Quotes from Ernest Becker

The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive.

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.)

We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is "tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue.

Probably, if most of us had our way, we would try to maximize the predictability of everyone else, while leaving ourselves free to inject novelty into our relationships. Only this kind of power would give us complete safety and control. But it would also be dull.

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person's relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it.

modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment; he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength.

The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.

the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.

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. Each protects himself in his fantasy until the shock that he is bleeding.

never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding.

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax. . . What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?

What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself?

in order for this power to truly captivate us, it has to be generated in the creation of meaning and in social performance

Some are more fortunately endowed to set the implicit tone for the performance because they present a model self. The less fortunate are obliged to dance a lifetime to the performance cues of others.

The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.

When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as religious as any other, this is what he meant: civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it—but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed.23

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth.

The human ego would have to become strong enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… . [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.7

Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion" whether it thinks so or not: Soviet "religion" and Maoist "religion" are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer "religion," no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives.

Perhaps Becker's greatest achievement has been to create a science of evil. He has given us a new way to understand how we create surplus evil—warfare, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modern man's moral dependence on another was a result of the Oedipus complex. But Rank could see that it was the result of a continuation of the causa-sui project of denying creatureliness.

At what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic? No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.

There are signs—the acceptance of Becker's work being one—that some individuals are awakening from the long, dark night of tribalism and nationalism and developing what Tillich called a transmoral conscience, an ethic that is universal rather than ethnic.