by Ernest Becker
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Open the Eye Behind the I..., 2008-09-06
In hardly more than 200 pages, Ernest Becker has written a book of remarkable and startling insight into human nature, the culture that arises from that nature, and how to see what most people cannot: the way we've been programmed from infancy to cope with the anxieties of the human condition according to the symbol systems imparted to us by our parents and our society.
Culture, religion, political ideals...they are nothing but neurotic defenses against existential terror.
We're born from out of nowhere and dissolved back into nowhere--and the anxiety this produces we must somehow forget if we're to get on with the day-to-day business of living. But as a result, we end up living largely shallow lives, finding "meaning" in material pleasures and possessions, in patriotism, professions, catechisms of one sort or another, even in parenthood because that's what our society rewards us for doing.
But do these pursuits really satisfy--or are they only neurotic responses to feelings of powerlessness and fears of meaninglessness in the face of an inescapable death we'd rather do anything than face?
Becker lucidly traces our development as individuals and as a species from a basic sense of helplessness to a mastery of our environment through the manipulation of symbols, primarily language, self-reflection, and abstract thinking. This mastery is, in fact, a desperate and necessary quest for self-esteem in the face of our cosmic irrelevance that is literally a matter of life and death.
That seemingly stupid and pointless exchange of nods and raised eyebrows that transpires when you pass a workmate in the office--it's loaded with codes and cues. The dumb small-talk you're compelled to make at cocktail parties--it fulfills a social contract whose terms we've agreed to by default, just by being a "human" being. We are all engaging in a drama, each with our parts to play, and if you don't play yours, the rest will turn against you because what you are doing is threatening to expose the whole show as nothing but a charade. The unemployed, the ostracized, the homeless, the lonely, those committed to prisons and mental hospitals--their ranks are filled with people who, for one reason or another, cannot play along successfully.
Most people can't handle the truth--which is largely how the world keeps going round.
Becker is talking to those who can. He urges those strong enough to cast off the fictions we live by, the fetters that bind us, the falsehoods that protect us from fear--but that also keep us from authentic living. Because even if we play along, many of us are unhappy, even if we don't realize why. The world is a violent place filled with neurotic and psychopathic "normal" people...society itself is a neurotic response taken by the majority to an intolerable condition. Instead of merely playing our roles, Becker calls us to a new kind of religious sensibility--one that asks questions rather than repeat traditional answers. A religious sensibility--not a religion--that enables us to hold in balance our paradoxical position somewhere between god and animal.
The goal, Becker seems to say, is to choose a role for ourselves but never forget that it is a role. Like the existentialists, Becker suggests that the "meaning" of life is the meaning we give it--but that's "all" it is, the meaning we've decided to give it. And to be truly free is to never become so wholly lost in the role we've assigned ourselves, nor the drama we've written to star in that we mistake ourselves for our role or the drama for reality.
We are, in fact, what lies behind all that--an actor whose face we never see in full light, who appears on stage and disappears off-stage, who remains unknown even when the final credits roll.
It may well be that most people cannot endure such uncertainty--nor so much freedom. And, sadly, that's why the world is in the sorry condition it's in, has always been, and most likely will always be.
But "I" is a candle that can only be lit one at a time. That's the good news Becker delivers in this bluntly provocative but ultimately inspiring book. If you've often felt like a character in a Twilight Zone episode, the one sane person in a lunatic asylum, Becker is good company. You're almost certain to enjoy his work.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
The Most Coherent Ontology of Man, Yet devised, 2008-02-28
Introduction
When the name Ernest Becker is mentioned, it is time to pull out the superlatives. Like his other books, this one too is panoramic in scope; magisterial in its command of the material it covers, and as always, comprehensive. It is another synthesis that constitutes an odyssey on the meaning of man. And, as with his other analyses, this one begins with anthropology, adds psychology, psychosocial history, and as needed, biology and philosophy. Because it is so comprehensive, yet so readable, this remains one of the most important books in the social sciences. It is near the top of my "Hall of Fame" list of must read good books. It sums up in an elegant, simple, yet profound way, what we know about man's existence on this earth up to the present.
