– The study that you did with judges.

– They were given a case women accused of prostitution. And the judges were asked to just set a bond, how much money so that the defendant wouldn’t be imprisoned until their trial. The judges were either reminded of death or not. And all we wanted to know is whether or not the decisions might change as a function of whether or not death is on your mind. In the control condition, the average bond was $50, and that’s great because it was the average bond for that infraction throughout the town. So we’re like, “Okay, that’s an accurate baseline.” The judges reminded of their mortality were nine times higher.

– Nine times higher.

– Yeah, when we talked to the judges afterwards and told them what we were thinking, which is that when death is on your mind, a moral transgression is a conceptual attack on your cherished beliefs. And so your punitive reaction is to restore confidence in your beliefs. And they’re like, just to be profane, they’re like, “No fucking way.”

– Hey, everyone. Today’s conversation is focusing on the mind, the brain. We human beings, why we do what we do, and the kinds of things that motivate us in our life choices and how that ultimately affects our own search for meaning and purpose. And I’m so pleased that I’m having this conversation with Professor Sheldon Solomon from Skidmore University. Thank you so much for being here and all the incredible work that you and your colleagues have done over the years, which I’d love to focus in on. But sort of as a framing, I might note that when I was an undergraduate, like, I was a physics major, I did math and physics, but I took some psychology. I was just interested. And I took a course by, it was taught by David Buss.

– Oh yeah.

– I don’t know if you know him, yeah. And it was called Human Motivation. It was actually Psychology and Social Relations 1040. I mean, it had an impact on me, so I actually remember the number. And one of the assignments that we had was to come up with our own theory of human motivation. And I was playing around with this idea, that idea, you know, the need for, you know, pleasure and meeting all the necessities of survival and, you know, all sorts of, but everything I came up with, I felt like it was just made up. Until my sister, who was older than I was, psychology was her focus. She gave me a book called “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker. And when I read that book, all of a sudden, I felt like this wasn’t made up. This felt like it really mattered. And then from there, I read Oswald Spengler, “Decline of the West”. And all of a sudden, I began to feel like maybe there is not only, like, a unified theory of physics, maybe there’s a unified theory of how we humans behave. And so I know that Ernest Becker and his book has had a deep impact on you. Did you come upon it in a course or was it serendipity or like-

– Yeah, total accident.

– Really?

– Yeah. First of all, this is awesome to get to talk to you directly. David Buss, I go way back with him.

– Oh, really?

– And we had a lot of conversations about these ideas and he resisted the point that you just made because we found Becker’s claims to be really broad and general. And we were taught as experimental psychologists to aim for broad theories. You know, Darwin’s got evolution by natural selection. You got, you know, Einstein equals MC squared, Newton and so on. Anyway, to make a short story long, I got a job at Skidmore College. I was trying to teach a course in personality theory that I had no background in. I was looking for a book by Freud. And on the same shelf were two books right next to each other by Ernest Becker, who I had never heard of. So this was 1980. One book was “The Birth and Death of Meaning”, and the book right next to it was “The Denial of Death”. And it’s a little silly, but it was actually the color of the cover of “The Birth and Death of Meaning” that had some green objects on it that got my attention. And anyway, I yanked it out of the shelf. And in the first paragraph, he said, “I wanna understand why people do what they do.” And I was like, “Yeah, me too.” After getting a PhD bogged down with jargon and textbook stuff that I considered non-pharmacological interventions for insomnia, here’s somebody just saying, “Why do we do what we’re doing?” And then moreover, he said, “If we’re gonna figure this out, we need to be interdisciplinary. We need to have input from all disciplines, not only academic disciplines, but all sources. Let’s see what the novelists are doing and everybody else.” And then he’s like, “Yeah, let’s be very broad. Let’s respectfully consider all of these ideas. But let’s also note”, and this was his second point, “That you have a right to be wrong. Not all ideas are equally compelling and we have to ultimately test them empirically.” And I was like, “Yeah.” And then he was like an enlightenment dude where he’s like, “And let’s use these ideas to help enhance psychological wellbeing and foster social progress.” You know, it sounded like the 1960s hippies, but I’m like, “I like that.” And then he was like, “And I really think that any broad motivational theory of human affairs has to be grounded in an evolutionary framework.” And so I was already, in a single page, extraordinarily interested. And then the book next door was “The Denial of Death”. Where in the first paragraph, he says that it is humankind’s awareness of their mortality and our disinclination to accept the reality of the human condition that ultimately underlies almost everything that we do. And then I was like, “Okay, wow, finally.” At the very least, that helped me understand my own personal experience. I’ve been disinclined to die since my grandmother died when I was eight years old, which was the day that I realized that I would eventually be expired. And so that’s kind of what got us started.

– Yeah. It’s interesting because for me, I had long wondered why do I care about mathematical theorems? Why do I care about laws of physics? I mean, yes, they’re interesting, they’re deep, they reveal some kind of underlying truth, but I couldn’t quite grasp what was pulling me. And when I read Becker’s book, and as you say, his thesis, which we’ll get into the experiments that you’ve done to actually establish this to be true through data. But his thesis was that we know about our own death. We tremble in the face of it and we seek to do things or hang on to things that in some cases, or in some ways mitigate the terror of facing the abyss. And one of the ways we can do that, he says, is through symbolic immortality.

– Absolutely.

– And to me, a mathematical theorem, what could be more immortal than that, right? It’s a fundamental truth that you’ve proven on the basis of certain assumptions, but once you prove a mathematical theorem, it’s done. If you didn’t make a mistake, it’s there for eternity in some sense.

– Tends to persist over time.

– Yeah, and so what better way to have symbolic immortality than something that will list, and so it suddenly gave me a framework for understanding the very things that had driven me since I was a kid. So I was really hooked into that. And then as I began to think about and read more, I realized that this idea that Becker was providing had a long history-

– Absolutely.

– In philosophical thought. I mean, you could take us through it, but you go back to Plato and Socrates, the point of living is to learn how to die or you go forward. And the world’s religions, as we should get into, in some sense, can be interpreted in this scheme. Kierkegaard, you know, this notion that we are these trembling beings and we have to grab onto something that will allow us to go forward. And on and on this goes through history. And so what was special about Becker? Was he synthesizing, would you say, this whole history in some sense?

– Yeah, really well put. So in the introduction to “The Denial of Death”, and this really attracted my attention at the time, Becker said, “You know, we actually have enough truth. We’re almost choking on truth.” And that what’s happened to us as academics is we’ve kind of become isolated in our disciplinary hideouts. And he said, “I wanna go back and I wanna point out that since antiquity, there’s been a convergence: religion, philosophy, art”, and of course, psychology’s always the last one to catch up to these ideas. He said, “I’m not proposing anything original. What I am hoping to do is to integrate and synthesize almost the history of Western thought with a touch of Eastern input, you know, in order to come up with a haiku-like conception of what motivates human affairs.”

