Star Man
06-05-2019, 05:52 PM
Here is a piece of original scholarship. I have summarized two of the key arguments in my book, "Requiem for a Dying World." Many people--none of them in power--agree we are destroying our environment. No one understand what motivates us to do so. This article explains it. I hope you read it. We all at least deserve to know why we are destroying our home and our world.
Star Man
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Externalizing Death Anxiety
by
John Omaha
Copyright 2019 by John Omaha All Rights Reserved
In the four and one-half decades since Ernest Becker's seminal work, The Denial of Death, appeared, a profound reorganization of psychoanalytic theory has taken place especially as regards the unconscious. Becker analyzed death anxiety in the context of Freud's model of the unconscious as the repository of material that is unacceptable to the conscious mind and hence is repressed and banished from consciousness. Freud equated repression with the unconscious. Within the Freudian context, Becker seized on the concept of heroism as an organizing principle, proposing that “Society is a symbolic action system to serve as a vehicle of earthly heroism.” Heroism is the individual's stance in the face of death. Knowing he will die, the hero nevertheless erects monuments, establishes governments, writes poetry and novels.
The objective of this article is to understand two of the most troubling of human behaviors. One is murder of our own and our conspecies and the other is murder of the environment we depend on for life. A further objective is to reconfigure Beckerian concepts in the light of recent discoveries in the field of neuropsychology.
Becker was wrong when he proposed humans heroically confront death through creating works that will survive the creators' deaths. Humans are not heroes erecting monuments in the face of death. Humans are driven by unconscious terror of death that motivates them to murder each other and to murder the very environment they require to live. Humanity's greatest monument is its destruction of itself, the world it lives in, and the environment it requires to survive.
Neuropsychologists beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century—the “decade of the brain”—employed the emerging tools of PET scans and fMRI scans to observe the workings of the brain in real time. Their investigations resulted in elegant models for the brain's operations and in particular for the neuropsychology of the unconscious. The contemporary understanding of the unconscious begins with an emphasis on early experiences that are encoded before the narrative memory system is mature enough to create explicit memories, i.e. during the first four to five years of life.
The unconscious comprises the encoded experiences of the first years of life. These encoded early experiences are stored largely in the right brain. The brain serves the survival of the organism. The unconscious and emerging conscious brain comprising explicit memories interact intimately. In this interaction, past learning that has been reinforced is valued above all else, and the unconscious brain/mind automatically enacts what it already knows. In the early years, the brain mind serves the preservation of the physico-chemical identity of the organism. What the brain acquires during the early learning period becomes the basis for all future behavior and for emotional and relational responding.
The physico-chemical identity knows without being able to name: hunger; isolation; physical pain; and physiological responses like cold, hot, gastrointestinal discomfort, wetness.
As yet undifferentiated proto-emotions of fear, anger, and anguish are elicited by these states, and each of these states is met with cries of distress. If the cries of distress successfully attract a caregiver, the cries subside. If the cries are not assuaged, they increase in intensity becoming frantic and then hysterical. All of this material is recorded by the infant's brain and stored in the basal ganglia and cerebellum where it forms the content of the unconscious.
The physico-chemical identity is genetically and physiologically and reflexively motivated to continue to live, to survive. This is not a conscious motivation. The newborn infant's cries for support are directed by genetics, physiology, and biochemistry interacting with the environment. The infant is the means by which the organism survives in order to mature to reproductive age. The infant is a complex adaptation to the requirement to survive.
The experiences acquired and stored during the early experience period become the basis for conscious motivation later in life as the narrative forming part of the left brain develops. The physico-chemical identity comprises the right hemisphere and is the primordium for the unconscious. The unconscious operates through two pathways: the cortico-striatal system between the basal ganglia and the cortex, and the cortico-cerebellar system from the cerebellum to the cortex. These two circuits connect to all regions of the brain. The unconscious pathways operate extremely rapidly and assure automaticity. What worked in the past will be repeated in the present. Since the contents of the unconscious are unconscious, psychologists have discovered that the only way to know what the unconscious holds is to deduce from the adult behavior.
As experience accumulates, the left hemisphere becomes dominant. Always the unconscious and emerging consciousness interact. Operating outside of conscious awareness, the unconscious contents acquired during the first years of life affect all subsequent perception, thought, emotional responding, sensate responding, and behavior. Conscious, willful thought that provides for reflection and judgment about potential outcomes of possible courses of action operate through a separate circuit to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC circuit is slow by comparison to the unconscious pathways. Ninety-five percent of human perception, thought, emotion responding, sensate responding and behavior is motivated by the unconscious.
As the left hemisphere attains dominance, the early physico-chemical experiences morph into concepts, ideas, thoughts, motivations. The infant's experience of inchoate distress—lack of food, thirst, physical pain—assemble into the adult's schema of terror.