Becker's Ontology of Man
Becker has put forth here nothing less than a full ontology of man. At the center of his theoretical (and theatrical) edifice is man's urge to achieve self-esteem. In Becker's ontology, the pursuit of self-esteem is the supreme motive of man's existence. Self-esteem (a point that Freud missed) is the construction material out of which the "Grand Hotel" that houses all of man's meaning, is built: That Grand Hotel is culture.
Man comes about self-esteem as being his primary motive for existence in a very natural and logical way. The meaning begins with Becker's unraveling of the mystery of how the mind evolved. Mind, is simply an organism's style of reacting to its environment. The world of meaning is built up out of the range and subtlety of its reactivity. Through "fine-tuning," the animal learns overtime to condition his reactions, and from there, on to mental association. Mind then is just a progressive increase in the freedom and sophistication of an organism's ways of reacting. Freud gave us a map of how this process of reactivity is constituted within the brain's architecture. The "id," a remnant of the instinctive and reptilian brain, is uncontrolled "reactivity; the ego seeks to control and delay the reactivity of the "id." This delaying allowed for the ability to see ahead, plan and decide. From this basic understanding, of reactivity, Becker's story of the development of mind is simply this:
That the imperatives of man being a "meat-eating mammal" and the complex social requirements of, being around females in constant estrus, caused the turning of a complex evolutionary wheel that ended in an unfolding of all the characteristics we now recognize as human: the ability to plan and reason; the use of language and the invention of social organization and culture. The ensuing developmental sequence in Becker's mind is clear and straightforward: Meat-eating required hunting; a successful hunt (especially of larger animals) of course required cooperation. Cooperation on the hunt, and the avoidance of conflict -- over the continuous sexual stimulation due to monthly estrus -- mandated, planning, symbolic or abstract thinking, and complex social interactions, which led to social organization. Social organization and symbolic thinking led directly to a culture based on language and then on to its most evolved social expression, with the end-product being a "hero system;" a system where the primary sustenance was no longer based on fighting for sex and meat alone, but also on symbolic rewards such as status and roles based on self-esteem: Pride in ones own ability became a survival tool that replaced the familiar animal need to fight over food and sex.
The Drama of Culture as Meaning
Culture is the treasure chest in which all of man's meanings reside - effectively a conduit to man's historical memory. It is where character, identities and personalities of individuals are constructed, shaped, and sensitively maintained. It is where the rules for "self-esteem maintenance" are transacted and enforced through the process of socialization. In exchange for the safety of one's self-esteem, and being allowed to become "an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action," man is asked to give up most of his freedom "to be." The price for a room in the Grand Hotel of culture thus at first seems negotiable: It is to become a "reality-adjusted" and a "socially-adjusted" being. Sharing the same "worldview" and sharing the same "social customs and meanings" is the price for a key to a room in the Grand Hotel of culture. But there is a paradox: one can "opt out" of the negotiation only at the peril of his own psychological and physical existence. Thus, one is either "socially-adjusted, or abandoned from the Grand Hotel of culture.
Inside the Grand Hotel, the drama of culture is "played out" each night on the stage in the main opera house. It is a comic-tragic self-referential drama of social heroism. Society writes the scripts, assigns the roles, shapes the identities, choreographs all meanings, and orchestrates the plot about itself. It is a drama in which, anyone seeking a room in the hotel, cannot "opt out of." If ones life is to be an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action, then his self-esteem must be hitched to a culture. In short his freedom must be "cashed in" at the theater window. There are no other choices. Opting "not to play a role" is in fact a role in man's cultural drama of heroism. Thus all of the dramas of man's meanings are existential in character. In all the plots about man's heroism, the highest form of existence for him is to be able to act with freedom and independence in a world of meaning. But everything that man does is self-referential, self-objectifying and self-justifying, because the world in which his meanings become operational is primarily symbolic: that is to say, the world of meanings itself is negotiated through language.