– Yeah. And so with this framework to think about why we do what we do, the natural thing to distinguish it from just so stories, I mean, there’s so many ideas that people have put forward, you know, not just the ramblings of a college freshman trying to come up with ideas for why we do what we do, but you know, we seek art and beauty. We seek connection and relationship. We seek to be part of a communal group that allows us to survive more fully. And you know, there are all sorts of ways of thinking about human motivation and why we do what we do. When you encountered these ideas as an experimental psychologist, was your immediate thought of, can we bring this into the realm of empirical data?

– No, not at all. So again, I appreciate these questions. We were just enchanted and enthralled by the simplicity of his central claims. And we found them to be very systematic. He was like, “Look, humans are similar to all other living things in that we’re biologically predisposed to wanna survive and reproduce.” And you know, of course that’s the Darwin point. And then he’s like, “Yeah, but there’s different ways that over billions of years, creatures have managed to survive over time.” You know, and the silly examples, the giraffe with the big neck, the turtles with the shells, you know, the eagle with the eyesight. And then he’s like, “Yeah, what about humans?” And you know, we got some physical stuff, upright bipedalism, you know, prehensive, you know, binocular vision. And yet he’s kind of funny when he says, “Yeah, but we’re not very big. We’re not very fast. We’re not very strong. So what do we got?” And he’s like, “Yeah, well, we got the uber social nature combined with the unbelievable capacity to think abstractly and symbolically to the point where we can imagine something that doesn’t exist and make it happen.” I just think that’s so magic to look at pictures of da Vinci drawing a helicopter. And you know, 500 years later, we’re all moving around in them. And then he goes to Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard’s point was to be that aware, to be that sophisticated. Another component of that is self-awareness. And Kierkegaard is saying, “You know, we take it for granted, but a rose bush is here and doesn’t know it. The raccoon’s here, doesn’t know it. We’re here and we know it.” And in a little book called “Fear and Trembling”, he says that that engenders two uniquely human emotions, awe and dread. It’s awesome to be here and to know it. And it’s dreadful, unless you’re a child or intellectually impaired. You realize even when your life is not threatened, that like all living things, your life is a finite duration. And you too will someday die. All right, so that’s the first knee in the existential groin. Not only will you die someday, but we can die at any time for reasons that we can’t anticipate or control. And then Becker, just to give us another knee in the gut. And then following Freud, he’s like, “And we’re animals. You know, we’re embedded in a carcass that is biologically speaking. You know, we’re breathing pieces of defecating meat. We’re not any more significant than lizards or potatoes.” And his point is, is that that gives rise to potentially debilitating existential terror. He claims, he’s like, “If that’s all we thought about, ‘I’m gonna die. I can walk outside and get hit by a comet. You know, I’m a cold cut with an attitude’, that I literally will be reduced to psychological rubble.” Yeah. And then he’s like, you know, to borrow from Woody Allen, he’s like, “Yeah, but why aren’t most of us just twitching blobs of psychological protoplasm, you know, cowering under our chairs, groping for sedatives the size of sport utility vehicles?” And he’s like, “Well, most of us, ourselves included, we can stand up and move around every day.” Because in his opinion, human beings manage existential terror by constructing and embracing what he called cultural worldviews. You know, humanly constructed beliefs that we share with our fellow humans that reduce death anxiety by giving us a sense that life has meaning and we have value. And you’ve already kind of suggested this, but according to Becker, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are primarily motivated throughout our lives to maintain confidence in our belief system, as well as a sense that we have a significant contribution to it. And that the primary function of those motivational yearnings is to keep death anxiety at bay.

– Now, do you worry at all about that? Or now I suspect you don’t, but back then, in the early days when encountering these ideas, you know, if you were to explain this, as you have to many people, both through your lectures and through books, you know, I actually do teach some of these ideas now, strangely enough, in my course at Columbia and a physics course as a way in which I integrate these ideas. There’s a tendency of many people when they first encounter this idea that death anxiety may be motivating them. There’s a tendency of people to say, “Uh, not for me. You know, I’ve come to terms that I don’t really think about.” Now, of course, what Ernest Becker would say is that’s culture speaking. That’s the cultural armor that’s speaking for you. And so that’s a natural explanation of that, but it also seems, could that be a just so story?

– Yeah. So again, excellent. So, you know, we encounter these ideas. My buddies, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, we were in graduate school together. We found them to be poignantly profound. We also though that they helped us understand questions that were swirling in social psychology at the time. What’s the nature and function of self-esteem?. And why do people have such a hard time getting along with folks that don’t share their beliefs? But we started giving talks. They were no different than what I’ve just been blubbering about at psychology conferences. And you know, if there were 200 people in the room, 100 of them would be gone by the time I said Kierkegaard or theory. And then of the people that would be left, most of them, as you just proposed, they would say, “That is ridiculous. I’m not quivering with death anxiety.” And of course, we were young and annoying and we would say, “Well, according to Becker, that’s because you’re comfortably embedded in the cultural worldview to which you subscribe. So you’re actually a great example of the veracity of these claims.” That just made them-

– More angry.

– Even more annoyed.

– Yeah, right. So we wrote a paper for the “American Psychologist”, which was supposed to be like our top journal. And it was just a paper saying, “Here’s what Becker says. We think these are interesting and important ideas.” It was rejected. We got one review, it was a single line. The reviewer said, “I have no doubt that these ideas are of no interest to any psychologist whatsoever, alive or dead.”

– That’s pretty definitive, right?

– Yeah, and Jeff and Tom were like, “Oh, they don’t like it.” And I’m like, “No, they’re just being coy.” So that same paper, you know, we submitted to every psychology journal. And, you know, including like “Parade Magazine”, “Good Housekeeping”. And it took eight years to publish.

– Really?

– And finally after being rejected at the “American Psychologist” several times, we bumped into the editor at a conference. And he was very gracious and he just said, “Look, these are interesting ideas, but in the 20th century, psychological science is based on empirical assessment of them. And I can’t help but notice that you guys have PhDs in experimental social psychology. And so why not go about trying to do that?” And that is kind of what redirected us. And so for the last 45 years of our professional lives, yeah, it was devoted to developing empirical paradigms that allow us to assess the merits of the-

– Yeah, so I wanna get, I wanna get to those ideas in just a moment, but I’m just wondering, did it surprise you that there was this resistance in the psychological community when, by contrast, Ernest Becker posthumously wins the Pulitzer Prize for the “Denial of Death”?

– But he couldn’t get a job when he was alive. So that’s the interesting notion. He got bounced from Syracuse to Berkeley, ended up at Simon Fraser.

– But I thought that, and again, correct me if I’m wrong, I thought part of that was he was kind of an activist.

– Yeah, he was. And that had –

– And would not sort of toe the line-

– He would not.

– For anybody. And I don’t remember the detail, but I think he was defending somebody.

