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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.

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
Hatred
Ruling
Kill
Occasion
Enemy
Classes
Class
Occasions
Diverts
Happy
Enemies
Mutilate
War
Foreign
Cleverly
Popular
Valve
Safety
Sociological

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All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
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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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Horror alone brings peace of mind.
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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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Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.
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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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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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To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.
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Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
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In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
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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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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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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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Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
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the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
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When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
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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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Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
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People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves
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Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.
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