"To have emerged from nothing" "To have a name deep inner feelings" "An excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression yet to die" "Humankind has always been restless" "Never satisfied with our physical limitations we've always strive for more" "With machines we conquer gravity and travel faster and farther than any other animal" "We explore the heavens the last great frontier" "And we manipulate our own biology through medical science" "In defiance of nature we have manufactured the means to become rulers of the natural world" "What is left to conquer?" "And are we satisfied?" "Since time immemorial we have battled our greatest limitation" "One which seems to render our efforts to overcome and conquer" "Insignificant to distance ourselves from harm and death" "But beneath the surface we are aware that these day-to-day strategies are doomed to fail" "We will die eventually and all of this will come to an end" "Human beings find themselves in quite the predicament" "We have the mental capacity to ponder the infinite seemingly capable of anything yet housed in the heart pumping breath gasping decaying body we are godly yet creaturely" "Death is the end of the self" "It is perhaps the ultimate mystery" "We may never know what death really is and whether it marks the end of everything or as many believe the beginning of something else" "Yet we do know that death is something to be avoided" "What are we to do with death?" "And why do we fear it?" "then why should we fear it?" "The fear of death is absolutely ubiquitous it is hardwired into us" "For all the things that we don't know about what follows death" "There are plenty of things we know about what precedes death to make it unwelcomed and even seem like an evil interruption and that is life itself" "At a gut level my feeling is death is unacceptable" "I did not sign that contract." "I looked at the small print and everything else and it is unacceptable." "That is just sort of a gut feeling in the sense that we love life" "Death is an insult to our spirit" "Added to that is of course the fear of the process of dying which is different of the loss of control" "Of the pain associated with it" "Others will say what they fear is leaving everyone behind" "Or they fear that the sadness that they will cause others" "In August of 1999 my life was forever changed because" "I was given a diagnosis of infiltrating ductal carcinoma which as medical people know is a very common form of breast cancer" "I have gone into in advanced state of breast cancer with metastatic disease to the bone" "And I'm basically in the battle for my life right now and I don't know what tomorrow may bring" "The average prognosis for a person with metastatic bone disease is two to five years" "I'm now in year three so according to medical statistics I probably only have two years to live." "to make one thing stand for another which of course is the basis of language" "We have the capacity to project ourselves in time and imagine things that have not yet happened" "We have the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect" "We have the capacity to reflect back on ourselves and look at ourselves from a perspective outside of ourselves" "All of these capacities play a central role in the system through which human beings regulate their behavior" "On the one hand we have these minds that are capable of just really embracing the entire universe on all fronts you know" "We can think of five million years from now" "We can think about what it would be like to be tap dancing on the Great Wall of China while we stand here by the golden gate bridge So we can ponder our present circumstances in light of future possibilities and modify our behavior accordingly" "All of that is tremendous and all of it is highly problematic because it renders us as human beings uniquely aware of the inevitability of our demise" "We then recognized that death happens to us" "I have to live with the knowledge that I will die an instinct to live" "Our species has as much of that as any other species but we also have the intelligence to know that we're doomed" "Our survival presents a problem for us because we have the kind of consciousness that makes us aware from really a pretty early point in life that desire to live to feed and live and survive is ultimately going to fail" "That creates a cognitive problem for us" "It creates a potentially enormous amount of anxiety that we have to do something with" "The explicit awareness that you're a breathing piece of defecating meat destined to die and ultimately no more significant than well lets say a lizard or a potato but is not especially uplifting" "Fear is a response to danger" "Animals experience fear" "But animals live in the present moment when animals experience fear they are experiencing the present danger which is either a predator or fire or some threat to their life and their response to that is the fight flight reaction they either fight the predator" "or flee from the predator We also experience fear when we're confronted by a present danger we can anticipate future dangers and we can imagine future dangers but the physiology is the same fight flight reaction" "Because the body can't tell the difference between the past and future" "Anxiety is the anticipation or imagination of a future danger" "So we are all anxious about the future because we know we are going to die we just don't know when" "We carry a burden of anxiety that no other species carries" "Then one day the heart just quits" "Yes he looked healthy" "Since the beginning of recorded history and likely long before that the awareness of our own mortality has haunted us" "We've gone to great lengths to forget deny and overcome death" "From the ancient myth of Osiris to the resurrection of Jesus Christ" "History is rich with tales of the afterlife and of men and women kings and pharaohs rising from their graves and returning from the dead" "In 1839 archaeologists discovered in a region that includes parts of modern day Iraq" "Syria and Turkey one of the oldest known and most profound literary works" "Inscribed in a series of tablets which date back as early as 2000 BCE we find the epic of Gilgamesh the story of an ancient Sumerian king who inspired by the death of a close friend" "Embarks on a journey to find the secret of immortality" "A chinese proverb instructs:" "treat death as life" "In ancient China Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di spent his life hoping to avoid death" "He commissioned doctors to concoct potions and sent ships out to sea in search of islands where immortals supposedly live" "Fearful that his efforts might ultimately fail he enlisted more than half a million conscripts to build the magnificent underground tomb surrounded by over seven thousand life-size terracotta soldiers in military formation" "Upon the emperor's death living servants were also buried with him" "In every corner of the world myths of immortality and the means to achieve it have been at the heart of people's most cherished beliefs" "From magical elixirs to elaborate tombs furnished with spectacular treasures there was no limit to humankind's imagination