– Yeah, Thomas Szasz at Syracuse. And at Berkeley, I believe it was the Vietnam War.

– [Brian] Ah, okay.

– So yes, there were a lot of those concerns. He also didn’t want to be a pigeonholed into a single discipline. He’s like, “I teach in the anthropology department, but I’m gonna expand the range of these ideas.” But mainly, he just got caught in a moment. He did not do empirical work himself. And so here we were at a time where, academically, empirical support for one’s theoretical claims were deemed important. And what a lot of people said at the time was there’s no way you could ever provide empirical support for these ideas because he’s insisting that most of these processes are fundamentally unconscious. So this is the same historically as the reaction to Freud-

– Freud.

– The century before where Watson is like, “Let’s just study behavior.” But it’s the same silliness. In other words, because you cannot observe or measure something at the moment doesn’t mean that it cannot be done with the acquisition of new technology.

– Right, right.

– And that’s where we were lucky. So it was at a time where there were a lot of paradigms from cognitive psychology as well as social psychology. And it made us realize that it was worth a shot.

– Right. So you started to develop ideas for testing. And I mean, I’d love to hear some. The one that, I think, encountered first, the study that I encountered first, and it was probably in some literature or your book or some place where you and your collaborators, and it’s Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski.

– Tom Pyszczynski, that’s right.

– The study that you did with judges.

– Good.

– Is this in Arizona or something like that?

– Yeah.

– I’ll leave it to you.

– Yeah. All right. I’ll back up one second, Brian. So the first thing that we did because we were like, “How are we gonna go about this?” And we didn’t honestly know. So we’re sitting there saying, “Okay, we wanna do studies, but how so?” And my background in graduate school was just studying reactions to stress. And we did, you know, physiological assessment and, you know, measuring skin conductance as an indication of sympathetic nervous system arousal and so on. And so we’re like, “Okay, why don’t we start with that paradigm?” Because Becker argues, he called self-esteem an anxiety buffer. And-

– If you feel good about yourself, you can ward off the sense that my life has no meaning.

– Yeah.

– And stuff like that.

– And he’s like, “It buffers anxiety in general and about death in particular.” So we’re like, “All right, let’s give that a go.” And we had done other studies where we manipulated self-esteem momentarily to either elevate it or leave it at its present level. And so we’re like, “All right, let’s just do something relatively simple.” We were also trained by awesome people who said, “Keep it simple to begin with. Just produce an effect. Then we can figure out, you know, the moderating and mediating elements.” So we did a very simple study, randomly divided people into two groups. We gave them what was bogus personality feedback, because we know that if you tell people, “Here’s your horoscope,” they tend to believe whatever you say. And we had worked on this. We got two different feedbacks. So people came in, they took personality questionnaires, and then we said, “Oh, we analyzed them and here’s your assessment.” One was a paragraph designed to momentarily elevate their self-esteem. The other one was to leave it as is. We had manipulation checks to confirm that that’s the case. And then after either raising or leaving self-esteem alone, in one of our experiments, people were hooked up to a physiograph machine and we’re measuring their skin conductance. And we told some of the people that for the next 90 seconds, they were gonna be watching some colored lights while we measure their arousal. We told other people that they would be receiving painful electrical shocks that while not fatal, would be quite unpleasant. And I know that sounds prior to ethics in the world, but it is an astonishingly effective manipulation of anxiety and arousal. And so basically what we found is that in the control condition when self-esteem was left unaltered, the anticipation of a shock raised both self-purported anxiety as well as physiological arousal. However, when self-esteem was raised, anxiety and arousal were increased a tiny amount in response to expecting a shock, but nowhere near as much as when self-esteem was left alone.

– Left alone.

– And so that was the, and that effect has been in all of the studies that we’re talking about were replicated either directly or conceptually more than once. All right, back to your point though about the judge study. Then we’re like, “All right, we’re doing good. But now how are we gonna test Becker’s claim that our beliefs about reality are in part functionally constructed to minimize death anxiety?” And, you know, here’s where I’m blubbering a bit, but I think it’s important that students and people in general realize that science doesn’t happen like it’s reported in textbooks, as you know.

– Yeah, absolutely.

– It is often just a product of, yeah, we’re just got lucky. And I say that because we had a student, a graduate student of Jeff’s at the University of Arizona, and she happened to be in a social work course on death and dying. And she came into Jeff’s office one day and she’s like, “Wow, look at this assignment we got. We were asked to write our own obituary as a way to foster acceptance of our finitude.” And then she said, “Oh, and look, they gave us these two questions. Write down your thoughts and feelings about dying.” And I can’t even remember the other one. But Jeff Greenberg, who’s a brilliant methodologist, he said, “You just changed everything. Let’s use that as a manipulation to get people to momentarily think of their own mortality.” We called it mortality samples. Because you have to have jargon. And we couldn’t have been more enthusiastic. And then on top of it, I believe the same woman, her boyfriend worked in the district attorney’s office in Tucson. And that’s what got us access to a sample of municipal court judges.

– [Brian] Oh, wow.

– And so we’re like, “Wow, this will be an awesome test because judges are taught to adjudicate the law in a uniform fashion and not to allow their own thoughts and feelings to impinge upon those decisions.” And so it was a relatively small sample, 30-something judges, I think. And so half of them, we reminded them that they were gonna die.

– Through reading this question.

– Yeah, through reading. Yeah, they’re filling out questionnaires and then right in the middle, the two open-ended questions.

– How do you feel about your own death?

– Yeah, how do you feel about your own death? In subsequent studies, we added control conditions where people would be asked similar questions about unpleasant stuff, but not fatal.

– I see.

– Yeah.

– [Brian] Good.

– You’re in a car accident, they had to chop your leg off. You got to have a tooth pulled, but they don’t have anesthetic. You failed the test. All unpleasant, but not fatal. In the first study though, the judges were either reminded of death or not. And then they were given a case that was prototypical of Tucson at the time, and that was women accused of prostitution. And the judges were asked to just set a bond, how much money so that the defendant wouldn’t be imprisoned until their trial. And all we wanted to know is whether or not the decisions might change as a function of whether or not death is on your mind. All right, so in the control condition, the average bond was $50, and that’s great because it was the average bond for that infraction throughout the town. So we’re like, “Okay, that’s an accurate baseline.” The judges reminded of their mortality were nine times higher.

– Nine times higher.

– Yeah. I call it the tookie eyeball test. You don’t even need statistics to know that that’s not only statistically significant, but the practical implications of that are profound. Moreover, when we talked to the judges afterwards and told them what we were thinking, which is that when death is on your mind, a moral transgression is a conceptual attack on your cherished beliefs. And so your punitive reaction is to restore confidence in your beliefs. And they’re like, just to be profane, they’re like, “No fucking way did your stupid little questionnaire”-

– Have any effect on it.

– “Have anything.” And again, that effect, increased punishment of moral transgression has been replicated many times. But then we wanted to show-

– But can I ask you one question?

