Month: August 2008

Contra Mundum.

I feel like Athanasius. ‘a boat of false hope lost at sea’

The days are growing longer and colder, and the further I get from high school the more I feel like an alien. I went to a wedding yesterday and could only stare past the bad consciences to focus on the decadent waste of the chocolate fountain and the superficial greetings of enslaved servers. 17 year olds calling me Mr. in their black bowties. I want to flip every table and to smash false honors.

I have never had a drop of alcohol – as far back as I can remember my reason has rejected such seductions, sold to the people by vermin pretending to offer a liberal spirit but instead corrupting the soul. I read about Marcus Aurelius and yearn to live amongst people who are honorable and virtuous. Are these people who only lie as dust, or are they the phantoms of some cruel fantasy? I am a bastard of wisdom suffocated by a complete lack of meaningful social interaction. My love is wasted on specters.

Why am I the only one who feels a sense of despondency through revelation of clear and piercing perception? I see through every deception and sear the absurd with the flame of reason. Is there a single woman who relates to this or am I damned to walk with only my weary wits as steady companions? I think a hug would be worth more to me than any other thing. I’m not sure why I posted this, I’m just grasping for anyone who feels besieged, so that we might not feel like the only ones alive, trapped in the cave.

What happens to be a typo could have really unfortunate consequences for any poor bastard caught in that area when the military rolls in.

The Denial of Death (ISBN 0-684-83240-2) is a psychology/philosophy work written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction in 1974, two months after the author’s death. The book builds largely on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and one of Freud’s colleagues, Otto Rank.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since man has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an “immortality project” (or causa sui), in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will outlast him, man feels he has “become” heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die, compared to his physical body that will die one day. This, in turn, gives man the feeling that his life has meaning; a purpose; significance in the grand scheme of things.

From this premise, mental illness is most insightfully extrapolated as a bogging down in one’s hero system(s). When someone is experiencing depression, their causa sui (or heroism project) is failing, and they are being consistently reminded of their mortality and insignificance as a result. Schizophrenia is a step further than depression in which one’s causa sui is falling apart, making it impossible to engender sufficient defense mechanisms against their mortality; henceforth, the schizophrenic has to create their own reality or “world” in which they are better heroes. Becker argues that the conflict between immortality projects which contradict each other (particularly in religion) is the wellspring for the destruction and misery in our world caused by wars, bigotry, genocide, racism, nationalism, and so forth, since an immortality project which contradicts others indirectly suggests that the others are wrong.

Another theme running throughout the book is that humanity’s traditional “hero-systems” i.e. religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason; science is attempting to solve the problem of man, something that Becker feels it can never do. The book states that we need new convincing “illusions” that enable us to feel heroic in the grand scheme of things, i.e. immortal. Becker, however, does not provide any definitive answer, mainly because he believes that there is no perfect solution. Instead, he hopes that gradual realization of man’s innate motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.