What are you doing to earn your feeling of heroism?

December 19, 2004 8:40 PM

The Ernest Becker Foundation is "devoted to multidisciplinary inquiries into human behavior, with a particular focus on violence," based on the work of the titular academic iconoclast, "to support research and application at the interfaces of science, the humanities, social action and religion." Becker's Pulitzer-winning The Denial of Death (completed just before his own tragic demise at 49) viewed Kierkegaard's proto-existentialism through the lens of Otto Rank's psychology and concluded that "the root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality and achieve a heroic self-image" (summary quoted from Sam Keen's excellent Foreword to the latest edition of the work). The book has now inspired an award-winning indie documentary that purports to be "the first documentary film ever [!] to examine the manifestations of death anxiety on spiritual, cultural, and psychological levels." (6.5 MB QT trailer)
posted by joe lisboa (15 comments total)

A quick-and-dirty Becker primer, via Keen:

1) The world is terrifying.
2) The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.
3) Since the terror of death is so overwhelming, we conspire to keep it unconscious.
4) Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil (and denying our mortality) have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world.

(Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the EBF, nor have I seen the above film. I am, however, an undergraduate philosophy instructor that has used Becker's work to foster thoughtful discussion in past classes.)
posted by joe lisboa at 8:41 PM on December 19, 2004

Trailer's actually here. (So much for my immortality project of posting to the blue).
posted by joe lisboa at 8:44 PM on December 19, 2004

Hmm, I've been on their mailing list for years--never thought to check to see if they had a website. Thanks for this.
posted by y2karl at 9:13 PM on December 19, 2004

excellent stuff. thanks, joe!
posted by ori at 10:09 PM on December 19, 2004

I haven't checked out the links yet, but Denial of Death is a fantastic and forbiddingly true book. Thanks a bunch!
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:04 PM on December 19, 2004

This sounds a lot like Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski's Terror Management Theory but with more editorializing.
posted by trey at 5:08 AM on December 20, 2004

It has been a good many years since I last read and reread the Bekcer book, so what I here say may be questionable. I had the impression that Beckre was truly onto something when he not3ed that all people are afraid to die, to lose Ego, to be no more. But his "projects" to give meaning etc seemed little more finally than another way of escaping the reality that we are born, we live. we die. His writing encompasses a lot about poets and artists finding "meaning" via projects, but that they too finally do not escape what must be. Perhaps distractions and "projects" give an appea;rance of this or that, and certaijoy some Far Eastern notions try also to releave us of the fear of death. Alas, Becker's cancer ended his life. I believe he had another, later book that he was either working on or had completed.
In sum: the "wisdom" that we get from Becker and just about all other thinekers, spiriutal guides, religions, etc amounts little more than to the wisdom of Simba in The Lion King: there is a circle of life and we are a part of it.
posted by Postroad at 8:25 AM on December 20, 2004

I have had Becker's book on my shelf for awhile and plan to read it in the near future. As a student of aging and spirituality, this book has been commended to me over and over, probably in part because my professors came of age when the book was first published in 1973. Thank you for the post and for introducing me to the film as well. Joe, which were you aware of first--the book, the foundation, or the film?
posted by gonzesse at 9:21 AM on December 20, 2004

glad a few folks found this interesting, as well.

gonzesse: the book. Professor Dick Westley used it in the philosophy of human nature course I took with him as a freshman at Loyola U Chicago back in '95 (Westley's an incredible teacher and a magnificent human being).

Now that I'm teaching my own philosophy courses, I'm starting to use Becker's work as a bridge between exitstential thought and psychology. There's a companion piece that was published post-humously called Escape from Evil which deals with the "science of evil" caused by our more misguided heroic projects (e.g., war) that I've yet to read, too.

The thesis seems more than a little relevant to current events, IMHO, but I didn't want to mar my first post by deliberately referencing, say, the war in Iraq.
posted by joe lisboa at 10:54 AM on December 20, 2004

joe, what's 'exitstential thought'? Is it the study of the placement of exit signs and the meaning of freeway off ramps in contemporary society? A combination of semiotics, existentialism and traffic flow analysis? Do you see Satre's play no exit as a pre-emptive denial of exitstential thought?
posted by sien at 2:29 PM on December 20, 2004

In sum: the "wisdom" that we get from Becker and just about all other thinekers, spiriutal guides, religions, etc amounts little more than to the wisdom of Simba in The Lion King: there is a circle of life and we are a part of it.

Hakuna matata, eh ?
posted by y2karl at 2:43 PM on December 20, 2004

Does anyone know about current screenings of the film? The most recent times listed on the website are from October of this year.
posted by gonzesse at 2:52 PM on December 20, 2004

joe, what's 'exitstential thought'?

exitstential thought: noun, philosophical system that identifies spell check as a crutch for philistines shackled to their respective societies' utterly arbitrary codes of heroics. see also: doh-ism.
posted by joe lisboa at 2:57 PM on December 20, 2004

Nice balderdash, Joe.
posted by gonzesse at 9:10 PM on December 21, 2004

man, i tried!

(and i was kidding, gonzesse. honest.)
posted by joe lisboa at 10:37 PM on December 21, 2004