In this book, the birth and death of meaning, Becker has two concepts. One is called meaning and the other is called value and let's unpackage them briefly. He says, all right, let's talk about meaning. And he says, well, we learned from anthropologists that all cultures have some account of the origin of the universe. All cultures have some prescription of what you ought to do while you're here. All cultures have moral edicts. What's right and what's wrong. And, moreover, all cultures have some promise of immortality to people who behave in accordance with cultural dictates. Okay, let's talk a little bit about immortality, because here, what Becker does is to make a distinction between literal immortality and symbolic immortality. All right, so literal immortality I think you're all familiar with. And these are the heavens and the afterlives and the reincarnations that are promised to people in all of the world's great religions. Head shakes if you're familiar with those, even vaguely. All right and as far as we can tell with the only very few exceptions there is no culture in the history of earth that does not have some explicit form of literal immortality. But as Becker points out, there's another kind of immortality that he calls, he actually gets this term from another guy, a psycho historian named Robert J Lifton. He calls this symbolic immortality. And this idea actually goes back to the Ancient Greeks. Who's ever heard of Plato? I know you have. Plato talked about how you may not believe that you're going to live forever. But, there's things that all of us as humans sometimes try to do to give us a sense that some vestige of ourselves will persist over time. Nevertheless, who's ever seen the pyramids? Not directly, but pictures of the pyramids? Well they were built 5,000 years ago. Isn't that cool? If you built a pyramid, to know it would be around 5,000 years after your not? Who's ever seen Pythagoras? Anybody ever see him? No, because he's been dead for 3000 years, but who's ever used his theorem? Right, isn't that cool? That you have an idea that's here 3000 years later. Other things like having children, amassing great fortunes, writing great books, producing great works of art. All according to Becker. Give us a sense that the world around us has meaning. Alright let's take just a slight timeout here because I don't know if I'm going to get to this notion until the end of my tirade today and I may not get to it at all. Is there anybody getting a sense from what I'm saying so far that Becker is kind of treating religion disrespectfully or denouncing it as some kind of feeble human invention. Can you see where some people might think that way? And one thing that I want to make very clear is that that is not his point. Nor is it his belief, Becker himself was a devoutly religious man. In his book The Denial of Death, he says that psychology properly understood, necessarily deposits you on the doorstep of religion. So his argument is in no way, unlike the atheist that you've been exposed to, it is not his intention to deny the literal existence of either Gods or souls. Who's ever heard of the dead russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky? Anybody know the book The Brothers Karamazov, or have you heard of that book? Dostoyevsky was a profoundly religious man. And yet in a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor, who's ever heard of that? Because this is supposedly one of the most famous little chapters in the history of literature, Dostoyevsky writes that if there were no Gods, man would create them. And Becker's point here, very simply, is that this argument is not meant to bear directly on the existence or non-existence of atheistic entities, or the literal nature of any of our beliefs about the soul. He's simply pointing out the tremendous psychological impotence to lean in that direction. I know I'm being a little obtuse but head shakes if that makes a little bit of sense. His point very simply is that in order to stand up in the morning you need to believe that life has meaning. All right, has anybody ever doubted that? You ever have a day where you're not so sure? Anybody? So, it's a rhetorical question but I've had plenty of days where I'm not sure, I did grow up in New Jersey after all. And how do you generally feel when you're like, oh fuck I don't know if life means anything? Is that an uplifting realization? No and Becker's point is that when you don't believe that life has meaning, that that makes you disillusioned. And when you're disillusioned, that makes you demoralized. And what's the most common psychological problem on the planet that results when you don't believe that life has meaning, or you don't believe that you have value? Depression. And so Becker's description of what underlies depression above and beyond the biological propensity and anatomical imbalances that might be associated with it is just the pervasive sense that life has no meaning, right. So what Becker says is, hey, we need to believe that life has meaning. That's necessary but not sufficient. We in addition, also need to believe that each of us as individuals, that we're valuable contributors to the culturally constructed drama to which we subscribe. Alright again. Another rhetorical question. Who remembers being a little kid and maybe sitting around outside in the playground daydreaming about doing something cool or important? Anybody ever dream of curing cancer? Anybody ever dream of being an Olympic athlete? Anybody ever dream like me of curing cancer while catching a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl while winning the lottery and becoming a hedge fund manager and being elected emperor of Earth? Well maybe that is just me. But, the point that Becker wants to make is that that's not pathological narcissism. At least it need not be, but rather just the normal yearning of the human animal. That we are here for some reason and that our life serves some purpose. And what Becker asks us to ponder is that culture gives us opportunities to feel like we are valuable people through social roles with associated standards of conduct, the satisfaction of which gives you the sense that you're a person of value in a world of meaning. And what he proposes is that when do feel that way, when you feel good about yourself, I am a person of value in a world of meaning, he calls that self esteem. Who's ever heard that term before? I think everybody has. It's the most common term in psychology but what I like about Becker's ideas is that he actually defines what he means by that. And his argument is that self esteem is when we believe we're valuable participants in a meaningful universe. He argues that the primary function of self esteem is a defensive one. It's to help us reduce anxiety