Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Sheldon Solomon, a social psychologist, a philosopher,
00:00:05 co developer of terror management theory, and co author of The Warm at the Core on the role of
00:00:12 death in life. He further carried the ideas of Ernest Becker that can crudely summarize as the
00:00:18 idea that our fear of death is at the core of the human condition and the driver of most of the
00:00:25 creations of human civilization. Quick summary of the sponsors Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and Cash App.
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00:00:36 this podcast. Let me say as a side note that Ernest Becker’s book, Denial of Death, had a
00:00:43 big impact on my thinking about human cognition, consciousness, and the deep ocean currents of our
00:00:49 mind that are behind the surface behaviors we observe. Many people have told me that they think
00:00:55 about death, or don’t think about death, fear death, or don’t fear death, but I think not many
00:01:00 people think about this topic deeply, rigorously, in the way that Nietzsche suggested. This topic,
00:01:08 like many that lead to deep personal self reflection, frankly is dangerous for the mind.
00:01:15 As all first principles thinking about the human condition is, if you gaze long into the abyss,
00:01:20 like Nietzsche said, the abyss will gaze back into you. I have been recently reading a lot
00:01:26 about World War II, Stalin, and Hitler. It feels to me that there is some fundamental truth there
00:01:32 to be discovered, in the moments of history that changed everything, the suffering, the triumphs.
00:01:39 If I bring up Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin in these conversations, it is never through
00:01:43 a political lens. I’m not left nor right. I think for myself, deeply, and often question everything,
00:01:52 changing my mind as often as is needed. I ask for your patience, empathy, and rigorous thinking.
00:01:58 If you arrived to this podcast from a place of partisanship, if you hate Trump, or love Trump,
00:02:04 or any other political leader, no matter what he or they do, and see everyone who disagrees with
00:02:09 you as delusional, I ask that you unsubscribe, and don’t listen to these conversations, because my
00:02:16 hope is to go beyond that kind of divisive thinking. I think we can only make progress
00:02:21 toward truth through deep, empathetic thinking and conversation, and as always, love.
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00:05:27 people around the world. And now, here’s my conversation with Sheldon Solomon.
00:05:34 What is the role of death and fear of death in life?
00:05:38 Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness to accept
00:05:48 that fact, we would argue, is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything
00:05:56 that people do, whether they’re aware of it or not.
00:05:59 So that’s kind of been your life work. Your view of the human condition is that death,
00:06:06 you’ve written the book Warm at the Core, that death is at the core of our
00:06:09 consciousness of everything, of how we see the world, of what drives us. Maybe can you,
00:06:14 can you elaborate how you see death fitting in? What does it mean to be at the core of our being?
00:06:22 So I think that’s a great question. And, you know, to be pedantic, I usually start,
00:06:29 you know, my psychology classes and I say to the students, okay, you know, let’s define our terms.
00:06:35 And the ology part, they get right away. You know, it’s the study of, and then we get to the psyche
00:06:42 part. And understandably, you know, the students are like, oh, that means mind. And I’m like,
00:06:49 well, no, that’s a modern interpretation. But in ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the
00:06:59 Cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the West think when that word comes to mind.
00:07:05 And so you hear the word soul and you’re like, well, all right, that’s the nonphysical part of
00:07:14 me that’s potentially detachable from my corporal container when I’m no longer here. But Aristotle’s
00:07:22 who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist. He was a monist. He thought that the soul
00:07:31 was inextricably connected to the body. And he defined soul as the essence of a natural body
00:07:40 that is alive. And then he goes on and he says, all right, let me give you an example. If an
00:07:50 axe was alive, the soul of an axe would be to chop. And if you can pluck your eyeball out of
00:07:58 your head and it was still functioning, then the soul of the eyeball would be to see, you know,
00:08:07 and then he’s like, all right, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop. The soul of a woodpecker
00:08:12 is to pack, which raises the question, of course, what is the essence of what it means to be human?
00:08:20 And here, of course, there is no one universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity.
00:08:29 All right, Aristotle, you know, gives us the idea of humans as rational animals. You know, we’re
00:08:34 homo sapiens. But not the only game in town got Joseph Heusinger, an anthropologist in the 20th
00:08:42 century. He called us homo ludens that were basically fundamentally playful creatures. And
00:08:50 I think it was Hannah Arendt, homo faber, were tool making creatures. Another woman,
00:08:57 Ellen Dizanayake, wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus. And following Aristotle and his
00:09:03 poetics, she’s like, well, we’re not only rational animals, we’re also aesthetic creatures that
00:09:08 appreciate beauty. There’s another take on humans. I think they call us homo narratans.
00:09:16 We’re storytelling creatures. And I think all of those designations of what it means to be human
00:09:24 are quite useful heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation. But what
00:09:30 garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a Scottish guy,
00:09:39 who was Alexander Smith, in a book called Dreamthwarp. I think it’s written in the 1860s.
00:09:47 He just says right in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes
00:09:53 us human. And I remember reading that. And in my gut, I was like, oh, man, I don’t like that. But
00:10:01 I think you’re onto something. And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher and arguably
00:10:08 the first academic psychologist, he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human
00:10:16 condition. So that’s where the worm at the core idea comes in. And that’s just an allusion to
00:10:24 the story of Genesis back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden. Everything was going
00:10:32 tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chop out of the apple of the tree of
00:10:39 knowledge, and Adam partakes also. And this is, according to the Bible, what brings death into
00:10:47 the world. And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of
00:10:58 the origin of consciousness, where we get to the point where, by virtue of our vast intelligence,
00:11:05 we come to realize the inevitability of death. And so, you know, the apple is beautiful and it’s
00:11:12 tasty. But when you get right into the middle of it, there’s that ugly reality, which is our
00:11:19 finitude. And then fast forward a bit, and I was a young professor at Skidmore College in 1980.
00:11:28 My PhD is in experimental social psychology, and I mainly did studies for the study of the
00:11:34 world. I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of
00:11:41 nonpharmacological interventions to reduce stress. And that was good work, and I found it
00:11:47 interesting. But in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I’m just walking up and down the
00:11:54 shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural
00:12:01 scientist, recently deceased. He died in 1974. After weeks before, actually, he was posthumously
00:12:12 awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death.
00:12:17 And that was his last book?
00:12:19 It’s actually his next to last book. I don’t know how you pull this off, but he had one more
00:12:24 after he died called Escape from Evil. And evidently, it was supposed to… Originally,
00:12:30 The Denial of Death was supposed to be this giant thousand page book that was both,
00:12:36 and they split it up, and what became Escape from Evil, his wife, Marie Becker, finished.
00:12:45 Well, be that as it may, it is in The Denial of Death where Becker just says in the first paragraph,
00:12:53 I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline
00:13:02 to respond to it is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we’re aware of
00:13:10 it or not, and mostly we’re not. And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, wow,
00:13:19 okay, this dude’s…
00:13:20 You’re onto something.
00:13:21 You’re onto something.
00:13:22 It’s the same thing here.
00:13:23 It’s the same thing. And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologist, but
00:13:31 let’s face it, I believe there’s a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to. So
00:13:40 I’m in my mid 20s. I got Ernest Becker’s book in my hand. And the next thing I know, I’m remembering
00:13:47 that when I’m eight years old, the day that my grandmother died. And the day before, my mom said,
00:13:55 oh, say goodbye to grandma. She’s not well. And so I was like, okay, grandma. And I knew she wasn’t
00:14:04 well, but I didn’t really appreciate the magnitude of her illness. Well, she dies the next day.
00:14:10 And it’s in the evening and I’m just sitting there looking at my stamp collection. And I’m
00:14:17 like, wow, I’m going to miss my grandmother. And then I’m like, no, wait a minute. That means my
00:14:22 mother’s going to die after she gets old. And that’s even worse. After all, who’s going to make
00:14:29 me dinner? And that bothered me for a while. But then I’m looking at the stamps, all the dead
00:14:34 American presidents. And I’m like, there’s George Washington. He’s dead. There’s Thomas Jefferson.
00:14:39 He’s dead. My mom’s going to be dead. Oh, I’m going to get old and be dead someday. And at
00:14:48 eight years old, that was my first explicit existential crisis. I remember it being,
00:14:54 you know, one of these blood curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore for the most of the
00:15:03 time I was subsequently growing up. But fast forward back to Skidmore College, mid twenties,
00:15:10 you know, reading Becker’s book in the 1980s, thinking to myself, wow, one of the reasons
00:15:18 why I’m finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience.
00:15:23 And then to make a short story long, and I’ll shut up, Lex, but what grabbed me about Becker,
00:15:31 and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books, there’s another book, The Birth and
00:15:37 Death of Meaning, which is framed in from an evolutionary perspective. And then The Denial
00:15:45 of Death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point. And as a young
00:15:54 academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don’t
00:16:06 see that often. Yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types
00:16:14 and vice versa. And maybe only John Bowlby, you know, there’s there’s other folks. But
00:16:20 the attachment theorist, John Bowlby, was really one of the first serious academics to say these
00:16:27 these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible.
00:16:33 And can you comment on what’s what a psychodynamics view of the world is versus an evolutionary view
00:16:39 of the world, just in case people are not?
00:16:40 Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s that’s a fine question. Well, for the evolutionary types
00:16:45 in general are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings
00:16:59 in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter.
00:17:06 You used to be a fish. Yeah, we used to be a fish. And I’ll end up talking on a podcast.
00:17:13 Yeah. How we came to be that way.
00:17:16 How we came to be that way. And so whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say,
00:17:22 are more interested in development across a single lifespan. And but but the evolutionary
00:17:30 types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for
00:17:38 their views. They, you know, they’ll just say these guys are talking shit, if you’ll pardon
00:17:44 the expression. And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary
00:17:51 types that they are often and rightfully criticized evolutionary psychologists for what are called the
00:17:58 just so stories that where it’s like, oh, this is probably why fill in the blank is potentially
00:18:07 adaptive. And my thought again early on was I didn’t see any intrinsic antithesis between
00:18:20 these viewpoints. I just found them dialectically compatible and very powerful when combined.
