by Angry_Chimp » Sun 27 Apr 2008, 22:27:46
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('btu2012', 'I')t seems that humans have a propensity for delusion, perhaps as a defense mechanism. Does delusion maximize survival ? Does delusion make us stupid ? Does it make us evil ? How much of the world we live in is a result of collective delusion ? Peak oilers, have a go at it.
Check out:
Flight From Death
link
From: The Ernest Becker [1924 - 1974] Reader, Selected, Edited, and Introduced by Daniel Liechty, The Ernest Becker Foundation in association with The University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, Pb, c2005.
'Introduction: Ernest Becker has long been something of an enigma in the world of scholarship. His academic career endured for less than 15 years. For all but the final few years of that career, Becker led a rather nomadic academic life, existing on short-term contracts, often not knowing when one year ended where he would be for the coming year. Even as article after article and book after book appeared, he was continually denied contract renewal and any pathway to the academic tenure track. When finally he was offered a position that included some security, it was in a rather contentious and experimental interdisciplinary program that eventually spun apart. In any case, cancer soon intervened to cut Becker's career short at the young age of 49 years. The absorbing question Ernest Becker pursued in all of his research and writing was simply, WHAT MAKES PEOPLE ACT THE WAY THEY DO? Although Becker certainly did receive some significant accolades, even these were not unambiguous. When in 1967, for example, students at the University of California at Berkeley [I (LS) was a student there, 1956] heard that Becker's contract as a visiting lecturer would not be renewed by the administration, they voted to pay Becker's salary out of student funds in order to retain him, being the first and only time this gesture of student support has been given. Unfortunately, the administration understood this gesture as an attempt by students to intervene in the hiring and firing process and the offer was roundly rejected. This strong gesture of student support for Becker's teaching did nothing to endear him to the college administration. Similarly, as he was dying, Becker's book, The Denial of Death (1973), was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. While this award would certainly be more than a feather in the cap of any writer, in the academic world in which Becker worked, a Pulitzer Prize was generally viewed as a 'literary' award for writing, rather than an academic or scientific award in recognition of a major contribution to an academic field....' ["11"].
"The gist of Becker's mature theory was best outlined by public philosopher Sam Keen, in his introductory preface to the 1997 printing of The Denial of Death. Keen summarized Becker's theory as containing four main strands of emphasis.
[1] THE WORLD IS A TERRIFYING PLACE. Here it is important to recognize that Becker purposely situated his views as a corrective to overly optimistic versions of evolutionary philosophies, in which increasing human perfection is our natural destiny. Becker pled humble ignorance on human destiny; we simply cannot know what aims the cosmic Life Force may have. But viewing our situation on this planet with jaundiced empiricism, we do know that we are inextricably bound up in a systemic food chain in which living organisms sustain themselves only by ingesting, digesting and creating fertilizer of other living organisms. For all but a very few of its organisms, this must be seen a nightmarish system of constant terror. Even for our own species, recent anthropological literature suggests that the transition from prey to predator took place only very recently in our evolutionary history. Accordingly, we may assume that the rumblings of a prey animal's terror, as well as the exaggerated human fascination with power and weaponry that facilitated this recent transition from prey to predator, remain very present in the collective unconscious of our species. The undeniable awe and wonder in nature's beauty aside, Becker insisted that there is a real terror in the most basic structures of this world, terror that is echoed in the deepest recesses of our being. Even as we repeat our cultural narratives of conquest and comfort, we cannot mistake these narratives for empirical reality itself. We employ an array of culturally constructed 'necessary FICTIONS' to aid us in the repression of our real anxiety of death and vulnerability, giving us as individuals and as societies a sense of purpose and forward movement. Yet because such narratives are bound to conflict across cultures and this will have real consequences, including overt violence between people, we must keep on our mental horizons the narrative nature of our transcending Truths.
[2] THE BASIC MOTIVATION FOR HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS THE NEED TO CONTROL OUR BASIC ANXIETY, TO DENY THE TERROR OF DEATH. The most basic anxiety is not sexual urgency or aggressiveness. It is the anxious terror produced in an animal that has attained self-awareness and knows that it will die. Though in his own time, Becker's theories were not widely accepted by specialists, hypotheses derived from these theories (called 'Terror Management Theory' in the specialized literature) have been proving amazingly resilient under rigorous empirical testing.
[3] SINCE THE TERROR OF DEATH IS SO OVERWHELMING WE CONSPIRE TO KEEP IT UNCONSCIOUS. Death awareness and the anxiety it produces is not simply uncomfortable. It does not simply make us uneasy. It is so overwhelmingly threatening to the human psyche that it positively has to be repressed. The entire range of psychological defenses must be employed to keep this basic anxiety masked and disguised, and this need to repress death anxiety from consciousness may well have been, in fact, the stimulus at the origin of these psychological defense mechanisms. Individual and social character emerge from a dynamic unconscious, which must expend an enormous amount of energy in this positive repression of the terror of death from conscious awareness. The very definition of a successful culture is that it offers satisfactory, convincing and viable avenues for achieving triumphant sublimation of this basic anxiety in the form of cultural 'heroics. The heroic drive is the varied and culturally-contoured drive to excellence, by which individuals 'make their mark,' prove their larger worth and value, and thereby earn self-esteem and SYMBOLIC IMMORTALITY.
[4] OUR HEROIC PROJECTS, AIMED AT DESTROYING EVIL, HAVE THE PARADOXICAL EFFECT OF BRINGING MORE EVIL INTO THE WORLD. Because it remains unconscious and repressed, human beings will displace and scapegoat the terror of death almost willy-nilly. We are able to focus on almost any perceived threat, whether of people, political or economic ideology, race, religion, and blow it up psychologically into a life and death struggle against ultimate evil. In doing so, we lose the very faculties that allow us to place limits on the violence we are willing to employ against this perceived threat. This dynamic of spiraling violence, more than anything else, remains the underside of human social interaction at all levels, from personal interactions, to group interactions, to interactions between nation states.
BECKER'S THEORY OF HUMAN BEHAVIORAL MOTIVATION IS NOT easily OPTIMISTIC; if the ultimate human struggle is ultimately an unconscious fight against mortality itself, and therefore doomed to repeated defeat, it is hard to see how the spirals of violence can ever be eliminated from our behavior. On the other hand, if we are able to recognize the true nature of our struggles against evil, this may assist us in demythologizing the real threats posed by 'evil empires' and other perceived enemies, thus yielding at least some handle of rationality for setting controls and prior limits on our violence." [15-16].
"AS INDIVIDUALS, WE ARE FINITE, MORTAL, WEAK ANIMALS. GIVEN THE CHOICE BETWEEN ACCEPTING THIS REALITY OR GIVING ONESELF OVER TO ILLUSIONS OF GREATNESS AND IMPORTANCE WHICH A LEADER IMPARTS TO FOLLOWERS.
THE MASS OF HUMAN BEINGS WILL CHOOSE ILLUSION OVER REALITY, LIES OVER TRUTH, FICTION OVER FACT."