– Yeah, go, go, go.

– So did you predict, in other words, when I read that study, I asked myself before looking at the result, A, is there gonna be a difference or not? I have no idea. It was amazing that you found such a significant difference. But if I were to guess, I would have thought that the people reminded of their own death might have been more lenient. That would be my intuition because I’m like, they realize that this transgression, prostitution, whatever is so small against the large penalty that we all pay, which is that our lives are terminated that they would have given, you know, $5 as opposed to $50. So I’m totally wrong, obviously.

– Yeah, well, but you are describing a set of conditions that should in principle result in the opposite effect. No, I believe it was Jeff who just said this is going to turn them into-

– Zealous protectors of the realm.

– Yeah, punitive defenders. But then we had to turn that around, Brian, because we wanted to show that when death is on your mind, you don’t just denigrate or punish people who violate your beliefs, but it also magnifies your affection and support for people who are aligned with your values. So we did another study. Some people reminded they’re gonna die. Some people reminded of something unpleasant. We show ’em an article about a citizen who stops a bank robbery. A robber runs out, running down the sidewalk. The citizen chases them and gets ’em tackled till the police come. And the question is how much of a monetary reward should they receive? And the people reminded of death said the reward should be three times higher. And so that’s where we started. We did a lot of other experiments to rule out alternative explanations. But that gave us a, what we call the mortality salience paradigm, that, in general, our proposal was that when death is on your mind, it impels us to restore confidence in our beliefs. And that means we disparage those that are different. We increase our affection and support for the ones that are the same. And we also strive to enhance our self-esteem. And it was then that we kind of set out, you know, Becker in “The Denial of Death”, he just says that that death, that that has a pervasive and persistent effect on all elements of human affairs. I do think it’s important. He’s not saying that’s the only thing. What he’s saying though is that if we really want to understand the human condition, we need to recognize that that’s a central determinant.

– Now these are very subtle reminders. And in fact, before we go to my sort of next question, which is the less subtle ones, there’s one other example. I think there have been now hundreds or thousands of studies-

– [Sheldon] Yeah, there’s thousands now.

– Studies. But there’s one that I recall. And again, if I’m saying this incorrectly, just, you know, correct me. But you did a study where all you did for the reminder of your own mortality was have an interview with a person either near a funeral parlor or far from a funeral parlor. You didn’t necessarily even call attention to it. Now I have to just say, for me personally, when I go down Broadway, there’s a funeral parlor. I think it’s on 76th Street and Amsterdam.

– Yeah, yeah, yeah.

– It was where my father was. I’m in the taxi cab. It’s a little ridiculous because I’m like a physicist. I can’t look. I turn my head as we’re going by. When I’m walking down the street, I walk on the other side. So it is for me because of that. But yours was a much more subtle version of that.

– Yeah, again, really fine point. Back to our training. Our people emphasized the need to replicate these effects by manipulating mortality salience in different ways and also having different dependent measures. And it was a colleague in Germany where a lot of the funeral parlors, there were corpses in the windows, you know, in the coffins. I was like, wow, that –

– Wow, it’s pretty heavy.

– Yeah, it is pretty heavy. And so that’s what gave us the idea to stop people either right in front of the funeral parlor or 100 meters to either side. And sure enough, when the people were in front of the funeral parlor, that replicated the effects that were produced in the lab when we asked them to write down their thoughts and feelings about death. And then that brought us back to the lab. These are all, again, back to science. A lot of these things were just, you know, at these conferences, walking around with people. And it was at the same conference that one of the folks is like, “Well, we need to do subliminal death primes.”

– Subliminal.

– Yeah. And so back to the lab. You know, you’re looking at your computer.

– Like a screen where it’s too short for you.

– There you go. 28 milliseconds.

– I see. And you need 33 or something.

– Exactly. I’m not sure exactly how many, but we’re like, it was either the word death or field.

– Pop up there.

– Yeah, with pop up.

– Right.

– And being a little detailed, but we chose field ’cause it’s the same length and the same frequency of use in English as death. All right? And sure enough, nobody saw anything. And then to check that, we showed them a list of four words.

– No one was aware that they showed-

– No one was aware.

– Right.

– But then to check, we said in a manipulation check condition, we did that and then we said, “You didn’t know it, but we flashed some words into your bean.” And then we showed ’em a list of four words, including the one that they had been exposed to, and they didn’t pick the right one more than chance. So we confirmed that they had no awareness that death was on their mind. Sure enough, the same effects result. And so for us, it is important not in the sense of inflating our value as researchers so much as to point out the potency of support for Becker’s ideas. There’s these different ways of manipulating death on our mind. And then other people, you know, while it was just us doing this work, it was a hobby. It wasn’t science. You know, it’s only science when somebody else steps up. And a German colleague did an amazing study. German university students reminded of death or not. And then they think the study’s over. And they’re brought in a waiting room with, like, nine chairs. And right in the middle is somebody sitting there. And they’re supposed to wait to get paid for being in the study. And the person sitting in the middle either looks German or like a Turkish immigrant. And the dependent measure is where does the participant in the study sit-

– Sit.

– You know, in the line of chairs depending upon whether or not death is on their mind.

– So let me just predict it.

– Go.

– So the idea is they’re going to sit closer if it’s German because-

– Exactly.

– Yeah, right.

– Yeah.

– Right.

– And further away. Wow. And then we did other studies where we gave people opportunities to harm folks that are either similar or different. And the good news is no difference in harm in control conditions. However, when death is on your mind, you know, you dislike people, you sit further away from them. And if you can hurt and harm them, that increases those efforts to be punitive.

– And so this sort of takes us, I guess, directly to out of the laboratory into the real world.

– Yeah.

– Right? So, you know, we’re talking Germany.

– Yeah.

– I mean, so do you find that this way of thinking about human nature, human motivation gives some insight into the kinds of things that we have done, you know, the gas chambers? I mean-

– So, yeah. Again, absolutely. What attracted us to Becker was his just unwavering commitment to comprehend what’s actually happening. And our work, when we look at it now, we’re like, well, basically, you know, I always say, I’m not really a scholar. I’m a dishwasher that read a few books because we read “The Denial of Death”. And one of the first things he’s writing about is why can’t we get along with people who are different? You know, he’s like, “Wow.” You know, even the most benevolent glance at human history is not pleasant, right? It’s one ongoing genocidal atrocity or the brutal subjugation of designated in-house inferiors. And his point was, again, disarmingly simple. He’s like, “Look, if your beliefs, if my beliefs serve to mitigate death anxiety, then the mere existence of somebody different is a threat whether we’re aware of it or not.” If I believe God created the earth in six days before taking a break, who is it in the South Pacific? There’s groups that believe that the earth was created out of a giant, out of a coconut, Fulani and Mali, the earth was created out of a giant drop of milk. You know, well, if the dairy, your pina colada people are right, then the six day people have to be wrong. And what Becker hypothesized therefore is that when death is on our mind and we encounter people who are different, we tend to belittle and dehumanize them. We tend to be motivated to impel them, to dispose of their ideas and adopt theirs or ours instead. And if that doesn’t work, just kill ’em. Thus proving that our ideas are superior after all. And so that got us going on a line of inquiry, a basic study. Christian students in the University of Arizona reminded of death or not, and then asked to evaluate other students in the room who were very similar, except some reported that they came from Christian families, some reported that they came from Jewish families. All right, again, the great news in the control condition, the evaluations of their fellow students did not vary as a-

– Control means not reminded.