00:18:27 So one question I would ask here is about a science being speculative. You know,
00:18:33 we understand a little about the human mind. You said you picked up Becker’s book and, you know,
00:18:38 it felt like it was onto something. That’s the same thing I felt when I picked up Becker’s book,
00:18:45 probably also in my early 20s. You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question
00:18:50 of the meaning of life kind of, you know, this seemed to be the most the closest to the truth
00:18:58 somehow. It was onto something. So I guess the question I want to ask also is like how speculative
00:19:06 is psychology? How like all of your life’s work? How do you feel? How confident do you feel about
00:19:14 the whole thing? About understanding our mind? I feel confidently unconfident to have both ways.
00:19:25 Like what do we make of psychology? What do we make starting with Freud, you know,
00:19:30 starting just our, or even just philosophy, even the aspects of the sciences, like, you know,
00:19:40 my field of artificial intelligence, but also physics, you know, it often feels like, man,
00:19:47 we don’t really understand most of what’s going on here. And certainly that’s true with the human
00:19:53 mind. Yeah. Well, to me, that’s the proper epistemological stance. I don’t know anything.
00:19:59 Well, it’s the Socratic I know that I don’t know, which is the first step on the path to wisdom.
00:20:08 I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to. I would argue equally forcefully,
00:20:20 but not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science, but I believe that the Thomas
00:20:26 Kuhns of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress.
00:20:34 And so on the one hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you
00:20:42 wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain. On the other hand, I think
00:20:49 it’s quite arrogant when scientists, I’ll just speak about psychological scientists, when they
00:20:59 have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight. And when they make the
00:21:11 mistake, in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that’s this idea that the mere accumulation
00:21:19 of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs. And so I like the, well, we’re all,
00:21:29 I hope, appreciative of the people who trained us. But I remember my first day in graduate school at
00:21:35 the University of Kansas, they brought us into a room and on one side of the board was a quote by
00:21:40 Kurt Lewin or Levine, famous German social psychologist. And the quote is,
00:21:48 there’s nothing more useful than a good theory. And then on the other side was another quote by
00:21:53 a German physicist, his name eludes me, and it was all theories are wrong. And I’m like,
00:22:00 which is it? And of course, the point is that it’s both. Our theories are, I believe,
00:22:09 powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able
00:22:21 to understand ourselves in the world around us. Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist,
00:22:30 I adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices.
00:22:38 And that at its best, science is a dialectical interplay where you have theoretical assertions
00:22:44 that yield testable hypotheses and that either results in the corroboration of the theory,
00:22:52 the rejection of it or the modification thereafter. If we look at the existentialists
00:23:01 or even like modern philosopher, psychologist types like Jordan Peterson, I’m not sure if
00:23:07 you’re familiar with Jordan pretty well. We go way back. Actually, if he were here with us today,
00:23:14 we would he would be jumping in and I believe very interesting and important ways. But yeah,
00:23:22 we go back 30 years ago. He was basically saying our work is nonsense. Let’s get into this. I’ll
00:23:30 talk to Jordan eventually on this thing. Yeah, there’s some rough times right now. Oh, absolutely.
00:23:35 And I and I wish him well. Jordan was working on his maps of meaning and we were publishing our
00:23:44 work. And I think Jordan at the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all
00:23:56 meaning is arbitrary. He takes a more Jungian as well as evolutionary view that I don’t think is
00:24:05 wrong, by the way, which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important,
00:24:16 let’s say religious types, and that we didn’t pay sufficient attention to that in our early days.
00:24:25 So can you try to elucidate like what his worldview is? Because he’s also a religious man.
00:24:31 And so what what was this? What was some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements
00:24:37 that then? Yeah, well, back in the day, I just said, you know, Jordan was a young punk. We were
00:24:42 young punks. He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that
00:24:49 we you’re still both kind of punks. Yeah, we are kind of punk. So I saw him three or four years
00:24:53 ago. We spoke on a it was an awesome day. We’re in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival,
00:25:00 where we were asked to be on a Canadian broadcast system program. I think we were talking about
00:25:06 Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective. And I hadn’t seen him in a ton of years. And we spent
00:25:14 two days together, had a great time. You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core.
00:25:20 And he’s like, you know, you’re you’re missing a big opportunity. Every time you say something,
00:25:26 you have to have your phone and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on YouTube.
00:25:32 Yeah, he was onto something that, you know, that just as a small tangent. Yeah. It’s it’s almost
00:25:40 sad to look at Jordan Peterson and somebody like yourself. After having done this podcast,
00:25:44 I’ve realized that there is really brilliant people in this world. And oftentimes, especially
00:25:51 like when they’re, I mean, it would love are a little bit like punks. That’s right. They kind
00:25:58 of do their own thing and make the world doesn’t know they exist as much as they should. And it’s
00:26:03 so interesting because most people are kind of boring. Yes. And then the interesting ones kind
00:26:11 of go on their own. And there’s not a smartphone. No, that’s that’s so interesting. He was onto
00:26:16 something that I mean, it’s interesting that I don’t think he was thinking from a money perspective,
00:26:22 but he was probably thinking of like connecting with people or sharing his knowledge.
00:26:27 But people don’t often think that way. That’s right. So maybe we can try to get back to you’re
00:26:33 both brilliant people. And I’d love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about
00:26:39 in your psychological work and your world views. Well, our disagreements today would be
00:26:50 along two dimensions. One is he is and again, I wish he was here to correct me. Yes. When I say
00:26:59 that he is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo Christian tradition, I see particularly
00:27:09 Christianity and in a sense is a contemporary Kierkegaard of sorts when he’s saying there’s only
00:27:17 one way to leap into faith. And I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that
00:27:26 that is one, but by no means not the only way to find meaning and value in life. And so and I see
00:27:37 his. What’s his warm at the core? What is like? So we’re talking about a little bit of a higher
00:27:43 level of discovering meaning. Yeah. What’s his? What does he make of death? Oh, I don’t know.
00:27:49 And this is where it would be nice to have him here. He has, you know, from a distance criticized
00:27:59 our work as misguided. Having said that, though, when we were together, he said something along
00:28:06 the lines that there is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which
00:28:15 there is more empirical evidence. And so I appreciated that. He’s a great researcher. He’s
00:28:22 a good clinician. The other thing that we will agree to disagree about rather vociferously is
00:28:30 his ultimately political slash economic. So I remember being at dinner with him,
00:28:39 telling him that the next book that I wanted to write was going to be called Why Left and Right
00:28:44 are Both Beside the Point. And my argument was going to be and it is going to be that both
00:28:50 liberal and political liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and
00:28:59 morally bankrupt because they’re both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are
00:29:05 demonstrably false. And Jordan didn’t mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those
00:29:14 grounds. That would basically be like Steven Pinker’s blank slate. But he took issue when
00:29:21 I pointed out that actually it’s conservative political philosophy, which starts with John
00:29:29 Locke’s assumption that in a state of nature, there are no societies, just autonomous individuals
00:29:36 who are striving for survival. That’s one of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the
00:29:45 history of intellectual thought. And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual
00:29:55 right to acquire unlimited amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for
00:30:03 neoliberal economics. Can you linger on that a little bit? Can you describe his philosophy
00:30:11 again as view of the world and what neoliberal economics is? Yeah, let me translate it in
00:30:19 English. So basically on all these days, anybody who says I’m a conservative free market type,
00:30:30 you’re following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you’re aware of it or not. So here’s
00:30:35 John Locke, who, by the way, all of these guys are great. So for me to appear to criticize any
00:30:42 of these folks, it is with the highest regard. And also, we need to understand in my estimation
00:30:49 how important their ideas are. Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine
00:30:57 right. And he’s trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power
00:31:06 and autonomy to individuals. And he starts in his second treatise on government, 1690 or so,
00:31:16 he says, okay, let’s start with a state of nature. And he’s like, in a state of nature,
00:31:22 there’s no societies, there’s just individuals. And in a perfect universe,
00:31:29 there wouldn’t be any societies, there would just be individuals who by the law of nature have a
00:31:37 right to survive. And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the
00:31:48 fruits of their own labor. But his point is, and it’s actually a good one, he’s following Hobbes
00:31:56 here. He’s like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes. And if they would
00:32:02 let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just
00:32:08 doing what they did to get by each day. But it’s a whole lot easier if I see like an apple tree
00:32:16 a mile away. Well, I can go over and pick an apple. But if you’re 10 meters away with an apple
00:32:23 in your hand, it’s a lot easier if I pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple.
00:32:29 And his point was that the problem is that people can’t be counted on to behave. They will take each
00:32:38 other’s property. Moreover, he argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to retribution
00:32:52 in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression. English translation,
00:32:57 if I take your apple, you have the right to take an apple back. You don’t have the right to kill
00:33:04 my firstborn. But people being people, they’re apt to escalate retaliatory behavior, thus creating
00:33:13 what Locke called a state of war. So he said, in order to avoid a state of war, people reluctantly
00:33:20 give up their freedom in exchange for security. They agree to obey the law and that the sole
00:33:28 function of government is to keep domestic tranquility and to ward off foreign invasion in
00:33:34 order to protect our right to property. All right. So now here’s the property thing. All right. So
00:33:42 Locke says, if you look in the Bible and in nature, there is no private property.
00:33:48 But Locke says, well, surely if there’s anything that you own, it’s your body. And surely you have
00:33:58 a right by nature to stay alive. And then by extension, anything that you do where you exert
00:34:07 effort or labor, that becomes your private property. So back to the apple tree. If I walk
00:34:14 over to an apple tree, that’s everybody’s apples until I pick one. And the minute I do,
00:34:21 that is my apple. And then he says, you can have as many apples as you want, as long as you don’t
00:34:30 waste them. And as long as you don’t impinge on somebody else’s right to get apples. So far,
00:34:39 so good. Yep. And then he says, well, okay. In the early days, you could only eat so many apples
00:34:55 or you could only trade so many apples with somebody else. So he was like, well, if you put
00:35:01 a fence around a bunch of apple trees, those become your apples. That’s your property.
