“…human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence a whole society can be sick.”
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
In the modern world, few truly thrive while many grapple with character flaws and destructive lifestyles that foster anxiety disorders, neurotic illnesses, and depression. Increasingly normality is becoming synonymous with mental illness. In this video, we explore the social conditions fueling this malaise by drawing from the insights from 20th-century cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker and the 20th-century psychologist Erich Fromm.
“You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
The human condition confronts us with a paradox which we must solve to attain any semblance of psychological health. This paradox lies in the fact that we are what Erich Fromm calls “a freak of the universe.” We are the only animal with a reflexive consciousness that can transcend the here and now and contemplate other environments, the distant past and future, or the concept of nothingness and infinity. We are the only species that can construct technologies transform the environment in ways that overcome our animal limitations and we are the only species that can transform or reinvent ourselves through learning novel behaviors or radically altering our mindset, and as the 20th century cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker observed:
“This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
This godlike self-consciousness, however, is a blessing and a curse; for while it permits us to envision limitless possibilities, it also makes us aware of our limitations. We can become sick, our body can break down, and eventually we die. Numerous thinkers have recognized this paradox as lying at the heart of the human condition. Nietzsche said that in the human being creature and creator are united, Soren Kierkegaard described the human self as a synthesis of beast and angel, of the finite and infinite, the psychologist Abraham Maslow said we are simultaneously a worm and a god. Ernest Becker observed:
“This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart pumping, breath gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill marks to prove it…Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and have to live with.”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
To solve the problem which this paradox presents, and thus evade the acute anxiety and dread it can evoke, we must find a way to accept our creatureliness yet simultaneously transcend it by affirming our godlike capacities and expressing our creative potentials. Or as the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal noted:
“It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness…Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Accepting our creatureliness involves becoming aware of, and integrating into our personality, what Carl Jung called our shadow. While affirming our greatness and expressing the creator within us involves satisfying what Ernest Becker called our urge to heroism. “The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest… our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic.” (Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death)
