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

by Sheldon Solomon

In his latest book, The Denial of Death, which he described as his “first mature work,” Becker concluded that human activity is driven largely by unconscious efforts to deny and transcend death. “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.”

Our studies and discussions led us to focus on two very basic human proclivities. First, we human beings are driven to protect our self-esteem. Second, we humans strongly desire to assert the superiority of our own group over other groups.

There we introduced what we dubbed terror management theory in order to build on Becker’s claim that people strive for meaningful and significant lives largely to manage the fear of death.

The fear of death is one of the primary driving forces of human action. In the course of this book, we will show how this fear contributes to human behavior far more than most of us realize. In fact, it drives us so much that any effort to address the question “What makes people act the way they do?” is profoundly inadequate if it doesn’t include the awareness of death as a central factor.

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. This is an important distinction. Unlike geese, monkeys, and wombats, we can carefully consider our current situation, together with both the past and the future, before choosing a course of action.

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.

Fortunately, we humans are an ingenious species. Once our intelligence had evolved to the point that this ultimate existential crisis dawned on us, we used that same intelligence to devise the means to keep that potentially devastating existential terror at bay. Our shared cultural worldviews—the beliefs we create to explain the nature of reality to ourselves—give us a sense of meaning, an account for the origin of the universe, a blueprint for valued conduct on earth, and the promise of immortality.

Our cultures also offer hope of symbolic immortality, the sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves that will continue long after we die. This is why we strive to be part of meaningful groups and have a lasting impact on the world—whether through our creative works of art or science, through the buildings and people named after us, through the possessions and genes we pass on to our children, or through the memories others hold of us. Just as we remember those we loved and admired who died before us, we feel the same will be done for us. We “live on” symbolically through our work, through the people we have known, through the memorials marking our graves, and through our progeny.

We humans all manage the problem of knowing we are mortal by calling on two basic psychological resources. First, we need to sustain faith in our cultural worldview, which imbues our sense of reality with order, meaning, and permanence. Although we typically take our cultural worldview for granted, it is actually a fragile human construction that people spend great energy creating, maintaining, and defending. Since we’re constantly on the brink of realizing that our existence is precarious, we cling to our culture’s governmental, educational, and religious institutions and rituals to buttress our view of human life as uniquely significant and eternal. But we don’t just need to view life in general this way; we need to view our own life this way. The paths to literal and symbolic immortality laid out by our worldviews require us to feel that we are valuable members of our cultures. Hence, the second vital resource for managing terror is a feeling of personal significance, commonly known as self-esteem. Just as cultural worldviews vary, so do the ways we attain and maintain self-esteem.

The desire for self-esteem drives us all, and drives us hard. Self-esteem shields us against the rumblings of dread that lie beneath the surface of our everyday experience. Self-esteem enables each of us to believe we are enduring, significant beings rather than material creatures destined to be obliterated. The twin motives of affirming the correctness of our worldviews and demonstrating our personal worth combine to protect us from the uniquely human fear of inevitable death. And these same impulses have driven much of what humans have achieved over the course of our history.

We began conducting studies in which one (experimental) group of participants was reminded of their mortality, and another (control) group was not. We wanted to see whether, when reminded of death, people in the experimental groups would intensify their efforts to uphold their culturally acquired beliefs.

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.

Our early years are very important for establishing psychological security. If they don’t go well, the journey toward adulthood can be incredibly harrowing.

Even before children are fully aware of what they are frightened of, their faith in a worldview that provides order, purpose, and significance helps them manage their fear. This has everything to do with the problem of death.

Suddenly, you grasp the horrible truth: Death is not just an unfortunate accident that occasionally befalls the aged, the hapless, and the wicked. Sooner or later, you realize, death will happen to everyone, including you; the curtain will surely fall while you are strutting across the earthly stage, and your ultimate fate will be the same as that of the disemboweled squirrel splattered on a roadside, or that skeleton you so fear. This realization is momentous. “Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being,” wrote the poet William Wordsworth. Such thoughts “often lie too deep for tears.” In this instant, you became fully human. Once children understand that they, as well as their mothers and fathers, are perpetually vulnerable and ultimately finite, they shift from their parents to their culture as their primary source of psychological equanimity. Deities and social authorities and institutions now appear to be more stable and enduring than our all-too-mortal and therefore all-too-vulnerable parents, grandparents, and pets.

The results of this study showed that the seven-year-olds had not yet transferred their psychological eggs to their cultural basket. After being asked about death, the younger children reacted more negatively to pictures of both Israeli and Russian children. They were afraid of death, but they had not yet deployed their culture to manage their fear. It was a different story for the eleven-year-olds, however. After being asked about death, these older children were more eager to befriend fellow Israeli children and rejected the idea of befriending the Russians. In short, the eleven-year-olds reacted to reminders of their mortality in the same way that adults do. Having realized that death is inevitable and irreversible, they pledged permanent psychological allegiance to their culture.

The seemingly trite words “self-esteem” are at the very core of human adaptation. They do not represent an extra self-indulgence, or a mere vanity, but a matter of life and death. The qualitative feeling of self-value is the basic predicate for human action…. Unlike the baboon who gluts himself only on food, man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem. —ERNEST BECKER, The Birth and Death of Meaning

Self-esteem is a concept most people grasp only superficially. It means feeling good about yourself and believing that you are a worthy individual. But what does that actually mean? You might say to yourself, “I feel good about myself because I am a highly regarded member of my profession, a loyal and devoted partner and parent, and I generally try to do the right things.” However, these sources of self-esteem do not spring fully formed from some deep inner self. Rather, they are a reflection of the roles and values provided by your culture’s scheme of things. Your understanding of what the “right” things to do are, what social roles are of value, and how to properly fulfill your own role depends on your worldview. Accordingly, 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.

buffers anxiety,

This is strong evidence that self-esteem keeps the physiological arousal associated with anxiety in check. Self-esteem is more than a mere mental abstraction: it is felt deeply in our bodies.

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.

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

There are two main ways self-esteem can break down. First, individuals, or groups of people, can lose faith in their cultural worldviews. Such disillusionment can be precipitated by economic upheaval, technological and scientific innovations, environmental catastrophes, wars, plagues, or unwelcome intrusions by other cultures.

Finally, 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.

The commercial ended by reminding viewers that “membership has its privileges.” The message was simple: You can be a person of unique value if you have enough disposable income to buy transportation luxuries that will get you where you need to go when other people can’t. And to achieve that, you must have an American Express card.

does not ensure a successful life or great achievement; that requires innate abilities, excellent training, high levels of motivation and commitment, and persistent exertion. But self-esteem is a key to psychological security: as we have seen, it helps buffer anxiety, blunts defensive reactions to thoughts of death, makes people more resilient, and fosters physical, psychological, and interpersonal well-being.

Our ancestors had become bipedal, self-reflective imaginative primates who could, as Otto Rank put it, “make the unreal real.” How awesome to be alive, and to know it. What was not to like? Drought, famine, pestilence, or disembowelment by hungry lions was not to like. Drowning and decapitation were not to like. And if you were lucky enough to elude all these catastrophes, witnessing the ravages of time transform an active, vivacious family member into a frail, mentally feeble shadow of his former self, and considering one’s inevitable future in light of this transformation, was not to like. In short, death was not to like.

People terrified by the prospect of their own demise would be less likely to take risks in hunting to increase the odds of landing big game, to compete effectively for mates, or to provide good care for their offspring. So our ancestors made a supremely adaptive, ingenious, and imaginative leap: they created a supernatural world, one in which death was not inevitable or irrevocable. The groups of early humans who fabricated the most compelling tales could best manage mortal terror. As a result, they would have been the most capable of functioning effectively in their environment and thereby most likely to perpetuate their genes into future generations.

In tenuous circumstances, classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison argued, human beings must act to ease their worry or grief, even if it means thrashing around and howling like an animal. Such spontaneous, idiosyncratic emotional reactions were probably the basis for the earliest rituals. But to become a ritual, an individual’s demonstrative outburst had to be formalized and copied by others.

RITUALS ARE THE BEHAVIORAL bedrock of human culture. As wishful thinking in action, rituals empower us to sustain life, forestall death, and manage the universe. They assure our success in love and war. They determine who we are. You’re not an adult until ritually fashioned into one. Ritual determines when you’re married. You are not even considered fully dead until the official ritualizers—doctor, coroner, preacher—declare you to be. And if something goes wrong in our lives, we have an out: The problem is due to a wish or prayer somehow misdirected or gone awry. We must have performed the ritual improperly, or we need to add another step to an existing ritual, or create an entirely new one instead. Rituals, then, help manage existential terror by superseding natural processes and fostering the illusion that we control them.

“Without art,” mused George Bernard Shaw, “the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”

Alternatively, agriculture may have arisen, or been abetted, as an unintended consequence of burial practices. By this account, advanced by science writer and novelist Grant Allen in his 1897 The Evolution of the Idea of God, digging graves tilled the soil and got rid of weeds. Burying the best grains (along with other grave goods) with the corpses was the first planting of seeds; the decaying flesh may incidentally have provided fertilizing nutrients for the seeds. When new plants grew on the grave site the next year, people likely attributed their good fortune to the goodwill of their ancestors or the gods with whom they were believed to be dwelling. Eventually they would have figured out that seeds, sans corpse, would suffice to grow food.

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? Narrative depictions of supernatural conceptions of reality became possible, and necessary. Myth, like art and ritual, lends form to abstract notions like the soul, or the idea of immortality. Myth making, according to cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald, may have been the original function of elaborated language, rather than providing answers to pragmatic “how-do-I-milk-this-goat?” questions. Indeed, all human societies, even the most primitive and technologically impoverished ones, have sophisticated creation myths, ideas about the structure of the universe, and explanations for what happens after death.

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. Sociologist Emile Durkheim and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that the only reason religion originated and flourished was that it fostered social cohesion and coordination. Summarizing this view, science writer Nicholas Wade asserts that “religious behavior evolved for a single reason: to further the survival of human societies.” While religions provided such benefits by shoring up extant social structures and interpersonal bonds, we believe it was their psychological appeal that enabled them to serve as social glue in the first place. In short, these spiritual belief systems thrived because they quell existential terror (and we will present evidence in support of this claim in the next chapter).

