Once you start to see it, you see it everywhere. First, there is the spectacle of Bryan Johnson, who is spending millions to stay young, injecting his son’s blood plasma into his veins, electroshocking his penis, following a strictly regimented diet that looks for all the world like an eating disorder. When Katie Drummond interviewed Johnson for Wired, she asked him flat out: “True or false: You, Bryan Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day at some point in the future, will die,” to which he replied, “False.” He went on to talk about extending human life “to some unknown horizon” while simultaneously replicating himself as AI that will be such a perfect copy of him that it will be indistinguishable. In this, he echoes Peter Thiel telling Ross Douthat in The New York Times that, through technology and surgery, you should be “able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”
You see it in less flashy, more banal ways as well, such as in the refusal of the political gerontocracy—on both the right and left—to relinquish power, seemingly content to allow the country to rot with corruption and ineptitude because they simply cannot imagine a world without them in control. At some point, one starts to recognize that so much of today’s political and cultural environment is ruled by those who are visibly, pathologically, afraid of death. And many of these people, rather than face up to this fear and deal with it, are instead wreaking untold havoc on the world around us.
Just over 50 years ago, Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, an attempt to fuse psychology and religion with the goal of making a grand, unified theory of human culture’s relationship to mortality. Becker’s thesis was simple (it was right there in the title): Sigmund Freud was wrong to assert that all human behavior and culture can be reduced to questions of childhood sexuality. Rather, it is a fear of death itself that drives us—on both an individual level and a cultural level. What’s more, we do all we can to suppress that fear, to the point where we’re barely aware of it. But even suppressed, it continues to act on us, and it is this dread that defines us as a species. “We build character and culture,” Becker told psychologist Sam Keen, “in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death.”
Keen interviewed Becker as he was dying from colon cancer at the age of 49, a deathbed interview less than a year after The Denial of Death—what Becker called his “first mature book”—was published. It was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, arriving as part of a revolution in terms of how Americans looked at (and talked about) death. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (with its famous, and often misunderstood, five stages of grief) had arrived in 1969; two years before, Cicely Saunders had founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in London, helping to fuel the modern hospice movement.
But while Saunders and Kubler-Ross offered ways for people to better face their own impending death, Becker had more of a sociologist’s eye (his Ph.D. from Syracuse University was in cultural anthropology). Rather than focus on one individual’s confrontation with mortality in the face of a terminal diagnosis, Becker widened the lens to ask why and how our awareness of mortality, or lack thereof, shapes everyday life and culture at large. And while its language and methodology now feel quite dated, The Denial of Death’s central insights have never been more relevant, particularly in a world still hollowed out by a pandemic that we’ve never fully reckoned with. For what Becker understood was that when confronted with mortality, we not only tend to flee from that recognition, but we tend to act out in antisocial and authoritarian ways as an attempted hedge against our own impending demise.
In life, Becker’s reputation was complicated. He moved around through various academic appointments, never quite finding a permanent home, despite regularly filling 900-seat lecture halls to overflow capacity. Perhaps this was partly due to his insistence, in writing and teaching, on an interdisciplinary approach (he would call his style in The Denial of Death an attempt “in harmonization of the Babel of views on man and on the human condition, in the belief that the time is ripe for a synthesis that covers the best thought in many fields, from the human sciences to religion”) at a time when academic departments were becoming increasingly insular. Which may also explain his popularity among students: When the University of California, Berkeley refused to retain him in 1967, students submitted a petition with 2,000 signatures protesting the move; when the school cited budgetary concerns, the student government offered $13,000 from its general fund to pay his salary. (The university didn’t go for it.)
Obituaries of Becker highlighted his status as both a captivating teacher and an interdisciplinary iconoclast, but even colleagues and defenders were often unconvinced of the truth of his thesis. The Denial of Death was Becker’s ninth book but the first to really crystallize something in the American consciousness. The New York Times’ Anatole Broyard would go on to call it “one of the most challenging books of the decade,” and more recently it made former President Bill Clinton’s list of his 21 favorite books. It’s also one of the few books that Don DeLillo has been willing to claim as an influence on his work. Throughout DeLillo’s novels, one finds characters struggling with a diffused, inchoate fear of death—most notably Jack Gladney of White Noise, who is obsessed with “the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.” Perhaps most famously, The Denial of Death has a cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, when Allen’s Alvy Singer tells Diane Keaton’s title character to buy the book, alongside Jacques Choron’s Death and Western Thought. “I’m obsessed with death, I think,” he tells her. “It’s a big subject with me.”