00:35:07 Those become your apples. That’s your property. If somebody else wants to put a fence around
00:35:13 Nebraska, that’s their property. And everybody can have as much property as they want because
00:35:22 the world is so big that there is no limit to what you can have if you pursue it by virtue of
00:35:33 your own effort. But then he says money came into the picture. And this is important because he
00:35:41 noticed long before anybody, before the Freud’s of the world, that money is funky because it has no
00:35:48 intrinsic value. He’s like, ooh, look at that shiny piece of metal that actually has, if you’re
00:35:55 hungry and you have a choice between a carrot and a lump of gold in the desert, most people are
00:36:00 going to go for the carrot. But his point is that the allure of money is that it’s basically a
00:36:10 concentrated symbol of wealth, but because it doesn’t spoil, Locke said, you’re entitled to
00:36:18 have as much money as you’re able to garner. Then he says, well, the reality is that some people
00:36:29 are more, the word that he used was industrious. He said some people more industrious than others.
00:36:36 All right, today we would say smarter, less lazy, more ambitious. He just said that’s natural. It’s
00:36:43 also true. Therefore, he argued, over time, some people are going to have a whole lot of property
00:36:52 and other people not much at all. Inequality for Locke is natural and beneficial for everyone.
00:37:04 His argument was that the rising tide lifts all boats and that the truly creative and innovative
00:37:13 are entitled to relatively unlimited worth because we’re all better off as a result.
00:37:19 So the point very simply is that, and then you have Adam Smith in the next century with the
00:37:29 invisible hand where Adam Smith says, everyone pursuing their own selfish, that’s not necessarily
00:37:36 pejorative, if everyone pursues their own selfish interests, we will all be better off as a result.
00:37:44 And what do you think is the flaw in that way of thinking?
00:37:47 Well, there’s two flaws. One flaw is, first of all, that it is based on an erroneous assumption
00:37:57 to begin with, which is that there never was a time in human history when we were an asocial
00:38:03 species.
00:38:05 In a sense, you don’t feel like there’s this emphasis of individual autonomy is a flawed
00:38:12 promise. There’s something fundamentally deeply interconnected between us.
00:38:18 I do. I think that Plato and Socrates in the Crito were closer to the truth when they started
00:38:27 with the assumption that we were interdependent, then they derived individual autonomy as a
00:38:33 manifestation of a functional social system.
00:38:37 That’s fascinating.
00:38:38 So when Margaret Thatcher, you’re too young, in the 1980s, she said, societies? There’s
00:38:44 no such thing as societies. There’s just individuals pursuing their self interest.
00:38:53 So that’s one point where I would take issue respectfully with John Locke.
00:38:57 Point number two is when Locke says in 1690, well, England’s filled up, so if you want
00:39:06 some land, just go to America, it’s empty. Or maybe there’s a few savages there, just
00:39:11 kill them.
00:39:13 So Melville does the same thing in Moby Dick where he thinks about, will there ever come
00:39:20 a time where we run out of whales? And he says, no, but we have run out of whales.
00:39:26 And so Locke was right maybe in 1690 that the world was large and had infinite resources.
00:39:36 He’s certainly wrong today, in my opinion. Also wrong is the claim that the unlimited
00:39:47 pursuit of personal wealth does not harm those around us. There is no doubt that radical
00:39:54 inequality is tragic psychologically and physically. Poverty is not that terrible.
00:40:02 It’s easy for me to say because I have a place to stay and something to eat. But as
00:40:07 long as you’re not starving and have a place to be, poverty is not as challenging as having
00:40:15 the impoverished in close proximity to those who are obscenely wealthy.
00:40:20 LW So it’s not the absolute measure of your
00:40:24 well being, it’s the inequality of that well being is the penalty painful.
00:40:29 So maybe just to linger on the Jordan Peterson thing, in terms of your disagreement in his
00:40:37 world view. So he went through quite a bit, there’s been quite a bit of fire in his defense
00:40:45 or maybe his opposition of the idea of equality of outcomes. So looking at the inequality
00:40:52 that’s in our world, looking at, you know, certain groups, measurably having an outcome
00:40:59 that’s different than other groups, and then drawing conclusions about fundamental
00:41:06 unfairness, injustice, inequality in the system. So like systematic racism, systematic sexism,
00:41:13 systematic anything else that creates inequality. And he’s been kind of saying pretty simple
00:41:20 things to say that, you know, the system for the most part is not broken or flawed,
00:41:28 that the inequalities part, the inequality of outcomes is part of our world. What we
00:41:34 should strive for is the, you know, equality of opportunity.
00:41:39 Yeah, and I do not dispute that as an abstraction. But again, to back up for a second, I do take
00:41:47 issue with Jordan’s fervent devotion to the free market and his cavalier dismissal of
00:41:55 Marxist ideas, which he has, in my estimation, mischaracterized in his public depictions.
00:42:06 Let’s get into it. So he just seems to really not like socialism, Marxism, communism.
00:42:13 Historically speaking, sort of, I mean, how would I characterize it? I’m not exactly sure.
00:42:19 I don’t want to, again, he’ll eventually be here to defend himself. John Locke, unfortunately,
00:42:24 not here to defend himself. But what’s your sense about Marxism and the way Jordan talks
00:42:34 about it, the way you think about it, from the economics, from the philosophical perspective?
00:42:39 Yeah, well, if we were all here together, I’d say we need to start with Marx’s economic and
00:42:45 philosophical manuscripts of 1844, before Marx became more of a polemicist. And I would argue
00:42:54 that Marx’s political philosophy, he’s a crappy economist, I don’t dispute that. But his arguments
00:43:02 about human nature, his arguments about the inevitably catastrophic psychological
00:43:10 and environmental and economic effects of capitalism, I would argue every one of those
00:43:17 has proven quite right. Marx maybe did not have the answer, but he saw in the 18, whenever he
00:43:28 was writing, that inevitably, capitalism would lead to massive inequity, that it was ultimately
00:43:41 based on the need to denigrate and dehumanize labor, to render them, in his language, a fleshy
00:43:49 cog in a giant machine. And it would create a tension and conflict between those who own things
00:43:59 and those who made things, that over time would always, the Thomas Pickardy guy who writes about
00:44:07 capital, and just makes the point that return on investment will always be greater than wages. That
00:44:17 means the people with money are gonna have a lot more. That means there’s gonna come a point where
00:44:23 the economic house of cards falls apart. Now, the Joseph Schumpeters of the world, they’re like,
00:44:29 that’s creative destruction, bring it, that’s great. So I think it’s Niles Ferguson, he’s a
00:44:35 historian, he may be at Stanford now, he was at Harvard. He writes about the history of money,
00:44:40 and he’s like, yeah, there’s been 20 or whatever depressions and big recessions in the last several
00:44:48 hundred years. And when that happens, half of the population or whatever is catastrophically
00:44:56 inconvenienced. But that’s the price that we pay for progress. Other people would argue, and I
00:45:05 would agree with them that I will happily sacrifice the rate of progress in order to flatten
00:45:16 the curve of economic destruction. To put that in plainer English, I would direct our attention
00:45:28 to the social democracies that forgetting for the moment of whether it’s possible to do this on a
00:45:35 scale in a country as big as ours, on all of the things that really matter, gross, domestic GDP
00:45:44 or whatever, that’s just an abstraction. But when you look at whatever the United Nations says,
00:45:50 how we measure quality of life, life expectancy, education, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and so on,
00:46:00 the countries that do better are the mixed economies. They’re market economies
00:46:07 that have high tax rates in exchange for the provision of services that come as a right
00:46:16 for citizens. Yeah, so I mean, I guess the question is, you’ve kind of mentioned that, you know,
00:46:24 as Marx described, capitalism with a slippery slope, eventually things go awry in some kind
00:46:30 of way. So that’s the question is, when you have, when you implement a system, how does it go wrong
00:46:35 eventually? You know, eventually we’ll all be dead. That’s exactly right. No, that’s right.
00:46:43 So, and then the criticism, I mean, I think these days, unfortunately, Marxism is a dirty word.
00:46:50 I say unfortunately, because even if you disagree with a philosophy, you should, like calling
00:46:58 somebody a Marxist should not be a thing that shuts down all conversation. No, that’s right.
00:47:05 And the fact is, I’m sympathetic with Jordan’s dismissal of the folks, the talking heads these
00:47:13 days who spew Marxist words. To me, it’s like fashionable nonsense. Do you know that book that
00:47:22 the physicists wrote mocking? You’re too young. So in the 20 or so years, we’re all pretty young.
00:47:28 Well, yeah, that’s right. But I think there were these NYU physicists, they wrote a paper just
00:47:33 mocking the kind of literary postmodern types. And it was, oh, those kinds of, yeah, it was just
00:47:41 nonsense. And of course it was made the lead article. And you know, my point is Marx wouldn’t
00:47:48 be a Marxist. True. I have read and listened to some of the work of Richard Wolff. He speaks
00:47:56 pretty eloquently about Marxism. I like him. He’s one of the only, you know, one of the only people
00:48:03 speaking about a lot about Marxism and the way we are now in a serious way, in a sort of saying,
00:48:10 you know, what are the flaws of capitalism? Not saying like, yeah, basically sounding very
00:48:16 different. People should check out his work. Because all this kind of work, this kind of
00:48:21 outrage mob culture of sort of demanding equality of outcome, that’s not Marxism.
00:48:30 It is not Marxism. He didn’t say that. You know, he literally said each, what was it like,
00:48:37 each according to their needs and each according to their abilities or something like that.
00:48:42 So the question is the implementation, like, humans are messy. So how does it go wrong?
00:48:47 Like, it is, there you go, Lex. Brilliant. It’s messy. And this gets back to my rant about
00:48:54 the book that I want to try if I don’t stroke out, why left and right are both beside the point.
00:49:01 You know, the people, the conservatives are right when they condemn liberals for being simple minded.
