Culture as a collective fabrication facilitating our quest for immortality

I often wonder how people are capable of simply going about their business, chatting about last night’s sporting event, working on crossword puzzles or thinking about buying a new car, despite the fact that they will be dead someday, maybe even someday soon. And for those with children, their children will also be dead a few decades later. How can we possibly live with those dreaded thoughts hanging over us? In fact, every person now living will likely be dead in 150 years. How can we engage in mundane things like gossiping, consuming, traveling and amusing ourselves when every person on the planet is facing annihilation? How do we put death out of our minds so easily? Ernest Becker would suggest that I have it all backwards. According to Becker, people intensely amuse and distract themselves, and immerse themselves in culture, because they are anxious about death. They are not necessarily consciously aware of their impending deaths, but they feel it deeply, and their minds grind and sputter on this topic, under the surface, unconsciously. We do the best we can to deal with this terrifying thought that we will all be dead, and the best we can think of doing is to distract ourselves with the many bright and shiny bigger-than-us, bigger-than-life things offered by culture. We put these things on a pedestal and then we cling to them as if they were life preservers. We embellish our cultural treasures with accolades recognizing their “eternal” significance. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Babe Ruth, stamp collections, being a trivia pursuit star, triathlons, Michelangelo’s David. And for some of us, Jesus Christ loves us and He will let us live with him forever in heaven. According to Becker, these cultural mainstays are important for keeping us steady, even while death (and the threat of death) lurks around every corner. I recently had the opportunity to watch the highly acclaimed low-budget 90-minute 2005 documentary titled "Flight from Death: the Quest for Immortality,” produced by Patrick Shen and Greg Bennick. The film is based on the works of Ernest Becker’s “terror management theory,” (TMT) on which I’ve written several times (see here and here). Even though I was well acquainted with the works of Becker prior to viewing this video, I found the film to be transformative, in that it offers a schematic of underlying “hydraulics” that help us to understand many things that otherwise seem so puzzling about culture. I’d highly recommend “Flight from Death” whether or not you sometimes find it stunning that you live on a planet where mobile intestinal tracks scurry about, drive buses and even serve you meals at your local restaurant. Here’s the trailer. Even though I was already familiar with Becker’s theory and many of the experiments substantiating Becker’s theory, I found the film illuminating. “Flight From Death” includes well-chosen imagery and music to accompany the interviews with thoughtful and eccentric people from a wide variety of backgrounds (including psychologist Sheldon Soloman and writer Sam Keen, among others). [More . . . ]

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Separation of Church and State?

I was on my way to lunch today, when I saw an ad on a local 'mega-church' billboard. It was promoting a "Restoring America Conference". This is a church. It pays no taxes. It should have no say, as an entity, in our political process. Based on the speakers, this will not be about Restoring America in any social sense - something that a church should indeed participate and lead. This 'conference' will undoubtedly be a rabidly right-wing diatribe from start to finish. I have absolutely no problem with free speech, not do I have a problem with Partisan speech. I do have a problem when political speech is not only associated with religion, but sponsored and promoted by a religious organization.

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Welcome to the new Plutocracy!

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” -- Warren Buffett, currently the world's third richest person
Most Americans have the sense that something's wrong in our country, and most realize that it's intimately tied up with money and politics. Those who have not studied the issues deeply could be forgiven for thinking we have a foreclosure problem, or an unemployment problem, or a Democrat problem, or a Republican problem, or a problem with Congress as a whole, but the truth is more important than those symptomatic issues. The truth is that we are now living in a nakedly plutocratic state-- that is, a state which is run by, and for, the wealthy. Or perhaps a corporatocracy (a state run by, and for, corporations), but they are functionally the same thing.

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Some Of What Follows Is Hyperbole

Christine O'Donnell is one of those public figures that emerge from time to time that make any writer of fiction envious of reality. Only a truly gifted writer could make someone like this up and then sell her as a plausible character. At the heart of it, she is the problem with the Tea Party. Here's the thing I've never understood about the far right: fiscal responsibility is well and good and certainly we could do with a lot more---we could have used some for the last thirty years, certainly, a period during which Republicans (and by inference conservatives) have been largely in control of Congress---but how come is it we can't seem to get candidates who are just about that without dragging all the social issue crap along with them? I for one am tiring of having my alternatives clipped because some whack-a-do who may well have a sound fiscal policy in mind is also hell bent on "correcting" the lax, immoral, godless state of the country. Now we get right down to the basic issues with Ms. O'Donnell: jacking off. It's destroying the country. People are going blind from this, divorce rates are record high because selfish people are doing themselves at the expense of the shared relationship god intended they have. Abstinence means all of it! Tie those peoples' hands behind their backs! Put those genital safety belts on those young fellows who can't leave johnny alone! Why, if we root out the evil of self-pleasuring, we'll be on the road to sound financial policy and security in no time! Then of course there's the usual slate of absurdities---she's a young earth creationist. (What, may I ask, does this have to do with fiscal conservatism? Well, in her case, apparently, a difficulty with basic math...) Naturally she opposes abortion and since she's so down on pud pounding, we may presume she hasn't much use for birth control of any kind, sex education, or possible female orgasm. She is that perfect contradiction of modern far right womanhood---someone who probably thinks women's place is in the home who is attempting to establish a powerful political career in order to legislate herself back into a state of chattel bondage. And then there's the Libertarian wing of the Tea Party that basically believes people ought to be free to choose their own lives without interference from anyone, especially the government, and eventually they will create the fissure in opposition to the Talibaptist contingent who want more than anything to tell people how to live decent lives. It may do this country good to elect some of these folks into public office so we can see, really see how they perform. How they make their philosophies mesh with what most Americans really want. It's a sad time for American politics. We're in a depression (why they insist on continuing to call it a recession is purist political cynicism), Obama has not miraculously fixed that, and people are pissed off. They are in a "Throw the bastards out" mood, but unfortunately they have little to choose from. The Republican Party, self-deluded that they may ride this tide back into power for "all the right reasons", has so bankrupted its credibility right before, during, and since W that even conservatives must hold their noses to vote for them. The Democrats have failed once again to define an American Ideology behind which the people can get and although right now they are probably on the right track fiscally, it will take time for their actions to result in anything fruitful. (Didn't Obama say all along it would take a long time? Didn't he say this would not be painless? Didn't he say a lot of work would have to be done before things started drifting back to something good? Didn't he? But he's been in office 19 months! My god, just how long is a long time?) They haven't "fixed things" so people don't like them either. So there's the Tea Party. This is bottom of the barrel time. These are the screeling, apocalyptic, neo-revisionist, founding-principled-though-illiterate gang of conspiracy theorist candidates who have gained momentum through sheer quality of nerve, who intend to save the country from our foreign-born Muslim president and the anarcho-socialist intellectual elite. They are the ones who wish to remove all the interfering laws and restrictions that hamper the marrow-deep entrepreneurial American essence and allow people to make millions on their own or starve in the gutter with their families because while Darwin was wrong about biology he was right about economic policy and the weak ought to perish so the strong can dominate. These are the folks who would free us to be dominated by Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and Big Insurance. These are people who believe corporations are people, too, and back the American dream nurtured in the heart of every kid who wants to grow up to be a corporation. Or an oligarch. But first, they have to curtail masturbation. The country has had enough of people jacking off. Time to get them back to work.

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