– Yes, oh yeah. Let me be more specific. Yeah, so if they’re reminded of something unpleasant but not fatal-

– Not fatal.

– They liked Jewish and Christian students equally. On the other hand, if they were reminded of death first, they liked Christians a lot more and Jewish people a lot less.

– And again, is it the same case with the judges that, I don’t know if you do, but did you explain to the students, “This seems to be what happened to you in this study.” Do they say, “Oh, come on.”

– No. No, so awesome. The students, and I also taught these ideas at a maximum security prison in New York when I first got to Skidmore. It was the academics that were like, “No, no way.” The prisoners are like, “Yeah, exactly.” A lot of the students were really captivated by that prospect.

– And do you think, I mean, I guess for your own immortality project, the answer would be yes, but that’s something we would come to. But do you think that this can and did and does, for people who understand it, have an effect on how people subsequently live? Or is that just hoping for too much?

– Yeah, good question because it may be. And I say that because here I am on the, at the end of my academic life, and people often say, “Well, you must be like Buddha in terms of your psychological equanimity after 45 years of doing this work.” And I was like, “Yeah, that would be awesome.” But I think it was 45 years of an intellectual-

– Death denial?

– Yeah. It was an intellectual effort to dodge actually having to be more directly engaged. I like to think that in the last 10 years or so that I’ve come around to that. But yeah. So anyway, that was kind of the first wave of stuff. You know, we did, and by the way, these studies, so this has nothing to do with Christianity, you know, basically –

– You’re saying any religion.

– Yeah, anything. And that’s that basic finding. You know, death is on your mind. You love people similar. You hate people that are different. That’s been replicated by independent scholars in like 25 countries.

– Across the world? Is it in 25 countries?

– Yeah, around the world. So-

– Is there any, like, difference between one country and the effect may be, but stronger in one?

– Yeah, I don’t know yet. So this is a next generation, you know, science, it takes 50 years just to establish a finding. And now the real work, I think, you know, as Thomas Kuhn put it in the-

– The paradigm shift?

– Yeah, paradigm shift. And now normal science. It’s like, let’s find the conditions that determine these outcomes. We were like basically just, we just wanted to demonstrate Becker’s point so that death matters.

– Right. And would you say that the community now has accepted these ideas or do you get pushback from colleagues or?

– Yes and no. So I do think, you know, our work, we call it terror management theory, is now in lots of textbooks. There’s GRE questions about it. So in some ways, it has become part of psychological discourse. In other ways, there’s another generation of scholars and psychology’s now in the midst of what they’re calling a replication crisis. And some folks have argued that our studies are underpowered, that-

– Meaning?

– Meaning, oh yeah. So meaning that they weren’t conducted with enough participants to draw valid conclusions. And so there’s some-

– Isn’t one over squared of N all that you sort of need to be-

– Right. So we think that’s a little silly because no one has yet proposed alternative explanations for these findings and other people have continued to replicate them.

– And if you do a meta analysis, I would think that the collective would be convincing. But you’re saying there’s some-

– I’m saying there’s more contemporary meta-analytic analyses that I have no skill in. And some of it suggests that what was claimed in earlier meta analyses were moderate to strong effects. Might be reduced to smaller. And okay, that’s a legitimate concern. At the same time though, and it’s kind of a joke, or at least it seems comic to me. In some ways, our work is less prevalent in psychological discourse, but it has become more integrated with other disciplines. So environmental science, economics. And so I think that, I think the ideas are, that Becker proposes are quite compelling. I think that they’re now beginning to be disseminated.

– I mean, I should say, look, the majority of the conversations that we have here are in physics or cosmology, quantum mechanics. Well, we do vary from that in a variety of ways, but this topic in particular, not only as I mentioned early on, has affected me personally. It does affect my worldview as a physicist because one of the things that fascinates me, and I wonder if it has any impact on you or thinking here is it’s not just that life is transient. It’s not just that life is finite here on planet. It’s not just human beings are going to die. When you look at any structure in the universe over a sufficiently long period of time, you know, the second law of thermodynamics, and this was pointed out really as far back as Boltzmann and Bertrand Russell in the philosophical community, you wait long enough and it all disintegrates. It all falls apart. In five billion years, the sun swells, it probably gobbles up the earth in, you know, 10 to the 20 years, you know, the earth, if it survived, would spiral into the dead sun, you know, 10 to the 30 years, stars will fall into their galaxy central black hole, by 10 to 38 years or something, matter probably disintegrates. And so when you think about the finitude of human life within the context of a universe in which structure, organization itself is finite, to me, it all mirrors in a very deep and, to me, terrifying way. I mean, yes, if you ask me personally, am I afraid of death? I am, but like everybody else, the cultural armor allows me to survive. When I allow myself to think about the disintegration of-

– Everything.

– Everything?

– Yeah.

– I can get to, I can get myself to a pretty, pretty dark place.

– Yeah.

– And so to me, this is mirrored across all scales in the cosmos. And does that kind of thinking enhance the effect of your recognition of the terror of death or-

– Yeah, so good question. Yeah, I’m in my early Mr. Magoo phase because I think there’s been some studies along those lines. I’ll find them and be in touch. But in our view, at least theoretically, yeah, that should bring us closer to the existential abyss.

– Yeah. And so, you know, I find, and I wonder about you in this point, as I was mentioning, most of my life I go about, you know, everyday life and that’s all it is. I have sort of trained myself over the years to get to that darker place just so that I can access it. ‘Cause I find there’s something deeply uncomfortable about it, but sort of when I pull out of it, I feel like I’m engaging with the world in a somewhat different way. Do you go to the dark places that these ideas can take you?

– Yeah, I hope so. Now again, what you’ve just said is magical and goes back to antiquity and is literally, in some ways, beyond Becker. You know, “The Denial of Death”, and then he wrote another book called “Escape from Evil”.

– “Escape from Evil”.

– And he was interviewed by a guy named Sam Keen.

– Sam Keen, right, in his deathbed, basically, right?

– Yeah, on his deathbed. And Sam Keen was, you know, asking things about, you know, how can we kind of get out of this, you know, like, anxiety-ridden hamster on the existential wheel of life as it were. And Becker was like, “Look, I was just concerned.” You know, a lot of work at the time, like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, they were talking about how do we bring out the best in people.

– Self-actualization and so on.