00:49:11 By assuming that a modification of external conditions will yield changes in human nature.
00:49:20 You know, again, that’s where Marx and Skinner are odd bedfellows. You know, here they are just
00:49:27 saying, oh, let’s change the surroundings and things will inevitably get better. On the other
00:49:34 hand, when conservatives say that people are innately selfish and they use that as the
00:49:45 justification for glorifying the unbridled pursuit of wealth, well, they’re only half right because
00:49:53 it turns out that we can be innately selfish, but we are also innately generous and reciprocating
00:50:02 creatures. There’s remarkable studies, I think they’ve been done at Yale, of, you know, babies,
00:50:08 14 month old babies. If someone hands them a toy and then wants something in return,
00:50:19 babies before they can walk and talk will reciprocate. All right, fine.
00:50:23 If someone, if they want a toy, let’s say, or a bottle of water, baby wants a bottle of water,
00:50:30 and I look like I’m trying to give it to the baby, but I drop the bottle so the baby doesn’t get
00:50:39 what she or he wanted. When given a chance to reciprocate, little babies will reciprocate
00:50:47 because they’re aware of and are responding to intention. Similarly, if they see somebody
00:50:55 behaving unfairly to someone, they will not help that person in return. So my point is,
00:51:04 yeah, we are selfish creatures at times, but we are also simultaneously ubersocial creatures
00:51:14 who are eager to reciprocate, and in fact, we’re congenitally prepared to be reciprocators to the
00:51:21 point where we will reciprocate on the basis of intentions above and beyond what actually happens.
00:51:28 How close, so, I mean, your work is on the fundamental role of the fear of mortality in
00:51:37 ourselves. How fundamental is this reciprocation, this human connection to other humans?
00:51:44 Oh, I think it’s really innate. Yeah, I think it’s because, yeah, bats reciprocate, not by intention,
00:51:50 but, you know, this, I’m going here from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, you know, to, I love
00:51:58 the early Dawkins, I’m less enamored. I like the early Beatles.
00:52:02 Yeah, no, no, no. And again, I say this with great respect, but, you know, Dawkins just points out
00:52:13 that, you know, reciprocation is just fundamental, cooperation is fundamental. You know, it’s a
00:52:22 one sided view of evolutionary takes on things when we see it solely in terms of individual
00:52:30 competition. It’s almost, from a game theoretic perspective too, it’s just easier to see the world
00:52:36 that way. It’s easier to, I don’t know, I mean, you see this in physics, there’s a whole field of
00:52:43 folks, like complexity, that kind of embrace the fact that it’s all an intricately connected mess,
00:52:50 and it’s just very difficult to do anything with that kind of science. But it seems to be much
00:52:56 closer to actually representing what the world is like.
00:52:58 So like you put it earlier, Lex, it’s messy.
00:53:02 So left and right, you mentioned, you’re thinking of maybe actually putting it down on paper
00:53:07 or something?
00:53:07 Yeah, I would like to, because what I would like to point out, again, in admiration of all the
00:53:14 people that I will then try and have the gall to criticize is, look, these are all geniuses.
00:53:19 Locke, genius. Adam Smith, genius, when he uses the notion that we’re bartering creatures. So he uses
00:53:28 that reciprocation idea as the basis of his way of thinking about things.
00:53:33 But that’s not at the core. The bartering is not at the core of human nature.
00:53:37 It’s not at, well, he says it is. He says we’re fundamentally bartering creatures.
00:53:42 Well, that doesn’t even make sense then, because then how can we then be autonomous individuals
00:53:48 autonomous individuals?
00:53:50 Well, because we’re going to barter with an eye on
00:53:53 for ourselves, self interest.
00:53:55 Yeah. But all right. So, but back to Adam Smith for a second, Lex. He’s like,
00:54:00 Adam Smith, here’s, he’s got the invisible hand and my conservative friends. I’m like,
00:54:05 you need to read his books because he is a big fan of the free market. And this is my other gripe
00:54:15 with folks who support just unbridled markets. Adam Smith understood that there was a role
00:54:23 for government for two reasons. One is, is that just like Locke, people are not going to behave
00:54:30 with integrity. And he understood that one role of government is to maintain a proverbial,
00:54:38 you know, even playing field. And then the other thing Smith said was that there’s some things that
00:54:44 can’t be done well for a profit. And I believe he talked about education and public health and
00:54:51 infrastructure as things that are best done by governments because you can’t, you can make a
00:55:01 profit, but that doesn’t mean that the institutions themselves will be maximally beneficial.
00:55:06 Yeah. So I would, I’m just eager to engage people by saying, let’s start with our most
00:55:16 contemporary understanding of human nature, which is that we are both selfish and tend
00:55:27 to cooperate. And we also can be heroically helpful to folks in our own tribe. And of course,
00:55:42 how you define one’s tribe becomes critically important. But what some people say is, look,
00:55:49 look, what would then be, what kind of political institutions and what kind of economic organization
00:55:59 can we think about to kind of hit that sweet spot? And that would be, in my opinion,
00:56:07 how do we maximize individual autonomy in a way that fosters creativity and innovation and the
00:56:16 self regard that comes from creative expression while engaging our more cooperative and reciprocal
00:56:27 tendencies in order to come up with a system that is potentially stable over time? Because
00:56:35 the other thing about all capital based systems is the stability. It’s fundamentally unstable.
00:56:41 Yeah, because it’s based on infinite growth. And it’s a positive feedback loop. To be silly,
00:56:47 infinite growth is only good for malignant cancer cells and compound interest. But otherwise,
00:56:54 we want to seek a steady state. So when Steven Pinker writes, for example, again,
00:57:03 great scholar, but I’m going to disagree when he says the world has never been better,
00:57:08 and all we need to do is keep making stuff and buying stuff.
00:57:14 So your sense is the world sort of in disagreement with Steven Pinker, that the world is
00:57:23 like facing a potential catastrophic collapse in multiple directions.
00:57:27 Yes.
00:57:28 And the fact that there are certain like the rate of violence and aggregate is decreasing,
00:57:33 the death, you know, the quality of life, all those kinds of measures that you can plot across
00:57:40 centuries that it’s improving. That doesn’t capture the fact that our world might be this,
00:57:44 we might destroy ourselves in very painful ways in the in the in the next century.
00:57:51 So I’m with Jared Diamond, you know, in the book Collapse, where he points out studying
00:57:56 the collapse of major civilizations, that it often happens right after things appear to never
00:58:03 have been better. And in that regard, I mean, there are more known voices that have taken issue
00:58:12 with Dr. Pinker. I’m thinking of John Gray, who’s a British philosopher and here in the States. I
00:58:21 don’t know where he is these days, but Robert J. Lifton, the psycho historian. Yeah, they’re both
00:58:26 of my view and which I hope is, by the way, wrong.
00:58:31 Me too.
00:58:32 Yeah, no, but you know, between, you know, ongoing ethnic tensions, environmental degradation,
00:58:42 economic instability, and the fact that, you know, the world has become a Petri dish of
00:58:49 psychopathology. Like what really worries me is the the quiet economic pain that people are going
00:58:56 through, the businesses that are closed, dreams that are broken, because you can no longer do the
00:59:01 thing that you’ve wanted to do and how I mentioned to you off camera that I’ve been reading The Rise
00:59:08 and Fall of the Third Reich. And I mean, the amount of anger and hatred and on the flip side of that,
00:59:21 sort of a nationalist pride that can arise from deep economic pain. Like what happens with that
00:59:27 economic pain is you become bitter. You start to find the other, whether it’s other European
00:59:34 nations that mistreated you, whether it’s other groups that mistreated you, it always ends up
00:59:39 being the Jews somehow or fault here. That’s what worries me is where this quiet anger and pain goes
00:59:51 in 2021, 2022, 2030. If you look, sorry to see the parallels. No, no, no. Rise and fall of the
00:59:59 Third Reich, but you know what happens 10, 15 years from now from what’s because of the COVID
01:00:05 pandemic that’s happening now. And Lex, you make a, I think a really profoundly important point,
01:00:12 you know, back to our work for a bit or Ernest Becker rather, you know, his point is, is that
01:00:18 the way that we manage existential terror is to embrace culturally constructed belief systems
01:00:25 that give us a sense that life has meaning and we have value. And in the form of self esteem,
01:00:34 which we get from perceiving that we meet or exceed the expectations associated with the role
01:00:40 that we play in society. Well, here we are right now in a world where first of all, if you have
01:00:47 nothing, you are nothing. And secondly, as you were saying before we got started today,
01:00:53 a lot of jobs are gone and they’re not coming back. And that’s the, where the self esteem,
01:01:00 that’s where the self esteem and identity come in with people. It’s not only that you don’t have
01:01:04 anything to eat. You don’t even have a self anymore to speak of because the, we typically
01:01:11 define ourselves, you know, as Marx put it, you are what you do. And now who are you when your way
01:01:20 of life, as well as your way of earning a living is no longer available?
01:01:24 Yeah. And it feels like that yearning for self esteem that we could talk a little bit more,
01:01:29 because you about defining self esteem is quite interesting. The more I’ve read Warm at the Core
01:01:36 and just in general, your thinking, it made me realize I haven’t thought enough about the idea
01:01:43 of self esteem. But the thing I want to say is, it feels like when you lose your self esteem,
01:01:49 it feels like when you lose your job, then it’s easy to find, it’s tempting to find that self
01:01:58 esteem in a tribe that’s not somehow often positive. It’s like a tribe that defines itself
01:02:07 on the hatred of somebody else.
