The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

by Sheldon Solomon

“We build character and culture,” he told Sam Keen, “in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death.”

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. —VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory: A Memoir

Only we humans are, as far as anyone knows, aware of ourselves as existing in a particular time and place.

This awareness of death is the downside of human intellect. If you think about this for a moment, death awareness presents each of us with an appalling predicament; it even feels like a cosmic joke. On one hand, we share the intense desire for continued existence common to all living things; on the other, we are smart enough to recognize the ultimate futility of this fundamental quest. We pay a heavy price for being self-conscious.

And here’s the really tragic part of our condition: only we humans, due to our enlarged and sophisticated neocortex, can experience this terror in the absence of looming danger. Our death “waits like an old roué,” as the great Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel noted, lurking in the psychological shadows.

But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart, Knows to the bar when death shall cut him short like the cry of the shearwater, What can he do but defend himself from his knowledge?

Socrates defined the task of philosophy as “learning how to die.” For Hegel, history was a record of “what man does with death.”

At every age, we humans need that sense of security to survive and flourish, because the terrors are legion.

Indeed, cultural beliefs, values, and ideals would be hard to sustain unless they were physically reinforced by signs and symbols everywhere, from crucifixes and flags on public buildings to movies in which masked heroes vanquish planet-threatening bad guys.

“We have lost our gods,” Laura Hansen, a sociologist at Western New England University, told reporters for The Atlantic. “We lost [faith] in the media: Remember Walter Cronkite? We lost it in our culture: You can’t point to a movie star who might inspire us, because we know too much about them. We lost it in politics, because we know too much about politicians’ lives. We’ve lost it—that basic sense of trust and confidence—in everything.”

In reality, the average female model these days weighs about 23 percent less than the typical woman, a weight that is up to 20 percent below what is healthy for her age and height.

Very few women are model-thin; none stay young. Very few men have the vast resources of Donald Trump or Bill Gates. And very few men, women, or children become famous authors, movie stars, musicians, and athletes. Given such unrealistic standards of value, it’s no wonder that shaky self-esteem is the norm in the United States. And it is hardly surprising that one in ten Americans is clinically depressed and that so many suffer from anxiety, eating disorders, and substance abuse. These problems are, at least in part, a direct consequence of a culture that promotes rarely achievable standards for feeling worthy.

Some people, however, never develop a secure sense of self-worth in childhood and come to rely on excessive boasting and extreme defensive distortions to try to dampen existential dread. This leads to an inflated but fragile self-image that provides momentary security but requires constant reassurance and is vulnerable to the slightest challenge.

Studies have shown that people high in narcissism but not in self-esteem are especially likely to act aggressively toward a person who they feel insults them. Other research shows that narcissistic self-esteem is associated with bullying and perhaps other forms of antisocial behavior.

A perfect psychological description of Donald Trump.

What happened when a life-form, crafted by billions of years of evolution to strive to survive at almost any cost, recognized that it was destined to lose that war?

Myths provide the narrative justification for rituals and, embellished by art, form religion, which serves to regulate all aspects of social behavior.

Otto Rank proposed that the soul is one of humankind’s earliest and most clever inventions, enabling humans to dodge death by perceiving themselves as more than just physical beings.

Although early humans valued money and possessions, they disdained having to work to get them. In the biblical story of Genesis, Adam and Eve lived an idyllic leisurely life until they were cast out of the Garden of Eden as punishment for their sins: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” The Bible explicitly linked work to both sin and death.

History has been marked by an ongoing succession of genocidal atrocities, ethnic cleansings, and brutal subjugation of domestic inferiors.

Only humans, however, hate and kill other humans with righteous exuberance for symbolic affronts: worshipping different gods, saluting different flags, or humiliations hundreds or thousands of years in their past.

“One culture is always a potential menace to another,” Becker observed, “because it is a living example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to one’s own.”

There is always residual death anxiety, a “rumble of panic” that is projected onto other groups of people designated as all-encompassing repositories of evil. And when those in one group bolster their psychological security by imposing their will and venting their animosity on another, this frequently produces a backlash by the “others,” resulting in a vicious cycle of bitter acrimony.

Humiliation strips people of their self-esteem and reduces them to vulnerable creatures rather than significant beings in a world of meaning. According to a Somali proverb, “Humiliation is worse than death; in times of war, words of humiliation hurt more than bullets.” Bullets slay your body. Humiliation slaughters the sense of death-transcending significance that shields you from the terror of being just an ephemeral creature.

Women have historically been viewed by men as dangerous, polluting, licentious creatures, responsible for human misfortunes in general and for coyly eliciting lust-fueled masculine sexual excesses in particular.

The fact is, your brain gnaws anxiously on the bone of death more often than you think, but the ongoing operation of proximal and distal defenses keeps you from realizing it. So instead of walking around worrying about dying, proximal defenses first distract you with matters like what you want to eat for lunch and who will be the next contestant to be eliminated from American Idol. Distal defenses then direct you to think about how right your beliefs are or how much you are accomplishing.

This is because we are all, according to the existentialists, ultimately isolated from our fellow humans in that we can never communicate with them directly, only indirectly through words and other symbols that, despite their great power, never enable us to completely know another person or be known by another person. “We come into contact with others only through our exteriors,”

EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOTHERAPISTS RECOGNIZE THAT although clients are sometimes consciously troubled by death, they are more often unaware that inadequate defenses against death anxiety are contributing to their difficulties. Therefore the therapeutic focus is typically on helping the client shore up her terror management resources, her sense that life is meaningful, her self-worth, and her sense of connectedness to other people.

The knowledge of death, rather than death per se, is the worm at the core of the biblical apple. It is that knowledge that made us human and initiated our unrelenting quest for immortality—a quest that profoundly influenced the course of human history and persists to this day.

We cannot return to the Garden of Eden; we were never actually there.