Quotes from Ernest Becker

Man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature... Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms

Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so to the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation.

Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no twisted people whom we can hold responsible for this.

If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.

To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself.

Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.

The healthy person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the real man, is the one who has transcended himself.

Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life.

If the frustrations are not surrounded by anxiety, fear of life, insecure love and support, then the child progresses easily and naturally to the new challenges of a symbolic, social way of life. The child that we call, typically, autistic or schizophrenic, is the one who has not been able to feel this secure sense of support to his body; and so he does not make a confident transition from the biological to the social world. The "lever" of

Unlike the baboon who gluts himself only on food, man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem. It

Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures.

In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.

luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.

The person has to learn to derive his self-esteem more from within himself and less from the opinions of others; he has to try to base it on real qualities and capacities, things he can make or do

when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence

Even if men admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. There is no harmonious development, no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from men their need for a beyond on which to base the meaning of their lives.

Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.

children are trained to want to do as the society says they have to do.

Secrets and silences make life more real: the individual, self-absorbed and inwardly musing, taking himself very seriously, radiates a contagious aura: the tacit communication that the serious and the meaningful exist.

Sartre has called man a useless passion because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence-how take it away from people and leave them joyous?

The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.

The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to die, in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, the the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures.

Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat "atheistic communism.