If basic anxiety concerns survival neurotic anxiety involves self-esteem. We're moving here up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, away from physical and material needs to focus on internal motivations for establishing an identity and positive self-regard. But how, it will be asked, are these motivations being affected by death anxiety? Where the impact of basic death anxiety is easy to observe in our lives, the influence of death anxiety upon our self-esteem seems a bit murky.
The seminal works here are Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. According to Becker, in the face of death we confront a crisis of meaning. Death threatens to destroy all that makes life significant and worth living. This is the lament of Ecclesiastes:
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them. (1.1-4, 11)
In the face of this existential vacuum cultures step in to provide us with routes toward a significant, meaningful life. Becker calls these lifeways "cultural hero systems." Cultural hero systems provide us with "symbolic immortality." With my students I describe this by using an alumni award we give every spring commencement called "The Outlive Your Life Award." The name of the award perfectly captures the notion of symbolic immortality, how, in the face of death, we can have a durable and lasting impact upon the cosmos. We can "persist" in the face of death and this legacy of influence allows us to to escape the existential futility expressed in Ecclesiastes.
Self-esteem, therefore, becomes a metric reflecting how well we are performing within our particular hero system. This is how death anxiety manifests in our lives as neurosis. Are we hitting our marks in the hero game we've set for our lives? Are we winning or losing our version of the Outlive Your Life Award? As I tell my students, we're all playing some game of worth and significance. The game varies, of course, but we're all invested in playing the game. Henri Nouwen once said that the three temptations of life are the temptations to be powerful, relevant, and spectacular. Notice how each of these temptations are neurotic in nature, temptations that have little to do with satisfying basic needs but play out in the hero game of our self-esteem.
And so, that's the second way the devil gets his claws into us. Where basic anxiety causes failures of generosity, sharing, and hospitality, neurotic anxiety is implicated in our struggles with our ego and self-image, our desire to be powerful, relevant, and spectacular. Worse, when we experience failures in our hero game the devil poisons our minds with shame, self-loathing, and chronic insecurity.
Win or lose your hero game, either way the devil's got you.