The striving for immortality—universal to all cultures—forestalls terror and despair. Consequently, humans do not have agriculture, technology, and science despite ritual, art, myth, and religion; rather, humans developed agriculture, technology, and science because of them.

Metabolism, de Grey and other scientists believe, is a two-sided coin: while a fast metabolism is great for burning calories and fat, it also contributes to aging because it makes us wear out faster, analogous to driving your car a hundred miles more a day. Aging, they argue, results from toxic by-products of cellular metabolism, the process that turns food into energy. So the fix, de Grey and other scientists think, is to slow down metabolism and clean up the age-promoting waste that it produces. The Taoists did this by eating nothing but berries and roots once a day, and it might have worked; the fewer calories you eat, the slower your metabolism runs. Research by these modern immortalists has showed that mice that ate 30 percent fewer calories lived 40 percent longer than mice that ate as they pleased.

We don’t just want our children to move our genes forward in time; we want them to move our beliefs, values, and group identifications into the future as well.

Celebrities are known for being known, even if they have never done anything particularly noteworthy or productive.

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

Humiliated people attempt to restore their pride and dignity by berating and eradicating their oppressors. “When a humiliated mind is left to reflect on its own destruction,” writes Dr. Evelin Lindner, “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.”

George Bernard Shaw observed that “when the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretenses of civilization are blown from men’s heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind.” Sadly, laboratory studies show how just a slight turn of the existential screw is sufficient to tilt people in this direction. Death fears inflame violence toward others with different beliefs, especially those whom we designate as evil.

“Life,” wrote biologist Stephen Jay Gould, “is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.” While other creatures have succumbed to abrupt climate changes or competition from other plants or animals, we humans are the only species that can prune our own branch from the proverbial Tree of Life. Although symbolization, self-consciousness, and the capacity to transform figments of our imagination into reality have been of tremendous service to us humans, they have also made us aware of our vulnerability, transience, and mortality. Confidence in a cultural scheme of things and our own self-worth banish the dread. But when someone “different” challenges our core beliefs or sense of significance, we want to derogate, dehumanize, assimilate, demonize, humiliate, and destroy them. Perhaps the only reason humans have survived to date is that until recently, we lacked the technological means to exterminate ourselves.

People in all cultures go to extraordinary lengths to deny that they are animals and to regulate activities that remind them of their corporeal nature.

Why? Our bodies and animality are threatening reminders that we are physical creatures who will die. To manage our terror of death we have to be much more than that; and a fundamental function of cultural worldviews is to prevent our bodies from undermining our pretentions of meaning and significance.

BEING AN EMBODIED ANIMAL aware of death is difficult indeed. We simply cannot bear the thought that we are biological creatures, no different from dogs, cats, fish, or worms. Accordingly, people are generally partial to views of humans as different from, and superior to, animals. We adorn and modify our bodies, transforming our animal carcasses into cultural symbols. Rather than thinking of ourselves as hormonally regulated gene reproduction machines bumping and grinding our way toward oblivion, we “make love” to transform copulation into romance. And when women ooze hormones, blood, and babies, men blame them for their own lustful urges, which serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about, and justify abuse of, women. Terror of death is thus at the heart of human estrangement from our animal nature. It isolates us from our own bodies, from each other, and from the other creatures with whom we share noses, lips, eyes, teeth, and limbs, everywhere on the planet.

A sense of meaninglessness often results from the client’s taking a galactic view of the world in which all culture-based meanings fall away, leaving only an absurd, indifferent universe in its wake. No self-respecting existential psychotherapist would argue that life has any inherent or ultimate meaning. Instead, she would try to bring the client down to a less grand perspective on life by encouraging the person to focus on what matters to him in his life.

“Often,” as Becker put it, “we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are, only to fall strangely and miserably flat.” In existential psychotherapy, clients are helped to come to accept this undeniable truth. Only then can they come to understand what can and cannot be obtained from their relationships with other human beings. If you go into a relationship wanting the other person to know you fully, you will inevitably be disappointed and frustrated. By trying to use another person to overcome existential isolation, people are seeking too much and therefore often end up getting too little. Once the person understands what a relationship with another person cannot provide, the person can begin to focus on the positive things that they can provide. The key to forging good relationships that reduce feelings of existential isolation and loneliness is to have the goal of getting to know another person rather than the goal of meeting your own needs.

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.

For Epicureans, including Lucretius, the way out of this psychological conundrum was straightforward. First, we must become aware of our fear of death; then, we must recognize that it is irrational to be afraid of death. After all, the Epicureans argued, bad things can only happen to those capable of sensation. Dead people are devoid of all sensations, just as we all were before we were conceived. Being dead is thus no different from never having existed. No one is terrified of the time before they were born, so why fret about death, since it is precisely the same insensate state that prevailed for eons before our time? Once we realize this, death anxiety will be eliminated and we will no longer yearn for immortality. This, Epicurus proposed, will in turn make “the mortality of life more enjoyable.”