The Denial of Death

The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.

Western culture is arguably built around the denial of death through the coping mechanism of distraction. As Ronald Rolheiser put it, “We are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”[4]

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

So masterfully do we hide death, you would almost believe we are the first generation of immortals. But we are not. We are all going to die and we know it. As the great cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else.”

This world seems to be indifferent to our fate. Even worse, we lack real control over our environment. Death can strike at any time and it is, in a very real sense, the only certainty that life offers us. Heidegger called our awareness of our own mortality ‘being-towards-death’.