold your breath for five minutes!
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Ironically, then, death anxiety might not be eliminated, and could even be heightened, in a world where death was not inevitable.
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people of each generation must grapple with them in light of current knowledge, historical conditions, and personal experiences.
Note:Zeitgeist
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“Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?”
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Martin Heidegger argued that every individual must recognize that she or he is a “being toward death,” and because everyone dies his or her own death, authentic living by courageous awareness and acceptance of death is of necessity a personal undertaking.
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Making peace with one’s death is surely a worthy goal with many psychological and social benefits.
Note:And public health benefits?
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Biosocial transcendence is derived from the literal connection to future generations by passing on one’s genes, history, values, and possessions, or by identification with an ancestral line or ethnic or national identity that perseveres indefinitely.
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the possibility of literal immortality; it can also be a more symbolic sense of spiritual connection to an ongoing life force.
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Creative transcendence is obtained by contributing to future generations through innovations and teaching in art, science, and technology.
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Natural transcendence is identifying with all life, nature, or even the universe.
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experiential transcendence is characterized by a sense of timelessness accompanied by a heightened sense of awe and wonder.
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The rock is a black-and-white scheme of things, with explicit prescriptions for attaining literal and symbolic immortality. Unfortunately, many people who subscribe to rock views fervently proclaim their beliefs to be absolute truth, and they insist that they can unambiguously differentiate between good and evil. “Isms”—fundamentalism, fascism, communism, and some forms of free-market capitalism—are rock views.
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the rock-type worldview tends to foster an us vs. them tribal mentality that, as we have seen, breeds hatred and inflames intergroup conflicts.
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conceptions of life that accept ambiguity and acknowledge that all beliefs are held with some measure of uncertainty.
Note:Lakoff relativism
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The hard place means accepting that meaning and values are human creations.
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