Ernest Becker: Free Yourself From Cultural Constraints
Very few writers have fed my curiosity on the human experience more than Ernest Becker. I’ve read his most well-known work, The Denial of Death, three times. It deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Becker’s insight and prose sheds new light on the age-old question — what makes people act the way they do?
The following is a passage from one of his other brilliant works — The Birth and Death of Meaning. In this book, Becker explores the fundamental human quest for meaning in life, arguing that individuals construct their own meanings as a way to cope with the awareness of their mortality.
Becker suggests that people construct various belief systems, cultural norms, and social structures to imbue their lives with significance and purpose, thereby alleviating existential dread. He also contends that these “constructs” are inherently fragile and subject to decay over time, leading to what he refers to as the "death of meaning."
He writes: “The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.”
Becker draws from poetry, mythology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology to deeply explore the profound existential questions that define the human condition.
I hope you enjoy it!
The great philosopher Henri Bergson wrote that the continuation of evolution was accomplished in the geniuses who broke out of the automatic cultural patterns of perception and renewed the life surge in a forward direction.
The challenge of the modern theory of democracy is that more people than just the geniuses or gifted leaders will have to free themselves from cultural constraint in order for sufficient new energies to emerge from nature.