The Denial of Mortality: A Psychological Insight into Evil

What if the darkest chapters of human history – genocide, mass violence, fanatical persecution – are not simply the product of greed, hatred, or political ambition, but of something far more primal? Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed exactly that. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Denial of Death (1973) and its companion volume Escape from Evil (1975), Becker argued that the deepest source of human evil is not aggression or selfishness – it is the terror of dying, and our desperate, often unconscious refusal to accept it.

The human animal and the awareness of death 🔗

Every living creature faces death, but only humans know it. This awareness – that we are mortal, finite, and ultimately insignificant against the vastness of the cosmos – generates what Becker called existential anxiety: a persistent, low-level dread that underlies much of human behavior. Other animals react to immediate threats. Humans, by contrast, carry the knowledge of their own end every waking moment.

Becker argued that human civilization itself is, at its core, an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism against this knowledge. Because we have both a physical self (a body that will decay) and a symbolic self (an identity built through culture, language, and meaning), we can do something no other animal can: we can psychologically transcend death by investing ourselves in things that feel permanent. This dual nature is central to everything that follows in his theory.

What are immortality projects? 🔗

To manage the terror of death, Becker said, people construct what he called immortality projects – also known by the Latin term causa sui, meaning “self-caused” or self-generated. These are the endeavors, beliefs, and identities through which individuals feel they are participating in something that will outlast them.

Immortality projects come in several forms. Personal projects include raising a family, writing a book, building a business, or leaving behind any kind of legacy. Societal projects involve identifying with a nation, ethnic group, or culture and drawing self-worth from that membership. Religious projects go further still, promising not just symbolic immortality but literal continuation of the self after death. By embarking on such a project, an individual feels they have become part of something eternal – something that will persist long after the body is gone.

These projects are not inherently destructive. A person who dedicates their life to art, science, or community service is engaged in an immortality project. The problem, as Becker saw it, emerges when these projects are threatened – or when they become so consuming that those who do not share them are viewed not as fellow human beings, but as obstacles to be removed.

When heroism turns dark: the seeds of evil 🔗

Becker’s most disturbing insight is this: the same psychological mechanism that drives people to build, create, and connect is also the one that can lead them to oppress, dehumanize, and kill. Once a person’s immortality project – their nation, their religion, their ideology – is tied to their psychological survival, any challenge to it feels like a challenge to their very existence.

In his book Escape from Evil, Becker extended this logic to societies as a whole. He argued that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between rival immortality projects – each side convinced that its way of organizing meaning is the correct one, and that the other represents not just a difference of opinion but an existential threat. To demolish someone else’s worldview is, symbolically, to kill them. And so people are willing to do precisely that – literally.

The root of humanly caused evil, Becker insisted, is not territorial aggression or innate selfishness, but the human need to gain self-esteem, deny mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best – a pure world, a righteous order, a thousand-year Reich – becomes the very cause of the worst.

Power as the denial of death 🔗

Becker took this logic further with a striking claim about power itself. In Escape from Evil, he wrote that all real power is, in essence, power to deny mortality – power to transform oneself from something small, helpless, and finite into something large, enduring, and significant. This is why political power, military conquest, and religious authority have so often gone hand in hand with the suppression of others. Domination over life and death is not merely a side effect of evil – for Becker, it is its psychological engine.

As one reading of Escape from Evil summarizes it, institutions like the church, the state, and the army all offer participants a symbolic extension of life: to die “for God,” “for country,” or “for progress” is to merge one’s finite self with an immortal abstraction. But when these institutions define their immortality against rival systems, the logic of destruction can escalate into organized evil – war, persecution, and genocide.

Immortality projects and mass violence 🔗

Perhaps the most chilling application of Becker’s theory is its explanation of genocide and mass destruction. When a group’s immortality project – whether racial, national, or religious – is perceived to be under existential threat, extreme violence can appear not only justified but morally necessary. The perpetrators do not typically see themselves as evil. They see themselves as heroic defenders of something sacred and eternal.

