Ernest Becker -- The Birth and Death of Meaning
I finished Ernest Becker's The Birth and Death of Meaning today and have logged my favorite quotes.
If the reader gets a feeling of pathos in all this, it is only logical: after all the humanization process is one in which we exchange a natural, animal sense of our basic worth, for a contrived, symbolic one. Then we are constantly forced to harangue others to establish who we are, because we no longer belong to ourselves. Our character [self-esteem] has become social.
- 71
If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down.
- 75
But of one thing we are sure: to lose self-esteem is to lose the nourishment for a whole, pulsating, organismic life. Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man, strange as that may sound to ethological faddists.
- 76
Probably for a half-million years mankind has believed that there were two worlds, a visible one in which everyday action took place; and a greater, much more powerful world-the invisible one, upon which the visible depended, and from which it drew its powers. Primitives have such a belief, as did the ancient Greeks, the Christians, and the Oriental civilizations. The visible world was said to emerge out of the void, out of chaos: the visible world with all its multiplicities, springs out of nothingness.
- 119-120
This is the way that Christians looked at their mission to earth: nothing here was really for one’s pleasure or fulfillment-or at least only incidentally. As Bossuet so well summed up the Christian view, it is not that Christians are unworthy of worldly honors, but that worldly honors are unworthy of them. The task of the mission was so to live, act, and consecrate one’s life, as to increase the power and glory of the Eternal One, and then return to the dimension of the invisible, of Eternal Life, where one really belonged.
- 123- 124
Man’s answers to the problems of his existence are in large measure fictional. His notions of time, space, power, the character of his dialogue with nature, his venture with his fellow men, his primary heroism-all these are embedded in a network of codified meanings and perceptions that are in large part arbitrary and fictional.
- 126-127
When a culture comes up against reality on certain critical points of its perceptions, and proves them fictional, then that culture is indeed eliminated by why we could call “natural selection.” When the Plains Indians hurled themselves against White man’s bullets thinking themselves immune due to the protection of the Guardian Spirits in the invisible world, they were mowed down pitilessly. When Hitler followed the fantastic perceptions of his Aryan mythology, instead of the realities of the Russian campaign, he led directly to the downfall of the Nazi hero-system.
- 127-128
Politicians who rely on the ancient trinity of “mother, home, and country” know all they need to know about the incestuous symbiosis without even knowing its name; they know with unwavering instinct the frightened, slavish hearts of their constituents. It is this that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices: those who focus their measured words and their sharpened eyes in the intensity of hate, and so seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction-what calm, what relief.
- 161
Everything that belongs to the narcissist, to his group, is overvalued; everything that reflects the outsider is undervalued… The narcissist tends to fear differences, to devalue those who are different even to the point of considering them less than human… This is the chilling calculus that made it possible for the Church to pronounce American aborigines less than human at the time of the Spanish conquest.
- 162
The genius of the theoreticians of democracy understood this, that we must have as many different individuals as possible so as to have as varied a view of reality as possible, for only in this way can we get a rich approximation of it. Twisted perspectives get corrected easily because each person serves as part of a corrective on the others. Totalitarianism is a form of government that inevitably loses in the longer run because it represents the view of one person on reality, or at most, a ruling few; and to this view the masses of sheeplike subjects assent.
- 164
If the reader gets a feeling of pathos in all this, it is only logical: after all the humanization process is one in which we exchange a natural, animal sense of our basic worth, for a contrived, symbolic one. Then we are constantly forced to harangue others to establish who we are, because we no longer belong to ourselves. Our character [self-esteem] has become social.
- 71
If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down.
- 75
But of one thing we are sure: to lose self-esteem is to lose the nourishment for a whole, pulsating, organismic life. Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man, strange as that may sound to ethological faddists.
- 76
Probably for a half-million years mankind has believed that there were two worlds, a visible one in which everyday action took place; and a greater, much more powerful world-the invisible one, upon which the visible depended, and from which it drew its powers. Primitives have such a belief, as did the ancient Greeks, the Christians, and the Oriental civilizations. The visible world was said to emerge out of the void, out of chaos: the visible world with all its multiplicities, springs out of nothingness.
- 119-120
This is the way that Christians looked at their mission to earth: nothing here was really for one’s pleasure or fulfillment-or at least only incidentally. As Bossuet so well summed up the Christian view, it is not that Christians are unworthy of worldly honors, but that worldly honors are unworthy of them. The task of the mission was so to live, act, and consecrate one’s life, as to increase the power and glory of the Eternal One, and then return to the dimension of the invisible, of Eternal Life, where one really belonged.
- 123- 124
Man’s answers to the problems of his existence are in large measure fictional. His notions of time, space, power, the character of his dialogue with nature, his venture with his fellow men, his primary heroism-all these are embedded in a network of codified meanings and perceptions that are in large part arbitrary and fictional.
- 126-127
When a culture comes up against reality on certain critical points of its perceptions, and proves them fictional, then that culture is indeed eliminated by why we could call “natural selection.” When the Plains Indians hurled themselves against White man’s bullets thinking themselves immune due to the protection of the Guardian Spirits in the invisible world, they were mowed down pitilessly. When Hitler followed the fantastic perceptions of his Aryan mythology, instead of the realities of the Russian campaign, he led directly to the downfall of the Nazi hero-system.
- 127-128
Politicians who rely on the ancient trinity of “mother, home, and country” know all they need to know about the incestuous symbiosis without even knowing its name; they know with unwavering instinct the frightened, slavish hearts of their constituents. It is this that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices: those who focus their measured words and their sharpened eyes in the intensity of hate, and so seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction-what calm, what relief.
- 161
Everything that belongs to the narcissist, to his group, is overvalued; everything that reflects the outsider is undervalued… The narcissist tends to fear differences, to devalue those who are different even to the point of considering them less than human… This is the chilling calculus that made it possible for the Church to pronounce American aborigines less than human at the time of the Spanish conquest.
- 162
The genius of the theoreticians of democracy understood this, that we must have as many different individuals as possible so as to have as varied a view of reality as possible, for only in this way can we get a rich approximation of it. Twisted perspectives get corrected easily because each person serves as part of a corrective on the others. Totalitarianism is a form of government that inevitably loses in the longer run because it represents the view of one person on reality, or at most, a ruling few; and to this view the masses of sheeplike subjects assent.
- 164