01:02:09 So that’s brilliant. And this is what John Gray, the philosopher in the 1990s,
01:02:15 predicted what’s happening today. He wrote a book about globalism. And actually Hannah Arendt in
01:02:22 the 1950s said the same thing in her book about totalitarianism. When she said that, you know,
01:02:31 that economics has reached the point where most money is made, not by actually making stuff,
01:02:39 you know, you use money to make money. And therefore, what happens is money chases money
01:02:48 across national boundaries. Ultimately, governments become subordinate to the corporate
01:02:57 entities whose sole function is to generate money. And what John Gray said is that that will
01:03:06 inevitably produce economic upheaval in local areas, which will not be attributed to the
01:03:17 economic order. It will be misattributed to whoever the scapegoat du jour is, and the anger
01:03:26 and the distress associated with that uncertainty will be picked up on by ideological demagogues
01:03:37 who will transform that into rage. So both Hannah Arendt as well as John Gray, they just said,
01:03:46 watch out, we’re gonna have right wingish populist movements where demagogues who are the alchemists
01:03:57 of hate, what makes them brilliant is they don’t, the hate’s already there, but they take the fears
01:04:07 and they expertly redirect them to who it is that I need to hate and kill in order to feel
01:04:15 good about myself. So back to your point, Lex, that’s right. So the self regard that used to come
01:04:23 from having a job and doing it well, and as a result of that, having adequate resources to
01:04:30 provide a decent life for your family, well, those opportunities are gone. And yeah, what’s left?
01:04:39 So Max Weber, German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in times of historical
01:04:47 upheaval, we are apt to embrace, he was the one who coined the term charismatic leader, seemingly
01:04:54 larger than life individuals who often believe or their followers believe are divinely ordained to
01:05:02 rid the world of evil. All right, now, Ernest Becker, he used Weber’s ideas in order to account
01:05:11 for the rise of Hitler. Hitler was elected, and he was elected when Germans were in an extraordinary
01:05:19 state of existential distress, and he said, I’m gonna make Germany great again. All right, now,
01:05:28 what Becker adds to the equation is his claim that what underlies our affection for charismatic
01:05:37 populist leaders, good and bad, is death anxiety. All right, now, here’s where we come in,
01:05:45 we’re egghead experimental researchers. Becker wrote this book, The Denial of Death, and he
01:05:52 couldn’t get a job. People just dismiss these ideas as fanciful speculation for which there’s
01:06:00 no evidence. And you’ve done some good experiments. Yeah, here’s where I can be more cavalier,
01:06:07 and where what I would urge people, like what you said, Lex, is ignore my histrionic and polemic
01:06:15 language, if possible, and step back, if you can, myself included, and let’s just consider
01:06:23 the research findings. Because in September 11, 2001, people that are old enough to remember that
01:06:34 horrible day, two days before, George W. Bush had the lowest approval rating in the history of
01:06:42 presidential polling. All right, three weeks later, after he said, we will rid the world of the
01:06:48 evildoers, and then a week or two after that, he said in a cover story on Time magazine that he
01:06:55 believed that God had chosen him to lead the world during this, to lead the country, rather, during
01:07:01 this perilous time, he had the highest approval rating. And so we’re like, well, what happened?
01:07:07 You know, what happened to Americans that their approval of President Bush got so high so fast?
01:07:16 Well, our view, following Becker, is that 2001 was like a giant death reminder. The people dying,
01:07:25 plus the symbols of American greatness, World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So we did a bunch
01:07:33 of experiments, and most of our experiments are disarmingly simple. We have one group of
01:07:37 people, and we just remind them that they’re going to die. We say, hey, write your thoughts
01:07:42 and feelings about dying. Or in other cases, we stop them outside, either in front of a funeral
01:07:48 home or 100 meters to either side. Our thought being that if we stop you in front of a funeral
01:07:55 home, then death is on your mind, even if you don’t know it. And then there’s other studies,
01:07:59 they’re even more subtle, where we bring people into the lab, and they read stuff on a computer,
01:08:05 and while they’re doing that, we flash the word death for 28 milliseconds. It’s so fast,
01:08:11 you don’t see anything. And then we just measure people’s reactions or behavior thereafter. So what
01:08:19 we found in 2003, leading up to the election of 2004, was that Americans did not care for President
01:08:29 Bush or his policies in Iraq in controlled conditions. But if we reminded them of their
01:08:37 mortality first, they liked Bush a lot more. So in every study that we did, Americans liked John
01:08:45 Kerry, who was running against Bush, they liked Kerry more than Bush.
01:08:49 Policy wise, in a controlled…
01:08:52 In a controlled condition. But if they were reminded of death first, then they liked Bush
01:09:00 a lot more.
01:09:01 So by the way, just a small pause, you said they’re discerningly simple experiments.
01:09:06 I think that’s, and people should read Warm at the Core for some other description,
01:09:11 you have a lot of different experiments of this nature. I think it’s a brilliant experiment
01:09:16 connected to the Stoics, perhaps, of how your worldview on anything and how delicious that
01:09:22 water tastes after you’re reminded of your own mortality. It’s such a fascinating experiment
01:09:28 that you could probably keep doing like millions of them to draw insight about the way we see the
01:09:36 world.
01:09:37 No, that’s right, Lex. And I appreciate the compliment, not because we did anything,
01:09:42 but because what these studies, many of which are now done by other people around the world
01:09:49 in labs that we’re not connected with, what I’m most proud about our work. I am proud
01:09:54 of the experiments that we’ve done. But it’s not science until somebody else can replicate
01:09:59 your findings and independent researchers are interested in pursuing them.
01:10:05 It’s such a fascinating idea. I don’t… I have to think about
01:10:08 a lot about the experiments you’ve done and that you’ve inspired, about the fact that death
01:10:14 changes the way you see a bunch of different things. I think the Stoics talked about the,
01:10:21 I mean, in general, just memento mori, like just thinking about death and meditating on death is a
01:10:28 really positive, not a positive, it’s an enlightening way to live life. So what do you
01:10:37 think about that at the individual level? Like, what is the role about being, bringing that terror
01:10:45 of death, fear of death to the surface and being cognizant of it?
01:10:48 For us, that’s the ball game. So what I’m trying to say is that
01:10:56 so what we write in our book and here we’re just paying homage to the philosophers and
01:11:06 theologians that come before us is to point out that literally since antiquity, there has been
01:11:17 a consensus that to lead a full life requires, Albert Camus said, come to terms with death,
01:11:28 thereafter anything is possible. And so you’ve got the Stoics and you’ve got the Epicureans and
01:11:37 then you’ve got the Tibetan Book of the Dead and then you’ve got like the medieval monks that,
01:11:43 you know, worked with like a skull on their desk. And the whole idea, I should back up a bit because
01:11:52 and just remind folks that our studies, you know, when we remind people that they’re going to die
01:11:59 and we find that, yeah, they drink more water if a famous person is, you know, advertising it,
01:12:08 but they eat more cookies. They want more fancy clothes. They sit closer to people that look like
01:12:16 them. It changes who they vote for. But all of those things, those are very subtle death reminders.
01:12:23 You don’t even know that death is on your mind. And so our point is that, and this is kind of
01:12:29 counterintuitive, and that is that the most problematic and unsavory human reactions to death
01:12:38 anxiety are malignant manifestations of repressed death anxiety. You know, we try and bury it under
01:12:45 the psychological bushes and then it comes back to bear bitter fruit. But what the theologians and
01:12:52 the philosophers of the world are saying is it behooves each of us to spend considerable time.
01:13:02 You don’t have to be a goth death rocker, you know, wallowing in death imagery to spend enough
01:13:11 time entertaining the reality of the human condition, which is that you too will pass
01:13:18 to get to the point where there is, to lapse into a cliche, the capacity for personal transformation
01:13:31 and growth. Let’s go personal for a second. Are you yourself afraid of death? Yeah.
01:13:41 And how much do you meditate on that thought? Like, maybe your own study of it is a kind of
01:13:49 escape from your own mortality. Absolutely. So you got it. And like, if you figure out death,
01:13:55 somehow you won’t die. So no, no. So my my colleagues and good friends, Jeff Greenberg
01:14:01 and Tom Posinski, you know, we met in graduate school in the 1970s. We’ve been doing this work
01:14:06 for 40 years. And we cheerfully admit, even though it doesn’t reflect well on us as humans,
01:14:16 that I should just speak for myself. But I feel like there’s a real sense in which doing these
01:14:23 studies and writing books and lecturing has been my way of avoiding directly confronting my anxiety.
01:14:34 Directly confronting my anxieties by turning it into an intellectual exercise. And every once
01:14:43 in a while, therefore, when I think that I’m making some progress as a human, I have to remind
01:14:48 myself that that is probably not the case. And I have at times, like all humans, been more
01:14:59 preoccupied with the implications of these ideas for my self esteem as like, oh, we’re going to
01:15:05 write a book and maybe we’ll get to go on TV or something. Well, no, that’s not the same as to
01:15:15 actually think about it in a way that you feel it rather than just think it.
01:15:23 Yeah, like you did when you were eight. Exactly right. So when I first read The Denial of Death,
01:15:30 I was so literally flabbergasted by it that I took a leave of absence for a year
01:15:37 and just like did what would be considered menial jobs. I did construction work. I worked in a
01:15:43 restaurant. And I was just like, well, wait a minute. If I understand what this guy is saying,
01:15:54 then I’m just a culturally constructed meat puppet doing things for reasons that I know not
01:16:04 in order to assuage death anxiety. And I was like, that’s not acceptable.
01:16:10 Maybe another interesting person to talk about is Ernest Becker himself.
01:16:16 So how did he face his death? Is there something interesting, personal?
01:16:24 I think so. So interesting to me is Becker also from a Jewish family, claimed to be
01:16:35 the atheistic, did not identify ultimately as Jewish. I believe he converted to Christianity,
01:16:47 but was himself a religious person. And he said he became religious when his first child was born.
01:16:55 Now religious, what does that mean? Does he have a faith? Well, let’s talk more. Most importantly,
01:17:03 is the afterlife. What’s his view on the afterlife? He was agnostic on that, but he did.