As language is acquired, the concept of time appears so the idea of past, present and future emerge. The idea of death emerges usually around the age of 4 or 5 and reaches completeness in adolescence. The idea of death absolutely depends upon a concept of time.
The concept of death is assembled with the inchoate, unresolved, uncontrolled physico-chemical experiences of distress from the first months of life. The knowing that these experiences could reoccur induces anxiety, the emotion of fear about the future. Eventually the schema of death anxiety appears residing in the border between conscious and unconscious and largely out of awareness.
Without awareness of death anxiety per se, people attempt to attenuate the anxiety they feel but not knowing why they feel. Anxiety is uncomfortable. Human beings attempt to decrease anxiety whenever they feel it, whether aware of it not. As Becker observed, people create immortality projects, heroic activities to decrease the anxiety associated with death. Immortality projects comprise any activity that orders reality by giving the activity meaning, duration, and the hope of, if nothing else, symbolic existence beyond death.
In addition to immortality projects, humans also employ psychological mechanisms to ease death anxiety. Denial is one such mechanism. Another mechanism is projective identification or externalizing to induce another person to experience the terrifying fear of death that is overwhelming to the self. Externalizing is a defensive strategy. By means of externalizing one person threatens another with death. The other feels terror. The one doing the externalizing thereby obtains power over his own death terror. He projects his death terror onto the other who then identifies with it. Murder and the mass murder called warfare are the means by which humans externalize their death anxiety. The history and pre-history of our species comprises a record of our externalizing of our death anxiety through murder, warfare, pogrom, and ethnic cleansing.
Assuaging our own death anxiety through killing has a long history. Beginning about 50,000 years ago Homo sapiens began to eradicate Homo neanderthalensis, our conspecies with which we had peacefully coexisted and even interbred for the previous 200,000 years. We could date the appearance of death anxiety among humans with the onset of the obliteration of the Neanderthals. In addition to the Neanderthals humans also exterminated many of the large predators and other threatening animals from their environments to ease their death anxiety. Saber-tooth tigers apparently went extinct under human pressure from a combination of habitat encroachment and hunting. Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, short-faced bears all disappeared from north America. The process continues today. Once numerous grizzly bears have disappeared from California. Wolves and coyotes are hunted until their numbers dwindle. There are now more tigers in zoos than in the wild.
In addition to eliminating other animals, humans began to kill each other as a means of easing death terror. In warfare humans discovered how to project their death anxiety onto whole populations. In the first recorded war between the Trojans and the Greeks, 30,000 human beings were killed. Six hundred thousand were killed during Rome's Punic wars. The First World War claimed 20 million human lives and the Second World War took 80 million. The killing continued in Vietnam, and continues today in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan where hundreds of thousands have died.
In each case the physico-chemical terror, acquired during the first years of life and held in the wordless unconscious, motivated the murderous behavior. Driven by the unconscious, the mind produces justifications and explanations for the murderous behavior. The syllogism is simple: I kill your people and your families so that you will feel terror and I do not have to.
The same principles that help us understand what motivates humans to kill each other can clarify what motivates humans to murder the environment. The onset of the current climate catastrophe coincides with the emergence of the corporation and its twin the bureaucracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Both the corporation and the bureaucracy are immortality projects to allay fear of death. They also serve to externalize death anxiety. I will focus on the corporation and its manifestation in Big Energy in this segment. The common goal of all the human members of the corporation is to assure the survival of the corporation. If the corporation fails to provide profit for its stockholders, the corporation will be dissolved and effectively cease to exist. If the members of the corporation fail to promote the interests of the corporation and endanger its survival, they will be terminated and will face the prospect of financial if not physical death.
The Big Energy corporations fear death if they do not continue to earn profits by continuing to unearth and burn fossil fuels. For this reason Exxon and the rest of the Big Energy sector have continued to drill and frack and mine although they have known since the 1970s that burning fossil fuels was destroying the planet's atmosphere and poisoning the land and oceans.
In applying these principles to the present climate catastrophe, it is the general population that feels terror at being murdered by poisoned water, by knowing their lives are being shortened by breathing polluted air, by feeling the terror of anticipating another Three-Mile Island or Fukushima or Chernobyl. The corporation, which cannot feel, and the people who work for it and the shareholders who own it, have induced the rest of the civilization to feel terror as the world is entering a stage of climate chaos that will end with the Sixth Extinction of the Anthropocene and the death of the human species. The corporation is a means for externalizing death terror. The owners of the Big Energy corporations and the bureaucrats who enable their lethal behaviors do not feel terror because they have induced We The People to feel their death anxiety.