and no possibility left unexplored" "So how are things different today" "While many of these antiquated methods still exist in some form or another our technologies are advancing exponentially by the year" "Yet our death anxiety is still as present as ever" "In our efforts to combat death and the aging process" "Scientists have now developed the means to reverse certain aspects of aging while others claim to be on the verge of solving the problem of death altogether" "Despite our technologies and desire for miracle cures the reality of death has not changed" "Infectious and parasitic disease will claim the lives of approximately 18 million people this year" "Heart disease and other circulatory diseases will kill 16 million" "Another five million will die in traffic accidents" "In total 54 million people alive at this very moment will be dead in the next twelve months" "Death anxiety pervades every bit of our human experience" "In part we respond to that anxiety by trying to feed ourselves in literal ways and secure our safety and survival in literal ways but knowing that is ultimately doomed we use our consciousness our cleverness our intellectual abilities to redefine the problem" "Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker spent his career investigating the human problem of death awareness" "Awarded the pulitzer prize in 1974" "The Denial of Death is a culmination of his life's work" "A synthesis of the wisdom of the ages" "Once referred to as one of the few great books ever written" "The Denial of Death formulates what has been considered to be a science of humankind" "A broad theory that attempts to explain why we do the things we do" "Ernest Becker appeared out of nowhere" "Ernest Backer fairly early in his career develop a sense that what he wanted to do was sort of bring together a lot of the knowledge that was being accumulated in the different social sciences and even outside even the humanities as well" "That lead him into an exploration of the writings of the ages" "He said I want to understand very broad questions about what it is that underlies human behavior and Becker's position was if you take that quest seriously then you can't confine your inquiry to any particular discipline he said the big questions require wide-ranging" "scrutiny and that no discipline should be disqualified from active consideration" "What he insists is that the human species solve the existential problem of death by utilizing the same intellectual skills that in an odd way created the problem in the first place and that's our vast intelligence and ability to think in abstract and symbolic ways" "in the service of constructing and maintaining what he calls culture culture is a collective fabrication a shared set of beliefs about the nature of reality developed to help us deal with our death anxiety" "Culture provides meaning and helps us to maintain a sense of security in an unsure world" "An enormous fear in every culture and every time and much of cultural arrangements have to do with ways of coping with this fear" "Our cultural conceptions of reality have evolved in order to help us deal with our knowledge of our own mortality" "All around the world we take part in activities designed to remember the dead" "Remembrances is one way we deal with the brevity of life" "Here one moment gone the next but never forgotten" "With the advent of photography in the 19th century families would often pose for photographs with the corpses of their loved ones as if the dead was still living" "Physical mementos with images of people were rare" "The post-mortem photograph provided families a means to remember their loved ones as they were in life" "When we look at history at least it seems very clear that from as long as it can be recorded and across cultures and across vast amount of time and space that death denial seems to be rather central to all cultural constructions" "We cannot be human without living in culture we are meaning hungry creatures" "As human beings we require meaning and whether we talk about it or not we are always living within meaning whether it had to do with family or some kind of work or country or goal it maybe and usually is rather unspoken" "Culture provides meaningful first of all by giving us a sense of where we've come from" "Every culture that we are aware of does have some account of the origin of the universe" "Some people believe that in the beginning of all life" "A god created heavens the earth itself" "This god then populated the earth with various creatures but give dominion to humankind" "The fulani tribe in Mali believes that the earth was created out of a giant drop milk" "I think that's quite nice in that the thought is that when God was getting things going there had to be some sustenance for the original creatures and so the earth started that way and then the yoruba in Nigeria believes that" "originally the earth was just water and then at the moment of creation" "God came and put a silver or some kind of metal plate on the water and then on the plate he took a snail shell and turned it upside down and filled it with dirt put that on the plate and then he put a rooster on the plate" "next to the snail shell and as the rooster peck the dirt out of the shell and it hit the water that form the continents as we know them and I think that's quite beautiful" "Buddhism does have a creation story like the other great religions it is found in the Agana Sutra they don't talk about a particular point of time when the universe began" "Rather you get both in hinduism and buddhism the idea that the universe has been going on for unimaginably long period of time where world systems are created and destroyed and you really can't trace it back to the very beginning" "While creation stories provide the members of a collective with a sense of meaning it is roles within those cultures that give individuals a specific and personal sense of importance" "Culture helps us out by essentially giving each of us a road map that gives us prescriptions of acceptable action" "All cultures have social roles with associated standards of valued conduct the satisfaction of which allows you to perceive yourself as a significant individual" "But it's only through a culturally constructed sense of reality that we know what it means to be a valuable or an important figure" "So in american culture you can stuff a rubber ball through a metal hoop" "You're a genius and we can pay you many millions of dollars" "But there is other cultures in which that would be considered quite worthless" "It would be better if you could throw a sharp stick through a fish's head" "And so cultures really gives us opportunities so feel valuable" "Many people feel connected to the eternal through their religion" "From the ancient egyptians to the modern day the idea of an eternal soul has inspired us" "Provided a sense of security and soothed our anxiety" "After all if the soul will live forever then what need is there to fear death?" "Because of the soul is an immortality ideology" "I had an interesting conversation some years ago with Paul Tillich the great protestant theologian and Tillich told me that