Life Anxiety, Part Twelve: Unfreedom

(Earlier posts in this series.)

So Becker suggests that we need "healthy repressions, ... explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence." Whatever that means!

We need to feel secure in the face of death. We need a bid for immortality and we need to see ourselves as heroic. Otherwise we retreat from life until we have nowhere left to run.

We live in a state of constant anxiety, hence the name of the blog.

But what are "healthy repression?" How can we be "explicit" about our own mythologies and still believe in them? Dr. B leaves it to us to figure the rest of that out.

Clearly it's not enough to just follow heroes who preach love and peace.

Especially if they are made of guns.

If all we needed were peaceful lover-leaders, the KKK would never have lynched in the name of Christ and Gandhi would have ended all the wars.

"What is it good for? Absolutely nothing." - Gandhi

But the more "explicit" we are about our need for heroism and our association of evil with death, the less likely we are to come under "The Spell Cast by Persons" a.k.a. "The Nexus of Unfreedom."

We live on borrowed power. That doesn't change. We look for something outside of ourselves to connect to. We find the person telling the story we need to hear. We project our needs onto their story and make it our own.

What's left for us to figure out, and it's no small task, is: "What is creative projection? What is life-enhancing illusion?"

After all, we write these stories. For ourselves and for each other.

Imagine what we could do if we were all better writers.

Epilogue: Terror Management

Life Anxiety, Part Three: Once

Why commit an act of terrorism? And why call it terrorism? What is terror, anyway and why are we at war with it?

Becker answered these questions in the 70's. Sometimes it seems impossible to me how much our society struggles blindly with evil when the 101 textbook on the subject has been around for 4 decades.

But before we get to evil, we have to talk about terror, which means we have to talk about death.

Day in and day out we exist inside of a protective bubble built out of the real and symbolic problems and joys of our lives: our hungers and aches, our careers, our loves, our families, our politics, our pleasures, our grief.

Then a flash, deafening heat, and the body is torn apart. Those who survive are forced to witness, to remember that it's only flesh after all. And to fear the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

What if that were it? What if you were snuffed out in a tragic instant?

Then they put some rotting meat into a dirt hole, and the "cosmic specialness" that was you simply ceases forever.

The mind rejects such a thought. Rather, at the very least, the epigram Becker gives his magnum opus, from Rilke:

And we also once. Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

For us, the idea of death is a terrible burden that must be dealt with.

All terror is at root the terror of death, which we refuse to allow entry into our conscious lives.

We have always been at war with terror.

Next: Immortality