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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

Ernest Becker

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Ernest Becker
Age: 49 †
Born: 1924
Born: September 27
Died: 1974
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Author
Existential Therapist
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Human
Inevitable
Humans
Deny
Self
Roots
Existential
Men
Image
Urge
Achieve
Mortality
Causes
Urges
Evil
Heroic
Natural
Root

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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of ex­perience. And the price of this kind of almost extra human crea­tivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.
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The manager asks how and when the leader asks what and why - Warren Bennis, Leadership Guru It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief
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The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
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To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
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What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.
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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
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We are gods with anuses.
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War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
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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.
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Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.
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The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this,makes man seem important,vital to the universe. immortal in some ways
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
Ernest Becker
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One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.
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When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
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We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.
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The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.
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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
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