01:17:11 Now the denial of death is, there’s a chapter devoted to Kierkegaard. And he talks about
01:17:23 for Kierkegaard, if you want to become a mature individual, if you want to learn something,
01:17:30 you go to the university. If you want to become a more mature individual, according to Kierkegaard,
01:17:36 you got to go to the school of anxiety. And what Kierkegaard said is that we have to let this vague
01:17:45 dis ease, put a hyphen between dis and ease about death. Kierkegaard’s point is you have to really
01:17:54 think about that. You have to think about it and feel it. You got to let it seek in or seep into
01:18:03 your mind. At which point, according to Kierkegaard, basically you realize that your
01:18:14 present identity is fundamentally a cultural construction. You didn’t choose the time and
01:18:19 place of your birth. You didn’t choose your name. You didn’t choose necessarily even the social
01:18:27 role that you occupy. You might’ve chosen from what’s available in your culture, but not from
01:18:32 the full palette of human opportunities. And so what Kierkegaard said is that we need to realize
01:18:40 that we’ve been living a lie of sorts. Becker calls it a necessary lie. And we have to momentarily
01:18:51 dispose of that. And so now Kierkegaard says, well, here I am. I have shrugged off all of the
01:19:00 all of the cultural accoutrements that I have used to define myself. And now what am I or who am I?
01:19:11 This is like the ancient Greek tragedy where the worst thing was to be no one or no thing. At this
01:19:19 point, Kierkegaard said, you’re really dangling on the precipice of oblivion. And some people
01:19:26 tumble into that abyss and never come out. On the other hand, Kierkegaard said that
01:19:34 what you can now do metaphorically and literally is to rebuild yourself from the ground up. And
01:19:40 there’s a, in the new Testament, there’s something you have to die in order to be reborn. And
01:19:46 Kierkegaard’s view though, is that there’s only one way to do that. This is his proverbial leap
01:19:51 into faith. And in Kierkegaard’s case, it was faith in Christianity, that you can’t have unbridled
01:20:01 faith in cultural constructions. The only thing that you can have unequivocal faith in is some
01:20:09 kind of transcendent power. All right. But of course, this raises the question of, well, is that
01:20:17 just another death denying belief system? And at the end of the denial of death, Becker admits
01:20:26 that there’s no way to tell while still advocating for what is ultimately a religious stance. Now,
01:20:35 one of the things that I don’t understand, and Becker has been the most singularly potent
01:20:41 influence in my academic and personal life, but a year or two ago, I started reading Martin
01:20:50 Heidegger. I’m reading Being and Time. And what I now wonder is why Becker, who refers to Heidegger
01:21:02 from time to time in his work, why he didn’t take Heidegger more seriously. Because Heidegger
01:21:08 is like a secular Kierkegaard. He has the same thing, which is death anxiety. Oh, and I should
01:21:16 have pointed out that what Kierkegaard says is that death anxiety, most people don’t go to the
01:21:22 school of anxiety. They flee from death anxiety by embracing their cultural beliefs. Kierkegaard
01:21:32 says they then tranquilize themselves with the trivial. And I love that phrase. It’s a beautiful
01:21:39 phrase because at the end of the denial of death, Becker’s like, look, the average American is
01:21:44 either drinking or shopping or watching television, and they’re all the same thing, right? Heidegger
01:21:50 says the same thing. He says, look, and he acknowledges Kierkegaard. He says, what makes us
01:21:56 feel unsettled? And evidently, that’s an English translation of angst, that we don’t feel at home
01:22:06 in the world. Heidegger says that’s death anxiety. And one direction is the Kierkegaard one.
01:22:14 Heidegger calls it a flight from death. You just unself reflexively cling to your cultural
01:22:21 constructions. And Heidegger borrows the term tranquilized, but he points out that he doesn’t
01:22:30 care for that term because tranquilized sounds like you’re subdued. When in fact, what most
01:22:38 culturally constructed meat puppets do is to be frenetically engaged with their surroundings to
01:22:44 ensure that they never sit still long enough to actually think about anything consequential.
01:22:49 Heidegger says there’s another way, though. He’s like, yo, what you can do is to come to terms with
01:22:57 that death anxiety in the following way. Thing number one is to realize that not only are you
01:23:06 going to die, but your death can happen at any given moment. So for Heidegger, if you say, I know
01:23:15 I’m going to die in some vaguely unspecified future moment, that’s still death denial because you’re
01:23:22 saying, yeah, not me, not now. Heidegger’s point is you need to get to the point where you need to
01:23:31 realize that I need to realize that I can walk outside and get smote by a comet, or I can stop
01:23:41 for gas on the way home and catch the virus and be dead in two days, or any number of potentially
01:23:48 unanticipated and uncontrollable fatal outcomes.
01:23:51 That’s brilliant, by the way. Sorry. To bring it to the now.
01:23:57 Yeah, it is brilliant. I agree, Lex, and that’s just why I’m wondering why didn’t Becker notice
01:24:03 this? Because that’s the being and time thing, is it’s got to be now. And then he says, so okay,
01:24:09 so now I’ve dealt somewhat with the death part. And now he says, now you’ve got to deal with what he
01:24:20 calls existential guilt. And he says, well, all right, you have to realize that like it or not,
01:24:31 you have to make choices. This is Jean Paul Sartre, we are condemned by virtue of consciousness to
01:24:37 choosing. But Heidegger is a little bit more precise. He’s like, look, as I was saying earlier,
01:24:45 you’re in reality, you’re an insignificant speck of respiring carbon based dust born into a time
01:24:55 and place not of your choosing when you’re here for a microscopic amount of time after which you
01:25:02 are not. And for Heidegger, you have to realize that, like I said, I didn’t choose to be born a
01:25:13 male or Jewish or in America, the offspring of working class people. And Heidegger, what he says
01:25:24 is, yeah, but you still have to make choices and accept responsibility for those choices,
01:25:34 even though you didn’t choose any of the parameters that ultimately limit what’s available
01:25:39 to you. And moreover, you’re going to not always make good choices. So now you’re guilty for your
01:25:51 choices. And then he uses the poet Rilke, he has a phrase, Becker uses it in The Denial of Death,
01:26:03 the guilt of unlived life. I just love that. You have to accept that you have already diminished
01:26:14 and in many ways amputated your own possibilities by virtue of choices that you’ve made or just as
01:26:23 often have declined to make because you are reluctant to accept responsibility for the
01:26:33 opportunities that you are now able to create by virtue of seeing the possibilities that lay before
01:26:42 you. So anyway, Heidegger then says, look, OK, so, you know, I’m a professor and I live in America
01:26:52 in the 21st century. Well, if I was in the third century living in a year in Mongolia, I’m not
01:27:00 going to have an opportunity to be a professor. But what he submits is that there is some aspects
01:27:10 of whatever I am that are independent of my cultural and historical circumstances. In other
01:27:19 words, there is a me of sorts. Heidegger would take vigorous issue and so would Heidegger’s
01:27:23 scholars because I’m not claiming to understand him. This is my classic comic book rendering.
01:27:29 But Heidegger’s point is that you get to the point where you’re able to say, OK,
01:27:34 I am a contingent historical and cultural artifact. But so what? You know, if I was,
01:27:44 you know, if I was transported a thousand years in the past in Asia, I’d be in the same situation.
01:27:52 I would still be conditioned by time and place. I would still have choices that I could make
01:27:58 within the confines of what opportunities are afforded to me. And then Heidegger says,
01:28:06 if I can get that far in this is his language. He says that there is a transformation and he
01:28:14 literally he calls it a turning. You’re turning away from a flight from death and you are allowed
01:28:22 you therefore you see a horizon is his word of opportunity that makes you in a state of
01:28:33 anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an
01:28:44 adventure perfused with unshakable joy. Let me unpack those things. It is beautiful. It is. I
01:28:54 love, Lex, that you’re resonating to the time thing. So he’s like, OK, we already talked about
01:28:59 now. Anticipatory is is already hopeful because it’s looking forward to be resolute. It means to
01:29:09 trust and to just have confidence in what you’re doing moving forward. All right. Solicitous. I
01:29:19 had to look up all these words, by the way. It just means that you are concerned about your
01:29:25 fellow human beings. And but I love the idea, even if it seems allegorical, I don’t mind that
01:29:34 at all. This idea you said love earlier. And I think that when Heidegger is talking about being
01:29:41 solicitous, that’s as close as he can get. There’s an Italian. Yes. So what was that line again with
01:29:49 the solicitous of the whole thing of turning away from death? And all the words you said are just
01:29:56 beautiful. I love those words. Yeah. Anticipatory resoluteness that is accompanied with solicitous
01:30:02 regard to our fellow humans, which makes life appear to us to be an ongoing adventure that is
01:30:12 permeated by unshakable joy. Now, again, Heidegger is not Mary Poppins. This I just got a tattoo.