* * *
John Omaha, Ph.D., MFT is a psychotherapist from Northern California. You can read a fuller presentation of these concepts in his book Requiem for a Dying World.
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Star Man
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Externalizing Death Anxiety
by
John Omaha
Copyright 2019 by John Omaha All Rights Reserved
In the four and one-half decades since Ernest Becker's seminal work, The Denial of Death, appeared, a profound reorganization of psychoanalytic theory has taken place especially as regards the unconscious. Becker analyzed death anxiety in the context of Freud's model of the unconscious as the repository of material that is unacceptable to the conscious mind and hence is repressed and banished from consciousness. Freud equated repression with the unconscious. Within the Freudian context, Becker seized on the concept of heroism as an organizing principle, proposing that “Society is a symbolic action system to serve as a vehicle of earthly heroism.” Heroism is the individual's stance in the face of death. Knowing he will die, the hero nevertheless erects monuments, establishes governments, writes poetry and novels.
The objective of this article is to understand two of the most troubling of human behaviors. One is murder of our own and our conspecies and the other is murder of the environment we depend on for life. A further objective is to reconfigure Beckerian concepts in the light of recent discoveries in the field of neuropsychology.
Becker was wrong when he proposed humans heroically confront death through creating works that will survive the creators' deaths. Humans are not heroes erecting monuments in the face of death. Humans are driven by unconscious terror of death that motivates them to murder each other and to murder the very environment they require to live. Humanity's greatest monument is its destruction of itself, the world it lives in, and the environment it requires to survive.
Neuropsychologists beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century—the “decade of the brain”—employed the emerging tools of PET scans and fMRI scans to observe the workings of the brain in real time. Their investigations resulted in elegant models for the brain's operations and in particular for the neuropsychology of the unconscious. The contemporary understanding of the unconscious begins with an emphasis on early experiences that are encoded before the narrative memory system is mature enough to create explicit memories, i.e. during the first four to five years of life.
The unconscious comprises the encoded experiences of the first years of life. These encoded early experiences are stored largely in the right brain. The brain serves the survival of the organism. The unconscious and emerging conscious brain comprising explicit memories interact intimately. In this interaction, past learning that has been reinforced is valued above all else, and the unconscious brain/mind automatically enacts what it already knows. In the early years, the brain mind serves the preservation of the physico-chemical identity of the organism. What the brain acquires during the early learning period becomes the basis for all future behavior and for emotional and relational responding.
The physico-chemical identity knows without being able to name: hunger; isolation; physical pain; and physiological responses like cold, hot, gastrointestinal discomfort, wetness.
As yet undifferentiated proto-emotions of fear, anger, and anguish are elicited by these states, and each of these states is met with cries of distress. If the cries of distress successfully attract a caregiver, the cries subside. If the cries are not assuaged, they increase in intensity becoming frantic and then hysterical. All of this material is recorded by the infant's brain and stored in the basal ganglia and cerebellum where it forms the content of the unconscious.
The physico-chemical identity is genetically and physiologically and reflexively motivated to continue to live, to survive. This is not a conscious motivation. The newborn infant's cries for support are directed by genetics, physiology, and biochemistry interacting with the environment. The infant is the means by which the organism survives in order to mature to reproductive age. The infant is a complex adaptation to the requirement to survive.
The experiences acquired and stored during the early experience period become the basis for conscious motivation later in life as the narrative forming part of the left brain develops. The physico-chemical identity comprises the right hemisphere and is the primordium for the unconscious. The unconscious operates through two pathways: the cortico-striatal system between the basal ganglia and the cortex, and the cortico-cerebellar system from the cerebellum to the cortex. These two circuits connect to all regions of the brain. The unconscious pathways operate extremely rapidly and assure automaticity. What worked in the past will be repeated in the present. Since the contents of the unconscious are unconscious, psychologists have discovered that the only way to know what the unconscious holds is to deduce from the adult behavior.
As experience accumulates, the left hemisphere becomes dominant. Always the unconscious and emerging consciousness interact. Operating outside of conscious awareness, the unconscious contents acquired during the first years of life affect all subsequent perception, thought, emotional responding, sensate responding, and behavior. Conscious, willful thought that provides for reflection and judgment about potential outcomes of possible courses of action operate through a separate circuit to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC circuit is slow by comparison to the unconscious pathways. Ninety-five percent of human perception, thought, emotion responding, sensate responding and behavior is motivated by the unconscious.
As the left hemisphere attains dominance, the early physico-chemical experiences morph into concepts, ideas, thoughts, motivations. The infant's experience of inchoate distress—lack of food, thirst, physical pain—assemble into the adult's schema of terror.
