The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

He’s an organism who can stand outside himself, reflect on his life, grasp infinity, imagine immortality, and write poetry about it. He can contemplate the Andromeda galaxy and contemplate himself contemplating the Andromeda galaxy. That’s godlike.

But all that soaring godlike consciousness is chained to a body that pisses, farts, shits, bleeds, decays, and dies¹. It’s grotesque. He can’t keep the animal out of the picture: hunger, lust, fear, excretion — all reminders that he is mortal meat, however fancy his mind.

Becker references Norman Brown’s idea of “anality”, using the fact that we have to defecate as shorthand for the clash between the symbolic self (the godlike, meaning-making part of us) and the body’s demands that we cannot ignore.

Shit is the unambiguous proof that:

• You’re an animal too, not just pure spirit.
• No matter your achievements, medals, titles, or projects, you’re still someone who squats and expels waste.
• The body dictates terms. You can’t transcend it; you must bow to its rhythm. Opting out of the animal nature of the body is only possible when you also are okay with exiting your spirit nature.

You are godlike in your consciousness and all that it can behold, yet you must use the bathroom – a shitting god.

Becker writes, “The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.”.

This simultaneous awareness – of your awesomeness and your inevitable fate (plus, your limitation at not being able to do anything about that fate) – is the problem of being human.

• On the one hand, we humans are self-conscious beings: we can imagine eternity, contemplate the cosmos, dream of achievements that outlast us. That’s the “awesomeness”.
• On the other hand, we’re also finite organisms: fragile bodies, dependent on air, food, digestion, and destined to decay. That’s the “inevitable fate”.

Becker argues this problem is the essence of the human condition.

About realising that you are conscious entity in a universe whose consciousness you can never be sure of (”cogito ergo sum”), that you may be the only one of your kind. And yet, despite all this, you are fated to the same end as the rest of the dumb universe.

This is a personally relevant problem for both adults and children. But for the child, this problem is especially disturbing and incomprehensible since they’re so young.

They might grapple with the question: “How can I be both this glorious, radiant, self-conscious being, and this animal thing that leaks, depends, and eventually disappears?”.

Becker writes, that as soon as the child realises this paradox – whether it is through an innate understanding of death, or something that he is taught by society – he must start his first “heroic project”: the attempt to create a “self-created self” – a causa sui being (”the father of himself” as Becker calls it).

To be causa sui (“self-caused”) means the kid wants to feel like the origin of his own existence, the author of his own being — not the product of others (parents, nature, accident).

But of course, the child can’t literally create himself. He already knows he came from the mother (or will get to know soon enough), and that he depends on his parents for survival.

So causa sui becomes a fantasy project:

• Psychologically → he wants to be independent of parental authority (“You don’t own me”).
• Symbolically → he dreams of a life where he sets the rules, where he is the boss, where he is the father, not just a child who was begotten (“I can have icecream for breakfast every day”).
• Heroically → it’s the first spark of the lifelong human project of “self-authorship” — we want to believe our lives are ours, not just extensions of biology or society.

Because having independence, freedom, self-sustenance means having power over death.

To be causa sui would mean to be your own creator, your own first principle, a true god.

You wouldn’t owe your existence to anything outside yourself; the child subconsciously thinks: “If I become independent, it’ll be proof that I can re-create myself should death come.”².

If an adult decides to engage in a causa sui project, he must do so with the intellectual knowledge that true self-creation, immortality, is impossible.

That no matter how self-authored, self-made, or heroic you get, the body still intrudes.

You still defecate. You still bleed. You still decay. You still die.

The “self-made god” remains tethered to the same animal substrate as the child he once was. He may be special in the universe, but not omnipotent. He can’t cheat death.

But the psyche can’t accept this fact wholesale.

The child’s fantasy project never goes away — it morphs into adult hero projects.

The adult subconsciously thinks, “If I cannot outlast death then I will create things, as extensions of me, that will.“.

Our projects, whether grand or everyday, all are attempts to cheat death — “Look, I mattered. I left something behind.”.

A hero not in the sense of “someone who saves people from burning buildings” (though that is very much within the realm), but rather a “hero” in the sense of “someone who is remembered for the work they did even after their death“.

This work can be “grand” such as building a trillion dollar company, or becoming the president of a country, world renowned artist, celebrated sportsperson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Nobel Prize-winning scientist, and so on.

Or the work can be (and for the vast majority of us, is) “commonplace” such as raising competent children, becoming head of a department in one’s company, or becoming a respected member in one’s community.

Narcissistic not in the sense of “someone who excessively preoccupied with oneself and one’s own needs at the expense of others”, but rather in the sense of “someone who feels that their own needs are reasonably important, and definitely more important than those of the next stranger”.

Becker writes, “… we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves.”.

And perhaps you can guess the reason we have narcissism: it’s because we are self-conscious.

Becker writes, “If you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it self-consciousness … you would have narcissism.”.