– And he was like, you know, that’s fine, but I just need to point out, you know, at the “Escape from Evil”, at the beginning of the book, he’s like, “I’m pessimistic, but I’m not cynical.” And at the end of “Escape from Evil”, he’s like, “I don’t even know if we’re a viable species.” Just like Robert J. Lifton who said, “We may have the ignominious distinction of being the first form of life to be responsible for our own extinction.”

– Yeah, right.

– You know, Becker was just, I’m just trying to show that when we bury death anxiety under the psychological bushes, it comes back to bear malignant fruit, right? But, you know, when you go back to the beginning of time, as you have already mentioned, in most religious and philosophical traditions, you know, back to Socrates, to philosophize as to learn how-

– Learn how to die.

– To die. And then you have the, you know, the monks in the Middle Ages doing their work with skulls-

– Like, on the table.

– On their table. And yeah, the argument is that there needs to be a mature and sustained engagement or confrontation with the reality of our own condition. And that is, according to these claims, be it Kierkegaard religiously or Heidegger in the secular sense. But they’re like, “You need to really recognize.” And I put a hyphen, re-cognize the reality of your finitude. And, you know, I like how Heidegger says it, or Kierkegaard also, how could this not be unpleasant? You’re momentarily disposing of your identity. Becker called it character armor. You’re momentarily not embedded in the symbolic cultural worldview. And so there you are facing the reality of the human condition. And one way, Heidegger called it a flight from death. He’s like, “Wow, you might be so upset by this that you just become a culturally constructed meat puppet.” Heidegger, I like his quote, or I like quoting him. He says that you’re tranquilized by the trivial. You’re just so involved, you know? It’s like, yeah, a lot of stuff’s happening, but where’s DoorDash? Where’s Amazon Prime? And so on. On the other hand, as you just put it, and I love how you said it, there’s an extraordinarily positive outcome that can result from the momentary existential apprehensions. And I also like the people that point out that anyone who says that important improvements in our psychological condition can be accomplished without pain are bullshitting. And so again, back to Heidegger or Kierkegaard, I like Heidegger’s point when he says that, yeah, when we come out of these things, they’re not saying we should be preoccupied like we’re punk rockers in a death cult. He’s saying that these protracted conversations with ourself about our finitude, they create psychological changes that are not necessarily obvious. Just like the world looks the same. I’m still a cultural artifact. But I like Heidegger’s words. He says, “First of all, it gives us”, Heidegger called it anticipatory resoluteness. You come out of it and you’re looking forward. And I just like that. And to be resolute is that you’re looking forward, you know, with purpose and intention. And then Heidegger says, and I have to look all these things up ’cause I didn’t do that well on my SATs. He says, “You have solicitous regard for everyone and everything around you.”

– Yes.

– I’m like –

– And I feel like I felt that.

– Me too.

– Yeah.

– That’s why I really love how you put it.

– Right.

– And then he says, “I’m not trying to be Mary Poppins or Walt Disney.” He doesn’t say that ’cause he’s long dead. But he says that when that happens, we have this feeling whether we’re aware of it or not that life is an ongoing adventure perfused with unshakeable joy.

– Yeah, right.

– And I’m like, “Wow.” And this before-

– And that doesn’t last.

– It does not last. There you go.

– Yeah. But nevertheless, to have that feeling is quite something.

– Quite something. And it doesn’t wipe out suffering or pain. But in current jargon, it fosters a sense of what some people call existential maturity. That we have the courage and character when existential difficulties arise to manage them in other ways. You know, we don’t have to hate people who are different when death is on our mind. We don’t have to vote for fascists, whether that be Hitler or Orange Hitler, our current president. We don’t have to spend our time groping for money and stuff. And so all of the kind of defensive reactions to death reminders that bring out the most unsavory aspects of our humanity, those don’t happen. And this is a lot of research that I think is honestly the best. It’s the next generation of scholars that show that when you have those kinds of experiences, Brian, that that increases our sense of awe, gratitude, and humility.

– That’s ultimately what it’s all about.

– And it is ultimately what it’s all about.

– Yeah.

– And I don’t know. There’s something that I find, and maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic, but it’s like science not all that. It’s not always linear. Here we are back to some of the central claims that have persisted through the ages across time, space, and culture.

– For sure. Now I want to go back to the Sam Keen interview with Ernest Becker. I’ve listened to that and fascinating to sort of actually hear Ernest. You read somebody and you sort of have an image in your mind of who they are and what they sound like and they tend to be-

– Yeah, very different.

– It’s quite interesting. But it struck me, and this may be a misreading or a mislistening, whatever the right verb is. But it struck me that Becker kind of went from a more Heidegger or Heideggarian, if that’s the right way of talking about it to a Kierkegaard.

– Absolutely.

– He did. Okay. Because it struck me that he wasn’t particularly religious in the earlier writings.

– Not at all.

– And it was not like he had a deathbed conversion. This wasn’t death of Ivan Illich at the end there or something, but it felt like his views on religion turned or shifted a bit toward the end. Is that, you know?

– That’s my understanding. Now I wish we had some other folks here that are more thoroughly acquainted with-

– We should ask Marie Becker.

– Yeah.

– Right, you know?

– No, I have spent time with her.

– I’ve only corresponded with her very, you know, through probably email. I don’t even know if we ever spoke on the phone.

– Yeah, so a few things. He grew up in a secular Jewish family. So was not particularly religious. And my understanding, and I think it was in a conversation, I got to hang out with her twice. And I’m pretty sure in one of them she said it was when they had kids that that kind of shifted his attention.

– Interesting, yeah.

– I think he converted to Christianity in the broadest sense.

– Converted to Christianity?

– I believe he did, but we should check this. And it is the case, and my students, when we read “The Denial of Death”, often find that fascinating because the Heidegger view is very similar. Except Kierkegaard claimed two things. Your worldview ultimately has to have-

– Transcendent qualities.

– Transcendent equalities.

– Yeah, yeah, yeah.

– And it has to be Christianity. And I’m sympathetic to the first prospect, which is that all psychodynamically sound worldviews have to have transcendence of some sorts. But I don’t understand why one has to claim that only Christianity. If we had Jordan Peterson here-

– Sure.

– We would-

– He would be arguing quite forcefully.

– Yes, he would.

– Yeah.

– And we would agree to disagree-

– Right, right, right.

– About that and other things, but that in particular.

– But can we go back then-

– Yeah.

– With that as a motivation? I mean, if you think about our early ancestors, I mean, there’s all sorts of archeological evidence, you know, the burials at Sungir and other locations where you have the deceased being buried with incredibly elaborate grave goods. Beads sewn into, you know, with the teeth of various, and I think people have done calculations that would’ve taken a single person, like, years of effort to create the grave goods. Why would they do that is the natural question. And the only answer that seems to come forward is they were imagining that death is not final. They had their cultural armor that death was not the end and they were preparing the deceased for the next phase of their existence. So this seems to have been with us since the earliest moment when we were burying our brethren, the very act of recognition that they had died.