almost from the beginning the more brilliant theologians always had a sense of the symbolic of the idea of the eternal" "rather than a literal sense of eternal life" "That literal sense of eternal life was in a way given to the masses by the church as part of its way of controlling them whereas the brilliant thinkers and outstanding theologians had a different sense closer to what I call the symbolic" "Our experience of the world is embedded within symbols" "We've excelled in this world because we've been able to make one thing stand for another" "Language for example enables us to communicate work together to achieve goals and plan for the future" "Symbols also serve as concrete manifestations of our most cherished beliefs and values" "They are tangible representations of abstract ideas and meanings" "Without symbols it would be difficult to sustain our faith and ideas" "When the literal world fails us we turn to the symbolic" "In the case of death if the battle cannot be won in the physical world then perhaps we can gain a sense of victory in the symbolic" "On comes Darwin and the enlightenment and science and then we have people starting to think more seriously about the idea that maybe this is all there is that it is just we are just these physical materials that will decay and die and that's it" "What happens then right when you don't have that literal immortality thing how do you cope" "Instead of simply trying to live on in the physical world" "We take that whole dilemma and we move it to the symbolic level" "We invest ourselves in symbols that we get from our culture and from religion that come to represent us we identify with them and we see ourselves in them" "And instead of trying to live on literally physically" "We try instead to make sure that our symbols of immortality our culture our religion are seen as powerful and durable and that through their endurance we feel that something of ourselves lives on with them" "One aspect of it is a collective sense of immortality" "If you can get a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself that you feel is immortal that you feel will transcend your individual death" "Then that's a symbolic kind of immortality" "But also other individual ways and we all know this" "Americans certainly know this that we're gonna write the great book or do the great documentary" "We try to figure out in what ways our culture defines the good life and we try to excel at it" "I distinguish myself and I stand out as special and when I do that" "I have got a comparative gap between myself and other people and in my mind I sort of see those other people is merely mortal and I see myself as somehow transcending the limit of mere mortality" "I look around me and everybody represents just the way human beings naturally are but I'd become supernatural" "So I try for heroism as a way of making myself believe I can transcend the limits of my mortality" "Our symbolic attempts to conquer death permeate every aspect of our lives" "We live in a world shaped by our imagination where brick and stone isn't just brick and stone triumph and of permanence" "The urge for immortality manifest itself as creativity" "So there comes our urge to build our urge to make a mark in the world" "Our urge to show that we have been here you know carve our name even on a tree" "Just to let it be known that we are here and that we matter" "Culture as a whole is basically an inexhaustible survey of immortality symbols" "Our law makes you feel that culture is stable and will last forever" "Architecture we build monuments we build religious buildings out of what historically have been the most enduring materials know to human beings" "American utopianism at the moment tends to be consumer utopia" "It is associated with money and the ability to command the wills of other people by paying them something which in effect is magnifying your own self" "It is magnifying your own strength" "If you can potentially make anyone of the world do your bidding because of your checkbook" "In effect you have everyone in the world extending your power you have millions of hands and arms" "Wealth is a kind of symbolic barrier against death and I think unconsciously we are thinking if" "I have enough of it it isn't going to get me" "I can buy my way clear of this" "The tragic flip side of this experience is that if you don't have money" "You are in effect surrendering your ability to choose or to control other people" "Or to put it another way you are radically vulnerable" "The ultimate state of being without money is to be a slave" "When you don't have a zillion dollars whose fault is it in the US today" "It is your fault you feel like a piece of crap" "It is not surprising that a third of the american population is depressed" "If our immortality depends on the endurance and durability of our symbols and symbolic systems" "What happens when those symbols fall or fail us" "Once again our symbols and our efforts to become something more than we are" "Are shown to be just as fleeting as life itself" "We experience a sort of symbolic death" "I am deeply and truly sorry for pain and hurt and anger and confusion that were the result from all of these" "On a social scale the loss of jobs relationships and our sense of self worth in our day to day lives are all experienced as a sort of social death" "An overwhelming sense that we have not achieved the standard set by our culture" "In effect to be in a state of social death is to be without money and without the ability to have an influence on other people's behavior and in turn to be totally vulnerable to the wills of the people around you" "And therefore from my point of view social death is analogous to and in many ways just as disturbing and terrifying as real death and it's not surprising to me at all if you look around the world again and again" "you see people threatened by social death responding with the kinds of virulent emotional reactions" "That you would associate with a more explicit threat to life and limb" "Which is to say either deep depression or volatile aggression or a kind of berserk violence" "It has been alleged that Mr Raser phoned a third party on January the 4th they've taken my life" "I have nothing to lose I don't have anything to lose" "I'll take my guns and whack a bunch of people" "Robert shot the other members of the family and then took his own life" "Death imagery can still haunt us and we try to constantly transcend it with affirmations of life or experiences of life imagery" "When we have meaningful kinds of connections with other people challenges and integrity a feeling of belonging to some larger and more meaningful whole that's what it takes to make us feel fully alive and vibrant" "Like our lives count for something" "And it can for instance include the producing and raising and nurturing of children" "Which are both a source of love and affection for us but also a symbol of the human future and the process of larger human connectedness" "And that's why after large-scale destruction after the holocaust or after Hiroshima many people sought to marry and have children because they wanted to reassert life images of life