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

by Sheldon Solomon

The poet W. H. Auden eloquently captured this uniquely human conundrum: Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The Hunter’s waking thoughts, lucky the leaf Unable to predict the fall, lucky indeed The rampant suffering suffocating jelly Burgeoning in pools, lapping the grits of the desert, 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?

This ever-present potential for incapacitating terror is the “worm at the core” of the human condition. To manage this terror of death, we must defend ourselves.

As their language evolved from its original crude social function, our ancestors began using it to address the questions that can only arise, and must inevitably arise, in self-conscious creatures: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of life? What should I do while I’m here? What happens after I die?

Socrates, for example, offered four very rational arguments for the immortality of the soul:

Our first line of psychological defense against those whose conceptions of reality are different from our own is to derogate or belittle them, diminishing the threat their beliefs pose to our own. They are ignorant savages (like the Lenapes), or servants of the devil, or they’re brainwashed by evil masters. Perhaps they are not even human. The Nazis portrayed Jews as rats. In the Inuit, Mbuti, Orokawa, Yanomamo, and Kalili cultures, the word for their own group means “man” or “human,” implying, of course, that members of other groups are not human. Traditional Arabs from Nejd in Saudi Arabia are blunter; they refer to all outsiders as tarsh al bahr—“vomit from the sea.”

IN ADDITION TO TRYING to convince others to adopt our own customs and beliefs, we humans also tend to “tame” the views we find threatening by incorporating attractive aspects of them into our own cultural worldview. We refer to this as “cultural accommodation” because people are altering their own worldview to include something appealing from another worldview, but in a manner that does not undermine their most cherished beliefs and values. Consider the counterculture movement in the United States in the 1960s, when young people began to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Sparked by support for the civil rights movement and opposition to the escalating war in Vietnam, the “hippies” railed against the militaryindustrial complex and the greed, materialism, sexism, racism, and sexual repression that went with it. There was a call to be more respectful of other cultures, minorities, women, and the environment, and to move toward a simpler and more peaceful lifestyle. Young people also rejected the clean-cut “Ozzie and Harriet” look of their parents and older siblings. They donned blue jeans to show their sympathy for Woody Guthrie’s workingman. They turned away from meat and started eating granola and other natural health foods. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were the cultural linchpins of their lives. At the time, these affectations were viewed as a serious threat to traditional American values, earning the scorn of upstanding citizens everywhere. “A hippie is someone who looks lik...

ALTHOUGH FINDING EVIL OTHERS provides a focus for disposing of residual death anxiety, this strategy usually backfires by increasing the actual threat posed by the others.

treasured traditions and

“Humiliation is worse than death; in times of war, words of humiliation hurt more than bullets.”

As Ernest Becker starkly put it, the “natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”

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.