This perspective is quite similar to the Hindu Advaitic tradition which says that the reason for all causal (karmic) activity in the universe is the perceived difference between the “self” and the “other”.

When an organism is able to perceive itself separately from the universe, when it is able to point to certain things as “me” and “mine” – anything which is not “me” or “mine” is naturally given the label “other”.

Duality is created.

From that point on it becomes possible for narcissism to develop in the organism, which will motivate it to try and preserve itself without much thought for the “other”.

Narcissism in complex organisms like humans thrives on symbols, like the flag we belong to, the company we work for, the brand of the automobile we drive, the number displayed as our bank balance or our social media followers, the label of the jeans we wear, the logo on the phone we use, and so on.

All of these symbols feed our narcissistic hunger, and Becker reminds us that narcissism has an unlimited appetite for symbols.

As I said earlier, since we cannot literally immortalise the body, we try to immortalise the symbolic self.

Symbols are “hero tokens” and our appetite is endless, because symbols never actually relieve the terror of death – they just temporarily soothe it.

But consider that even if you prefer certain symbols for purely their function, the reason you prefer them is because they allow you to do something that you consider valuable beyond mere function.

For example, the reason you prefer an iPhone is because it takes great photos and not because it’s an iPhone, sure. But the reason you want to take great photos is because?

Because you can capture in 4K resolution, great stories to tell later at family events.

And the reason you want to tell great stories is because?

Because it makes you feel special; more than just another brick in the wall, just another cog in the machine, just another plebeian in the hoi polloi who lived out an unremarkable life to be remembered by no one.

The pride you feel at being a member of a certain group implies that you’d somehow be worse-off had you been a member of the out group, or in other words, had you been a member of “the others”.

What is this other than an organism trying to benefit itself (in this case by feeling pride at being a member of an imaginary group) at the expense of its environment?

In this case by excluding those who are not part of its imaginary group.

All of this ties back to our desire for heroism – the desire to be seen, to oneself as well as society, as something more than what can be undone by death. As the special snowflake in the otherwise unremarkable ocean of existence that is this callous universe.

“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.“.

Consider those whom we call “enlightened” – they have no qualms with death, they accept it as it comes without making too much of a fuss, they do not invest in, or even care about heroic acts like becoming parents or founding companies.

Narcissism then, seems to be evolutionarily adaptive.

Narcissism isn’t just some unfortunate kink in our psychology — it’s the very fuel that keeps the organism moving forward.

A totally non-narcissistic being, one with zero preference for self over other, would have no reason to eat, to mate, to defend itself, or to build anything that outlasts it.

It would dissolve back into the indifferent universe.

Not just a good pay-check. Not just a happy family. Not just a few friends who’ll show up at our funeral.

Becker argues that deep down, these goals are just symptoms of something more fundamental – every human aches for a sense that their existence matters to the universe itself.

That somehow your life will be the one that left a permanent dent in a universe that is otherwise constantly changing.

That God himself will be forced to take notice of the strength of your character, the list of your achievements, or the scale of your magnanimity.

That’s why religions resonate: they offer prepackaged cosmic hero-systems (heaven, moksha, martyrdom, remembrance).

That’s also why secular people invent their own: progress, science, art, environmentalism. Each is a way of saying: my life partakes in something larger, enduring, transcendent.

But society can’t function if everyone just invents their own private way of cheating death.

So, society lays down “approved paths”: religion, politics, careers, family, military, sports, and so on — channels that it sanctions as “valid“ hero projects.

If individuals go rogue and pursue their own personally configured hero projects (say, radical sexual expression, alternative religions, or art that undermines social norms), society reacts with fear and repression — calling it “immorality” or “anarchy”.

But beneath the surface; it’s about society, as a super-organism, fearing loss of control over its subjects.

The child’s primal “I want to be self-made” urge gets cut down by reality and authority — so he learns to “play it safe”.

He gives his body, energy, and identity over to the collective: the tribe, the state, the church, the company.

He compromises on the fidelity of his hero project, but instead gets a ready-made template from society – a map, an instruction manual, a structure, and a ready sense of meaning – that saves him a lot of time and effort, not a bad deal TBH.

Becker says what we call “maturity” (being responsible, fitting in, living within sanctioned roles) is basically practiced self-deceit. You haven’t really transcended your limitations; you’ve just accepted a socially-approved idea of transcendence.

Societies we live in give all of us a shot at our heroic goals. The symbols we create: “… a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.”.

For Becker, society itself is religion by another name — not in the sense of worshipping gods, but in providing frameworks of symbols and stories that let people feel their lives matter in the face of death.

• In medieval Europe, you were a hero if you fought for Christendom, built a cathedral, or upheld noble honour.
• In Soviet Russia, the hero was the worker, the soldier, the party member, sacrificing for the Revolution.
• In modern America, it’s the entrepreneur, the innovator, the self-made man, the person who “made a dent in the universe”.
• Even the humble path counts: being a “good parent,” keeping a family lineage alive, passing on traditions.