and these were absolutely crucial" "In August this year I'm going to be having a double mastectomy" "Done with full reconstruction the same day which is going to amount to several hours of surgery" "I am trying to keep myself busy doing other things rather than just focus every day on the fact that My God in a few weeks that I am going to have my breasts cut off" "I'd just can't let it take over my life" "I just refuse and that's why I'm having the surgery so that I'm saying back to the cancer" "No you can't have me yet" "I'm not ready to go" "I see it as a challenge" "Cancer may kill me but it's never going to kill my spirit" "Striving for immortality nurtures and maintains us" "The byproducts of immortality striving can uplift us through our darkest days" "There is nothing you know there's nothing wrong with that" "We are in a tough situation and you know that helps us through and that's fine" "And a lot of great things have been done" "For immortality purposes Van Gogh painted those paintings and we're you know" "If we enjoy his paintings then we profit from that" "So a lot of our immortality striving has led to a lot of great things in terms of advancing human happiness and enjoyment of life and that sort of thing" "You would think that striving for immortality would be an endlessly good thing" "The more of it the better" "But at the same time our immortality ideologies often get us into trouble and create problems" "As the tragic history around us keeps traumatizing" "The drive toward immortality is very likely to turn into a rage for survival" "What I would call survival greed survival rage" "One of the easiest ways to make yourself feel more than mortal is to stand as the conqueror of someone else" "So there's a tendency to want to lift yourself up by elbowing other people down" "And that can be done in socially acceptable ways sports teams or whatever" "Getting the promotion at work over your colleague" "But it also can manifest itself in violence" "If culture help us deny or stave off death" "Then the existence of other cultures or even differing others within our own culture can pose a threat to our psychological and emotional stability" "Tolerance is an ambitious goal given the differences we encounter everyday then the other supposed truths must be wrong" "The existence of other conceptions of reality forces us to question how own belief system and therefore our claims to immortality" "If I believe that God created the earth in six days before taking a well-deserved break." "and then I run into somebody like the Fulani folks in Mali who think that earth was created out of a giant drop of milk" "Well if he's right ..." "I've got a problem" "What we generally do when this happens is to engage in a host of what turned out to be rather unsavory behaviors that serve a defensive compensatory function that allows us to restore our own psychologically equanimity by bolstering our faith in our particular perspective" "so the first thing that we normally do what we run into somebody different is to just dismiss them ..." "as an inferior form of life" "Sure they african dude believes that god created the earth out of the giant drop of milk" "But you know these are ignorant savages worshiping piles of sticks and mud and they do not have email and cable television" "And by derogating them we sort of defuse the threat but they keep you know but they're doing okay how can that be?" "so usually derogation is not enough so we try to assimilate others into our worldview" "Because if we can sell our worldview to them and they buy it that's a very strong validation that we are right" "So the most obvious example of this is of course missionary activity" "There are these african civilizations they are doing quite fine thank you and we march in and we give it one of these you're catholic now play bingo and then in a couple of minutes destroyed thousands of years perfectly viable indigenous cultures" "You convert them and if you successfully do that and that's been successfully done many many times" "Then you get even increased faith that your way is the right way your god is the right god" "The whole cold war was really a massive feud between capitalism and communism to extend their sphere of influence throughout as much of the world as possible" "Sometimes what we can do is if there's an alternative worldview that is implicitly suggesting that yours may not be the best or yours may not be absolutely true you can sort of incorporate certain aspects of that alternative worldview into your own" "and thereby defuse the threat and we like to use the example of the hippie subculture that developed in America in the mid sixties" "What mainstream America did was they incorporated some of the appealing aspects of the hippie subculture into the mainstream culture and cut off the really threatening aspects" "One of the things that the hippies started doing was they started wearing blue jeans" "Blue jeans before the hippies came along was something that was worn by certain population of workers in this country but they say you know what appearance is bullshit" "We're gonna wear blue jeans" "And that had some appeal" "So what mainstream America did is OK when this is going to get popular" "Fine now we are going to have designer blue jeans" "It can become a status symbol which completely is contrary to the original message of why the hippies started wearing blue jeans" "Another example is granola bars I think is a good example granola bars is getting back to nature simple foods non processed foods" "Now when you go to a store you buy a chocolate covered granola bars with like five hundred ingredients" "These are methods of coping that originate in our subconscious" "They linger beneath the surface of our actions" "However what happens when these methods fail and the threat to one's immortality is not sufficiently diminished" "For one's culture to continue serving its death denying function" "The threat must be dealt with at any cost" "It's a fight or flight reaction" "The derogation assimilation and accommodation of others though potentially intense direct and brutal" "Are no match for the horror which results from the fourth means of dealing with differing others" "Annihilation" "Who's right Let's see who's right" "You know my god is better than your god and we will kick your ass to prove it A major cause for world conflict are religious differences" "Ultimately most armed conflicts are ideological in nature" "Sure there are political and economic issues we don't want to be simple-minded about that and yet when you look at most of the protracted conflicts that often go over the course of centuries or thousands of years what you find is that they invariably come" "down to people who deny the right of other folks to even exist" "And our argument would be that that's because people are psychologically intolerant of other individuals who don't share their death denying illusions" "A 1993 study estimated that as many as one hundred and seventy five million lives were deliberately extinguished during the twentieth century due to politically motivated carnage" "As we are beginning to see political and social