Human Aggression, Death, and Happy Holidays
Important Notes and Ideas
My phone was all I had with me on my walk, but I thought I would share how loose associations can bring ideas together.
Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and theorist. Becker authored the book titled The Denial of Death as well as several other books.
In The Denial of Death, Becker proposed that culture and civilization represent an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism that allows us to deny the reality of our mortality.
As a result, humans sometimes defend their culture as if their lives depend on it. Symbolically speaking, they do…at least to our unconscious minds.
While we might say that Becker overstated his case almost as much as did Skinner in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (well, okay not that much), we can still find value in his theory.
Becker’s ideas greatly influenced Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski in the development of Terror Management Theory. They based their work on his work.
Terror Management Theory, much like The Denial of Death, posits that societies are designed to help us deny death and feel that we live on through our culture and its symbols.
The result is that some portion of human aggression stems from terror management.
We push our fear of death into our unconscious, and we experience discomfort/pain when our denial is challenged.
When our denial is challenged, in order to keep our fear unconscious, we consciously experience anger and other negative emotions aimed at other things, at other people.
In an attempt to avoid suffering from a fear of death, we inflict suffering upon one another.
Whether we accept this theory or not, it represents a valid call to introspect.
Freud and Jung would agree with Becker that we are challenged to bring the threatening unconscious things into our consciousness.
If we confront these unconscious fears and dreads, we can prevent ourselves from inflicting needless suffering on ourselves and each other.
In more Jungian terms (we will explore Jung in future videos), the shadow must be unveiled and the monsters must be confronted.
When we do this, these lurking psychological creatures lose their monstrous visage.
