Quotes from Ernest Becker

The urge to immortality is not a simple reflex of the death-anxiety but a reaching out by one's whole being toward life. Perhaps this natural expansion of the creature alone can explain why transference is such a universal passion.

For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth.

William James said long ago, solitude is the greatest terror of childhood.

We noted that the ego delays responses in order to permit a richer reaction: it allows the organism to choose between several alternatives, reviewed in awareness in lieu of immediate action.

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

modern man tries to replace vital awe and wonder with a "How to do it" manual.

It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. —LEO TOLSTOI

This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others—family, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties. In such a bogging down the individual does not feel or see that he has alternatives, cannot imagine any choices or alternate ways of life, cannot release himself from the network of obligations even though these obligations no longer give him a sense of self-esteem, of primary value, of being a heroic contributor to world life even

The sadist doesn't create a masochist; he finds him already made.

Power for man, as the genius of Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less.

In the head of the adoring male is the illusion that sublime beauty is all head and wings, with no bottom to betray it. In one of Swift's poems a young man explains the grotesque contradiction that is tearing him apart: Nor wonder how I lost my Wits; Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, shits! In other words, in Swift's mind there was an absolute contradiction between the state of being in love and an awareness of the excremental function of the beloved.

The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.10 There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.

culture consists in the sum total of efforts we make to avoid being unhappy

Sex is of the body, and the body is of death.

Human life may not be more than a meaningless interlude in a vicious drama of flesh and bones that we call evolution; that the Creator may not care any more for the destiny of man or the self-perpetuation of individual men than He seems to have cared for the dinosaurs or the Tasmanians.

It is this that makes people so willing 'to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices: those who focus their measured words and their sharpened eyes in the intensity of hate, and so seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction—what calm, what relief.

Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

All through history man has searched for ultimate reality by various means, mystical and intuitive, rational and scientific. Today, some thousands of years after the launching of this search we have had to throw up our hands with Einstein and modern philosophy, and declare that all is relative to our perceptual equipment and to our transcended place.

In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

Chapter Nine SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS: THE STAGING OF THE SELF-ESTEEM ERVING GOFFMAN (1959, p. 13) "Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way … he automatically exerts a moral demand upon others, obliging them to value him.

This penetrating vocabulary of initiatory acts, the infectiousness of the unconflicted person, priority magic, and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that father permits it or orders it. It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion.