Escape from Evil Quotes

“Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning
of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained
material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive
evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even
eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" people
whom we can hold responsible for this.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“Even if men admit they are cowards, they still want to be saved. There is no "harmonious development," no child-rearing program, no self-reliance that would take away from men their need for a "beyond" on which to base the meaning of their lives.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“[...] manipolando e odiando attivamente facciamo sì che il nostro organismo sia assorbito dal mondo esterno; ciò tiene a bada l'introspezione e il timore della fine.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

“Very early in human evolution men aggressed in order to incorporate two kinds of power, physical and symbolic. This meant that trophy taking in itself was a principal motive for war raiding; the trophy was a personal power acquisition. Men took parts of the animals they killed in the hunt as a testimonial to their bravery and skill— buffalo horns, grizzly bear claws, jaguar teeth. In war they took back proof that they had killed an enemy, in the form of his scalp or even his whole head or whole body skin. These could be worn as badges of bravery which gave prestige and social honor and inspired fear and respect.

But more than that, as we saw in Chapter Two, the piece of the terrible and brave animal and the scalp of the feared enemy often contained power in themselves: they were magical amulets, " powerful medicine," which contained the spiritual powers of the object they belonged to. And so trophies were a major source of protective power: they shielded one from harm, and one could also use them to conjure up evil spirits and exorcise them. In addition to this the trophy was the visible proof of survivorship in the contest and thus a demonstration of the favor of the gods. What greater badge of distinction than that? No wonder trophy hunting was a driving obsession among primitives: it gave to men what they needed most- extra power over life and death. We see this most directly, of course, in the actual incorporation of parts of the enemy; in cannibalism after victory the symbolic animal makes closure on both ends of his problematic dualism— he gets physical and spiritual energy. An Associated Press dispatch from the “Cambodian Front Lines” quotes a Sgt. Danh Hun on what he did to his North Vietnamese foes:

”I try to cut them open while they’re still dying or soon after they are dead. That way the livers give me the strength of my enemy… [One day] when they attacked we got about 80 of them and everyone ate liver”.”
― Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil