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June 27 - July 4, 2016
Under such conditions, people’s allegiance may shift to an individual who exhibits an “unconflicted” personality—in the sense of appearing supremely bold and self-confident—and offers a grand vision that affords a renewed prospect of being a valuable part of something noble and enduring.
Intimations of mortality amplify the allure of charismatic leaders
We are thus pervasively preoccupied with maintaining confidence in our cultural scheme of things and satisfying the standards of value associated with
Acknowledging their “truths” inevitably calls ours 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
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.
people everywhere ridicule immigrants.
it’s easier to dispose of troublesome thoughts of death when one disparages “different” others.
In fact, when death is close to mind, people prefer their out-groups to fit simple stereotypes.
When existential terror is aroused, we fortify our cultural scheme of things by encouraging others to conform to socially sanctioned cookie-cutter molds.
The disquieting point here is that because people need some tangible and potentially controllable cause of their residual death anxiety,
Humiliation strips people of their self-esteem and reduces them to vulnerable creatures rather than significant beings in a world of meaning.
Humiliation slaughters the sense of death-transcending significance that shields you from the terror of being just an ephemeral creature.
they all involved intense feelings of humiliation that fueled egregious acts of violence.
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.
“it may become convinced that it must inflict even greater pain on the perpetrator. So begins a vicious cycle of violation and vindication that both sides believe they are obligated to pursue…. Neither side can break free because being the first to back down would be a further humiliation, so they remain trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of mayhem and murder.”
people responded to the existential threat with assertions of their own value as well as that of their homeland.
The death of “evildoers” reduced their own mortal terror.
“natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.”
willing to die in zealous devotion to a cause were driven by an overriding passion for revenge that often resulted in escalating savagery and cruelty.
Our bodies and animality are threatening reminders that we are physical creatures who will die.
But as the awareness of death emerged, disgust extended to a broader range of reminders of our animality, such as guts, bones, blood, and bodily emissions.
Similarly, the youth within a culture often develop their own variants of beauty,
perhaps in part to distance themselves from the elderly on the cusp of death.
they found the physical aspects of sex less appealing after a death reminder.
death-related words were more frequent after considering the carnal aspects of sex.
like “expressing love for my partner,” is not linked to, and actually protects people from, concerns about death and their physicality.
Evolutionary thinkers attribute this solely to men’s need to control access to females in the service of sexual fidelity, thereby increasing the chances that a male is helping to raising his own offspring.
What researchers found was that after the woman dropped the tampon on the table, male and female participants rated her less competent and less likable than they did when she dropped the hairclip. They also chose to sit farther away from her. Perhaps most intriguing, dropping the tampon led both men and women to rate physical appearance as especially important for women.
Because men find females sexually alluring, they blame women for their own lustful urges, derogating and abusing them for reminding them of their own corporeal nature.
This finding suggests that many of the images we receive through the media combining death and sex may contribute to male tolerance of violence against women.
men crave sex, but simultaneously they want to punish women for arousing that desire.
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.
Being “comfortably numb” from drugs and alcohol is a great way to banish death thoughts from consciousness, but not so great for staying healthy and alive.
While the proximal defenses usher death thoughts from consciousness, distal defenses shore up self-esteem.
These findings support the general idea that phobias often entail projecting fears of big, uncontrollable concerns, like death, onto smaller, more manageable problems, like spiders.
It appears that the OCD participants, like the phobics, were focalizing their fear of death, something beyond their control, onto germs, something that could be more readily avoided.
Anorexics tend to view eating as a bestial behavior tied to an animal body destined to decay and
Death thoughts apparently drove women to seek to meet the cultural ideal of thinness.
psychic numbing (often aided by heavy use of alcohol and other drugs).
But we do know that a strong sense of the meaningfulness of life and of one’s own value in society provides shields against such mortal terror.
And after being jolted into defending their culture by a reminder of their mortality, the mildly depressed people reported that life was more meaningful.
However, many suicides, rather ironically, result from the horror of mortality itself. Why bother to go on living when death will get you anyway?
By and large, people who lack sufficient meaning and self-worth are most prone to becoming addicted to drugs rather than using them in moderation.
momentary surge of self-esteem,
Gamers are seduced by the allure of a fantasy world in which they can attain a sense of heroism and, importantly, in which death is not permanent.
psychotherapists seek to grasp how the client has derived, or seeks to derive, meaning in the world.
helping individuals reaffirm previous meanings, modify existing beliefs to render them more compelling and sustainable, or fashion entirely new meanings.
once individuals relinquish their intellectualized galactic view of existence, there are virtually always aspects of life that do matter to them.
individuals can better distinguish between who they are and who other people expect them to be, and clarify what they want for themselves.