conflicts have deep psychological motivation" "However these motivations are not exclusive to world leaders dictators and military strategists" "They reside in each of us along with the potential for limitless violence" "I think that what we see in the middle east is an obvious example where you have the palestinian saying we want to push the israelis into the ocean yet the israelis responding you know with the quaint phrase "the only good arab is a dead arab" and you know that's" "not the basis for any rational political discourse you know that's the histrionic ranting of the kind of fundamentalism that I think betrays the utterly psychological nature of these kinds of concerns" "We are the palestinians we have our rights and this is our country" "Tom Pyszczynski and Jeff Greenfield" "For the last twenty years this trio and their colleagues have been conducting empirical laboratory experiments to substantiate the claims of Ernest Becker about the effects of death denial" "They've conducted over one hundred and fifty studies in support of what they called Terror Management Theory" "These groundbreaking studies display that when reminded of death test subjects do indeed react aggressively towards those who are different and positively towards those who was similar" "In a sense we are many Gods" "In the early nineteen eighties when we started speaking in public about Becker's ideas some folks were intrigued some folks were horrified" "You are an assemblage of blood and guts and organs that should a knife impact upon your belly at an unfortunate angle would spill out on the pavement just like you see those squashed animals on the side of the road" "But what most people said is look we don't know what to do with these ideas it's like poetry it may be interesting but there's no way that you can actually test them" "And this is where our training as experimental social psychologist was actually put to good use" "Terror Management Theory came out of the writings of Ernest Becker" "His writings answer some questions that we have been asking in our own work" "We are social psychologists and we are very focused on the empirical research" "What we said is well okay let's try and think about ways to taking all of these ideas and let's really boil them down to some basic statements about the nature of reality that we can then use to generate hypotheses and go out and actually test them" "The first component of terror management theory states that individuals need to sustain faith in a meaningful worldview" "The second component states that individuals need to feel as though they are valued protected members objects of significance within this world view" "Psychologist will generally call this self esteem" "And if we can sustain these two psychological constructs then we can function relatively securely in the world" "And if these constructs are threatened then we are going to feel anxiety and have a need to defend those constructs" "So we develop what we call the mortality salience hypothesis and all that says is look if culture serves a death denying function then if you remind people that they're going to die that should momentarily really increase the need for the death" "denying aspects of their particular beliefs about reality and that should be reflected by their reactions to other individuals who either bolster or support those beliefs or who undermine those beliefs by either being hostile to them or merely different from them" "The very first study that we did was with municipal court judges in Tucson Arizona" "Judges have a kind of a clear set of values that are part of their worldview and that is to uphold the law" "So what we thought is that if we make some judges think about their own death they should become more punitive toward a law breaker" "So half the judges on a random basis were given questionnaires that ask them about their own death" "Half were not given such a questionnaire" "And then we have them actually look at an actual court case the most common case in municipal court in Tucson is solicitation of prostitution" "They were simply asked to recommend the bond for the prostitute" "What we found is the judges who were reminded of their own death before setting bond for the alleged prostitute recommended a bond of four hundred and fifty five dollars" "The control judges who were not reminded of their own death set a bond an average bond of fifty dollars" "In another study Christian test subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire intended to determine how people form impressions of others" "But the subjects didn't realize is that the researchers were actually making determinations about them" "Embedded within some questionnaires were questions specifically formulated to make the reader think about his or her own death" "The students were then asked to give their impressions of two fictitious individuals" "Who on paper shared similar personality traits but differed in religious affiliation" "The hypothesis was that after the christian subjects thought about their death" "They should be especially positive in their reactions to a fellow Christian student" "And especially negative toward the Jewish student" "And that's exactly what we found" "The students who did not receive death reminders showed no preferences in their evaluations" "These results were important indicators that attitudes towards others change when one is confronted with one's own death" "However the results did not speak to behavioral changes" "And so one example of a study that we've done to test this idea was a study in which we wanted to see if reminding people of their own death would make them more reluctant to use cultural symbols or icons in inappropriate ways" "For this study subjects were asked to participate in what they were told were research experiments designed to explore both personality and creative problem solving" "Once again subjects completed personality questionnaire some of which contain death reminders" "they come out then we describe the two tasks for them and their job is to try to complete the tasks" "The first task required subjects to sieve sand from a jar also containing water and black dye" "Various items were available to help complete this task" "We set it up so that the only object they could use to successfully achieve the goal of sifting the sand out was a little american flag" "And so what they would have to do is secure the american flag with a rubber band on an empty jar and then pour the black dye through the american flag which of course ruins the american flag" "For the second task subjects were asked to hang a crucifix on the study room wall" "Again various items were available to help them do so" "In order to do that the only object that they can use to successfully hammer the nail into the wall so that they can hang up the crucifix was the crucifix itself" "Those students who had received death reminders tried more alternative ways to complete their tasks" "They were more apprehensive to desecrate their most cherished cultural icons and took twice as long as those who were not reminded of their death prior to the experiment" "Now that the terror management team had establish that changes in behavior occurred when people thought about their own death they were prepared to conduct what was to become their most striking and ominous study" "If it could be determined that thinking of death cause behavior patterns to change" "Could it not also be determined that these behaviors might in fact be aggressive toward other individuals" "The problem with measuring any type of aggressive behavior in a laboratory situation is the ethical concerns that it brings up" "We can't exactly have people punching one another hitting shooting stabbing that's frowned on ethically and so what we did was we devised a measure where we could safely assess intent to harm another person and we did that by using hot sauce" "You know Becker argued that we got into this partly because we thought that this could help explain real world prejudice and aggression against different others" "But it was inspired by real incidents in which people have used hot sauce to physically attack other people" "There was a case where a cook was angry at police and spike a couple of cops food with hot sauce" "More significant unless humorous and there are numerous cases in which parents have used hot sauce to punish their children" "Which is a form of child abuse" "But in the lab what we thought we might be able to do is at least get some indications of an intention to hurt someone else simply because you've been reminded of your death and they're threatening an aspect of your worldview" "In this paradigm the subjects come in and they are told that the study concerns personalities and food preferences" "Subjects are once again given the set of supposed personality questionnaires" "Some included the death reminder and others did not" "Then in what subjects were told was an unrelated study they were asked to allot a variable amount of extremely hot sauce for a participant of dissimilar political background to taste and rate" "Those who had received death reminders prescribed more than twice the amount of hot sauce as those who did not receive the death reminders" "This has profound implications" "These studies show that reminders of death play an influential role in the human psyche and can inspire us to act aggressively the implications of these studies are frightening" "What happens when the means of aggression is not hot sauce but rather a gun or another weapon" "And what might be the result if the issue at hand was whether or not to provide food aid to a starving country" "Would we act differently if their culture post a threat to our psychological equanimity" "Many people function day to day seemingly oblivious to the effect death has upon them" "Most would claim that they don't think about death at all" "The industry world has sterilized itself to the point where we hear about death but rarely see it first hand" "But does this mean that we are immune to the effects of death" "When a lot of people hear about this theory for the first time the initial reaction is you know I don't think about death all that much" "And if I don't think about death all that much how could death be playing such an important role in our lives" "How could it be affecting me in these powerful ways?" "How could it affect ongoing behavior when I almost never think about that?" "People do think about death and are reminded of death quite commonly" "Any major city newspapers has got a murder story pretty much every day if you watch television you see stories of murder and death pretty consistently so reminders of death are actually quite common" "The other point is that we do agree that we don't think about death all that much consciously in our daily lives" "You know the essence of Freud's ideas about the nature of the psychological apparatus is that most psychological activity is quite unconscious" "We repress our concerns about death inner thoughts of death but it is underneath it's outside of consciousness then how do you get at that" "That sounds like this is sort of untestable" "It is not untestable" "Psychologists have recently developed technology to present material to people without their awareness that they're being exposed to the material and we call this subliminal priming" "Utilizing this method the terror management team spearheaded by Jamie Arndt at the University of Missouri at Columbia developed what they call the subliminal death prime" "We had folks come and stare at a computer screen and do what they call lexical decision task it's just words are flashed on a screen and people are supposed to look at them and push a button if they're similar so if you know if you see like shoes and pants" "those are similar items and if you see like taco and sneaker you know those are dissimilar items but really that's just an excuse to get them to look at the screen because in between those words very rapidly at like twenty-one milliseconds" "are either flashed the word death or the word field because those words have the same of number letters in the same frequency of occurrence in the english language and in fact when you do that nobody knows that it has happened that's what makes these studies amazing" "if we show people afterward if we say hey we flashed some stuff that you couldn't see here's four words can you tell us which one was flashed people cannot pick out the one that they've seen reliably so we know that it's quite" "quote unconscious and yet they show the same hostility towards someone who is different than themselves and the same affection toward someone who is similar when we asked them to explicitly to ponder their own demise" "Many cultures have different methods for dealing and examining death" "Exploring deaths denial offers just one example but it is applicable cross-culturally these results have been replicated in test throughout the world implying that fear of death is most likely a universal influence regardless of the specifics of various cultures or customs" "I think these ideas about death and symbolic immortality about denial of death and Becker's work extend cross culturally" "They are all primal ideas and all primal human experiences are universal" "World events can sometimes serve as a window through which we can confirm the veracity of these ideas" "Today our fellow citizens our way of life our very freedom came under attack" "And a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts" "I saw the first tower kind of smoking and I saw the second plane maneuver around behind and hit the second tower" "Holy fuck oh my God oh my God (some kind of God to have let something like this happen) this can't be real" "And then when I got past that that this is actually happening" "My first response was anger I was angry I'm a new yorker from New York" "I did think of pearl harbor but I thought that we had denial of death in the sky over manhattan" "There is no question that what's happening there is a clash of world views" "I think that what we've seen in response to those attacks is a lot of anxiety and a lot of anger" "First of all it reminds us of our mortality" "We usually keep that buried day to day in the symbolic system and this kind of brought it to the fore" "The other threat