[MD] The MOQ and Death 2: The Quest for Immortality

[John Carl]

Horse,

I recommend this essay to join those on the moq.org website as worthy of
enshrinement.

With a bit of editing out of the references to dmb's dickhood, which
passersby ought to discover for themselves, rather than having it foisted on
them.

Great writing Steve.  Thanks for showing us how it should be done.

John the student

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 6:34 AM, Steven Peterson <peterson.steve at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> The title to this thread could have been "Becker's Theory of Evil: Why
> DMB is such a dick, why Bo is a megalomanic obsessed with the SOL, and
> why the rest of us are pretty much a bunch of assholes, too."
>
> I'm going to continue my book report on Ernest Becker;s The Denial if
> Death. Like Joseph Campbell, Becker achieved his widest recognition
> very soon after his death. e product of his own quest for immortality,
> The Denial of Death, was published in 1973 and was awarded the
> Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1974, two months after he died of
> cancer at the age of 49. It continues to resonate with many readers
> today and was listed among Bill Clinton's 21 favorite books in his
> recent autobiography. Becker was an anthropologist who wrote about
> psychology within the tradition of existentialism.
>
> While Becker was not himself religious, he, like theistic
> existentialist philsophers as Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, was not
> so critical of religion as were many other existentialist philosophers
> such as Nietzche and Sartre who pointed to religion as an example of a
> particularly inauthentic response to our existence and eventual
> annihilation.  In their view, religion had desensitized us to life and
> thus cheapened life through repression of our essential fear--a terror
> that we ought to be felt in its fullness and faced head on if we want
> to live authentically.
>
> Religion is indeed at least in part a response to man's anxiety about
> death and is one of the most successful coping mechanisms that man has
> invented to deal with the fact of our mortality, but it is certainly
> not the only one. Becker pointed out that religion is only one
> manifestation of the "vital lie." Our personalities themselves, what
> Becker calls our characters--the social roles we play--are built up
> gradually as shields in response to the stimulus of knowledge of our
> deaths. Our pursuits of "success," art, patriotism, genetic offspring,
> and virtually every aspect of culture get called out as elaborate
> defense mechanisms for repressing knowledge of our own mortality. We
> embark on such "hero projects" whenever we try to create something or
> become a part of something greater than ourselves--something eternal.
> Such projects give us the sense that our lives have meaning and are
> significant and justified in a larger order.
>
> Becker thought that the products of such hero projects include
> individual personality formation, artistic expression, our social
> roles, and our progression from tribe to nation. Our response to death
> constitutes the whole of what we know as culture. He believed that it
> is not our "animal natures but rather our hero projects aimed at
> transcending our creaturliness which explain most of the misery that
> humans perpetrate upon one another. Most of this misery is the fallout
> from the conflict that inevitaly follows from the fact that some of
> our hero projects will be at cross-purposes with the hero projects of
> others. Becker wrote, "It is the desguise of panic that makes us live
> in ugliness, not the natural animal wallowing." Becker offered a
> simple answer for why we make such a mess of the world and why we are
> so unhappy. Unfortunately, the problem is one that anti-aging creams,
> lotions, cosmetic procedures, and pills offering to beautify us and
> make us look younger, and the shelf-fulls of self-help advice books
> won't solve. Once we've lost all those unwanted pounds, cleared up our
> acne, gotten ahead in our careers, bought that mini-mansion, dealt
> with our daddy issues, finished writing the great American novel, and
> started a foundation with your name attached to it, one problem will
> remain that explains why we were so messed up in the first place. The
> problem is simply that human beings are all freaked out about dying.
> No therapy can take our fear of death away, because that fear is real
> and entirely justified. The most these projects can do is provide a
> needed repression of that fear.
>
> Our responses to that problem, our hero projects, are adding to our
> misery because while none of them can really solve the problem of
> death, our hero projects conflict with one another. Our personal and
> private hero projects may be at cross purposes with one another and
> cause us resulting in neuroses, and our public hero projects are
> likely to clash with the hero projects of other individuals and groups
> rusulting in suffering. Racism and nationalism are explained as the
> dark side of hero projects of groups of people trying to become
> something cosmically significant--to be something other than "the
> others" who are merely mortal, or worse, no better than animals.
> Likewise, the dog-eat-dog world of some economic practice--the pursuit
> of "success" often at the expense of others--is participation in such
> a hero project.
>
> These projects are not all evil on the surface. Many of our projects
> are in fact targeted at defeating evil or are intended as in the
> service of "the greater good," but as Sam Keen explains in his
> foreword to the 1997 edition, many of "our heroic projects that are
> aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more
> evil into the word." This is so because our human conflicts are not