– Yeah, now again, I’m biased, but that’s the way we view it. You know, you have this cultural big bang. You got art, body ornaments, and grave goods at the same time. You just said it. This was not a short-term hobby. It took years to do this. We can’t see any simpler explanation than to infer that that’s the case. And then our argument is that once humans started writing and having oral traditions passed over time, you know, the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, which is-

– Right there, Enkidu died.

– Exactly.

– Right, yeah.

– And so we’re like, I don’t know how it could be otherwise. And then we’re like, “Yo, what about the pyramids in Egypt? That sure seemed like the whole purpose of life was to make sure that it didn’t end.” And then you go to China with the soldiers buried.

– Oh, buried with the terracotta.

– Yeah.

– Yeah.

– So I have a hard time at seeing what’s happening now as any different. You know, you got the Chinese folks thousands of years ago, the alchemists, you know, trying to turn lead into gold in order to develop the elixir of life. You got people going all over the world looking for the fountain of youth. And so here we are today with people paying, you know, millions of dollars to have their heads frozen.

– Ted Williams, right?

– Yeah, there you go. And, you know, a lot of the rich oligarchs right now are spending billions of dollars in order to persist. And so I see what’s happening around us now as just a contemporary manifestation of those proclivities.

– And so what if they’re successful, right?

– [Sheldon] Yeah.

– What if we’re able to stave off death? I mean, again, from my perspective as a physicist, there’s no such thing as true immortality.

– [Sheldon] That’s right.

– Because once matter disintegrates, like I’m not a dualist. I don’t think that there’s an inner soul. I think that once it’s gone, it’s gone. But putting that to the side, what if we could live much, much longer, which by human scales would be nearly immortal? What would that mean for these ideas? Do they disintegrate themselves into obscurity because they no longer matter? Or would we still have some remnant?

– Yeah, let me know. Again, my silly thing when I hear such great questions. It’s like, if I could answer that, we’d be on the beach with rum and a coconut, you know, with our Nobel Prizes. But they’re really important questions. Becker took a shot at it in “The Denial of Death” in a way that is, I find, very counterintuitive, but potentially compelling. He said, “You know, this may sound eerie, but if we could extend life almost indefinitely, I think that’s gonna make us more anxious about death.”

– He did say, God, I have to reread it. I don’t remember that.

– He’s like, well, I think, unless I’m making this up-

– No, no, I’m sure, yeah.

– No, I may be at this point because it was something along the lines of, well, okay, you’re climbing up a mountain and you’re 70 years old and you fall off. And people are like, “Yeah, that’s kind of sad, but this dude was old anyway.” All right, but if you’re seven years old and you fall off the mountain-

– It’s tragic.

– It’s a disaster. It’s tragic.

– Yeah.

– All right, but now let’s say you expected to live 500,000 years and you’re seven years old-

– Oh my god.

– And fall off the mountain. So one thing that he proposed was that it would make us more potentially anxious because we may be able to get rid of death, but we’re not gonna be able to get rid of chance.

– Right. Unless, of course, you go even further and now we’re going into completely sci-fi land.

– That’s correct.

– You know, if you can upload your consciousness into a book. Every system can crash though, right? So I guess no matter what you do, there’s some way in which you die.

– Right.

– Metaphorically, poetically, you know, some version of that.

– No, so there you go. It’s like, oh, you might feel great if you’re not, you don’t have a Facebook page, but you are the Facebook page ’cause you’ve abandoned your body and you’re on the site. Yeah, but when the power goes down, you’re down. So that’s one thing that these folks talk about. Then there’s a philosopher, Martha Nussbaum.

– Yes.

– Really thoughtful. And she wrote a paper, and I’m always gonna get this wrong. I think it’s the mortal immortals or the other way around, but she-

– There’s actually a short story by Borges, I think, which has effectively the same title.

– That’s right. And what she points out, and I find this, again, compelling because I’m talking out of two sides of my face. I love being alive and I am disinclined to die. On the other hand, what Nussbaum says is, “Yeah, but isn’t it weird that when you look at the Greek mythology that all of the immortal gods are preoccupied with hanging out with humans and their lives, they’re really bored just sitting up there in the mist.” And again, I don’t know if I’m making this up, but I think Lucretius.

– Yeah, you don’t worry about the fact that you didn’t exist before you were born, but you do worry about the fact that you won’t exist after you die.

– Exactly.

– Maybe you shouldn’t.

– That’s correct.

– Yeah.

– And then he says like, “Yeah, but all the things that are, like, great for humans, they have a start and they have a finish.” He’s like, “Yo, let’s say you’re reading a great book. If it never ended, there would come a point where your attention and interest would fade.” And now I love this as a metaphor. You know, let’s say that you’re having a feast and it’s the most delicious food ever. Yeah, but if it doesn’t stop coming, you know, isn’t there a moment where what makes things so valuable is that they conclude?

– Yeah, and there’ve been many works. You know, there’ve been plays, you know, George Bernard Shaw, Methuselah. And there’ve been many stories. And many stories, I should say, that focus on the possibility of eternal life or a very, very long life. Almost none of them turn out well, right?

– That’s correct.

– We always imagine more or less along the lines of what you’re saying that maybe we ultimately crave to have a finite existence because it’s hard. No. And there’s an interesting academic study. I forget all the authors on. Susan Wolf, a philosopher was one of them. There are a few others in there as well. And, you know, the natural arguments were we’re just gonna get bored. If truly eternal, then you’ll have done everything. You’ll have gotten good at whatever it is that you, no challenge goes unmet because with eternal time, you can rise to every possible challenge, every possible occasion.

– That’s right.

– Now I hear that as an academic, as an academic argument. And I’m like, “Yeah, I sort of get that.” But if you were to ask me-

– Absolutely.

– Would I take it if it were available?

– There you go. I’m like, “Put me on the waiting list.”

– Put me on the list, right? So what’s that? You know, is that’s some very atavistic primal thing within ourselves that, you know?

– I think you just called it. We’re multidimensional entities that can simultaneously cling to our existence while at the same time, as you framed it, you know, in terms of cosmology. The fact is, is that, yeah, everything goes in that direction. And so I think there’s a part of us that’s just embedded in us to a degree.

– On the other hand, then like you take Daniel Kahneman.

– Yeah.

– Right? And I knew him, but not well. We interact at, you know, gatherings and so forth. And I was really surprised to hear-

– [Sheldon] Me too.

– From other folks that, you know, he decided that the time was right. He’d sort of, again, I don’t wanna speak for him. I don’t know for a fact. But the way people who knew him well describe it, you know, he got to a point that he knew it was sort of downhill from there and didn’t want to be on the tail end of things. So he decided, I guess at roughly 90 or something, to have assisted suicide.