is the threat to our culture that what allows us to know you know what walk around day to day feeling okay is that we're americans and we are part of this strong powerful and good nation" "and that's a big part of what protects us from our mortality concerns and now that's being threatened by not only killing a lot of americans but attacking major symbols of our culture pentagon world trade center obviously on purpose" "The events of September 11th 2001 reminded millions of people of their mortality in very direct ways" "In the span of only a few hours the cultural worldview collectively maintained by the united states was agonizingly damaged" "The ripple effect spread throughout the world" "Just like the terror management theory experiment carried out in an enormous scale" "All the conditions were in place for the subjects to first reinforce their shared cultural world view" "In the united states examples of this became quickly apparent" "Our country is strong a great people has been moved to defend great nation" "Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings" "But they cannot touch the foundation of america" "I'm just going out here to support my country" "Let everybody know this is one nation under God" "How long have you been out here?" "Since the planes crash in the world trade center Tuesday" "We show our strength right" "We buy american flags" "American flags are off the racks" "Also you see christians and religious people are turning to their religion" "As terror management theory would have predicted in the laboratory setting" "What was to follow would be an aggressive reaction against the threatening other" "I think we should go over there and kick ass and take names later" "Near Tucson we saw a man killed because he was wearing a turban" "And in fact he was from India and he was a Sikh" "He had absolutely nothing to do with this" "Some angry american killed him" "And it is frustrating right because you can't find Osama Bin Laden" "He has been vilified he is the evil" "He is who we want to get retribution from but he is hard to get at" "So you see the scapegoating the over-generalization" "That urge for revenge and that urge to be protected and call on our superior forces to go and annihilate and so forth those are very strong emotions and I don't think we should discount them but it doesn't mean that" "that should be the basis on which we act" "We are confronting something that we don't know how to deal with" "We're confronting people who use their death against us" "Somebody who says there's something more important than my life is unstoppable" "Once we have move that struggle for survival beyond the physical level to the symbolic level" "I am willing to give up my life lots and lots of life" "To make a heroic sacrifice to see my immortality system prevail" "Apocalyptic violence that really means violence in the service of not just achieving a political goal there may be political goals but beyond any political goal these are more amorphous sense of bringing an end to the present world because it is too corrupt" "and that can be justified because one is doing it in the service of a spiritually pure world" "From the terror management theory research we see why Ernest Becker's work has been called a science of evil his ideas have given us a means by which we can scientifically examine the root causes of human aggression and violence" "Becker writes that humans cause evil by wanting to triumph over evil in the quest for immortality" "Our most oppressive and violent and brutal behaviors are Becker says are responses to our death anxiety" "The core problem from this perspective is that we've got to invest in this worldviews and then we have got to defend them" "And in defending them we often end up hurting others" "The groups of people that we have to make other to make victims to make not truly human" "The ways we have to humiliate or brutalized them torment them destroy them" "Hitler was very big on that that the Jews are animals and the Gypsies are animal" "You know you compare them to vermin" "But we Aryans we're not we're the true humans and we are going to live on in greatness" "And he was unfortunately able to sell that message" "The most brutal and primitive style of coping with death is to dream that you can master it by killing or destroying other people" "It is an opportunity to confront death and to escape it while inflicting it on someone else" "Soft people don't make it in this world" "You can either be the victimizer or the victim and I choose to be the victimizer" "We commit the greatest evil by trying to escape from evil by trying to create a paradise on earth" "We are literally looking for things to label evil so that once we've done that we can fight them" "You know even in the cold war Ronald Reagan referred to" "Russia as the evil empire and in Iran they refer to us as the great Satan" "Today our nation saw evil" "We will not rest until this evil is driven from our world" "And I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards" "We demonize folks and we see them as the all encompassing repositories of evil the removal of which would make life on earth as it is on heaven" "So more people have been killed in the name of God and country" "than by all the serial murderers" "Jeffrey Dahmer types put together this is a just a drop in the bucket compared to how much killing is going on out of loyalty patriotism love for god and country" "The toll in human lives is almost too staggering to consider" "Violence seems to be an inherent part of who we are" "Our propensity to destroy others and the world around us begs the question" "Are we a viable form of life?" "We are the inheritors now of a species who has made a habit of warfare" "They gave me a gun and they said that's the enemy over there if you don't shoot them they are going to shoot you" "Our unit basically is a search and destroy unit" "Not all units have that clear-cut order" "Orders are very simple" "Search and destroy" "I remember a sergeant telling me well when you get over there you are going to be able to kill a lot of Vietcong" "Now you got to wonder because nobody had ever used that word" "Kill" "No matter how gung-ho you are it is still hard to kill that first person" "I was on the ground hiding when he came up on us and I stood up and shot him" "you'll never forget it" "And then he went down" "I got sick" "That first time" "Across economic political and geographic boundaries" "Death anxiety is a psychological common denominator" "No one is immune" "Cross-culturally and internationally we see the effects and reactions that this anxiety brings" "Yet the prognosis for our future is not altogether bleak" "If death is unavoidable how are we to remedy the situation in which we find ourselves" "Questions are more common than the answers" "Is the medical field offering any hope?" "Is there any possibility that we will someday eliminated death?" "And what would this mean for our world?" "Will we rid ourselves of fear if we rid ourselves of death?" "Just make death go away" "You know the kind of cryogenic thing let us just make death just disappear" "This idea that you can freeze dry