Escape From Evil

Escape From Evil (book)
Type	book
Publication date	1975
Author(s)
Subjects	Terror Management Theory,  evil,  enemy images,  fear of death,  heroism
Posthumously published companion volume to The Denial of Death, attempts to "show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil".

Escape from Evil is a non-fiction book by Ernest Becker about death anxiety that attempts to "show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil". Described as a companion volume to The Denial of Death -- in which he ar­gued "that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols" -- it was was posthumously published in 1976.

This book is highly recommended for students of deep politics, as it brims with insights into the deeper motives of the psyche and how this affects social dynamics. For example, in chapter 8 Becker notes in passing that “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.” By showing the lie behind simplistic "good v. evil" narratives, the book sheds illuminates the hidden human psycho-dynamics essential for a deeper understand a wide range of concepts such as brainwashing, false flag attacks, patriotism, scapegoating, enemy images, the strategy of tension etc.

Relevance to Deep Politics

The denial of creatureliness is something of a third rail topic, very rarely if ever raised in commercially-controlled media. However, Becket argues, it is an ever present undercurrent in the human psyche, and explains the power of enemy images and hero images, in- and out-groups to shape human behaviour. This, in turn, is vital to understand the appeal of patriotism and the appeal the utopian schemes of politicians, businessmen and others. Terror management theory has yielded important insights for propagandists.

Contents

The chapters gradually build up to the argument that “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.”

Preface

Becker, in the preface, admits that the book is "a large project for one mind to try to put between two covers".

Introduction - Between Appetite and Ingenuity

Becker's introduction repeats a claim from the companion volume, The Denial of Death about culture:

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Becker concludes his pithy introduction to the book with the arresting claim that “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.”

Chapter 1 - The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

Becker writes that the earliest men, motivated by death denial, used ritual "as a technique for giving life". That is, "throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could control life!" This central point serves to explain a huge variety of different details, from different societies. Lest modern man be tempted to dismiss the relevance of this claim, he traces the contours of this approach, showing that which the rituals themselves have changed, it continues to underpin modern society, because the anxiety is unaddressed. He reminds us that “with medical science we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our conscious­ness.”

Chapter 2 - The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

In this chapter Becker extensively draws on Arthur Hocart and Norman O. Brown whose "analysis of primitive economics literally brims with insights", including most importantly the insight that “[P]rimitive economics is inexorably sacred, communal, and yet psychologically motivated at the same time.”

In stark contrast to superficial theories of barter, he notes that “The exchange of offerings was always a kind of contest -- who could give the most to the gods of their kinsmen.” (an analysis consistent with David Graeber's writings in Debt The First 5000 Years).

Citing a plethora of anthropological literature he discusses ancient economic traditions such as the potlatch, highlighting their sacred nature as means to expiate the inevitable feelings of guilt.

“[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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Chapter 3 - The Origin of Inequality

“If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion.”
Norman O. Brown (1959) 

The above quotation introduces Becker's third chapter and well summarizes its key insight. He looks at the historically important explanations of inequality by Rousseau and Marx but judges them as superficial because of their failure to grasp the psychological aspects which he developed in the preceding two chapters.

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

“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."”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

This "enemy within" is the dynamic of death denial.

“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”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Becker concludes that “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.”

Chapter 4 - The Evolution of Inequality

This chapter asks “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.”

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Armed with this insight, Becker looks at modern consumerism:

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Chapter 5 - The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Chapter 6 - Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology

“[M]oney is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

For money to come into existance and to be able to assume such a pre-eminence, a number of conditions needed to be met, which Becker reviews:

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Chapter 7 - The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil

Becker starts chapter 7 with a quote from Otto Rank which utopians everywhere would do well to reflect upon “All our human problems, with their intolerable sufferings, arise from man's ceaseless attempts to make this material world into a man-made reality ... aiming to achieve on earth a "perfection" which is only to be found in the beyond ...thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both spheres.” He terms this quote "a complete scientific formula about the cause of evil in human affairs."

“[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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Chapter 8 - The Nature of Social Evil

This chapter looks in detail at guilt, sacrifice, heroism, and immortality "because they are the key concepts for the science of man in society that is emerging in our time."

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Transference to a powerful other takes care of the overwhelming­ness of the universe. Transference to a powerful other handles the fear of life and death.

Chapter 9 - Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud

Ernest Becker sees consderable merit in the ideas of Marx, Freud and Rousseau, but they all short because of a failure to appreciate death denial.

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

He writes that

“[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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

Chapter 10 - Retrospect and Conclusion: What Is the Heroic Society?

“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.”
Ernest Becker (1976) 

The final chapter summarizes the lessons learned as regards death denial, and the concomitant drive towards cosmic heroism. Becker considers it possible that "the ex­periment of man may well prove to be an evolutionary dead end, an impossible animal", although he is cautious to avoid predictions. Instead he concludes with the cautious hope that "evil itself is now amenable to critical analysis and, conceivably, to the sway of reason."

Criticism

Becker's work is well referenced, tightly argued and compelling. One minor flaw is his anthropocentric claim that "man -- alone among all other organisms -- ha[s] a con­sciousness that his life [comes] to an end here on earth", which is made without a reference as if it were self-evident. Indeed, he actually compares the behaviour of animals with humans, noting that “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.” This observation seems to run counter to his claim that humans alone share the conscious awareness of their impending death, but reflects the lack of awareness prevelant at the time he wrote the book that animals have language and culture at least partially comparable to humans.

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