Ernest Becker on the "Denial of Death"

Profound quotes on the core psychological paradox of being human

I’ve been wanting to publish more content lately and overcome some of these perfectionistic tendencies that I hold onto with my writing. In light of this, here are some truly astounding quotes that I’ve come across reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

🫣 The Terror of Existence

But even more immediately, it represents man’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face … to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

the terror of the world, the feeling of over-whelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation—the miracle of it, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all.

man’s natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; his real creature feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being.

The world as it is, creation out of the void, things as they are, things as they are not, are too much for us to be able to stand.

most of us—by the time we leave childhood—have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience.

He doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation

[We’re] gods with anuses.

what is this fear, but a fear of the reality of creation

One’s own face may be godlike in its miraculousness, but one lacks the godlike power to know what it means, the godlike strength to have been responsible for its emergence.

What does it mean “to be born again” for man? It means for the first time to be subjected to the terrifying paradox of the human condition, since one must be born not as a god, but as a man, or as a god-worm, or a god who shits. Only this time without the neurotic shield that hides the full ambiguity of one’s life. And so we know that every authentic rebirth is a real ejection from paradise.

[A]nxiety could not all be overcome therapeutically, and this is what he meant: that it is impossible to stand up to the terror of one’s condition without anxiety.

🤐 A World of Lies

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on.

if the child were to give in to the overpowering character of reality and experience he would not be able to act with the kind of equanimity we need in our non-instinctive world. So one of the first things a child has to do is to learn to “abandon ecstasy,” to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say “naturalized” but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden, a despair that the child glimpses in his night terrors and daytime phobias and neuroses.

The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character.

💭 Stories As A Way To Avoid The Terrifying Paradox of Being Human

Take stock of those around you and you will… hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. — —José Ortega Y Gasset (which Becker references)

Thanks for reading :)

How did all this land with you? Does you experience match up with Becker? Let me know by commenting or responding to this email.

With Care,
Ethan