In The Denial of Death, I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. ... man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
My previous writings did not take sufficient account of truly vicious human behavior. This is a dilemma that I have been caught in, along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the Enlightenment tradition of a science of man: how to reflect the empirical data on man, the data that show what a horribly destructive creature he has been throughout his history, and yet still have a science that is not manipulative or cynical. If man is as bad as he seems, then either we have to behaviorally coerce him into the good life or else we have to abandon the hope of a science of man entirely. ...
I now see that we must make a clear distinction between man's creatureliness - his appetite - on the one hand and his ingenuity on the other.
Man is an animal. ... the basic human condition: that man is first and foremost an animal moving about on a planet shining in the sun. Whatever else he is, is built on this. ... we shall never understand man if we do not begin with his animal nature. And this is truly basic. The only certain thing we know about this planet is that it is a theater for crawling life, organismic life, and at least we know what organisms are and what they are trying to do.
At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed - a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. ...
Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. ...
Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist - continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one's inner pulsations and musculature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the organism is satiated, this becomes its frantic -all consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost - and the costs can be catastrophic in the case of man.
And this brings us to the unique paradox of the human condition: that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive organism; he is driven by the same craving to consume, to convert energy, and to enjoy continued experience. But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to gear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die.
... From the very beginning, man could not live with the prospect of death. ... man erected cultural symbols which do not age or decay to quiet his fear of his ultimate end - and of more immediate concern, to provide the promise of indefinite duration.
We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms is the basic motive for what is most distinctive about man... it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other (religion, passing on one's genes, being remembered, etc)... culture itself is sacred, since it is the "religion" that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. ... Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. ... all systematizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count. ...
What men have done is shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since man must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil (death), man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man' ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. ... man's impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.
