Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker      ( anthropologist)
Born	September 27, 1924  Springfield,  Massachusetts,  U.S.
Died	March 6, 1974 (Age 49)  Burnaby,  British Columbia,  Canada
Cause of death	colon cancer
Nationality	USA
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	Syracuse University
Spouse	Marie Becker-Pos
Interests	•  death •  death anxiety
US academic whose work centered the importance of the human fear of death

Ernest Becker was an academic whose work centered the importance of the human fear of death. He believed all culture was an attempt to handle this fear.

Publications

Becker's magnum opus is The Denial Of Death, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize 2 months after his death from cancer. This was followed by the posthumously published Escape From Evil.

 

Quotes by Ernest Becker

Page	Quote	Date	Source
Christianity	“[P]rimitive Christianity is a real threat to both commercialism and communism, at least when it takes its own message seriously. Primitive Christianity is one of the few ideologies that has kept alive the idea of the invisible dimension of nature and the priority of this dimension for assuring immortality.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Christianity	“In a perverse way, the churches have turned their backs both on the miraculousness of creation and on the need to do something heroic in this world. The early promise of Christianity was to bring about once and for all the social justice that the ancient world was crying for; Christianity never fulfilled this promise, and is as far away from it today as ever. No wonder it has trouble being taken seriously as a hero system.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Man never was free and cannot be free from his own nature. He carries within him the bondage that he needs in order to continue to live.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Primitive man lived in a world devoid of clocks, progressive calendars, once-only numbered years. Nature was seen in her imagined purity of endless cycles of sun risings and settings, moon waxings and wanings, seasons changing, animals dying and being born, etc. This kind of cosmology is not favorable to the accumulation of either guilt or property, since everything is wiped away with the gifts and nature is renewed with the help of ritual ceremonies of regeneration. Man did not feel that he had to pile things up.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Man is on the "cutting edge" of evolution; he is the animal whose development is not prefigured by instincts, and so he is open to becoming what he can. This means literally that each person is already somewhat "ahead of himself" simply by virtue of being human and not animal... even the average person in any society is already more of an individual than any animal can be; the testimonial to this is in the human face, which is the most individuated animal expression in nature. Faces fascinate us precisely because they are unique, because they stick out of nature and evolution as the most fully developed expression of the pushing of the life force in the intensity of its self-realization.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“[T]he leader lives with his head full into the clouds of the cultural symbols; he lives in an abstract world, a world detached from concrete realities of hunger, suffering, death; his feet are off the ground, he carries out his duties much like funeral directors and men who perform autopsies or executions-in a kind of emotional and psychological divorce from the realities of what he is doing... Words, symbols, shadowboxing - no wonder so much pulsating life is so serenely ground up by the nation-states.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Most people would agree that the word "alienation" applies to modern man, that something happened in history which gradually despoiled the average man, transformed him from an active, creative being into the pathetic consumer who smiles proudly from our billboards that his armpits are odor-free around the clock.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“[I]t is the politician who promises to engineer the world, to raise man above his natural destiny, and so men put their whole trust in him. We saw how easily men passed from egalitarian into kingship society... because the central power promised to give them unlimited immunities and prosperities.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Offhand you might think that blatant power would exercise its own fascination and its own irresistible coercion, but in the affairs of men things don't seem to work that way : men will not give in to power unless it is accompanied by mystification, as in the service of something that has a grander aura of legitimacy, of symbolic compellingness.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man's impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“The Sioux could announce by certain decorations on his moccassins how many horses he had captured, enemies killed, whether the warrior himself had been wounded, etc.; similar things were conveyed by the feathers he wore and the color they were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior to mark himself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each warrior was literally a walking record of his military campaigns : the "fruit salad" on the chest of today's military men is a direct descendant of this public announcement of "see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accomplished I am as a death dealer and death defier." It is of course less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. But it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social honor”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Why did people go from an economy of simple sharing among equals to one of pooling via an authority figure who has a high rank and absolute power? The answer is that man wanted a visible god always present to receive his offerings, and for this he was willing to pay the price of his own subiection.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“with medical science we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our consciousness.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense "supernatural,"' and all systematizations of culture have in the end the same goal : to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“[P]rimitive economics is inexorably sacred, communal, and yet psychologically motivated at the same time.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“The exchange of offerings was always a kind of contest -- who could give the most to the gods of their kinsmen.