Both Allen’s Singer and DeLillo’s Gladney seem to revel in their fear of death—and they see no real means (or even need) to overcome it. They are what psychoanalysts of the era would have diagnosed as neurotic. But this was hardly Becker’s point. One of the goals of The Denial of Death was to make sense of this neurosis, and, more importantly, point toward some way out of it. The central irony, as Becker saw it, was that our “deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” There is certainly a hint of the traditional religious attitude one finds everywhere from Catholicism’s memento mori to Buddhism’s daily meditations on death—that remembering you must die is the first step toward liberating yourself from that fear.
But the purpose of such meditations in a religious context is to focus on one’s immortal spirit. Becker’s book tries to invert a traditional mind/body dualism that has been present since the dawn of human philosophy. “This is the paradox,” he stipulates at the outset of The Denial of Death: The human being “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. His body is material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.” But rather than assert the supremacy of the spirit, immortal and sacred, over the corporeal body, Becker instead suggests that it is the body itself, doomed to eventual failure, which is the controlling half of the dichotomy. It is the body, after all, that ultimately wins the struggle with one’s inevitable death, proving that the mind can’t escape its fleshy bag of meat and wet electricity.
How do we resolve this problem? Much of what we call “culture,” for Becker, is just attempts to hide this fact from our “creaturely nature.” Unable to conquer death itself, we look for proxies—ways we can assert power over that which inspires fear. For Becker, this has a range of knock-on effects, from the affirmative desire for love and children (to carry on our lineage past our own death) to more active hostility toward others like us. Hatred, intolerance, political repression—what are these but attempts to control that which we fear? And what more do we fear than our own death? According to Becker, “This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard of morality will be undermined—another way of saying that they fear they will no longer be able to control life and death.” From censorship and war to love and the creation of art, we are all, one way or another, looking for something that will give us mastery over our life and death, even if in our heart of hearts we understand that mastery to be, finally, illusory.
Becker presents this theory as a a far more durable explanation for human behavior than Freud’s emphasis on libido and sexual repression. Psychoanalysis, he makes clear, “has to be broadened to take in the fear of death rather than the fears of punishment from the parents.” Indeed, much of The Denial of Death is focused on a critique of psychoanalysis, to the point that it feels anachronistic to read its critiques long after that field’s heyday has passed. As Becker attacks a number of Freudian concepts that he views as inadequate and unhelpful, from anal fixations to the death drive, one gets a sense of both how much of a grip psychoanalysis still had on culture in the 1970s and how far we’ve come since then in developing an understanding of human development and psychology.
And yet there’s a surprising number of insights that are still waiting once you make it past the outdated jargon. Rereading it in 2025, it’s hard not to see how the rise of Donald Trump’s current brand of authoritarianism was fueled, in part, from a country traumatized by a mass pandemic. The culture whipsawed between confronting mass death and then immediately being asked to forget about it, in service of restarting the economy. Death-haunted yet unable to admit it, many people shifted toward the certainty of a conman.
Becker’s theory would purport to explain not just the return of Donald Trump but the slavish hero worship of his followers. The psychoanalytic concept of transference, he argues, helps explain why so many people are willing to identify with a strongman, even one as weak as Trump. Because people cannot tolerate existential freedom, Becker argues, they cannot tolerate political freedom either, and a fear of death drives them, in many cases, to embrace authoritarians and false prophets. It is a “form of fetishism, a form of narrow control that anchors our own problems. We take our helplessness, our guilt, our conflicts, and we fix them to a spot in the environment.” And if we ourselves know, on some subconscious level, that we cannot live forever, we can put our energies toward some cause, some higher ideal that we believe can transcend our own mortality: “This use of the transference object explains the urge to deification of the other, the constant placing of certain select persons on pedestals, the reading into them of extra powers: the more they have, the more rubs off on us.” We participate in their immortality, he concludes, “and so we create immortals.”