There are many people who’d prefer (and indeed, exercise the option through suicide,) physical death over the death of the self.

Think of people who say they’d rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

We hear stories about desperate farmers in ruinous debt traps who commit suicide. Or stories about betrayed lovers hanging themselves after learning about their partner’s affair. Or heads of state, like Hitler, putting a gun to their heads when they knew the regime was about to collapse.

If it were purely a question of avoiding physical death, the word “suicide” would not exist in our dictionaries.

But it does, which means the real death we are afraid of is not the body’s.

It is the death of the self, the ego (not to be confused with “ego-death” BTW) which is the real thing we are afraid of. And like I wrote above, it is the most fundamental thing we are afraid of. Because at its core, it’s not about organs failing, it’s about “I-ness” disintegrating.

Physical death is inevitable. The death of the self – social, symbolic, psychological – is what we dread so much that we’d sometimes choose physical death as the lesser evil.

Other fears are situational: snakes, fire, violence. They pass when the danger passes. Death-anxiety persists beneath the surface even when we’re “safe”. A farmer ever fears a bad harvest because it brings him closer to death as his family’s provider. A soldier ever fears defeat because it might erase his legacy as a hero. Death of the self is the common denominator.

When a fear overwhelms us, scratch the surface and you find the fear of death beneath it.

Fear of humiliation? It’s fear of social death.

Fear of irrelevance? It’s fear of symbolic death.

Even phobias – claustrophobia, acrophobia – are proxies for the fear of finality. Becker’s point: you can trace every terror back to death if you dig deep enough.

The healthy-minded argument says that society, life experiences and so on, put into a child the fear of death who otherwise is free of it when she is born.

The morbidly-minded argument says that the fear of death is a natural one and present in all of us at a constant baseline level, which then may be exacerbated or reduced by life experiences.

Becker sides with the morbidly-minded argument, like I said, this isn’t a cheerful book.

“Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant.”.

The healthy-minded camp is basically Rousseau’s child of nature — innocent, uncorrupted, living joyfully until society whispers “You’ll die someday”. Under this lens, religion, culture, and overprotective parents teach us to fear death. The fix? Change society, change upbringing, and maybe the fear dissolves.

The morbidly-minded camp, though, digs deeper. It says: nope — fear isn’t installed by society, it’s already baked in at the core of consciousness. The very moment a creature realises “I am me and I am separate.”, it also realises “I can be unmade.”.

That knowledge never leaves.

What religion and society do to help is cover up the fear with rituals, myths, distractions, and symbolic hero systems.

Ultimately though, Becker tells us to not get hung up on whether the fear is taught (environmental) or born (innate). Because at the end of the day, the psyche (of most) responds the same way:

• It represses the raw terror.
• It channels that repression into symbolic projects (families, nations, art, careers, wealth, rituals).

The destination is the same because the organism, once self-conscious, cannot tolerate naked mortality. It must build walls of meaning, whether those bricks are laid by nature (instinctive recoil from death) or by nurture (cultural stories and practices).

That repression and those projects become our denial of death.

If you’re thinking: “So, on the one hand Becker says the fear of death is constant, and on the other hand he is saying that it cannot be constant, else the organism would be paralysed?”.

Yes, that is exactly what he is saying, but this isn’t an illogical statement, because Becker posits that these two – the constancy of the terror of death and its absence – operate at two different levels.

A man knows he can die, so he works to preserve himself during times of danger and scarcity; but during times of safety and abundance he acts as though he is immortal and invests in his heroic projects.

This is the “denial” in The Denial of Death.

We deny our deaths despite being fully aware of its inevitability. Becker says humans live in a permanent double awareness:

• On one hand, we know with certainty that we will die.
• On the other, we act as if we won’t – investing in projects that stretch beyond our lifespans.

This denial isn’t stupidity, nor is it ignorance. It’s a necessary defence mechanism.

Without repressing death enough to get on with life, we’d collapse into nihilism.

But without remembering death at all, we’d live recklessly and shallowly.

Becker calls this denial of death “repression”, and it is repression that “… takes care of [makes disappear] the complex symbol of death for most people. But its disappearance doesn’t mean that the fear was never there.”.

But this repression doesn’t just repress the fear of death, it uses that repressed fear in a controlled manner to create all kinds of things in the world. Like how the energy in the atom can be released all of a sudden in a fusion bomb for bad, or over time in a fusion reactor for good.

When released slowly and in a controlled manner, it allows us humans to create the Taj Mahal, write the Fountainhead, compose the fifth symphony, paint the Great Wave, build Sunchaser, and so much more.

Each of us develops personality traits, rituals, coping styles, habits of mind that shield us from the raw terror of death.

A child starts building these defences early without realising he’s building them: seeking approval, developing control rituals, taking pride in pedigree, talents, grades, achievements, skills, attaching to social roles.