> mere pursuit of our animal interests. They are symbolic struggles
> between hero projects which must bear the burden of transcendent
> significance. Therefore, Keen writes, "Human conflicts are life or
> death struggles--my gods against your gods, my immortality project
> against your imortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is
> not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression or innate
> selfishness, but our need to deny our mortality, gain self-esteem, and
> achieve a heroic self-image."
>
> The evil brought about by our animal urges is small potatoes when
> compared to the evil wrought by our symbolic battles against the many
> scapegoats for our feelings of inferiority in the face of the infinite
> cosmos--an inferiority that we project onto our enemies: the infidels,
> the godless Commies, the Jews, the niggers, the homos, the others,
> "them." Such enemies must be opposed because they are "dirty." We have
> projected all our own insecurities about our creatureliness upon them,
> and they must be made to suffer for their unworthiness. Bigoty can not
> be explained by our animal selfishness, lust, or territorialism.
> People don't engage in genocide by because they have succumbed to
> their primal desires. Such evil can only be wrought in a symbolic
> struggle. These are holy wars of purification, Keen said, "in which we
> sacrifice our brave boys to destroy the cowardly enemies of
> righteousness. And the more blood the better, because the bigger the
> body-count, the greater the sacrifice for the sacred cause, the side
> of destiny, the divine plan."
>
> The notion of survival of the fittest applied to cultures suggests
> that successful cultures needed to provide intricate symbolic systems
> for their members for coping with death. Such systems are at least
> covertly if not explicitly religious. The ideological conflicts
> between cultures are battles between immortality projects which always
> have the character of holy wars. Keen said,
>
> "One of Becker's lasting contributions to social psychology has been
> to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by
> unconscious motives that have little to so with their stated goals.
> Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less
> to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for
> assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting
> worth...Becker's radical conclusion is that it is our altruistic
> motives that turn the world into a charnel house--our desire to merge
> with a larger whole, to dedicate our lives to a higher cause, to serve
> cosmic powers--poses a disturbing and revolutionary question to every
> individual and nation. At what cost do we purchase assurance that we
> are heroic?"
>
> Once we begin asking ourselves this question and begin to recognize
> our personal hero projects for the immortality seeking crusades they
> are and expose the unconscious motives by which individuals and
> nations operate, we are on our way to avoiding participation in such
> evil in the future. The silver lining in this bleak look at our fear
> of death is, according to Becker, that "this means that evil itself is
> amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the saw of reason."
> We may not be able to do without such hero projects if Becker is
> correct in saying that truly facing our own mortality is a horror that
> no human can suffer and continue to abide, but not all hero projects
> are destructive. We can maintain our benign practices though they may
> still qualify as immortality projects.
>
> Is Becker correct?
>
> Becker's claim is a bold one.  I see no way that we could every verify
> or falsify his claim that all of culture is a response to repressed
> fear of death. It may still be useful however as a way of thinking
> about our lives and as a "theory of evil" that may help to explain how
> our symbolic selves rather than our "animal nature" is responsible for
> the misery that humans perpetrate on one another. Since our symbolic
> selves our own unconsious responces to repressed fear that are
> susceptible to conscious deconstruction and self-creation, we can try
> to avoid destructive hero projects.
>
> Becker may not be right about his assertion that all of human behavior
> has its root in fear of death, but I suspect that he is right that our
> religious practices are no more a response to our fear of death as
> many of our other practices. The "smug atheist" alluded to in my last
> post may have abandoned or never had a religious immortality project,
> but that does not mean that he has not been working on all sorts of
> other immortality projects to deny her own fear of death.
>
> Like the MOQ's theory of evil, I see Becker's theory as a paradigm
> that can be applied to do what Socrates asked us to do: inquire about
> why we ourselves do the things we do.
>
> After reading Becker I started questioning my own motivations. Is what
> I am doing part of an immortality project that is bound to fail and
> make others suffer along the way? It also helps to explains the
> possible hidden motivations of others. For example, perhaps it
> explains why every disagreement, no matter how small it seems to us,
> is blown up into a life or death holy war by DMB. And perhaps it
> explains why Bo could not ever, NEVER, give up on the SOL no matter
> how strong the arguments against it may be.
>
> What do you think? Do you see Becker's theory of evil as useful? Can
> it be harmonized with Pirsig's theory of evil as the conflict between
> types of value patterns? Why is DMB such a dick?
>
> Best,
> Steve
>
> (DMB, though I think you are a big dick, if you are ever in the Philly
> area I would really love to get together for a brewski.)
>
>
> woody allen
> "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to
> achieve it through not dying."
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