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

by Sheldon Solomon

The evolution of the human brain led to two particularly important human intellectual capacities: a high degree of self-awareness, and the capacity to think in terms of past, present, and future. Only we humans are, as far as anyone knows, aware of ourselves as existing in a particular time and place.

When confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support or uphold our beliefs.

Nightmares and night terrors are vivid manifestations of a child’s emerging knowledge of vulnerability and death.

Children also use all kinds of mental tricks to dodge death, starting by simply declining to think about it.

Between the ages of five and nine, children think of death as avoidable if you are swift or smart enough to avoid getting caught.

it is not enough to be equipped with our scheme of things. We humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we believe in.

self-esteem is the feeling that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe. This feeling of personal significance is what keeps our deepest fears at bay.

the behaviors and achievements that confer self-esteem do so only to the extent that we embrace a cultural worldview that deems them worthy.

How others react to our behavior tells us how well we are meeting the standards of our culture and, ultimately, whether we really are the valued people we want to be.

Living up to cultural roles and values—whether we are called “doctor,” “lawyer,” “architect,” “artist,” or “beloved mother”—embeds us safely in a symbolic reality in which our identity helps us transcend the limits of our fleeting biological existence.

Self-esteem takes the edge off our hostile reactions to people and ideas that conflict with our beliefs and values. With it, we face things that would otherwise upset us with far more equanimity.

Taken together, these studies demonstrate that self-esteem protects us from deeply rooted physical and existential fears.

Ted Kennedy was a prime example of a central principle of human life: we combat mortality by striving for significance.

Research has borne out the fact that we strive for higher self-esteem in the face of mortality.

When people lose confidence in their core beliefs, they become literally “dis-illusioned” because they lack a functional blueprint of reality. Without such a map, there is no basis for determining what behaviors are appropriate or desirable, leaving no way to plot a course to self-esteem.

self-esteem plummets when cultures embrace standards of value that are unattainable for the average citizen.

American society, in particular, puts great value on attributes and achievements that are unreachable for most individuals. The cultural value of wealth, and the humiliation of not having it, is a source of anxiety for millions, thanks to a glut of wealth-celebrating commercialism.

BECAUSE SELF-ESTEEM PROTECTS PEOPLE from their deepest fears, they will do just about anything to get it. The pursuit of self-esteem is a driving force behind just about everything that people want in life.

Sometimes the need for self-esteem trumps even the desire to succeed. We create barriers to our own success so we can use them as ready-made excuses in case we fail. “Of course my presentation bombed this morning,” one of our students might say to himself, “I was up all night partying with my friends; and it’s no surprise I got a D on that test. I skipped half the classes and didn’t bother to do the assigned readings.”

What do people with genuine and durable self-esteem act like? First of all, they are steady; they score high on self-esteem measures over a long span of time. They don’t claim high self-esteem one day and low self-esteem the next. Barring extreme events such as running a red light and killing someone, this overall positive self-view is not easily shaken and does not wildly fluctuate from day to day. Such people accept change as it comes and don’t spend a lot of time comparing themselves to others. When you meet them, they seem to be emotionally calm and fulfilled, confident but humble, often putting themselves in service to others or to a cause.

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.

Narcissists are thus “legends in their own minds” consciously, but at the same time, deep down in the psychological bedrock of the unconscious, they really don’t like themselves. Beneath their façade lurk deep self-doubts and feelings of inadequacy.

Narcissists’ unrealistically high feelings of grandiosity and low levels of self-esteem make them prone to violence and aggression when their self-views are threatened. Lacking the resources for fending off such attacks that a realistic sense of their value would provide, they lash out at others to restore their damaged sense of pride.

Moreover, narcissists are overly competitive, resent others who are successful in the same pursuits, and are disconcerted when others are clearly superior to them in some way. And they desperately cling to unrealistic images of themselves by carefully avoiding experiences that challenge their inflated self-image.

for us humans self-esteem is our symbolic protection against death. All of which raises the question: What can we do to acquire it? One tactic is to encourage individuals to cultivate diversified self-concepts. After all, each of us is multifaceted:

Another approach is to foster the development of social roles and opportunities for people who would otherwise be marginalized or ostracized.

while any effort to reconstruct our evolutionary trajectory is necessarily somewhat speculative, we believe there is sufficient evidence to provide a plausible argument that early forms of terror management altered the course of human history.

Rituals, then, help manage existential terror by superseding natural processes and fostering the illusion that we control them.