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“Rousseau's thesis, like that of traditional Marxist theory, does not take sufficient account of the psychological dimension of man's unfreedom. This we will take up further in this chapter, and we will place the psychological aspect right where it belongs : at the heart of social theory.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“History, then, can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the death. Or, more momentously, individual life.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“There is a naturalness about trophy taking that may stem partly from man's primate nature. I am thinking of the interest that primates show for striking details and objects in their environment. Children show real fascination over gadgets and trinkets, and are constantly engaged in hoarding and swapping quantities of marbles, picture cards, etc. I remember how the agate stones that we called "moonies" seemed to possess real magical powers and how we coveted them. More than that, there may be some natural connection between trophy taking and being a hunter, oriented to a triumph over the prey. It gives a real feeling of power to bring back a part of the prey; it is a way of physically affirming ones victory. The victor does not leave the field of triumph empty-handed as he came, but actually increases his own organism as a result of the encounter, by adding to it some of the volume of the victim. A recent film study of baboons in their natural habitat showed them beating a dummy lion until its head broke off, upon which the leader seized the head and took it away with him.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us, it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed. All "wars are conducted as 'holy' wars" in a double sense then-as a revelation of fate, a testing of divine favor, and as a means of purging evil from the world at the same time. This explains why we are dedicated to war precisely in its most horrifying aspects : it is a passion of human purgation.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“We couldn't understand the obsessive development of nationalism in our time-the fantastic bitterness between nations, the unquestioned loyalty to one's own, the consuming wars fought in the name of the fatherland or the motherland -- unless we saw it in this light. "Our nation" and its "allies" represent those who qualify for eternal survival; we are the "chosen people." From the time when the Athenians exterminated the Melians because they would not ally with them in war to the modern extermination of the Vietnamese, the dynamic has been the same : all those who join together under one banner are alike and so qualify for the privilege of immortality; all those who are different and outside that banner are excluded from the blessings of eternity.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“The striving for perfection reflects man's effort to get some human grip on his eligibility for immortality. And he can only know if he is good if the authorities tell him so; this is why it is so vital for him emotionally to know whether he is liked or disliked, why he will do anything the group wants in order to meet its standards of "good" : his eternal life depends on it.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“[M]oney is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil. The evil that troubles man most is his vulnerability [i.e. mortality]; he seems impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the cosmos.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide. War sucks much of this up into one fulcrum and shoots it outward to make an unknown enemy pay for our internal sins.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“if hate is not a basic drive or a quantum of instinct, but instead results from the fear of death and impotency and can be relieved by a heroic victory over a hate object, then at least we have some scientific purchase on the problem.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“[E]conomic activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time, is sacred to the core. It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs. Or, better, it is not only that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain man's drive to create a surplus, from the very beginning of society to the present? How explain man's willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny himself, in order to produce beyond his capacity to consume? Why do people work so hard to create useless goods when they already have enough to eat? We know that primitives amassed huge piles of food and other goods often only to ceremoniously destroy them, just as we continue to do... we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand and led to the present plight of men-immersed in a horizon of polluting junk, besieged by social injustice and class and race oppression, haves and have-nots, all grasping, fighting, shoving, not knowing how they got into their abysmal condition or what it all means.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Escape From Evil	“If it is not only power and coercion that enslave man, then there must be something in his nature that contributes to his down fall; since this is so, the state is not man's first and only enemy, but he himself harbors an "enemy within."”	1976	Escape From Evil
Food	“Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life. The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life. "Give us our daily bread ..."”	1976	Escape From Evil
Human nature	“[H]uman nature is not as neutral as Rousseau and Marx wanted; nor is it as ineluctably evil as conservatives like to make out in order to keep the status quo.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Philanthropy	“We see the final evolution of this empty potlatch practiced in the western world, our cities, parks, and universities carrying buildings with the names Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hearst, Macmillan, Bioedel - men who grabbed millions from the labor and lands of others and offered back to the public a pittance. It was good public relations for alienated masses who understood nothing, but it was hardly expiation for public guilt; it was almost all proud heroism, the flaunting of power with very little mixture of repentance.”	1976	Escape From Evil
Pollution	“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.”	1976	Escape From Evil
War	“In times of peace, without an external enemy, the fear that feeds war tends to find its outlet within the society, in the hatred between classes and races, in the everyday violence of crime, of automobile accidents, and even the self-violence of suicide. War sucks much of this up into one fulcrum and shoots it outward to make an unknown enemy pay for our internal sins.”	1975	Escape From Evil

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