Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Beckerwas a Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 September 1924
men self giving
...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.
men self roots
Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
destiny self perfect
If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.
animal herd led man
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
men two feet
Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
hero evil victory
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
men devastation worship
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
creativity detours ends
The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
death destiny men
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
mind peace-of-mind horror
Horror alone brings peace of mind.
guilt results
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
men victory dying
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
art personality world
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.
queens children taken
We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.