Terror management theory
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Becker's view is pretty straight forward: We cannot incorporate a true understanding of our inevitable death into our psyche and function, so basically a huge amount of the complexity of our psychology is based in ways our mind is able to divert accepting this reality. When I was younger I though "fear of death" was a wildly over blown notion (I remember reading Delillo's White Noise and thinking "is death that scary?"). But as I got older, and started having friends die, I realized that in youth I was just much more deeply in denial of death. Needless to say I think Becker makes a good point.
For me, the violent reaction by the psychology community against TMT seems to only add validity to Becker's idea. We really can't deal with the reality of our own personal death, and that is so strong that on an intellectual level we immediately was to laugh off the idea so that we don't have to face that this might even be the case.
The Worm at the Core presents a more modern, evidence-based to TMT, but I don't know if it's widely read.
That's what I understood GP to mean, though there's another form of death denial: all the stories people invent about "death giving meaning to life", about "great circle of life", or the various reasons people give to dismiss the idea that we should focus a bit more on working towards extending life.
It is not conscious.
One of the consequences is that it makes you want to belong to a group and makes you chastise people that go against its moral norms. One of the experiments was to determine the amount of an amend (or was it bail?) a prostitute would have have to pay.
The expected amount is $100 and that's what the control experiment got, but if you remind the judge of their own mortality before asking that question, the median amount jumps to $400.
edit : link to the expy : http://people.uncw.edu/ogler/Experimental/TM%201.pdf
Consider this claim:
"The major finding of Experiment 1 was that, as predicted,reminding subjects of their mortality led them to recommendhigher bonds for an accused prostitute. According to terror management theory, moral principles are part of the culturalanxiety-buffer that protects individuals from anxiety concern-ing their vulnerability and mortality. Transgressions againstthese standards implicitly threaten the integrity of the anxiety-buffer and thus engender negative reactions toward the trans-gressor. Inducing subjects to think about their mortality pre-sumably increased their need for faith in their values, and thus increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor"
The experiment, to them, is confirmation of their theory, but this hardly follows as a parsimonious explanation that emerges by eliminating alternative explanations.
Frankly, I find the article absurd, and I have difficulty taking the theory seriously. Then again, I only have an undergraduate's understanding of the field.
What does that give us from a psychological perspective? People still live, where's the new tool from the reframing?
Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.
Hence it comes that play and the society of women, war, and high posts, are so sought after. Not that there is in fact any happiness in them, or that men imagine true bliss to consist in money won at play, or in the hare which they hunt; we would not take these as a gift. We do not seek that easy and peaceful lot which permits us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the labour of office, but the bustle which averts these thoughts of ours, and amuses us.
Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures.
The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.
This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us."
Blaise Pascal, 1670
"We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them."
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1841
Interesting, it makes sense on the surface but not if you dig dipper. I doubt that this fear has ANY impact on nation states or big economics, fear of death is very well situated and certain conditions must be met to trigger it, meaning it's not predictable, not constant, and can not be a major driver in global politics or economics. Sex and mating on the other hand, is a completely different story, I find the idea of sex being the major factor, influencer, and driver behind global trends and economics a lot more plausible (I'm a Freud's fan)
At the end of the day it's always going to be a theory within which that evidence finds its explanation, but it's perhaps more compelling than the alternatives.
It's the first time I've heard of TMT, but it does seem intuitively reasonable to me. Fear of death and its inevitability leads to search for meaning and symbolic immortality, and from that you can derive most of civilization, up to and including everything that happens in geopolitics. So the connection seems much more obvious.
Sex and death are often viewed in opposition. Psychotherapist Esther Perel has described eroticism as "an antidote to death" and the essay "Why Men Love War" [1] describes the use of sex by soldiers to forget about the death and destruction around them. TMT would argue that the influence of sex in society is precisely due to its effectiveness at distracting us from death.
Your argument actually confirms how powerful sex is. A lot more powerful than what we give it credit for.
This is how so much psychoanalysis worked, by the way, and is part of why that school lost credibility.
Your final point, turning the commenters argument around on itself, is a masterful example of rhetoric but not of argument or explanation. Of course, you leave open the question of why sex is important to us; of what it draws its importance from.
I have made some argumentative choices strictly because I find those visual and colorful within the scope and the nature of the discussions on the "interents".
Sex is the major driver behind evolutionary dynamics in nation states, and macro-economics, and I have yet to see any evidence suggesting otherwise.
And hereby I "masterfully" shift the burden of proof onto yourself, SolidSnack9000.
Unless you have a solid argument, we can dismiss your comment as a "dissection of banality", an argument for the sake of the said argument.
What surprised me most is how big a role Otto Rank plays in it. I only knew of Rank as the originator of the birth trauma theory and thought he was a minor disciple of Freud. Becker regards Rank as the greatest figure in the tradition after Freud if not greater. It made me want to learn more about Rank's work.
All the icky crap comes from knowing that can't be.
The subconscious dread of death is also a form of the Fear of Missing Out. How much cool tech and new discoveries will there be after us? I for one cannot cope with the possibility that I may never get to see a proper ending to Game of Thrones or a good Dungeons & Dragons movie.
That is true. I've been thinking about death more in the recent years, and most recently, the thinking focused on ideas like "if there's no afterlife, I wish there was at least a 'high score' screen, and a way to see how did the rest of humanity fare, how life looks a hundred thousand years from now".
This is a strong universal claim about a fact, and I'm pretty sure that it is not true. While probably generally true for young people, research on older people suggest that not everyone wishes to be immortal and some are actually in peace with the approaching end of their life.
Just one result from a quick search: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.137...
Exactly, by very definition of getting "older", they already know it's damn well not going to happen. They feel their frailty and corporeal limitations, and have lost other people to mortality, so they learn to cope with it, via the very topic of this post: Terror management or whatever you want to call it.
I said at the core, because the purpose of any mind is to, well, mind. If a mind wishes to cease to exist, it's because it's unable to attain its desires and knows it will never have enough time (for some, to even find a desire in the first place.)
I've always been fairly morbid myself. If given a choice, I'd choose to be immortal or never have come into existence at all, rather than this temporal teaser.
Like the comment below by rinchik [0], our global culture encourages every mind to .. succumb. We're discouraged from feeling, from the core essence of sentient existence.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-...
Be good to yourselves!
HNers are here for the intellectual stimuli and thus may not give you what you are looking for.
Likewise for intellectual stimuli, on HN.