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If death is the terror beneath everything, heroism is the shield we all raise against it. This second lecture from Academy of Ideas on Ernest Becker follows that shield into everyday life. Some of us seek significance through religion, some through cultural heroes and mass movements, and a few through sheer personal will — yet Becker showed that each path eventually fails. He closed with a rarer possibility: a genuine heroism that can face the terror of creation without illusion. It is a meditation on what gives a life weight, and what remains when the grand stories fall away.
Full Video Transcript
The 20th century philosopher William James once wrote,
Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism.
In this lecture we are going to look at what Ernest Becker called the universal urge to heroism.
We will investigate what heroism is, why individuals strive after it,
and examine the different ways Becker proposed individuals attempt to achieve heroism.
As a quick reminder, in the last lecture we discussed Becker’s ideas regarding the fear of death.
We saw how Becker proposed that if individuals were to grasp the full significance of their impending death, they would be overwhelmed with despair and anxiety.
In order to act in the world with relative composure, he maintained that individuals require a psychological antidote to keep the fear of death hidden safely away in the recesses of the unconscious.
unconscious. This antidote, we noted, is found by acquiring the conviction that one’s life is not
insignificant and meaningless, like the lives of all other earthly creatures, but instead is of
paramount importance. Becker called this attempt to deny one’s creatureliness and to assert one’s
cosmic significance the urge to heroism. Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of
death, wrote Becker in The Denial of Death. Some individuals satiate their drive to heroism by
achieving fame, fortune, or performing courageous acts. That is, by becoming what we typically
think of as a hero. However, Becker realized that such a path is not possible for most,
and instead the vast majority of people must strive for heroism in a much more limited
manner by attributing meaningful significance to their day-to-day actions. Whether they
find this through their job, their relationship with a significant other, raising a family,
or their devotion to a political party, the key is they must convince themselves that their actions
are contributing to something significant that will live on after they die. Becker thought that
the desire to be a hero is present in all humans. He wrote that such a desire is too all-absorbing
and relentless to be an aberration. It expresses the heart of the creature, the desire to stand out,
to be the one in creation. However, the attempt to achieve the status of a hero, Becker warned,
is destined for failure. Human beings are creatures whose cosmic significance does not rise above that
of any other creature, and thus in Becker’s opinion is virtually non-existent. Yet human
beings cannot live with the awareness that the attempt to achieve heroism is destined for failure,
and that therefore they are ultimately striving after an illusion. Becker was not being condescending
when he spoke of the inescapable need to strive after what is ultimately an illusion, for he
He realized that human beings, in being the only animal aware of the inevitability of
death, are in a terrible existential predicament.
He therefore concerned himself with critically analyzing the different ways individuals strive
to attain heroism.
The question of human life is, on what level of illusion does one live?
This question poses an absolutely new question for the science of mental health, namely,
what is the best illusion under which to live, or what is the most legitimate foolishness?
I think the whole question would be answered in terms of how much freedom, dignity, and hope a given illusion provides.
Historically, religion has been the most common and effective means for convincing humans that their lives are significant.
As Becker explained, most religions throughout history, and especially the Judeo-Christian teachings,
have convinced believers that one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a creator,
that despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense
because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things,
brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force.
Yet Becker thought that individuals in the modern era are in a very difficult position.
On the one hand, we all have the drive for heroism,
but on the other hand, religious dogma has become increasingly difficult for many to accept.
Becker proposed that individuals today increasingly attempt to achieve heroism
by identifying with what is deemed important by one’s culture.
Rare individuals, be they athletes, musicians, or celebrities, have no difficulty satiating their drive to heroism.
By becoming objects of worship and adoration among the masses, they attain the status of a cultural hero,
and thereby can easily delude themselves into believing that they are the one in creation, as Becker put it.
However, for the majority of individuals, becoming an object of worship is not a possibility.
Instead, most attain the feeling that they are important and significant by becoming
a cog in a heroic machine, be it one’s society, nation, or corporation.
Often this drive to heroism for the common man has led to the emergence of mass movements,
where individuals shape their entire existence around a cause they deem to be of the utmost
importance.
According to Becker, this is all driven by the need to identify and contribute to something
outside of oneself which will live on even after one dies.
Everyone earns his feeling of worth by following in the lines of authority and power internalized
in his particular family, social group, and nation.
Each human slave nods to the next.
Each earns his feeling of worth by doing the unquestioned good.
Becker thought the vast majority of individuals attain the feeling that they are important
and unique by participating in the social hero system into which they were born.
Yet in doing so, Becker proposed that individuals neglect their uniqueness as individuals and
discard whatever talents and potentials might have existed in their childhood and adolescence.
Take the average man who has to stage, in his own way, the life drama of his own worth
and significance. As a youth he, like everyone else, feels that deep down he has a special
talent, an indefinable but real something to contribute to the richness and success
of life in the universe. But, like almost everyone else, he doesn’t seem to hit on
the unfolding of this special something. His life takes on the character of a series of
accidents and encounters that carry him along into new experiences and
responsibilities. Career, marriage, family, approaching old age, all these happen to
him, he doesn’t command them. Instead of his staging the drama of his own
significance, he himself is staged, programmed by the standard scenario laid
down by his society. While the vast majority of individuals conformed to
their social hero system, Becker understood that a small minority of
individuals shun the social hero system into which they were born and attempt
to achieve heroism through a sheer act of personal willpower. Becker described this
type of individual as one who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate,
a self-created man. He will not be merely the pawn of others, of society. He will not
be a passive sufferer and secret dreamer, nursing his own inner flame in oblivion. Such
a person attempts to achieve heroism by finding their authentic talent and developing this
talent to the best of their ability.
This talent is then used as the sole measure of one’s worth.
Becker saw this type of pursuit of heroism as, not surprisingly, doomed to failure.
If I were asked for the single most striking insight into human nature and the human condition,
it would be this, that no person is strong enough to support the meaning of his life
unaided by something outside him.
Given that Becker believed that for most religious heroism is no longer a possibility, cultural
heroism transforms individuals into blind conformists, and personal heroism is doomed
to failure, the question arises, what is one to do? For the vast majority, Becker believed
that striving for heroism by following the standard scenario laid down by society was
the highest heroism one could hope to attain. But he also thought that a rare minority of
individuals had the strength to stand up to the truth of man’s condition without requiring
the protective cover of cultural heroism. Becker thought these rare individuals are
capable of attaining what he called genuine heroism. These individuals do not require
illusions to live, but instead have the courage and strength to face up to the impossible
situation man is in. I think that taking life seriously means something such as this, that
whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation,
of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything, otherwise it is false. The genuine
hero who lives with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything, lives
with an attitude of resignation, that is not a pessimistic denial of life, but instead
a recognition that the awesome powers of the universe dwarf man and his petty concerns,
and that in reality there is nothing to be done, because we are all doomed from the start.
One with this awareness, Becker proposed, would live with a humble reverence towards
the awesome mysteriousness of it all, and arrive at the wisdom that “…the most that
any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something, an object or ourselves, and drop
it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.
Source: Academy of Ideas