The Death of Meaning
In a paradoxical tautology that is inherent in man's linguistically based world of meaning, man posits, as a creative act of mind, theories about what is meaningful within his own world. He then, as a way of confirming the theory he has just concocted, goes about trying to objectify and prove that these meanings are what he said they were in the beginning.
Invariably these theories are about what man must do in order to survive physically and mentally in a disordered, chaotic and always hostile environment (the most hostile of which is man himself). The hero is always the one who "knows, and can lead the way to order, safety, and survival." However there is a limit to what man can do in order to ensure his own survival, and the survival of his meanings: Man's existence on earth is finite. There is a definite endpoint. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only darkness. The existential drama must always end in tragedy. Inevitably, the drama of heroism always ends in death: the death of man, and the death of his meanings. Man has not yet learned how to overcome death. But even in this case where he learns to deny his lack of mortality: where he must struggle with his own finitude, man must create symbolic ways of overcoming and defying death. These ways are called "immortality projects."
If one looks closely enough at all of the dramas of heroism staged in the Grand Hotel, they all "pretend" to sidestep and ignore death, yet despite this, if you examine them closely, they are always about how to go directly to the act of building "immortality projects," or about how to invoke gods who will rescue man and his meanings from the inevitability of the very death he is "pretending" not to know is there? In this state of collective denial, man's dramas of heroism are always both comic and tragic.
1000 stars
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Riveting Insights, 2007-06-15
Becker again posits brilliant insights into the human condition and the psychological forces which motivate us. This is an early work, not as complete and relevant to his later, brilliant, The Denial of Death, but still definitely worth the read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A profound exploration of the meaning of life , 2007-05-21
This book is in one sense an overall anthropological history of the development of Mankind. In another it is a kind of Freudian- Adlerian-Frommian analysis of why we humans are what we are. For Becker the central element in the human condition is our search for self- esteem. I found illuminating his whole description of this subject, and the way in which human beings seek to have their value affirmed in the judgments of others.
Becker tells the story of how children in seeking the approval of their apparents, are taught to limit themselves and develop the guilt of conscience. He tells how each of us may conceive our own lives as a kind of drama in which we are the hero. And how often what we do is artifically constructed to meet our human need for self- esteem.
There are many deep quotable passages in the book.
" The basic question the person wants to ask and answer is 'Who am I''What is the meaning of my life"'' What value does it have'? And we can only get answers to these questions by reviewing our relationships to others,what we do to and for others, and what response we get from them.Self- esteem depends on our social role,and our inner-newsreel is always packed with faces- it is rarely a nature documentary. Even holy men who withdraw for years of spiritual development come back into the fold of societyto earn recognition for their powers.'
This is work which leads us to ask how we know and understand our own meaning and value in life.
And if it is difficult to know where exactly Becker comes out in the end, and what exactly he is advocating ( Reveling in the paradoxes of our own being? and our inability to solve the riddles of our life and death?) this work has great value in inspiring reflection on the meaning of our humanity.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
a FIRST BOOK to read if you see the world as a "problem", 2006-04-10
Ernest takes your innocent little hand and walks you through human organismic life from the beginning, and quickly paralyzes you with observations like this: (quote-page 67) "The child learns painfully that he cannot earn parental approval...by continuing to express himself with his body...(his) self-value no longer derives from the mother's milk, but from the mother's mouth. The change is momentous because of what is implicit in it: the child's basic sense of self-value has been largely arificialized." From these brutal observations, Becker lays the solid groundwork for his Pulizer Prize "Denial of Death" and final "Escape from Evil". PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR: If you have always sensed that the world is artificial and want to begin to reset your mind for further thinking, buy and read all of Becker's work. In doing so, his philosophy will never leave your mind. Intelligent people owe it to themselves to give it a glance and apply their own thoughs to it.
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