– Yeah, I thought that-

– I mean, how did that strike you as, I mean-

– Well, I read about it in “The New York Times”, and I think he and his wife went to Sweden.

– Sweden or something, yeah. Or Switzerland. One of the either, yeah.

– Yes. It may have been Switzerland, but I mean, my anecdote is I admire him a great deal. That was our biggest moment. We got a little plaque 20 years ago by the American Psychological Association for doing this work. You know, of course, we’re, like, really proud. And sitting next to us is Daniel Kahneman, who had just won a Nobel Prize. And what was awesome, you know, just a kind, thoughtful, and he was somewhat aware of our work. And we did some emailing back and forth. And he was just, “Yeah, this is what you guys are up to.” He thought was consequential, which has nothing to do with what you asked except that fast forward to the time where he decided to voluntarily conclude his own existence, I see it as a thoughtful decision that is a representation of existential maturity. Again, I hope I’m not messing up the details, but I don’t think that they had kids. I think that-

– That I don’t know.

– Yeah.

– Yeah. If I’m wrong, then somebody will tell-

– I think they did though, because I seem to recall that he visited with grandchildren.

– Yeah, so maybe I’m wrong here, but I just think they were like, “Well, we’ve had a great life. We’re kind of declining now.” And, you know, kids or not, they were just, “Hey, there there is nothing cowardly or immature about these decisions.” And my understanding is that there’s a lot of cultures historically where that’s quite common.

– Yeah, right. And so when you think of your own life in the context of these ideas that are both academic and abstract, but also real and demonstrated and applied, do you feel that your life has been in part defined by an immortality project? Like, trying to. I mean, your work, obviously. Let’s say this work continues and is really established to be a key part of human nature, you know, does that fill you with a sense of symbolic immortality because the ideas spread and can have impact long after you’re no longer here?

– Yeah, so honestly, sure. And when Tom and Jeff and I hang out, we’re like, “Yeah, it’s nice that we’re, quote, successful as academics.” And in the last few years, as I reflect, I’m like, “I think that’s something to be proud of, but I’m trying to, at least for myself, expand the range of symbolic immortality.” For example, I planted fruit trees now in our yard. I call it the apocalypse garden. And I’m like, “Well, I’m not putting my name on these trees. But that fruit is gonna be there long after I am.” And my hope is that that’s psychologically equivalent to, like, winning a little plaque. Moreover, I think it’s a dead author of the last century, Henry Miller, who wrote “Sexus” and other novels. And I can’t remember which book it was where he said, “You know what? It’s not for any of us to judge our importance or lack thereof.” And it was something along the lines of, “You don’t know the impact that you might have on your life.” I think it was Thoreau talking about throwing a rock in the pond at Walden, the rippling effect. And it’s like, all right. You know, you’re walking down the street and you know how sometimes you just see somebody and you make eye contact, you have like a little nod just acknowledging the existence of a fellow human. Well, you’re never gonna see that person again. You know, but let’s say we’re in lower Manhattan and what you didn’t know is that that person was heading to the Brooklyn Bridge, depressed and ready to jump off it. But your little interaction restored their sense of humanity. And they didn’t jump off the bridge. You don’t know this, you might even be dead, but they become the next Einstein or Jesus or Mother Teresa. Well, you changed the world. You didn’t know it. And I think for me, that provides another sense of how to navigate one’s existence that doesn’t require that we’re winning prizes, being successful at culturally defined outcomes. You know, so much as having a stance towards ourselves and those around us, everyone and everything, that might cultivate those kinds of activities.

– You know, it’s interesting because I agree with everything that you’re saying, even though I phrase it slightly differently in a way that some people find unpleasant. But I view the world as being governed by insensate laws of physics that are sort of operating behind the scenes. So much so that I don’t think we have free will. I think that our bodies are following the laws that our particles are compelled to follow. And that move when you acknowledge the person in lower Manhattan was nothing but a collection of particles, namely you, nodding your head or smiling, you know? And so I see us all as just conduits through which the universe expresses the initial conditions and the laws of physics. And so in that way, it also takes weight off of accomplishments. It takes weight off of the things that don’t go so well. Because it is just the way the world evolves over time. I get to the same place, I think is what you’re describing, but in a slightly different way.

– Yeah, no, I love that. And there’s some clinicians now that advocate for, I think they call it a cosmic insignificance. And it’s to go in that direction. It is rather than having to inflate ourselves in order to ward off death anxiety, it is to put ourselves more appropriately in the context of the world, which is that we are. You know, we didn’t choose when we’re gonna be born. We didn’t choose the carcass in which we reside. Back to your point, we’re just in this swirl of physical activity. And yet we can still extract from that a sense of psychological equanimity. And the claim goes as long as we still perceive ourselves as connected, you know, because here we are, all of the molecules are bouncing around and they do have a deterministic effect. And yeah, we’re all related to each other. Symbolically as well as literally in that sense.

– And so, you know, I don’t want us to get to sort of a hallmark card ending here. But final question. If these ideas were more present in people’s minds, and I’ve always been surprised, for instance, almost nobody I talk to knows of Ernest Becker. I don’t know really why that is. But if this way of thinking was more widely embraced by the culture, by the world, I mean, do you think, I mean, again, I don’t want a hallmark card it, But do you think this could be a way to get us to a better place?

– I would like to think so.

– Yeah.

– Now again, Ernest Becker at the end of “Escape from Evil”, he said, “Why aren’t these, like, why can’t somebody speak at the United Nations? Can’t we disseminate these ideas to enough people to determine if that might happen?” And we tried something along those lines more than, well, it was right before September 11th, 2001. A guy that I was working with in Seattle, he had what I thought was a crazy idea. He said, “Let’s write to the leader of every country in the world and ask them if we could come see them.” And so we got a list of every country in the world where you wrote a letter, I can send it to you, to say-

– Love to see it.

– Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, “Hey, we think Ernest Becker’s ideas are important. Here’s what he’s saying. Could we come see you for an hour? We’ll pay for it. We’ll talk about it.” So anyway, we sent a letter to every world leader. And most of the responses were like, you know, “No way. Don’t do this. The United States was, you know, peace is bad for business.” Luxembourg was like, you know, “We’ll arrest you if you come here.” So we haven’t figured out how these ideas might be disseminated, except to note that, in my opinion, it’s what you and folks like you are trying to do. I think that right now, the widest distribution of ideas to the most diverse groups of people across, you know, geographical as well as demographic variables is through these kinds of efforts. Yeah. Yeah, I’d like to think that it’s really time for us individually and collectively to step back and to just acknowledge, as you were doing, and as I’d like to think that I was doing that a substantial proportion of our activities, it is a non-conscious effort to ward off death anxiety by inflating ourselves to superhuman proportions. That in turn can be overcome by the thorough contemplation of reality and the emotional changes that result thereafter.

– Yeah, no, I totally agree. Sheldon, thank you so much-

– Thank you.

– For joining us.

– This was great.

– Great, thank you.