As this child grows into the adult, several of the defences that he started building in childhood get strengthened and solidify into character traits.

More than they becoming part of his identity, he becomes them.

These traits are functional lies: they let the adult move through life without being paralysed by the awareness of mortality.

They aren’t “lies” in the sense of conscious dishonesty, but in the sense of psychological fictions the adult lives by, and doesn’t really think about too much or too deeply (for good reason).

They’re stories you tell yourself, whether consciously or unconsciously, to avoid facing the fact of death: there is no way to immortality – corporeal (bodies die) or symbolic (symbols are forgotten⁴).

For example: the overachiever convinces himself he’s indispensable; the people-pleaser convinces herself she’s loved by everyone; the aristocratic one convinces himself of his bloodline’s superiority; the rich one convinces himself of his wealth’s power; the stoic one convinces himself he needs nothing.

Each is a “lie” that makes the prospect of the death of the symbolic self – being erased / forgotten / passed over / ignored – easy to forget about because the person attaches their symbolic self to something known to outlast the body.

Becker says that the “… hostility to psychoanalysis … will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world …”.

And also: “We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair, and not with the despair itself.“.

He’s pointing out a subtle but crucial distinction:

• Humans deliberately take on stress, challenges, and risks — climbing mountains, building businesses, raising kids, running marathons, challenging injustices and so on. On the surface, it looks like we’re bravely confronting life’s harshness.
• But Becker says what we’re really doing is taking on these manageable, symbolic stresses as a defence mechanism — they give us something to do, something that feels meaningful, while keeping us distracted from the ultimate stress we can’t face head-on: the inevitability of death and the obliteration of the self.

Think of it like this:

• A climber summits Everest not because he’s directly challenging death, but because the successful climb offers a way to symbolically transcend death — to be remembered, to prove vitality.
• A parent pours themselves into their child’s growth, not because it erases mortality, but because it makes their life feel extended through someone else.

But suppose a person were to give into the full realisation that they are not safe from death, either in the corporeal or symbolic sense – where does that leave the person? For most, it’d leave them paralysed. They wouldn’t be able to do anything at all since they’d realise the ultimate futility of all action.

There it is again, the necessity of repression, of narcissism, of the denial of death.

It allows us to get out of bed, go to work, raise kids, write blogs.

It screens us from despair and makes life liveable.

Becker says that the “… irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself that awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”.

• Our deepest need: Freedom from the terror of death. We long for some guarantee that our special, self-conscious being will endure.
• The obvious choice: What is proof that you’re not dead yet? That you’re alive and kicking.
• But the cruel irony: The more alive you are — the more aware, conscious, feeling, imaginative, creative, engaged with the world — the sharper the awareness of the inescapability of death becomes. Life itself stirs the very fear we want to get rid of.
• So we shrink: Instead of living fully, many retreat into half-lives. They blunt awareness with distractions, addictions, routines, conformity, busy-ness — anything that dampens the raw terror that consciousness brings.

That is why acts of heroism are so fundamentally valued across societies, cultures and eras – they vicariously satisfy our compulsive need to conquer death.

When a firefighter runs into a burning building, to save a child in the nick of time before the structure collapses; that’s not just a guy doing his job for which he’ll receive salary at the end of the month – that’s a hero going into the world of death and returning to tell the tale.

Have the same thing done by a robot or a drone and you simply won’t feel the same feelings as the ones you feel towards the human saviour. Huge difference.

Becker would argue this is why every society sanctifies its heroes: firefighters, soldiers, martyrs, freedom fighters, saints.

They alleviate our deepest insecurity and show that you can spit in the face of death and win, even if temporarily.

Becker talks about the “inauthentic” or the “immediate” man – one who “… recognises that he has a self only by externals.⁵“.

This man is lulled into complacency by social conditioning, by his parents, the symbols that he identifies with – and it is due to those symbols that he feels worthy. Oblivious to the irony, “self-esteem” to him comes from society’s perception.

He’s not complacent as in “lazy”, on the contrary this man is well versed with the ways of the world: climbing the social ladder, gathering assets and earning money; he is a “man of the world” one can say.

But he is complacent in that he does not confront the true facts of his existence, that his desire to accumulate all these symbols is a way for him to protect his self against the terror of death.

The big houses, the social media, the running for office, and other things – beneath a veil of self-esteem is the child trying to escape the terror of death.

“… the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security.“.

He slips into a “ready-made maze” of roles, duties, and cultural games as Becker calls social life. These provide shelter from the terror of death, but at the cost of a deeper, self-authored meaning.

Life transitions expose these fault lines. At each stage, the old role is shed and a new one taken on. That’s where the faint whisper of inauthenticity can be heard most clearly: Was this really my choice, or was I just carried along?

And most people, as Kierkegaard and Becker both suggest, will shrug, sigh, and accept it as “the way it is”. That sigh itself is tragic: a recognition of something missing, paired with a resignation that nothing can be done.