01:30:20 I know. This is great. I just love that exact quote. No, I’m piecing together. These are his
01:30:28 exact words that and I spent the last two years reading almost everything that I can find because
01:30:35 I want to. I’m sick of death. You said it. So I want to second what you say, Lex. So it’s not
01:30:42 about death. It’s the Sherwood Anderson guy. He’s a novelist that I like about. He wrote a book
01:30:49 in Lyonsburg, Ohio. And now I’m going to forget what he said on his tombstone. But, you know, it
01:30:57 was something to the effect. Oh, he said life, not death is the great adventure. The point being is
01:31:05 that, you know, to consider that we must die and the existential implications of that, really,
01:31:15 the goal, the way I see it is getting from hate to love. And I feel like Heidegger has
01:31:26 a way of thinking about things that moves us more in that direction. And so that’s kind of my
01:31:34 current preoccupation is to take what I just said to you and to talk about it with my colleagues
01:31:44 and other academic psychologists, because the way we started with Ernest Becker,
01:31:50 remember I said earlier, I wasn’t trained in any of these things. I’m an egghead
01:31:56 researcher that was doing experiments about biofeedback. And, you know, then we read these
01:32:02 Becker books, and I thought they were so interesting that for the first few years,
01:32:08 we didn’t have any studies. I just would travel around and I’d be like, here’s what this Becker
01:32:13 guy says. I think this is cool. Well, my present view is I’m like, here’s what this Heidegger guy
01:32:20 says. I think these ideas are consistent with what Becker is saying because they are anchored in
01:32:30 death anxiety. But I like that direction as an alternative to the Kierkegaardian insistence that
01:32:41 the only psychologically tenable way to extricate ourselves from maladaptive reactions to death
01:32:51 anxiety is through faith in the traditional sense. Yeah, I always kind of saw Kierkegaard unfairly,
01:33:00 like you said, in a comic book sense of the word faith as a non traditional sense. I kind of like
01:33:06 the idea of leap of faith. Oh, I love that idea. And so what I’ve been babbling about with, you
01:33:11 know, Heidegger, I’m like, yeah, Kierkegaard is a leap of faith in God. Heidegger is a leap of faith
01:33:21 in life. And I just like it. I found the leap of faith really interesting in the technological
01:33:29 space. So I’ve talked to on this thing with Elon Musk, but I think he’s also just in general for
01:33:37 our culture, a really important figure. Oh, absolutely. That takes, I mean, sometimes a
01:33:43 little bit insane on social media and just in life. When I met him, it was kind of interesting
01:33:51 that, of course, there’s, I mean, he’s a legit engineer, so he’s fun to talk to about the
01:33:56 technical things, but he also just the way the humor and the way he sees life, it just like
01:34:05 refuses to be conventional. So it’s a constant leap into the unknown. And one of the things
01:34:14 that he does, and this isn’t even like fake. A lot of people say, cause he’s a CEO,
01:34:20 there’s a business owner. So he’s trying to make money. No, I think I looked him in his eyes. I
01:34:27 mean, this is real, is a lot of the things he believes that are going to be accomplished that
01:34:33 a lot of others are saying are impossible, like autonomous vehicles. He truly believes it. To me,
01:34:39 that is the leap of faith of I’m almost going like, we’re like the entirety of our experience
01:34:45 is shrouded in mystery. We don’t know what the hell’s going to happen. We don’t know what we’re
01:34:50 actually capable of as human beings. And he just takes the leap. He fully believes that we can,
01:34:56 you know, we can go to, we can colonize Mars. I mean, how, how crazy is it to just believe and
01:35:04 dream and actually be taking steps towards it to colonizing Mars when most people are like,
01:35:10 that’s the stupidest idea ever. Yeah. Well, I’m, I’m in agreement with you on that. You know,
01:35:16 two things, you know, one is it reminds me of Ben Franklin who in his autobiography,
01:35:21 you know, has a similarly childish in the best sense of the word, unbridled imagination for what
01:35:31 might become, you know, Ben Franklin’s like, yeah, I got electricity. That’s cool, but we’ll be
01:35:37 levitating soon. And I, we can’t even begin to imagine what we are capable of. And of course,
01:35:45 people are like, dude, that’s crazy. And there’s a guy with it’s FCS Schiller, some humanistic guy
01:35:53 at the beginning of the 20th century. He’s like, you know, lots of things that people think about
01:36:05 may appear to be absurd to the point of obscene. But the reality is historically
01:36:13 every fantastic innovation has generally been initiated by someone who was condemned
01:36:22 for being a lunatic. And it’s not that anything is possible, but surely things that we don’t try
01:36:31 will never manifest as possibilities. Yeah. And that’s, that’s that there’s something beautiful
01:36:38 to that. That’s the embracing the abyss. And again, it’s like the, it’s the embracing the
01:36:46 fear of death, the reality of death and then turning and to look at all the opportunities.
01:36:54 That’s right. Let me ask you, whenever I bring up Ernest Becker’s work, which I do and yours
01:36:59 is quite a bit, I find it surprising how that it’s not a lot more popular in a sense that,
01:37:11 no, we’re not, I don’t mean just your book. That’s well written. People should read it,
01:37:16 should buy it, whatever. I think it has the same kind of qualities that are useful to think about
01:37:23 as like Jordan Peterson’s work and stuff like that. But I just mean like why people are not,
01:37:32 don’t think of that as a compelling description of the core of the human condition. Like,
01:37:42 I think what you mentioned about Heidegger is quite, connects with me quite well. So I ask
01:37:47 on this podcast, I often ask people if they’re afraid of death. That’s like almost every single
01:37:52 part. I almost always get criticized for asking world class people, scientists and technologists
01:38:00 about fear of death and the meaning of life. And on the fear of death, they often
01:38:09 like don’t say anything interesting. What I mean by that is they haven’t thought deeply about it.
01:38:16 Like you kind of brought this up a few times of really letting it sink in. They kind of say this
01:38:22 thing about what exactly you said, which is like, it’s something that happens not today. Like I’m
01:38:29 aware that it’s something that happens. And I’m not, the thing they usually say is I’m not afraid
01:38:34 of death. I just want to live a good life kind of thing. And what I’m trying to express is like when
01:38:42 I look in their eyes and the kind of the core of the conversation, it looks like they haven’t
01:38:47 really become, like they haven’t really meditated on death. I guess the question is, what do I say
01:38:54 to people that there’s something to really think about here? Like there’s some demons, some realities
01:39:04 that need to be faced by more people. Well, that’s a tough one. You know, I could tell you what not to
01:39:10 do. So when we are young and annoying, a lot of famous people, mostly psychologists because that’s
01:39:19 who we intersected with, we would lay out these ideas and they would be, well, I don’t think
01:39:29 about death like that. So these ideas must be wrong. And we would say, well, you don’t think
01:39:37 about death because you’re lucky enough to be comfortably ensconced in a cultural worldview
01:39:44 from which you derive self esteem. And that has spared you the existential excruciations that
01:39:50 would otherwise arise. But that’s like Freud. You know, you’re repressing, so you either agree with
01:39:57 me in which case I’m right, or you disagree with me in which case you’re repressing and I’m right.
01:40:04 Well, so that’s the Nietzsche thing. What I felt when I’ve, there’ve been moments in my life
01:40:11 when I really thought about death. I mean, there’s not too many. Like really, really thought about it
01:40:17 and feel the thing when you felt that eight, maybe I’m traumatizing or romanticizing it. But
01:40:23 I feel like it’s, the conservatives call it popularly like, or the movie Matrix call it the
01:40:31 red pill moment. I feel like it’s a dangerous thought because I feel like I’m taking a step
01:40:39 out of a society. Like there’s a nice narrative that we’ve all constructed and I’m taking a step
01:40:45 out. And it feels, there’s this feeling like you’re basically drowning. I mean, it’s not a
01:40:55 good feeling. It is not. But this gets back to the Heidegger Kierkegaard school of anxiety. You are
01:41:00 stepping out and you are momentarily shrugging off, again, the culturally constructed psychological
01:41:09 accoutrements that allow you to stand up in the morning. And so, I mean, in that sense, it feels
01:41:18 like, I mean, how do you have that conversation? Because I guess I’m dancing around a set of
01:41:29 questions, which is like, I guess I’m disappointed that people don’t, are not as willing to step
01:41:37 outside. Like even just, even any kind of thought experiment. Forget denial of death. Like
01:41:48 there’s not a community of people. Let’s take an easy one that I think is scientifically
01:41:53 ridiculous, which is, there’s a community of people that believe that the earth is flat. Or
01:41:59 actually even better, the space is fake. Like what I find surprising is that a lot of people I talk
01:42:09 to are not willing to be like, imagine if it is, like imagine the earth is flat. Like think about
01:42:18 it. Like a lot of people are just like, no, the earth is round. They’re like scientists too. They’re
01:42:25 like, yeah, well actually, wait, have you actually like thought about it? Like imagine like a thought
01:42:31 experiment that like basically step outside the little narrative that we are comfortable with. Now
01:42:38 that one in particular is, has really strong evidence and scientific validation. So it’s
01:42:48 pretty simple thing to show that it at least is not flat. But just the willingness to take a step
01:42:56 outside of the stories that bring us comfort, it’s been disappointing that people are not willing to
01:43:03 do that. And I think the philosophy that you’ve constructed and that Ernest Becker is constructing,
01:43:09 you’ve tested, I think is really compelling. And the fact that people aren’t often willing to take
01:43:14 that step. It’s disappointing. Well, yes, but perhaps understandable. I mean, one of this is
01:43:21 an anecdote, of course, but when we were trying to get a publisher for our book, we had a meeting
01:43:30 with a publisher who published some Malcolm Gladwell books. And she said, I’m very interested
01:43:41 in your book, but can you write it without mentioning death? Because people don’t like death.
01:43:47 And we’re like, no, it’s really kind of central. And I think that’s part of it. I think, again,
01:43:56 if these ideas have merit, and I actually like the way that you put it, Lex, it’s that to step away
01:44:06 is to momentarily expose yourself to all of the anxiety that our identity and our beliefs
01:44:20 typically enable us to manage. I think it’s as simple as that.
01:44:24 Yeah, I had this experience in college with my best friend who got really high. And he forgot,
01:44:36 it was in the winter, it was really freezing. It was memorable to me. I think it’s an analogy,
01:44:41 it’s very useful. So he went to get some pizza. And he left me outside and said,
01:44:53 I’ll be back in five minutes. And he forgot that he left me outside. And I remember it was,
01:44:59 I was in shorts, it was freezing winter. And I remember standing outside, it’s a dorm,
01:45:05 and I’m looking from the outside in, it’s a light and it’s warm. And I’m just standing there frozen,
01:45:12 I think for an hour or more. And that’s how I think about it. I don’t give a damn about the
01:45:19 stupid winter. I’m drawn to be back to the warm. And that’s how I feel about thinking about death.
01:45:29 At a certain point, it’s too much. It’s like that cold. I wanna be back into the warm.
01:45:37 Getting back to Heidegger for a moment. He uses a lot the idea of feeling at home,
01:45:46 not as like in your house, but just feeling like you’re comfortably situated.
01:45:52 Maybe you could talk about, like I had a conversation about this with my dad a little bit.
01:45:58 How does religion relate to this?
01:46:01 I see it as the disease and the cure. In a sense, a few things. One is that I think a case could be
01:46:18 made that humans are innately religious. So now we’re gonna get into territory where there’s gonna
01:46:26 be a lot of disputes. And what do you mean by religious?
01:46:33 Religion is an evolutionary adaptation.
