The Denial of Death

the routine activity for organisms is “tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue.”

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

a step into a true kind of sub-divinity in nature. Life in the body is not “all we have”12 if we have an ego. And the ego represents, as far as we can judge, a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life.

How can we say that evolution has made a mistake with man, that the development of the forebrain, the power to symbolize, to delay experience, to bind time, was not “intended” by nature and so represents a self-defeat embodied in an improbable animal?

When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life. This is the reason for the daily and usually excruciating struggle with siblings: the child cannot allow himself to be second-best or devalued, much less left out. “You gave him the biggest piece of candy!”“You gave him more juice!”“Here’s a little more, then.” “Now she’s got more juice than me!” “You let her light the fire in the fireplace and not me.” “Okay, you light a piece of paper.” “But this piece of paper is smaller than the one she lit.”

The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die.

depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.8 He also, as Adler pointed out, gets the people around him to respond to him, to pity him, and to value him and take care of him. He controls them and heightens his own personality by his very self-pity and self-hatred.

reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility.

daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum.