Living Beyond Mortality: Immortality in the Modern World - Essay Sample

Introduction

In today's world, people tend to deny death by fully absorbing themselves in their social lives by striving to do what the society tends to think of the desirable; in this state, the current world is all about money, fame and social statuses. Ernest Becker, suggests that humans live by believing that they are in a part of something more than their mortal bodies, that they will get themselves the form of immortality (Paris,2018). This leads to the mainspring of the human activity that instead develops the theory of terror management. In this theory, Becker tends to show compatibility with the theory of evolution. The author suggested that everywhere in society is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. This means that the system in society is in the form of codified heroism. This paper describes the application of the theories reflected on the youth, and their search for immortality today, as in the book "The Denial of Death" authored by Ernest Becker.

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Terror Management

The theory of terror management tries to explain the type of defensive human thinking and behaviors that originates from awareness and the fear of death. Humans are full of fear in precise situations because of the self-awareness and the ability of weak thoughts that make them progressively aware of their vulnerabilities and helplessness. It is in fear that we do try to control our anxieties by sustaining the love and protection given to us by our guardians, we seemingly try to contemplate the understanding by coming into agreement on the world given to us by our guardians and repay them with what they want us to be (Becker,2007). Youths in modern society no longer feel heroic in executing plans for their actions for their culture is already established.

They don't believe in their lives and times since the have the codified society, to them they have already achieved it in life and its one of the mistakes that hits them because it's a kind of power of myth. This is so similar to Becker's suggestion resulting from the emergence of man for he is known as a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even when there are no worries. The youth induce themselves in serious crimes; property crime, violent crime, motor vehicle theft, burglary, larceny-theft, manslaughter, sexual assault, abduction and murder (Becker, 2007). The individuals involving themselves in such evils find themselves frightened to face a terrible reality and they try to cover their wrongdoings with certain fantasies where everything to them is clear.

The youth are driven towards things that support the lie of their characters but they tend to control themselves by defying themselves. This is the irony of man's state that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and destruction (Becker, 2016). Some of them end up with disorders that are related to the kind of lifestyle they are living, some get depressed and this lowers the level of interaction to and possibly avoids independence and more life precisely because those are the things that threaten them with destruction and death. All this happens right from the start when children are born, they adapt with some of the power that transcends from their parents or around their parents' social groups that signifies society.

This allows them to act following the background they are set or provided to them by their parents. Undoubtedly, they automatically take control of the delegated powers as long as they got the anxiety that they use it as an external spring of growth into their new criteria's of their thoughts and trust (Becker, 2007). Becker devotes most of his time trying to explain how humans deny death. Briefly, he claims that the denial of death and associated urge for heroism is so vital to human existence because a failure to deny death through heroic success results in devastating levels of stress, anxiety, and depression which can drive one mad. These elicit levels of fear and anxiety can be so debilitating that to properly function one must deny their mortality.

On the educational theory, Becker's perspective on the role of self-esteem maintenance in education is particularly on the essence to educational theorists, since the role of self-esteem works along with the denial of thoughts of the death of which the term is borrowed from Otto Rank by creating the principle of immortality striving as a crucial point on the society. This theory reflects on the youths of today in such a way that the current world marginalizes on education (Martin, 2016). Some of them are faced with denial thought on their performance which they term themselves as failures, this leads to suicidal thoughts causing deaths thinking that they have overcome their situations by taking off their lives instead of pushing through their worst failures into the success and shining on achieving the best grades by self-esteem and self-motivation.

Some youth tend to take illicit drugs that have a lasting effect on their brains by simply not believing that anything truly bad can ever happen to them. They are young, meaning that their lives stretch out before them to the prospect that they feel immortal. Most social science theory talks about the views on social life structured by social institutions, cultural systems, structural races, class, and gender (Becker, 2007). This determines the flow of things in everyday life and this represses the influence that impacted the youth. When this theory is combined with a mythical-religious perspective, it provides a model that would ensure the fullest liberation of man. The traditional science had failed man in that it did not provide the basis of a meaningful existence.

Only by embracing the religious perspective, individuals overcome and surpass the crippling panic of death. On the religious perspective, which leads to the recognition of the soul creator- God. In Becker's schemes, there was no theory about a man without a belief in what is proper for a man (Martin,2016). Society is just a monumental game, a game of living principle of civilization in which the world of human aspiration is largely fictitious. Once social fiction is discredited, the way to triumph over despair is lost. On the youth today, what causes things to be how they are onto them is how the society got to be as they are, on which the only principle must be that of human freedom.

The crisis of the middle and upper-class youth in the Western world is accurately on the crisis of belief in the vitality of the hero-system that is obtainable by contemporary materialist society. In short, individuals feel good about themselves in a figurative and organismic way. The ferric in human existence is that reaching for the highest needs, self-esteem, and immortality, this clearly shows that man does so over the flesh and blood of other men (Becker,2016). This has resulted in the social fiction that man has uncritical performance and the rituals created. Becker believed that the motivating principle of human behavior is the fear of death, to relieve this fear man generates a supernatural nature to culture. It is obvious that man alone is conscious of death and engages in self-perpetuation.

This attributes to him killing others to sustain his own life. Certainly, evil drives a man to a personal intention behind a man's disastrous need for heroic victory over death. Becker claims that it's only by implementing a religious perspective, by turning to God can make man live a truthfully meaningful life (Becker, 2007). Nevertheless, the writer wished to show us that the culture we are in today is robbing us of the possible responsibility of being heroic. Truly, the basic contradiction is that for a man not everything is possible. What man wants is immortality, not that social science cannot provide immortality but it takes the belief in it away with it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, professing the futility to the compound of the basic anxiety of human existence. Briefly, Becker's thesis is that death is primary domination. However, theories explain why things happen and they rather predict events and behaviors using the time flow without explaining why such events are taking place (Becker, 2007). The author published the literature without knowing that those predictions were describing his death, but the goal of the book was on ideal-real social science. The ideal fears of mankind are not extinction but extinction without meaning. Self-esteem and self-motivation of man attribute to the religious sphere that only creates the necessary hero-system.

References

Becker, E. (2007). The denial of death. Simon and Schuster. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=G67wXZ94JmoC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=Becker,+E.+The+denial+of+death.&ots=vG08ZWeJdG&sig=oauqJM2e-qludTN-W04P4jBm0Vk

Becker, R. W. (2016). Becker. Robert W. Becker. https://ernestbecker.org/about-becker/related-works/

Martin, J. (2016). Ernest Becker and Stanley Milgram: Twentieth-century students of evil. History of psychology, 19(1), 3. https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hop/19/1/3.html?uid=2015-55064-001

Paris, P. (2018). The marginalization of religion in the end of life care: signs of microaggression?. International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJHRH-09-2017-0053/full/html