and it's to help us reduce anxiety particularly about our discomfort with our mortality. All right, well, so what? Here's something I'll just toss out and ask you to think about. On the one hand, we need self esteem for us as individuals. On the other hand, what Becker points out is that you don't get self esteem for yourself by yourself. You get self esteem when you satisfy the standards of value that are adhered to in the context of your culture. And what that means in English is that there are certain times and places where it is easier for some people to get self esteem than other people. All right, if you live in Afghanistan, generally what's their attitude about homosexuality? Good or bad? Bad, they'll just tip a building over you, or they'll toss you off the top of one. Are there other times and places where homosexuality is acceptable or even valued? Yeah, there are. So, in ancient Greece it was considered normal. There are cultures today, where it's considered just one of a number of sexual preferences and it's no different than the color of your eyes or you're hair. All right, well let's just think very briefly about what it's like to be an American today because right now we could argue that America's a Petri dish of psychopathology. Who's aware that levels of depression in the United States are ten times higher than they were at the end of World War Two? And who's also aware that a third of the population of America is either addicted to drugs or alcohol? Did anybody know that? And Martin Seligman, who used to be the President of the American Psychological Association, what he said is you know what? Whenever there's a situation where large numbers of people in a population are having trouble feeling good about themselves, you need to look at what the culture values and wonder if there are realistic opportunities for as many people as possible to feel good about themselves. All right, so let's just be silly for a moment and traffic in grotesque overgeneralizations. But let's say that you're a man and that being a male, if you're a male in America and you want to feel good about yourself, what would be good to have? What's that? >> Good family? >> Good family. That's awesome. I wish it were that simple, but no. You're obviously an American of sorts but not a real American. >> [LAUGH] >> And I mean that as the highest compliment my friend, by the way. In America, if you want to be mas macho, what do you need? >> Lots of money >> Good you need money or you need a penis the size of a baseball bat. >> [LAUGH]. >> Which I have by the way, but I wrap it around my waist in the service. [LAUGH] I'm being silly but not really. All right, what I would argue is that in Los Estados Unidos we are valued generally by the size of our bank account and the size of our dangling participle and who learned when you were growing up that in America if you work really hard that you could have just as much money as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett? Anybody heard of the so called American dream, right? But, who's aware of the fact that that's actually statistically unlikely. That you are more likely to get out of poverty in Bangladesh than you are in the United States. That we are one of the most stratified societies In the industrialized world. But when you're little, what are you told? If you grow up, and you're working third shift at Taco Bell wearing the polyester suit and making minimum wage, whose fault is that? Its your fault and you blame yourself accordingly. Can you see why a lot of guys may have trouble feeling good about themselves under those circumstances. All right, what about the women, what do you gotta be to be regarded? >> Beautiful >> Good you gotta be beautiful and what does it mean to be beautiful? >> Be skinny. >> Good you gotta be skinny. If I can't floss my teeth with you, you're a little chubby and you need a license plate to appear in public and what else besides being skinny. How old can you be? You gotta be young so when you're about 25 or so, you're pushing the envelope. You may as well just put yourself in the microwave and press the button on an hour, >> [LAUGH] >> So you can be desiccated onto a little ornament that I could hang on my rear view mirror. >> [LAUGH] >> And the point is that not every guy can be richer than Bill Gates. Not every woman can be thinner than a piece of linguine or young forever. And, what Becker asks us to ponder is how difficult that is psychologically speaking. What about the good old days when you could be be proud of your family? When you can be proud of behaving with integrity and dignity? Were there not times when historically speaking, it was easier for more of us to feel that we are persons of value in a world of meaning. All right, let's go on and let's just talk. On my little handout, if you look on the back of the first page where you see soul beliefs, causes and consequences. Everybody there, can you see where we're at? I do want to read a few sentences of this but I made this handout because I wanted you to have something that you can all take away with and I hope that you'll take the time to gaze at some of the ideas in it. I just wanted to point out that the implications of what I've said thus far for the nature of belief in souls and I want to emphasize that this is one point of view and not the only point of view. This is from a book that I'm suppose to be writing with my buddies. Any procrastinators here? Anybody? So anyway the book was due three years ago. I don't answer my phone anymore [LAUGH] because they have lawyers and we signed a contract, but we're working on it. >> [LAUGH] >> And let's just read the top couple of sentences from the first paragraph for a moment. To dodge the deadly implications of being an animal stuck in a fallible, finite carcass, cultures everywhere portray humans as more than just physical beings. Otto Rank proposed that humans ingeniously accomplish this by inventing the soul. Throughout history, humans everywhere have had soul, although the specific nature of that soul varies considerably across time and space. Let's go to the next paragraph. Regardless of the differences all soul concepts render the prospect of immortality feasible. Because souls are detachable from their corporal containers that just means that after your body dies your soul can persist over time let's go way down to the bottom. The soul 'created in the bang of an irresistible psychological force our will to live forever colliding with the immutable biological fact of death is one of human kind's earliest and most clever inventions unencumbered by finite flesh the soul's persistence after death is conceivable, indeed even more conceivable and certainly more welcome than the alternative prospect of total annihilation, you guys can