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

Religions delineate how we should interact with and treat each other by providing a purposeful, moral conception of a life in which individuals’ souls can exist beyond their physical death. And religion gave our ancestors—as it gives us—a sense of community and shared reality, a worldview, without which coordinated and cooperative activities in large groups of humans would be difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.

Many ingenious approaches to immortality have arisen and endured. Some are of more recent vintage. All serve the same purpose: to diminish existential dread by denying that death is either inevitable or the end of one’s existence.

As the Egyptians like to say, “to say the names of the dead is to make them live again.”

The trappings of wealth are about much more than comfort and aesthetics. They are also about feeling special and therefore immune to life’s normal limitations.

people who view death most negatively are most attracted to high-status material possessions, especially if they have shaky self-esteem.

after thinking about their mortality, people estimated that they would make more money in the future and spend more of it on luxuries like clothing and entertainment.

Death reminders also spurred those with low self-esteem to plan more...

Thoughts of death led people in Poland to overestimate the physical size of coins and paper money; and Poles asked merely to count monetary notes rather than pieces of blank paper o...

managing existential terror underlies our insatiable desire for money and the urge to splurge, and they corroborate Tennessee Williams’s observation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that “the human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting.”

charismatic leaders rarely assume power unilaterally without the enthusiastic assent of their followers.

Intimations of mortality amplify the allure of charismatic leaders

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death…. —JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

According to terror management theory, the combination of a basic biological inclination toward self-preservation with sophisticated cognitive capacities renders us humans aware of our perpetual vulnerabilities and inevitable mortality, which gives rise to potentially paralyzing terror. Cultural worldviews and self-esteem help manage this terror by convincing us that we are special beings with souls and identities that will persist, literally and/or symbolically, long past our own physical death. We are thus pervasively preoccupied with maintaining confidence in our cultural scheme of things and satisfying the standards of value associated with it. But preserving faith in our cultural worldviews and self-esteem becomes challenging when we encounter others with different beliefs. Sinister complications almost inevitably ensue.

But demonic despots are never singularly responsible for virulent hatred and genocidal atrocities. It takes “normal” people—those who see themselves as doing “God’s work,” their patriotic duty, or “just following orders”—to stoke the gas chambers at Auschwitz, to sow the killing fields in Cambodia.

“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.” If the Aborigines’ belief that magical ancestors metamorphosed into humans after becoming lizards is credible, then the idea that God created the world in six days, and Adam in his image, must be suspect.

It is deeply disturbing to have one’s fundamental beliefs called into question. Take our meanings and purposes away, characterize them as juvenile, useless, or evil, and all we have left are the vulnerable physical creatures that we are. Because cultural conceptions of reality keep a lid on mortal dread, acknowledging the legitimacy of beliefs contrary to our own unleashes the very terror those beliefs serve to quell. So we must parry the threat by derogating and dehumanizing those with alternative views of life, by forcing them to adopt our beliefs and co-opting aspects of their cultures into our own, or by obliterating them entirely.

cultural worldviews gain strength in numbers. For beliefs to serve as effective bulwarks against existential terror, people must be absolutely certain of their validity. However, most of the core beliefs we depend on for psychological security are based on faith rather than fact; they cannot be unambiguously proven. Consequently, the more people who share our beliefs, the more sure we feel that they are correct.

When existential terror is aroused, we fortify our cultural scheme of things by encouraging others to conform to socially sanctioned cookie-cutter molds.

The humiliation that arouses lethal violence often stems from unresolved conflicts from the distant past that serve as rallying points for feelings of victimization and the need for heroic redemption.

This was the first direct evidence that fear of death magnifies the desire to physically harm those who challenge and insult our beliefs, but it was not the last.

In a 2006 experiment, American conservatives reminded of their mortality or the events of 9/11 were more supportive of preemptive nuclear and chemical attacks on countries that posed no immediate threat to the United States. They also felt that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden was worth such a risk, even if thousands of innocent civilians were killed or injured in the process. Another study found that death reminders made Americans more accepting of U.S. intelligence using brutal and humiliating interrogation techniques (torture) on foreign suspects. Parallel studies in Israel found that reminders of mortality led politically conservative Israelis to view violence against the Palestinians as more justified. These participants were also more supportive of a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran. And after pondering their mortality, Iranian college students increased their support for martyrdom attacks on the United States; they were also more interested in becoming suicide bombers themselves.