Terror management theory was utilized by military intelligence to predict a population’s reaction to certain threats. Its findings were well established. Human anxiety had countless sources—fear of nuclear war, terrorism, financial ruin, loneliness—and yet TMT had established that the predominant fear and strongest motivator behind human behavior was, undeniably…the fear of death. When a person was terrified that he or she might die, the brain employed extremely well-defined strategies to “manage” that terror.