think about that you have recitation groups right? You meet in little groups to talk about these things so maybe you can hang out and talk about that let's flip the page though, on the top it says empirical assessments of terror management theory. Remember that one of the things that Becker said his second epistemological assumption is that we need to be empirical and we have to think about whether or not ideas are right or are wrong and I hope that what I've said so far makes sense. But has anybody been listening to me in the back of your head just saying this guys just totally full of shit? Right I hope that some of you have because that's at least possible right just cu'z you talk fast and grew up in New Jersey doesn't mean that what you're saying should be taken seriously and in fact nobody did, In 1983, my buddies and I this is a guy named Jeff Greenburg at the University of Arizona and another guy named Tom Pazinski at the University of Colorado, we thought these ideas were tremendous and we thought that they were very interesting and we were very eager to share them. And we went to a psychology conference and all of the famous psychologist in America were at this conference and I started talking just like I am today and there were like 200, there's more than 200 of us here but they were like 200 people in the room and within ten minutes like all but 12 of them were running out of the room and my buddy Tom and Jeff they're just like oh I don't think they liked it and I was like no they fucking loved it. >> [LAUGH] >> They were just rushing out to get the paper that we've not yet written where we will describe these ideas and so we wrote a paper a year later and we sent it to a journal called the American Psychologist and this is one of the most prestigious journals in psychology and we got a review back and it had one sentence where somebody wrote I have no doubt that these ideas are of no interest whatsoever to any psychologist alive or dead, and my buddies Tom and Jeff, they're like I don't think they liked it and I'm like no, they're being coy they want us. But evidently they weren't being coy because we then sent this paper to every journal in the world including like Parade magazine and Good Housekeeping and every time it would just get rejected. So anyway I was at a conference and I was standing next to the American Psychological Association who was the editor of the American psychologist and it was a cocktail party so just energized and encouraged by an overindulgence in ethanol I was like, hey, yo dude, you should publish our paper and he was like hey that's Dr. Dude to you show some respect but you guys should get some evidence. These ideas are indeed provocative they may even be true but you got to do more than just put the ideas out there you have to demonstrate by the traditional standards of scientific discourse that they have empirical merit and that's what my buddies and I have been doing for the last 30 years and Dan has helped out Florette give a little wave here's Florette Cohen, she was a PhD student like here at Rutgers, and we've been together since her undergraduate days and we now have 30 years of evidence that I would argue provides relatively strong support for these ideas. I just want to give you a little overview of what we know at the top of this piece of paper we've got self esteem as anxiety buffer and I'm not going to spend too much time on this except to tell you that our first round of studies we just wanted to establish that self esteem reduces anxiety, remember a couple of minutes ago I said that the primary function of self esteem Is to reduce anxiety and so what we did this was back in the good old days before ethics. We brought people into the laboratory in the late 1970s, early 1980s and we hooked them up to a physiograph machine do you all know what that is? That's just a machine that measures things like your heart rate and your blood pressure like you see on the programs that have medical things where there's like graphs and pieces of paper and stuff so we measured people's physiological arousal and what we did was to manipulate self esteem temporarily either by giving people false feedback about their personality in one experiment we told some people that they have very positive personality attributes who reads your horoscope? Any horoscope readers? And it's easy to raise people's' self esteem when you tell them something good about themselves in another condition we just left self esteem unaltered by giving people neutral but not overly positive feedback. In another version of this study we made people feel good about themselves by giving them what appeared to be like an SAT test who remembers taking the SATs? Do they still have the booklets where you have to break the seal with your pencil before you start? Well, I have a printer friend in Union, New Jersey, and he printed up these fake booklets and we had people take the little test and we told some of them that they did very well and others that they just done moderately okay and that was just done to either raise self esteem or leave it alone and then what we did was to tell half of the participants that we were interested in studying their physiological reactions to different kinds of physical stimuli, and that we wanted to have them look at colored light bulbs that they were going to look at yellow light bulbs and red light bulbs while we measured their physiological reactions. Would that bother any of you if you just had to look at a light bulb for the most part we meant that not to bother you. The other half of the people we said you're going to look at these light bulbs and while you look at them for the next two minutes you're going to get a series of painful electrical shocks and that smell, don't worry about that, that's just the hair on your arm burning but we can assure you that you'll be fine. Who might be bothered by that? Now that may seem sadistic, and indeed it's pushing the line although in fairness we did give participants the opportunity to withdraw from the study at any time but we wanted to make people very anxious who might be anxious if you thought you were going to get an electrical shock? In fact, just expecting a shock makes you so anxious that we never ever actually gave one what we wanted to see was how aroused people would be in anticipation of the shocks, as a function of whether or not their self-esteem had been elevated that's as tough as it's going to get today in terms of complexity head shakes if that makes a little sense. If self-esteem reduces anxiety does it make sense that people whose esteem has been boosted should be less aroused in anticipation of the shocks? That's precisely what we found let's move on there's dozens of studies that have since corroborated that basic notion.