Becker points out that the inauthentic man is socially sensitive because it feels safe. Other people (even those who belittle or crush them) serve as a shelter against the terror of death and aloneness.

But this dependence becomes meaningless over time, because it reduces him to a trivial, enslaved existence. Such a man may increasingly find life not as exciting as it used to be, he may succumb to ennui.

This person may become cynical or sarcastic, try to drown himself in ever more ingenious ways to consume like five-star travel, luxury purchases, excess food, accumulating more wealth than he could ever use etc.

This person has become trapped in a prison of his own making: the symbols that used to give him meaning in a meaningless existence have now morphed into defining him so fully that he cannot escape them.

At extremes, this situation may cause a person to become depressed.

• You don’t just have a career — you are your career.
• You don’t just enjoy money — you are your net worth.
• You don’t just take care of them — you are your role in the family.

And once you’ve fused your identity with those symbols, you can’t abandon them without feeling like you’re annihilating yourself.

It is interesting to think about how, even a half-century later, Becker’s words still resonate.

We live at a time of unprecedented material comfort and yet the rates of depression and anxiety have not gone to zero, even in countries like the U.S. where material standards of living are much better compared to the rest of the world.

To me, the Kierkegaardian ideas that Becker is describing fit with hedonic adaptation: we chase after hedonism, only to get trapped in our own game.

You get the new car, the bigger house, the better job — and for a few months, the self feels elevated, buffered, almost immortal.

But then the baseline reasserts itself. And worse: now the previous level of comfort is no longer enough.

Why does the baseline keep reasserting itself?

Because, as I have now explained in many ways through the length of this Note, there is no way to avoid death.

Paraphrasing Shri Krishna’s timeless words: What has started must come to an end.

And therefore, all attempts at heroism are doomed if they are taken with the goal of escaping or outwitting death.

No matter how much you gather, no matter how high you climb, death is sitting there at the finish line, patient and undefeated.

He reaches the understanding that us Indians have known for a lot longer⁶: that you cannot solve this question of death, and that you must dissolve it.

The only way is to confront the fact, confront the anxiety, and know that life cannot end in anything else but death, any project to extend life, literally or figuratively, is doomed.

You have to first know that death is inevitable and make it living reality, so that the actions you take are not taken as protests against death but instead as celebrations of life.

He’s saying: “Most of you need, and are in, a hero-system, whether you admit it or not. You wake up each day and orient your life around some project that promises to make you more than dust — children, career, nation, wealth, art, God, legacy.

The only real question is: Which game are you playing, and do you know it?“

Most people never ask this. They inherit a ready-made script from family, culture, or religion, and play along.

That’s fine — but this inauthentic man is also the most dangerous: because when his hero-system is threatened, he’ll defend it violently without rationale or concern for consequences.

The truly “heroic” person, in Becker’s view, is someone who doesn’t delude themselves about what’s at stake.

They face the terror of death honestly, and still choose their immortality project consciously, knowing it’s a construct — not the universe’s guarantee.

Becker takes this further and explains that transference does not happen just in the shrink’s office, but instead it is the universal human mechanism of projecting our need for safety, order, and meaning onto other persons.

This person represents the universe itself, its incredible power as well as its unfathomable mysteries. This “… allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe.”.

What happens is this: people take a person – real (like a political leader, a CEO, an guru, a head of a community) or figurative (like an organisation, or a department, or the government) – and imbue that person with (i.e., transfer to them) the powers of the universe.

Which is to say, they imagine that person to represent the universe they find themselves in as a conscious entity.

• In a child’s world, the parent is the universe: all-powerful, the giver of food, comfort, punishment, protection.
• In adult life, the politician, general, CEO, lover, guru becomes the universe: “my leader will protect me”; “my boss holds my survival”; “my lover takes care of me”; “my guru is my guiding light”; “my nation embodies my destiny”.
• Even institutions — a company, a church, a government — become symbolic persons, invested with near-mystical powers.

“Manage” how?

By considering the pleasure or displeasure of the leader as predictors of our fate.

Instead of asking: “Will the universe kill me in an earthquake, famine, or cancer?” — we ask: “Will the King, the CEO, the President, my father — punish or reward me?”.

That substitution gives us the illusion of control. If the leader is pleased with me, I’m safe; if he’s displeased, I’m in danger.

It converts the impersonal terror of death into a personal drama we feel we can navigate. “We seem to be pretending that the world does not contain terror and evil but only our parents.”.

They want comfortable lies that help them manage the terror of death and get on with life. And so the “… masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need …”.

You can see, therefore, how there is a natural need in people to find a leader, which emerges from their deeper need to avoid confronting death. And why, when a leader dies, there is such outpouring of emotion from even tough-looking men – they suddenly come face to face with death as it asks them: “If I didn’t spare your leader, why do you think I will spare you?”.

“’For only by living in close union with a god-ideal that has been erected outside one’s own ego is one able to live at all.’”.