Behind all the bravado, the jingoism and xenophobia, the violence and intimidation, Becker sees primarily fear. Man, he writes, “is not just a naturally and lusty destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers.” It is hard to find a more fitting and succinct description of Trump and his rabid followers, or those savaging the environment with energy-sucking data centers to run half-assed AI in the belief that doing so will grant them immortality.
Becker was himself not politically active, but he sympathized with the student radicals of the 1960s and their desire for justice and an end to the Vietnam War. The son of German Jewish immigrants, Becker was a U.S. Army infantryman during World War II and helped liberate the camps; one doesn’t have to think too hard to imagine his response to the current far right’s cult of death. For him, the crucial question remained: If all these pursuits are nothing more than illusory attempts to conquer death, then which illusion should one choose? How does one avoid the allure of destruction and hate and adopt a more productive relationship to one’s own death?
How one answers this is the measure of one’s life. To the extent one subscribes to this worldview, the only thing to do is to accept one’s existence as a being who will die and to seek out the illusion of immortality via the most constructive and productive means possible. Of all our possible responses to this fear of death, Becker rejected authoritarianism and censorship, of course, but he also rejected creativity and love, claiming neither was ultimately sufficient. Finally, he embraced religion, claiming that man is a “theological being.” While he clarified that he was “not developing an apologia for traditional religion,” only religion, he finally concluded, successfully expanded “awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong.” It’s an oddly unsatisfying direction for the book to take, and it feels as though Becker had a far better grasp of the problem than the solution.
Were it published today, The Denial of Death would not have nearly the impact it did then, not just because of its focus on psychoanalysis but also because Becker does not at any point cite a single study or survey, nor cite any empirical evidence in support of his claims. His book is almost entirely a dialogue with Freud, Otto Rank, Norman O. Brown, and a handful of others. It’s a book whose engine hums with rhetorical spark but assumes you won’t examine what’s beneath the hood. Filled with moments of aphoristic insight (“The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding”), the book nonetheless feels built on nothing but vibes. In commenting “how the fusion of a truthful insight with fallacious explanation… [makes] it difficult to untangle Freud,” Becker could have equally been writing about himself.
This was the problem faced by three young American social psychologists—Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski—who met in graduate school at the University of Kansas in the late ’70s. The three of them were entranced by Becker’s writing, which they’d later describe as a “Rosetta stone” that unlocked explanations for a myriad of behaviors they were studying. Together, the three coined the term Terror Management Theory, or TMT, as a catchall for Becker’s belief that people’s search for meaningful and significant lives comes from an attempt to manage an all-pervasive fear of death. But as they recount in their 2015 book, The Worm at the Core, their work was met with rejection after rejection until an editor at a psychology journal told them flat out: “Although your ideas may have some validity, they won’t be taken seriously unless you can provide evidence for them.”
TMT, as a discipline within the social sciences, has since set out to accomplish precisely that: turn Becker’s theories into testable hypotheses to determine to what extent we are ruled by our fear of death (what researchers often refer to as “mortality salience”). What TMT has been able to do is to take Becker’s ideas and give them the substance and evidence that The Denial of Death lacked. In 1989, for example, TMT researchers found that judges who had been thinking about their own mortality were far more likely to sentence defendants to harsher sentences. As Psyzczynski told The New York Times, “Making the judges think about their mortality presumably increased their need for faith in their moral standards. That increases the desire to punish someone who transgresses those values.” And over time, psychologists and sociologists have further borne out some of Becker’s initial insights. They’ve demonstrated that people without strong political opinions, when subconsciously thinking about their own death, tend to move rightward, expressing more favorable views of strongmen, preferring traditional gender roles, and expressing more sympathy toward racist views. (Those with previously held opinions tend to double down on them, seeing their political opponents as grave threats to their own mortality.)
TMT also has found repeated evidence to suggest that one of the many factors driving the rightward slide of culture over the past few years may be found in a widespread terror of mortality, which is pushing people to embrace authoritarians and xenophobia. Which is to say, the insights that Becker hit upon more than 50 years ago could never be more relevant. And at least part of the work of pushing against the terrifying tide of fascist encroachment must start with laying bare that fear of death—and what that fear drives us, individually and collectively, to do.