yourself and be reconstituted like a frozen burrito at some point some vaguely unspecified future" "I just find highly unfortunate" "Not only would it not remove our anxiety about death but it might make it even worse" "If you are ten years old and you slip and fall down a mountain" "That's tragic because you're losing like sixty years of your life but what if you are expected to live for five hundred thousand years and you fell down a mountain that would be even more grotesque" "So you might be able to banish death but you could never banished chance" "And to the extent that stuff happens that's just not going to work" "Are we doomed to repress our death anxiety and suffer the consequences of our death denial?" "Can we face death head on and at the same time avoid creating what can often can be destructive illusions of immortality?" "We are animals and we are on this hunk of earth" "Hurtling through space" "There's no meaningful to life" "There's no purpose" "It's completely absurd and pointless trying to have sex and eat and have shelter" "And the only thing for sure is that we are going to decay and die" "Just as our ancestors did and just as our progeny are going to and that's it" "Does that sound good?" "Doesn't sound too good" "Let's just banish illusions and let's just see things as they are that's also quaint but no can do because the very act of perception is ultimately an interpretative affair" "We used to think that people perceive like cameras or xerox machines" "Illusions are the explanations we come up with to give meaning to our own experience" "It doesn't mean we are lying" "It doesn't mean we have made a big mistake We can't just look at the world see what is valuable and not valuable" "We are creating illusions all the time" "We don't just use illusions to hide the facts from us" "We sometimes use them to better explore the facts" "constructed reality and one in which we continually search for meaning but these constructs can be nurturing and life-sustaining dignity and hope" "They don't have to be destructive" "A life-sustaining illusion can sooth the empirical realities of life and death" "But at the same time must provide the courage to resist oppressing by taking the lives of others to justify itself" "How can we bring ourselves wherever in the world we might be to a place where through our actions and constructs we practiced tolerance and kindness and possibly reach a point of acceptance or even respect recognizing that these are not signs of weakness and despair" "but rather manifestations of strength and resolution" "We need to examine the kinds of illusions that we are pursuing" "The things that our culture has defined as heroic that we find meaningful" "Psychologically speaking we don't have a set of values in place that renders it acceptable to just be a person of integrity" "If you're not rich if you're not famous if you're not thinner than a piece of linguine and permanently young" "Then you've got a problem here" "A good culture provides opportunities for people to feel good about themselves" "And but finally it does that without unduly harming other people either outside or inside of the culture itself" "Another thing that could be done is to think about the development of cultural constructions that have more direct and realistic confrontations with mortality" "It's not unknown to human history as you know" "People are afraid to die" "We're all afraid to die" "But there are two ways to go with that" "One way I think we can see quite clearly in buddhism but we find it in all the great religions is to do something with that fear of death to use that not to repress it but to bring it to consciousness" "and to use that as a way of helping us live more intensely" "Usually we think of life and death as opposites" "Either you are alive or you are dead but from this point of view you can see that they're more like the two sides of the single hand" "In Heidegger's words we are being toward death" "Or Juan Matus say keep death on your left shoulder" "Keep reminding yourself that the medieval monk would have even a skull on their writing desk" "Or in Tibet and those areas the skull cups that you drink out of is to remind you of your mortality" "Is to remind you of death so that it doesn't go into the thing of unconscious denial" "I think we get in trouble culturally from unconscious denial of death not from conscious efforts to position ourselves against death" "Trapeze was something as a kid I have always wanted to do it was a fantasy It is a kind of an anomaly" "I wrote fourteen books and neither Harvard nor Princeton where I both had advance degrees took any notice of me until I could hang upside down" "It's many things it's a joy it's a discipline" "I also understand having read Becker that there's a place where it's my defense" "If not against of death" "It's against old age" "So this is my this is a form of denial for me I'll admit it you know I mean I'm seventy" "I'm not going gentle into that I'm going to keep denying it as long as possible" "I think it's a healthy enough thing" "I think there is a relationship between the amount of death anxiety or death panic it maybe for some people" "And the degree of unlived life inside of them" "If you have a sense that you haven't really lived" "That you haven't really done what you could do in life" "There is a terror of dying before you ever really lived" "Well the surgery was not without some complications but I think I've recovered very well from it" "Although my own illness is classified as incurable" "I prefer to think of myself as incurably alive" "And I think the real difference between me and other people is that I no longer have the luxury to procrastinate my life away anymore" "I mean through tremendous personal growth looking at my life" "I've been able to overcome some great odds" "I think I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life" "In the words of Jean Paul Sartre everything has been figured out except how to live" "So perhaps the better question is not what are we to do with death" "But what are we to do with life" "Why if we can enjoy life with the fullness like no other organism" "Do we often falter?" "Life exists in individual moments" "And it is up to us to make sure that those moments are vital interconnected and vast" "That our process of living of contributing to the collective experience of life is embracing nurturing and meaningful" "To create a masterpiece out of life" "A life we would willingly repeat if we had to live it again and again for all of eternity" "This is what we can strive for" "Marcel says that hope only begins at the point where all of our calculations fail" "When people want to say well we have this kind of immortality that's a prediction" "I think those things get us in trouble but I think hope is to realize that" "I didn't come here by my own will and I won't leave by my own will" "So whatever it is that brings me into existence if I find existence good" "I have to say it's good" "It's good" "It has to be good even in spite of my death" "I believe Paul Tillich had it right Paul says that" "You don't conquer the anxiety about dying" "You meet it with courage"