For people, their leader isn’t as much “all-powerful”, as he is “all-useful”. That’s why loyalty can look absolute, but is actually fragile — if the leader stops being useful in managing their death anxiety, people will drop him, sometimes overnight.

People who achieve their heroism in this way, following a leader, are said to have “timid heroism”.

They may be following the leader into a truly perilous journey, such as enslaved people fighting for freedom against a dictator, but their heroism is still timid because they did not take the first step and instead adopted a pre-defined heroic project.

“… almost everyone consents to earn his immortality in the popular ways mapped out by societies … the beyonds of others and not their own.”.

“Cheap heroism”, if you will. “’Cheap’ because not in their own command, not with their own daring, and not in the grip of their own fears: everything is done with the leader’s image stamped on their psyche.”.

In a 2010-to-2020 global snapshot by Pew, 75.8% of people still identified with a religion as of 2020, but 24.2%—the third-largest group—were unaffiliated, reflecting a steady rise in the religiously unaffiliated.

A broader pattern across countries, especially in the West, shows a centuries-long secularisation trend – often mirroring modernisation and demographic shifts.

This has been one of the side-effects of the scientific revolution, and of the generally rational bent of mind that we have come adopt to as a species.

The same outlook, which demands evidence and repeatability as proof of a concept’s veracity is the same outlook that makes us reject or not take as seriously anything which is unable to clear the bar of objectively demonstrable outcome.

Those who believe in the truth of something because of faith may find themselves seen as orthodox and irrational.

When a religion told you that there was an all powerful deity that you should pray to and follow the rules prescribed by such a deity so that after that you can enter heaven, this gave man already made solution to handle the fear of death.

But when religion started losing its grip on people or rather, when people started doubting religion, they also lost an important scaffolding against the terror of death – this situation is, for most, too much to deal with – and so most started looking for a replacement to religion.

Becker talks about what has come to replace this “religious solution” – he calls it the “romantic solution”.

The romantic solution, instead of personifying the universe in the form of a God, personifies it instead in the form of a lover or more generally in the form of a human being that you consider an “idol”.

As Becker explains “… all of one’s inner conflict and contradiction … all these one can try to purge in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.”.

When you think that another person can represent the entirety of the universe in their human form when they can represent perfection itself, you make a grave mistake.

As Becker points out “No human partner can offer this assurance because the partner is real. However much we may idealize and idolize him, he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection.”.

Basically, when your idol – whether it is a leader or a guru or a teacher or a politician or a lover – does something that reflects their imperfection, such as an extramarital affair or accepting bribes or or even very mundane things like catching a cold or having to use the bathroom or getting grey hair, you realise that the human is not the God you were looking for, and instead, just like you, is a messy human trying to make sense of the world.

best thing about a religious God is that they are abstract that they do not exist in a real sense. Due to this, they are above human imperfection.

By being immaterial, God escapes the very thing humans are trying to transcend: creatureliness.

That makes Him the perfect projection screen for our longing for perfection.

We know by now that such a person cannot take social template (i.e. timid heroism) as his primary heroic project, instead, they must fashion a personal heroic project.

Naturally, one can understand that such a project is going to be very hard because it lacks the ready-made template and structure that society provides in the form of its various roles and responsibilities.

As Becker points out “… personal heroism … is a very daring adventure precisely because it separates the person out of comfortable ‘beyonds.’ … this move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself. These are the risks when the person begins to fashion consciously and critically his own framework of heroic self reference.”

Understand this person as anyone who takes the first step to create a uniquely personal heroic project.

Naturally, because this creative person does not use the ready-made templates available from society, their hero project is often seen as impractical, pointless or simply cuckoo.

The creative person rejects the available templates from society because timid heroism is not good enough for them.

They may feel the roles and responsibilities that others eagerly take on and make part of identity as the truly pointless endeavours.

This may manifest in, for example, them refusing to play games of politics and work extra long hours in the corporate workspace because the meaning that a corporate position provides them is not what they actually want.

So, it is not as much as an optional choice as much as it is a fundamental requirement for the creative person’s psyche to create a personal project.

No matter the template that society provides them, the creative person, due to their unique mental make up, will always feel a need to create something of their own.

The difference between the creative person and others is, in my opinion, not of kind, but of degree – because everyone has a creative urge, but those that fit into society and its various roles have the need for creativity easily satisfied by what society has available, whereas for the creative person, this is not the case.

In that sense, people who aim for timid heroism have it much easier.

Further, people who aim for timid heroism also have it easier in one more aspect: they can seek redemption from society itself.

Society cannot grant the creative person immortality (not that they wanted it in the first place).

So, where does the creative person get his redemption?

The answer is clear when you think about what the creative person is doing through his creation.

While the rest work for social approval, who does the creative person, having rejected socially approved templates, work for?

The creative person by design, aims his heroic project over the heads of his fellow men – he creates his heroic project as his legacy.

