#Ernest Becker

[nousrose]

It was not until the working out of modern psychoanalysis that we could understand something the poets and religious geniuses have long known: that the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness. It is not hard to reason out: if character is a neurotic defense against despair and you shed that defense, you admit the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition, what men are really afraid of, what they struggle against, and are driven toward and away from. Freud summed it up beautifully when he somewhere remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the common misery of life. Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery, but reality is the misery. That is why from earliest times sages have insisted that to see reality one must die and be reborn.

The Denial of Death

Ernest Becker

#quote #ernest becker #psychology

[entheognosis]

#ernest becker #creativity

[ahb-writes]

"It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours."

Ernest Becker, quoted in: Alaniz, J. 2015. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. 376 pp.

#writeblr #writing #writing tips #writing advice #writing villains #character development #ernest becker #jose alaniz #superhero fiction #disabled characters #writing disabled characters #villains #angst dialogue #villain

[t0rschlusspan1k]

The real significance of Arendt’s report, and of Becker’s concept of hero systems, is that the emergence of evil is not tied to any specific people or to some malicious, villainous attitude, but to greater social structures that envelop us and blind us to their implications. And we all exist in such structures, structures that promise heroic victory to those on the inside, and makes evil into something external. After the Second World War for example, there were many who believed that by achieving victory over the Nazi’s, we also achieved victory over the evil they represented, which unfortunately isn’t the case. But it goes to show that there is a fine line between recognizing a real threat to one’s self or community, and using that threat to delude ourselves into believing that we can erase the shadow of our own light by violently putting out someone else’s.

— Like Stories of Old, Lies of Heroism. Redefining the Anti-War Film

#quotes #Like Stories of Old #Hannah Arendt #Ernest Becker #Second World War #WWII #hero system #war #video #my posts

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"The other thing that bothers us is that since we don't know who we are, we don't know how we came here. You don't know where we came from - oh, I know, you say 'the sperm and the egg.' Sperm and the egg! Where do babies come from? 'Sperm and the egg!' Idiot answer. It's not an answer at all, it's merely a description of a speck in a causal process that is a mystery. We don't know where babies come from. You get married, you're sitting at a table having breakfast - there are two of you - and a year later there's somebody else, sitting there. And if you're honest with yourself, you don't know where they came from. You've made contact with them at the hospital, but that was another step on the causal chain. They just came, literally, out of nowhere, and they keep growing in your environment. If you stop to think about it, which you don't, because it's annoying, it's upsetting, then it's a total mystery. And if a child said, 'Where did I come from?' you don't know. So you can't answer honestly."

- Ernest Becker :: Growing Up Rugged

lassie & timmy  :: [all channels archive]

#quotes #Ernest Becker #Growing Up Rugged #lassie &timmy #Alive On All Channels

[alchemisoul]

"The tragedy is simply this: that new meanings can only come from the creative depths of the life force within each individual; but the individual is the last one who believes in his right to develop new meanings. He takes everything he needs uncritically from the society at large. As a result, man meanings, instead of being free and open, are in fact 'instinctived' - hardened into the mold of a standard social pattern."

- Ernest Becker

#ernest becker #chatgpt #chat gpt #samsara #dank memes #philosophy #philosophy memes #philosophy quotes #quote #quotes

[isnt-it-too-dreamy]

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.

— Ernest Becker, "The Denial of Death"

#ernest becker #quote #literature #the denial of death #mortality #philosophy #psychology

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing," but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

Ernest Becker 

#ernest becker #becker #quotes #life #wisdom #philosophy #knowledge #goethe #plunge into experience #mad #brutes

[convivialdave]

A powerful tool for attaching new habits with meaning...

#management #ernest becker

[nousrose]

The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself.

The Denial of Death

Ernest Becker

#quote #ernest becker #psychology

[entheognosis]

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man. It is a largely symbolic creation by an ego-controlled animal that permits action in a psychological world, a symbolic-behavioral world removed from the bound-ness of the present moment, from the immediate stimuli which enslave all lower organisms. Man's freedom is a fabricated freedom, and he pays a price for it. He must at all times defend the utter fragility of his delicately constituted fiction, deny its artificiality.