As language is acquired, the concept of time appears so the idea of past, present and future emerge. The idea of death emerges usually around the age of 4 or 5 and reaches completeness in adolescence. The idea of death absolutely depends upon a concept of time.
The concept of death is assembled with the inchoate, unresolved, uncontrolled physico-chemical experiences of distress from the first months of life. The knowing that these experiences could reoccur induces anxiety, the emotion of fear about the future. Eventually the schema of death anxiety appears residing in the border between conscious and unconscious and largely out of awareness.
Without awareness of death anxiety per se, people attempt to attenuate the anxiety they feel but not knowing why they feel. Anxiety is uncomfortable. Human beings attempt to decrease anxiety whenever they feel it, whether aware of it not. As Becker observed, people create immortality projects, heroic activities to decrease the anxiety associated with death. Immortality projects comprise any activity that orders reality by giving the activity meaning, duration, and the hope of, if nothing else, symbolic existence beyond death.
In addition to immortality projects, humans also employ psychological mechanisms to ease death anxiety. Denial is one such mechanism. Another mechanism is projective identification or externalizing to induce another person to experience the terrifying fear of death that is overwhelming to the self. Externalizing is a defensive strategy. By means of externalizing one person threatens another with death. The other feels terror. The one doing the externalizing thereby obtains power over his own death terror. He projects his death terror onto the other who then identifies with it. Murder and the mass murder called warfare are the means by which humans externalize their death anxiety. The history and pre-history of our species comprises a record of our externalizing of our death anxiety through murder, warfare, pogrom, and ethnic cleansing.
Assuaging our own death anxiety through killing has a long history. Beginning about 50,000 years ago Homo sapiens began to eradicate Homo neanderthalensis, our conspecies with which we had peacefully coexisted and even interbred for the previous 200,000 years. We could date the appearance of death anxiety among humans with the onset of the obliteration of the Neanderthals. In addition to the Neanderthals humans also exterminated many of the large predators and other threatening animals from their environments to ease their death anxiety. Saber-tooth tigers apparently went extinct under human pressure from a combination of habitat encroachment and hunting. Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, short-faced bears all disappeared from north America. The process continues today. Once numerous grizzly bears have disappeared from California. Wolves and coyotes are hunted until their numbers dwindle. There are now more tigers in zoos than in the wild.
In addition to eliminating other animals, humans began to kill each other as a means of easing death terror. In warfare humans discovered how to project their death anxiety onto whole populations. In the first recorded war between the Trojans and the Greeks, 30,000 human beings were killed. Six hundred thousand were killed during Rome's Punic wars. The First World War claimed 20 million human lives and the Second World War took 80 million. The killing continued in Vietnam, and continues today in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan where hundreds of thousands have died.
In each case the physico-chemical terror, acquired during the first years of life and held in the wordless unconscious, motivated the murderous behavior. Driven by the unconscious, the mind produces justifications and explanations for the murderous behavior. The syllogism is simple: I kill your people and your families so that you will feel terror and I do not have to.
The same principles that help us understand what motivates humans to kill each other can clarify what motivates humans to murder the environment. The onset of the current climate catastrophe coincides with the emergence of the corporation and its twin the bureaucracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Both the corporation and the bureaucracy are immortality projects to allay fear of death. They also serve to externalize death anxiety. I will focus on the corporation and its manifestation in Big Energy in this segment. The common goal of all the human members of the corporation is to assure the survival of the corporation. If the corporation fails to provide profit for its stockholders, the corporation will be dissolved and effectively cease to exist. If the members of the corporation fail to promote the interests of the corporation and endanger its survival, they will be terminated and will face the prospect of financial if not physical death.
The Big Energy corporations fear death if they do not continue to earn profits by continuing to unearth and burn fossil fuels. For this reason Exxon and the rest of the Big Energy sector have continued to drill and frack and mine although they have known since the 1970s that burning fossil fuels was destroying the planet's atmosphere and poisoning the land and oceans.
In applying these principles to the present climate catastrophe, it is the general population that feels terror at being murdered by poisoned water, by knowing their lives are being shortened by breathing polluted air, by feeling the terror of anticipating another Three-Mile Island or Fukushima or Chernobyl. The corporation, which cannot feel, and the people who work for it and the shareholders who own it, have induced the rest of the civilization to feel terror as the world is entering a stage of climate chaos that will end with the Sixth Extinction of the Anthropocene and the death of the human species. The corporation is a means for externalizing death terror. The owners of the Big Energy corporations and the bureaucrats who enable their lethal behaviors do not feel terror because they have induced We The People to feel their death anxiety.
* * *
John Omaha, Ph.D., MFT is a psychotherapist from Northern California. You can read a fuller presentation of these concepts in his book Requiem for a Dying World.
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