The possibility of not being able to create this project is akin to death for the creative person. Therefore, the creative person works for his creation. And hence, the creative person must seek his redemption from creation itself. Becker is on point: “The artist’s gift is always to creation itself … to God.”.

They’re working for the project to exist. The creation itself is the verdict. If it comes into being, they live on through it; if it never manifests, it is as if they never lived at all. Failure to create equals a kind of death.

Not a social death (reputation, job, status), but a spiritual death: the void of leaving no mark, of having been unable to give their gift back to creation.

Redemption is vertical, not horizontal.

While the timid hero seeks redemption horizontally (from peers, society, history), the creative hero seeks it vertically (from creation, God, or the absolute).

You see, when the creator creates something, that thing starts to exist – it transfers from the realm of the imaginary and abstract to the world of the real.

And the problem with anything that has started to exist, with anything that has a beginning, is that it must come to an end. How is that any different from the fate of the creative person who also must die eventually?

And therefore, if the creative person ends up getting too attached to their creation, if they make the creation such a part of their identity that they’re afraid of losing it, they run the risk of becoming prisoner like the rest of the people they see around them.

Examples of this mistake are many in the world. The entrepreneur who builds a successful business from scratch, and then strangles the business through centralised decision-making and ends up bankrupting it. The artist who creates an iconoclastic work of art, but then has a mental breakdown when the work of art is heavily criticised in society. The political leader who starts a political party aimed towards a good cause that many end up joining, but then makes it so centred around himself that it self-destructs.

For a human to put in their life into a personal heroic project, one that they fought very hard against society to bring into existence – and then give it up – this is true heroism.

This is the cutting edge of Becker’s philosophy: renunciation of your personal heroic project is the only way to transcend death.

In this way, the creative person does not work for his creation, but rather for the creative act itself. The creating, and not the created, is what redeems him.

By not binding your being to anything finite — not society, not your own art, not even your own symbolic immortality — you stop death from having leverage over you.

It’s straight out of the wisdom traditions:

• Bhagavad Gita: Do the work, forget the fruits.
• Buddhism: Cling to nothing, not even your own enlightenment.
• Stoicism: play your role, then exit the stage when the director calls.

The only full development is when you stop trying to outwit death through near-at-hand immortalities and instead surrender to that which contains both life and death — the ultimate powers of nature, existence, creation.

That’s why Becker’s language turns religious: “the passivity of renunciation to the highest powers”.

It’s not passive in the sense of doing nothing; it’s passive in the sense of yielding — letting go of the frantic project to save the self.

And notice the paradox again: “only by surrendering … can man conquer death” – not by fighting, not by creating symbols, but by renouncing all claims to permanence.

What a beautiful, poetic irony – the only way to “conquer” death is to stop trying to conquer it at all – to renounce the very causa-sui project that began as an attempt to escape it.

Their outside actions may not seem calm but inside they are an ocean of peace. The true hero may look like anyone else — working, parenting, dealing, hustling, building, even fighting battles.

But inwardly, they’re an ocean of peace because they’ve accepted death, so the life they live and the work they do is in the service of creating. Thus, as long as they get to create in a meaningful way, external success and fame are merely added bonus, and failure and infamy are the price of the privilege of being able to create.

They appear fully active and invested in the world, yet they are not attached to its fruits. They live without much clutching or clinging or thrashing about.

The key that the person holds is the key of active engagement: the person must make an effort to engage with the world in the way that calls to them, they must not renounce too early – Becker warns against premature surrender.

If a man leans too much on the universe (or God) too early, he risks skipping the developmental stage of standing on his own two feet, of claiming his individuality, of discovering his powers and limits as a human being.

If you “outsource” everything to God from the start, you never go through the crucible of anxiety, despair, failure, discernment, choice, and responsibility — the very experiences that shape authentic selfhood and are the foundation for true heroism.

The key that the universe holds is the key of grace⁸: the universe must bestow on us the wisdom and the strength to skilfully renounce the very thing we have been creating whilst we were turning our key.

The man can very well engage with the world and create prolifically, but without grace he may get entangled in the created and forget the creating.

With grace he gains the wisdom and strength to let go of the creation without bitterness, to renounce without despair.

Grace is what severs the clinging — it reminds the man that what redeems him is not the object he created, but the act of creating itself, the alignment with Being. Grace is not achieved by man, but given to him by powers outside himself.

Not just humans, but all animals, plants, insects and so on; indeed anything that ever existed, exists today, and will exist tomorrow can be called a child of existence.

In the Advaitic tradition this existence is called Brahman.

It is not a thing that exists, but the existence of all things. It is the ground of being itself.

It is the fact of existence, the is-ness that all things have and in which all things arise, change, and dissolve.

Existence is the parent, and all things that exist are its children.

What else can we be expected to do?

And when, denied literal immortality, we seek symbolic immortality – aren’t we just being good little children? Continuing the family tradition of just existing, just being?