Ernest Becker

#ernest becker

[realityhop]

"For Becker, not only death, but man's anality, the human body and life itself are for the most part represented negatively as frightening, disgusting or absurd phenomena and seldom is there recognition that sometimes people delight in their bodies, secretly enjoy their anal functions and, if not exactly "half in love with easeful death" (Keats, Ode to a Nightingale), at least having managed to achieve what Erikson (1968) describes as “integrity versus despair and disgust” and having fully lived, are able to face the prospect of personal extinction with acceptance. In its rejection of all such attitudes as "healthy-minded" forms of denial or outright Polyanna-ism, and in its depressed and angry bitterness toward human existence, Becker's work might better have been titled "the denial of life." This epistemological privileging of existential anxiety and refusal to recognize the other side of the ledger of human experience in which we find despair countered by delight, pain with pleasure, hate with love, and bitterness with thanksgiving, calls to mind Nietzsche's (1886) view of philosophy as a "disguised subjective confession." Becker and Berger appear to work with depression as their major unquestioned premise. Dismissing all positive attitudes toward human existence as founded upon denial and illusion, they inevitably fail to question their own negative postulates. Why was Becker unable to recognize the one-sidedness of his attitude of despair and disgust?" — Donald L. Carveth, The Melancholic Existentialism of Ernest Becker (2004)

#life #despair #death #Ernest Becker #The Denial of Life

[t0rschlusspan1k]

A realistic depiction of violence also serves to show that even if you do survive a war, you probably won’t feel like a hero. In fact, the impact of combat can be so traumatic that the toll it takes on your mental health can end up destroying exactly what you thought you’d protect, and leave you as a mere shell of your former self that’s neither heroic, nor victorious over evil, nor death-transcending. War don't ennoble men. It turns them into dogs. What is important to remember is that in hero systems, violence and suffering can be redeemed as long as they serve a greater purpose. As Becker wrote; “What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.” And so when we’re discussing the cinematic depiction of combat and trauma, this nuance is precisely the reason why many war films stumble in their message. One popular war film that exemplifies this is Saving Private Ryan. The film opens with the invasion of Allied soldiers at Normandy. The 20 minute or so sequence, which is filmed in a realistic-looking documentary style, features graphic violence, terrified soldiers, and the overall chaos and destruction of combat. But after that, as Agnieszka Monnet explains in her essay “Is There Such a Thing as an Anti-War Film?”, the conventions of Hollywood storytelling re-emerge and ultimately frame the violence and cost of human life as heroic, and renders it all meaningful. This is most notably demonstrated as our main hero falls at the end, which could have left us wondering if the sacrifice to save Private Ryan was worth it or not. But instead, the film provides us a clear answer with its epilogue in which Ryan lives to be a good man and beloved grandfather, who remembers and honors the men who died for his sake. In doing so, we are reassured that all is well, that all the sacrifices eventually served a heroic purpose, and death has successfully been transcended to achieve greater significance. To emphasize; this doesn’t make Saving Private Ryan a bad film, but it does make it a comfortable one, and as such, it greatly detracts from its effectiveness as a true anti-war statement. In his review, David Walsh also draws attention to the film’s heroic leaders. “The implicit stance taken by the film” – he writes - “is that only the authorities in Washington concerned themselves with ideological matters, while the men in the field were unthinkingly doing the dirty work.” By looking closer at the representatives of what we could see as the film’s hero system, we indeed see that they are portrayed as righteous, rational, and deeply concerned with the suffering of soldiers and their loved ones. The point is not so much if leaders were actually like this or not, but that it doesn’t at all question the hero system that is driving the violence. The film states the sacrifices were costly, but then assures us they were laid upon the altar of freedom. And this sentiment of meaningful suffering echoes throughout the entire film, and in doing so, redeems it. What it comes down to is that despite showing the gritty reality of combat, war films can still romanticize instead of criticize if they do not question the general function of their hero systems.

— Like Stories of Old, Lies of Heroism. Redefining the Anti-War Film

#long post #quotes #Like Stories of Old #Lies of Heroism #Redefining the Anti-War Film #war #war film #Ernest Becker #Agnieszka Monnet #David Walsh #Saving Private Ryan

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person's ideas and then another's depending on who looms largest on one's horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success, is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. 

But as life goes on we get a perspective on this and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula. 

~Ernest Becker (Book: The Denial of Death)

[Philo Thoughts]

#Philo Thoughts #Ernest Becker #The Denial of Death #quotes #immortality #mortality

[the-insect-is-awake]

“What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him.” —Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

#Ernest Becker #pessimism #life is evil #alone #eating #eating is evil #quoteoftheday #life quotes #inspiring quotes #motivational #inspirational #writing prompt

[alchemisoul]

"Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are."

- Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution

#philosophy memes #ernest becker #grant morrison #graphic novel #comic books #writing #quote