Ernest Becker

• 1. Introduction

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  Ernest Becker died on the 6th of March 1974, at age 49, in Burnaby, British Columbia. Two months later, the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded him their highest honor in nonfiction for The Denial of Death. He never knew he had won.

  Becker spent his entire professional career being fired, petitioned for, and moved on. He taught in hospitals, universities, and psychology departments across North America. Students packed his lectures. Colleagues often resented him. Administrators showed him the door more than once. And through all of it, he was quietly building one of the most unsettling arguments in twentieth-century thought: that the fear of death shapes nearly everything human beings do.

  What drove a Jewish kid from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp, to spend his life asking why people do terrible things to each other? And what does mortality have to do with prejudice, self-esteem, and religion? Those are the questions that define Ernest Becker's work, and the ones this documentary will follow.

• 2. From Springfield to Syracuse

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  Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents. The specifics of his early childhood are sparse, but the event that most shaped his intellectual life came during World War II, when he served in the infantry and helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp. That experience placed him in direct contact with the extreme consequences of human cruelty at an early age.

  After the war, he attended Syracuse University in New York and graduated. Rather than moving immediately into academic life, he joined the U.S. Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer. That detour into diplomacy did not last. In his early thirties, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology, completing his PhD in 1960.

  His doctoral dissertation became his first book. Published in 1961 and titled Zen: A Rational Critique, it was released by W. W. Norton and marked the opening of what the source calls "the short 14-year period of his professional career." Nine books would follow in the years he had left.

• 3. A Career Built on Exits

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  Becker's first academic post, teaching anthropology in the Department of Psychiatry at Upstate Medical College in Syracuse, New York, ended without warning. The administration fired him, along with other non-tenured professors, because he had backed tenured Professor Thomas Szasz in a dispute over academic freedom. Szasz's right to teach his views to psychiatry students was the specific issue; Becker's support did not extend to endorsing Szasz's broader anti-psychiatry positions.

  After a year in Italy, Syracuse University hired him again, this time in its School of Education. In 1965, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, joining the anthropology program as a lecturer. Trouble with administrators arose there too, and he left. Thousands of students signed petitions urging the university to keep him and even offered to cover his salary themselves. The petition failed.

  In 1967, he taught at San Francisco State's Department of Psychology. He resigned in January 1969 in protest against the administration's strict policies toward student demonstrations. That same year, he joined Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. It would be the last academic home he ever had.

• 4. The Theatrics of the Lecture Hall

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  At Simon Fraser University and everywhere before it, Becker's lectures were, by all accounts, events. Students flocked to them. The source describes his style as marked by a high level of theatricality, and Becker himself was self-aware about what that implied for a serious thinker.

  His colleagues frequently did not share the enthusiasm. His insistence on interdisciplinary work, pulling from anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, and more, made him a difficult fit within departments that preferred tighter boundaries. He drew on a wide range of thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and especially Otto Rank.

  Becker was candid about why he pursued symbolism and what he called the theatrical dimensions of human life so persistently. He wrote directly on the subject: "I have tried to correct... bias by showing how deep theatrical 'superficialities' really go." For Becker, the performance of everyday life was not a distraction from the real questions. It was the place where the real questions lived.

• 5. The Architecture of Denial

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  The Denial of Death, published in 1973, is where Becker's argument arrives at its sharpest point. His central claim was that an individual's character forms essentially around the process of denying one's own mortality. That denial, he believed, is not a flaw in human psychology but a necessary component of functioning in the world at all.

  The cost of that denial is significant. Becker argued that the armor people build to keep the fact of death at bay also blocks genuine self-knowledge. More troublingly, he believed that much of the evil in the world was a direct consequence of this need. When people cannot face their own finitude, they find other ways to manage the anxiety, and those ways often involve harming others.

  The book draws heavily on Otto Rank, whom Becker regarded as particularly important among his intellectual sources. The Birth and Death of Meaning, first published in 1962 and then extensively revised for a 1971 second edition, had laid the groundwork for this argument years earlier. Becker described that earlier book as his first attempt to explain the human condition, taking its title from the arc of humanity moving from a simple relationship with the world into one built on symbols and illusions, and then beginning to dismantle those illusions through its own intellect.

• 6. The Final Threshold

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  In November 1972, Becker was diagnosed with colon cancer. He continued working through his illness, eventually sitting for a series of interviews with Sam Keen for Psychology Today shortly before he died.

  Those interviews and the book he was writing at the time pointed in a direction that Keen described as Becker's greatest achievement. In Escape from Evil, Becker had arrived at the position that psychological inquiry can only take a person so far. At a certain threshold, belief systems must be invoked to satisfy the human psyche. That perspective brought science and religion into the same frame, which was a substantial step beyond where The Denial of Death had left things.

  Becker died on the 6th of March 1974. The manuscript of Escape from Evil was unfinished. Its second half was incomplete at the time of his death, but it was eventually assembled from the existing pages and notes on the unfinished chapter. The book was published posthumously in 1975.

• 7. What Becker Left Behind

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  Terror management theory, which emerged from Becker's ideas, became one of the more productive research programs in social psychology. By the time of the source's writing, it had generated over 200 published studies. The theory converted Becker's claims about death anxiety and its cultural effects into testable hypotheses, applying them to phenomena as varied as self-esteem, prejudice, and religion.

  The Ernest Becker Foundation was established after his death, focused on multidisciplinary inquiries into human behavior. Its particular emphasis is on reducing violence in human society, using Becker's basic ideas across the intersections of science, the humanities, social action, and religion.

  In 2003, filmmaker Patrick Shen directed Flight From Death, a documentary based on Becker's work and partially funded by the Ernest Becker Foundation. The film extended Becker's reach into a medium he never worked in himself. The Pulitzer Prize that found him two months after his death had already begun that extension, bringing wider recognition to a writer who spent his career being escorted out of institutions by the same administrators his students were desperate to overrule.