Every time you create, love, parent, write, build, or even just endure the absurd, you’re acting like a miniature universe continuing the work of Brahman.

Becker says “… the person who prides himself on being a ‘hard-headed realist’ and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task … Man has to have the courage to be himself, to stand on his own feet, to face up to the eternal contradictions of the real world. The bold goal of this kind of courage is to absorb into one’s own being, the maximum amount of non-being … daily life, then, becomes truly a duty of cosmic proportions and his courage to face the anxiety of meaninglessness becomes a true cosmic heroism … in one’s own person he tries to achieve what the creative powers of emergent Being have so far achieved with lower forms of life, the overcoming of that which would negate life …”.

In this way, is Becker not calling the human being a miniature universe unto himself?

If existence itself is the “parent,” then what is the primal duty of a child? To keep the lineage alive, to join the family business.

Every organism does this blindly — from the bacteria splitting itself, to the oak dropping acorns, to the bird guarding its eggs.

Humans, however, inherited the gift/curse of self-awareness. We know we exist, and we know this existence will end.

And so, we don’t just reproduce biologically — we reproduce symbolically: art, nations, legacies, books, monuments, ideas, children we raise to embody values.

This is why Becker sounds almost Vedantic here:

• Advaita Vedanta says Atman is Brahman — the self is not separate from the universe.
• Becker says: Man, by courageously shouldering existence, is doing at the micro level what being itself has always done: overcome non-being.

Becker advises that, “Men should wait while using their best intelligence and efforts to secure their adaptation and survival. Ideally, they would wait in a condition of openness towards miracle and mystery in the lived truth of creation, which would make it easier both to survive and to be redeemed because men would be less driven to undo themselves, and would be more like the image that pleases their Creator: awe-filled creatures, trying to live in harmony with the rest of creation.”.

• Do our best with the intelligence and skill we’ve been given. Take actions to survive. But don’t delude ourselves that we control it all.
• Beyond effort and intelligence, there is mystery — what you might call grace, chance, or the unpredictable unfolding of existence itself. Becker posits the healthiest posture isn’t frantic control, nor passive resignation, but openness. You acknowledge that there is something beyond you — call it mystery, creation, universe, God.
• When we try too hard to master life, to force immortality projects, to deny mystery, we often end up “undoing ourselves” (wars, exploitation, self-destruction). But if we live with awe — with humility that we’re part of creation — we stop sabotaging ourselves.
• For Becker, the “ideal human” is not the hyper-controlling hero, but the one who accepts his creatureliness with awe, who strives intelligently but also remains humble before mystery. That humility — living with reverence — is what makes life livable and redemptive.

And says, “… taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.“.

• Don’t deny death. Don’t sugarcoat the grotesque, the fear, the panic that sits just beneath the surface of existence.
• Don’t repress it away in comforting lies, timid heroism, or shallow projects.
• Instead, face it fully — the terror, the sorrow, the absurdity — and still create, act, love, build from within that awareness.

Becker is telling us: anything you do that forgets the terror of existence is false, flimsy, a lie propping up your denial.

But when you build and create with full consciousness of fragility, finitude, and fear — then your work is true, even if it’s small, because it comes from the deepest truth of what it means to be human.

“… the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the time-worn religious way: to project one’s problems into a God figure, to be healed by an all embracing and all justifying beyond.“.

Here Becker is blunt: you can’t resolve the contradictions of life (to be a god who shits, to want immortality in a mortal frame, to create while knowing all creation decays) by intellect alone, or by secular hero systems.

Projection into God isn’t childish fantasy — it’s a necessity. A “beyond” gives coherence where none can be found inside finitude.

This doesn’t mean a naïve return to Sunday-school piety. He’s saying that unless you place your project into something infinite, you’ll always crash into the wall of finitude. In other words: without transcendence, the terror of death eventually overpowers all vital lies.

This is his Kierkegaardian leap: faith as the only durable solution.

“The most that anyone of us can seem to do is to fashion something — an object or ourselves — and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”.

This is Becker’s poetic humility and bottom line. He admits: none of us can “solve“ existence. We can only create something, be it art, love, a child, a courageous act, a way of being.

And then, we let it go — “drop it into the confusion.”. Don’t cling, don’t imagine it will immortalise you.

Instead, it becomes an offering — to life itself, to Being, to God, however you name it.

The act of creating and releasing — without claiming ownership or demanding immortality — is the noblest posture man can take.

Put together, Becker’s conclusion is paradoxical but profound:

• Project upward (into God, the Beyond) to give your fragile heroism grounding.
• Offer outward (your creation, your self) without clinging, as a gesture to life itself.

This final synthesis is close to the Gita’s karma yoga + bhakti yoga:

• Karma yoga: act, fashion, create — and renounce the fruit.
• Bhakti yoga: surrender it to God, the all-justifying beyond.

Becker ends in the same place Krishna does: live fully, create bravely, offer everything up.