The Holocaust is one of the clearest examples. Nazi ideology constructed an immortality project around the idea of racial purity and a thousand-year Reich. The Jewish people, Roma, disabled individuals, and others were cast not as human beings with their own lives and worth, but as contaminants – threats to the project’s survival. Eliminating them was framed as an act of purification, not murder. The same psychological structure appears in the Rwandan genocide, where Hutu extremist ideology portrayed the Tutsi population as an existential threat to national survival. Becker argued that since immortality projects that contradict one another indirectly suggest that the others are wrong, the threatened party feels compelled to destroy the source of that contradiction.

This is not to excuse such atrocities or reduce them to psychology alone. But Becker’s framework asks an uncomfortable question: what does it mean that the people who carried out these horrors were not, in the main, monsters who enjoyed cruelty? Many were ordinary individuals who had simply surrendered their moral agency to an immortality project that demanded blood.

Terror Management Theory: empirical support for Becker 🔗

Becker died in 1974, before he could see his ideas tested in the laboratory. But a generation of social psychologists took up the challenge. Building directly on his work, researchers Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski developed Terror Management Theory (TMT) – a framework that translates Becker’s philosophical claims into testable hypotheses.

The core prediction of TMT is straightforward: when the psychological need to defend cultural worldviews is heightened by reminders of death, prejudice, stereotyping, and support for aggression against out-groups increases. Dozens of studies have confirmed variations of this. In one well-known series of experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that participants who had been primed to think about their own death were significantly more aggressive toward individuals who challenged their political worldviews – far more so than participants who had not received such a reminder. Mortality, it turns out, makes people angrier at those who are different.

Other studies found that when mortality was made salient, participants recommended harsher punishments for those perceived to violate cultural values and greater rewards for those who upheld them. Death anxiety intensifies moral policing. It narrows the circle of who counts as “us” and widens the category of “them.” These findings lend empirical weight to Becker’s philosophical claim that fear of death does not simply make people afraid – it makes them dangerous.

The paradox at the heart of heroism 🔗

One of the most striking – and sobering – aspects of Becker’s theory is what he called the central paradox of heroic projects: our heroic projects aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. The crusader, the revolutionary, the ideological purifier – each believes they are fighting for goodness and permanence. Each, in acting on that belief against those who threaten it, generates new suffering and new cycles of violence.

In Becker’s words, men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. This is not pessimism for its own sake. It is a warning: that the most dangerous person is not the one who has abandoned all values, but the one who is so absolutely certain of their own that they will destroy others to protect them.

Can acknowledging mortality reduce evil? 🔗

Becker did not offer a clean solution, and he was honest about that. He did not believe science or politics could dissolve the terror of death, and he was skeptical of any system that claimed to have the final answer. He hoped, instead, that a gradual realization of humanity’s innate motivations – above all, the fear of death – could help bring about a better world, producing ways of finding meaning that are less dependent on the destruction of others.

Philosophers throughout history – from Socrates, who faced death with deliberate openness, to Heidegger, who placed mortality at the center of authentic existence – have suggested that consciously confronting death, rather than fleeing from it, changes how one lives. Authentic engagement with mortality, rather than the dogmatic clinging to an immortality project, may offer a path toward greater honesty and greater tolerance – precisely because it strips away the illusion that one’s own worldview is so uniquely sacred that others must be made to suffer for it.

This does not mean that meaning itself is the problem. Becker was not arguing that people should stop seeking purpose or significance. He was arguing that when meaning becomes a weapon – when the need for a heroic self-image overrides the recognition of other people’s humanity – the result is a particular kind of evil: cold, convinced of its own righteousness, and extraordinarily difficult to stop.

What do you think? If the fear of death underlies so much human aggression and group violence, does becoming more conscious of our own mortality make us more compassionate – or simply more aware of a drive we cannot fully control? And is it possible to build meaning systems that do not depend on the diminishment or destruction of those who believe differently?

References

1. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Denial-of-Death/Ernest-Becker/9780684832401
2. https://www.ernestbecker.org/beckers-synthesis
3. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ernest_Becker
4. https://www.ernestbecker.org/lecture-texts/practice-of-dying
5. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/10/91327/
6. https://tov.com/more-good-ideas-1/
7. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00144.x
8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9523407/
9. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2795438/
10. https://www.ianfelton.com/post/book-review-escape-from-evil-by-ernest-becker