The Worm at the Core is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Copyright © 2015 by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution: Painting entitled “Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage” by T’ang Yin. Courtesy Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase, F1939.60. Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House: “The Cultural Presupposition” from W. H. Auden: The Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1945 by W. H. Auden and copyright renewed 1973 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Solomon, Sheldon. The worm at the core : on the role of death in life / Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4000-6747-3 eBook ISBN 978-0-67960488-4 1. Death—Psychological aspects. 2. Fear of death. 3. Terror. I. Greenberg, Jeff, 1954– II. Pyszczynski, Thomas A. III. Title. BF789.D4S66 2015 155.9’37—dc23 2014033937 eBook ISBN 9780679604884 www.atrandom.com Frontispiece: Hans Thoma, Adam and Eve (1897). Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman Cover design: Anna Bauer v4.1 a Contents —— Cover Title Page Frontispiece Copyright Introduction PART ONE: TERROR MANAGEMENT 1. Managing the Terror of Death 2. The Scheme of Things 3. Self-esteem: The Foundation of Fortitude PART TWO: DEATH THROUGH THE AGES 4. Homo Mortalis: From Primate to Human 5. Literal Immortality 6. Symbolic Immortality PART THREE: DEATH IN MODERN TIMES 7. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness 8. Body and Soul: An Uneasy Alliance 9. Death Near and Far 10. Cracks in the Shields 11. Living with Death Acknowledgments Notes About the Authors Introduction —— Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all- encompassing blackness…. We need a life not correlated with death…a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature…. And so with most of us:…a little irritable weakness…will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. —WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience On a rainy, gray day in december 1973, philosopher Sam Keen, writing for Psychology Today, trundled down the halls of a hospital in Burnaby, British Columbia, to interview a terminally ill cancer patient who doctors said had just days to live. When Keen entered the room, the dying man told him, with a touch of mortal irony: “You are catching me in extremis. This is a test of everything I’ve written about death. And I’ve got a chance to show how one dies…how one accepts his death.” The man in the hospital bed was cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. Becker had devoted his academic career to writing books synthesizing insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, religion, literature, and popular culture to get to the bottom of the ancient question “What makes people act the way they do?” In his latest book, The Denial of Death, which he described as his “first mature work,” Becker concluded that human activity is driven largely by unconscious efforts to deny and transcend death. “We build character and culture,” he told Sam Keen, “in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death.” Now, lying on his deathbed, Becker explained that his life’s work had been about coming to terms with the grinning skull looking back at him. Ernest Becker died on March 6, 1974, at the age of forty-nine. Like many visionaries, Becker died too young. Two months later, The Denial of Death was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Back in the late 1960s, Becker was an intellectual insurgent. He was immensely popular with students, who flocked to hear his lectures. However, colleagues and university administrators were not particularly enamored with an interdisciplinary thinker who drew together ideas from all corners of the academy, public discourse, and popular culture, and who challenged their academic and political orthodoxy. Becker thus became a kind of academic vagabond, drifting from Syracuse University (1960–1963) to the University of California, Berkeley (1965), where students offered to pay his salary after the anthropology department declined to renew his contract. After a stint at San Francisco State (1967–1969), he found an academic home at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia (1969–1974), where he wrote the second edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning, The Denial of Death, and his posthumously published Escape from Evil. A few years later, in the late 1970s, the three authors of this book met after enrolling in the doctoral program in experimental social psychology at the University of Kansas. We quickly discovered a shared interest in understanding the fundamental motivations that direct human behavior. Our studies and discussions led us to focus on two very basic human proclivities. First, we human beings are driven to protect our self-esteem. Second, we humans strongly desire to assert the superiority of our own group over other groups. But we had no idea what underlies these prides and prejudices until we stumbled upon Becker’s books as young professors in the early 1980s. Like the Rosetta Stone, they were to us a revelation. Mixing deep philosophical prose and straightforward layman’s language, Becker explained how the fear of death guides human behavior. He illuminated many of the key social-psychological phenomena that we had for years been studying and teaching but without fully grasping. Suddenly, we had a way to understand why we so desperately crave self-esteem, and why we fear, loathe, and sometimes seek to obliterate people who are different from ourselves. Brimming with youthful enthusiasm, we were excited to share Becker’s ideas with fellow social psychologists at the 1984 meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. There we introduced what we dubbed terror management theory in order to build on Becker’s claim that people strive for meaningful and significant lives largely to manage the fear of death. The audience started drifting away as soon as we mentioned that our theory was influenced by sociology, anthropology, existential philosophy, and psychoanalysis. When we got to the ideas of Marx, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Becker, renowned psychologists were storming the conference room exits. Bemused but undaunted, we prepared a paper for the American Psychological Association’s flagship journal, American Psychologist. Feedback arrived a few months later. “I have no doubt that this paper would be of no interest to any psychologist, living or dead,” read one rather pithy singleline review. But we kept at the editor, repeatedly asking him to explain why our ideas were unworthy. Our queries outlasted the original editor’s tenure, and finally a second, more sympathetic (or perhaps more beleaguered) editor gave us something we could work with: “Although your ideas may have some validity,” he told us, “they won’t be taken seriously unless you can provide evidence for them.” That’s when it dawned on us that our graduate training in experimental social psychology had prepared us to do just that. We’ve spent the last quarter century investigating the influence of the fear of death on human affairs. At first, we conducted the research with our own students. Later, as our theory gained traction, we were joined by colleagues around the globe. Today, terror management theory is widely studied by psychological scientists and scholars in other disciplines as well, yielding an array of findings that go well beyond what Becker could ever have envisioned. There is now compelling evidence that, as William James suggested a century ago, death is indeed the worm at the core of the human condition. The awareness that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in almost every domain of human life—whether we are conscious of it or not. Over the course of human history, the terror of death has guided the development of art, religion, language, economics, and science. It raised the pyramids in Egypt and razed the Twin Towers in Manhattan. It contributes to conflicts around the globe. At a more personal level, recognition of our mortality leads us to love fancy cars, tan ourselves to an unhealthy crisp, max out our credit cards, drive like lunatics, itch for a fight with a perceived enemy, and crave fame, however ephemeral, even if we have to drink yak urine on Survivor