01:46:36 And religion is like a belief in something outside of yourself kind of thing?
01:46:42 Not necessarily. So here we gotta be a little bit more careful. And again, I’m not a scholar.
01:46:50 How about I’m a well intentioned dilettante in this regard? Because what I have read is that
01:47:00 religion evolved very early on, long before our ancestors were conscious and the issue of death
01:47:11 arose. And the word religion evidently is from a Latin word, regatear. We can look it up. And it
01:47:22 means to bind. And Emile Durkheim, the dead French sociologist, he said, you know, originally
01:47:31 religion is Darce Lassing, who’s a dead novelist. She calls it the substance of we feeling that it’s
01:47:40 literally that it arose because we’re uber social creatures who from time to time took comfort in
01:47:51 just being in physical proximity with our fellow humans. And that there is this kind of sense of
01:48:03 transcendent exuberance, just back to the unshakable joy that Heidegger alludes to.
01:48:11 And that the original function of religion was to foster social cohesion and coordination. And that
01:48:21 it was only subsequently some claim that a burgeoning level of consciousness made it such that
01:48:30 religious belief systems that included the hope of some kind of
01:48:37 immortality were just naturally selected thereafter. So there are some people. So
01:48:46 it’s David Sloan Wilson wrote a book called Darwin’s Cathedral. And he said,
01:48:53 religion has nothing to do with death. It’s evolved to make groups viable. He’s actually
01:49:00 a group selection guy. What’s group selection? The idea that it’s the group that is selected
01:49:07 for rather than the individual. Yeah, so people have vigorous disagreements about that. But I
01:49:12 guess our point would be, we see religion as being inextricably connected, ultimately, to assuaging
01:49:21 concerns about death. Well, I guess another question to ask around this, like, what does
01:49:30 the world look like without religion? Will we, if it’s inextricably connected to our fears of death,
01:49:41 do you think it always returns in some kind of shape? Maybe it’s not called religion, but whatever,
01:49:47 it just keeps returning? Yeah, who knows? So that’s a great question, Lex. So there’s a woman named
01:49:51 Karen Armstrong. She was a nun turned historian. And she’s, I can’t remember the name of the book,
01:50:02 but no matter. She, we could look that up, but… If you want, I can look it up, but I can also,
01:50:08 I’ll just add it in post. Yeah, her point, it says God in the title, of course.
01:50:13 But she’s like, look, all religions are generally fairly right minded in that they advocate the
01:50:23 golden rule. And all religions, at their best, do seem to foster pro social behavior towards the
01:50:35 in group. And that confers both psychological as well as physical benefits. That’s the good news.
01:50:44 And the bad news is historically all religions are subject to being hijacked by a lunatic fringe
01:50:54 who declares that, you know, they’re the ones in sole possession of the world.
01:51:02 Sole possession of the liturgical practices or whatever they call them.
01:51:10 And they’re the ones that turn, you know, religion at its best into your crusades and holocausts.
01:51:19 Yeah. My view, not that it should matter for much, but I grew up just skeptical of religion
01:51:32 because I’m like, as a kid, I’m like, well, if we didn’t have these beliefs,
01:51:39 we wouldn’t be killing each other because of them. And I’d be like to my parents,
01:51:45 well, you’re telling me that all people should be judged on the merits of their character,
01:51:51 but don’t come home if you don’t marry a Jewish woman. Right. Which is implying that if you’re
01:51:58 not Jewish, you’re an inferior form of life. Yeah. That’s what tribes always do.
01:52:02 And there’s the tribal thing. And so there’s a guy named Amin Malouf, a Lebanese guy who writes
01:52:08 in French in the 1990s, I think wrote a book called In the Name of Identity, Violence and
01:52:17 the Need to Belong. And that was his point is unless we can overcome this tribal mentality,
01:52:29 this will not end well. But you said earlier something, Lex, that I think is profound and
01:52:35 profoundly important. And that is you did not recoil in horror when I mentioned Kierkegaard’s
01:52:44 use of the term faith. And so I’m a big fan of faith and I’m not sure what that implies.
01:52:56 And by the way, this is just a peripheral comment, but I find less resistance to Becker’s ideas in
01:53:04 our work when I’m in Jesuit schools. It’s the Americans, the secular humanists who
01:53:14 are most disinclined to accept these ideas. It’s an important side comment because I think it’s
01:53:21 mostly because they don’t think philosophically. I speak with a lot of scientists and I think that’s
01:53:27 my main criticism. I mean, that’s the problem with science is it’s so comforting to focus in
01:53:37 on the details that you can escape thinking about the mystery of it all, the big picture things,
01:53:43 the philosophical, like the fact that you don’t actually know shit at all. So in terms of Jesuit,
01:53:52 like that’s the beauty of the experience of faith and so on is like, wherever that journey takes you
01:54:01 is you actually explore the biggest questions of our world. So I don’t see religion going away
01:54:07 because I don’t see humans as capable of surviving without faith and hope. And
01:54:19 then everyone from the Pope to Elon Musk will acknowledge that it is a world that is unfathomably
01:54:29 mysterious. And like it or not, in the absence of beliefs, here I’m Charles Peirce, the pragmatic
01:54:38 philosopher, he just said beliefs are the basis of action. If you don’t have any beliefs, you’re
01:54:44 paralyzed with indecision, whether we’re aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, in order to
01:54:50 stand up in the morning, you have to subscribe to beliefs that can never be unequivocally proven
01:54:59 right or wrong. Well, then why do you maintain them? Well, ultimately it’s because of some form
01:55:07 of faith. But also faith shouldn’t be a dogmatic thing that you should always be leaping.
01:55:17 I guess the problem with science or with religion is you can sort of all of a sudden
01:55:25 take a step into a place where you’re super confident that you know the absolute truth of
01:55:30 things. There you go. And again, back to Socrates, Plato, back in the cave. At Skidmore, where I
01:55:37 work, that’s what I have the students read in their first week. And Plato’s like, oh, look at
01:55:44 all those poor bastards. They’re in the cave, but they don’t know it. And then they are freed from
01:55:51 their chains. And they have to be dragged out of the cave, by the way, which is another interesting
01:55:56 point. They don’t run out. But that gets back to why people don’t like to be divested of their
01:56:02 comfortable illusions. But anyway, they get dragged out of the cave into the sunlight,
01:56:07 which he claims is a representation of truth and beauty. And I say to the students, well,
01:56:13 what’s wrong with that? And they’re like, nothing. That’s like awesome. And then I’m like, yo, dudes,
01:56:21 you’re out of the cave, but how do you know that you’re not in another cave? The illumination may
01:56:29 be better. But the minute you think you’re at the end of the proverbial intellectual slash
01:56:41 epistemological trail, then you have already succumbed to either laziness or dogmatism or
01:56:50 both. That’s really well put. That’s both terrifying and exciting that there’s always
01:56:57 a bigger cave. A little bit of an out there question, but I think some of the interesting
01:57:03 qualities of the human mind is the ideas of intelligence and consciousness. So what do you
01:57:11 make of consciousness? So do you think death creates consciousness, like the fear of death,
01:57:19 the terror of death creates consciousness and consciousness in turn magnifies the terror of
01:57:29 death? I do. Like what is consciousness to you? Don’t ask me that. So now if I could answer that,
01:57:37 you know, I’d be chugging rum out of a coconut with my Nobel prize that, you know, it’s literally,
01:57:43 you know, Steven Pinker, I do agree with his claim and I think how the mind works, that it is the
01:57:51 key question for the psychological sciences broadly defined in the 21st century.
01:58:01 What is consciousness?
01:58:02 Yeah, what is consciousness? And I don’t think it’s an epiphenomenological afterthought. So a
01:58:09 lot of people, I think Dan Wagner at Harvard, a lot of folks consider it just the ass end of a
01:58:19 process that by the time we are aware of what it is, it’s just basically an integrated rendering
01:58:30 of something that’s already happened. You know, evidently there’s a half second delay between
01:58:37 when something happens, you know, those studies and our awareness of it.
01:58:43 And that’s where like ideas of free will will step in. You can explain away a lot of stuff.
01:58:47 And I think those are all important and interesting questions. I’m of the persuasion.
01:58:55 I mean, even, not even, but Dawkins and the selfish gene is very thoughtful. Actually,
01:59:05 in a lot of, it’s actually more in notes than in the text of the book, but he’s just like,
01:59:11 it’s hard for me to imagine that consciousness doesn’t have some sort of important and highly
01:59:23 adaptive function. And what Dawkins says is he thought about it in terms of just that we could
01:59:30 do mental simulations, that one possibly extraordinary product of consciousness is to
01:59:40 rather than find out often by adverse consequences through trying something would be to run mental
01:59:50 simulations. And so one possibility is that consciousness is highly adaptive.
01:59:55 Another possibility is Nicholas Humphrey, a British dude who wrote a book about, I think it’s
02:00:01 called Regaining Consciousness. And he hypothesized, I think this is 1980s, maybe even earlier,
02:00:09 that consciousness arose as a way to better predict the behavior of others in social settings,
02:00:18 that by knowing how I feel makes me better able to know how you may be feeling. This is like the
02:00:27 rudiments of a theory of mind. And it really may not have had anything to do with intelligence,
02:00:35 so much as social intelligence.
02:00:37 So in that sense, consciousness is a social construct. It’s just a useful thing for interacting
02:00:46 with other humans. I don’t know, but there seems to be something about realizing your own mortality
02:00:56 that’s somehow intricately connected to the idea of consciousness.
02:00:59 Well, I think so also. So this is where, and Nietzsche, he said a solitary creature would not
02:01:08 need consciousness.
02:01:10 What do you think?
02:01:12 Well, I don’t know what I think about that. And then he goes on to say that consciousness
02:01:18 is the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish. And wow, I was like, dude.
02:01:25 Relax.
02:01:31 Say you were on an island alone, and you saw a reflection of yourself in the water.
02:01:39 If you were alone your whole life.
02:01:40 Yeah, great question. Nietzsche’s view would be that your thoughts of yourself would never
02:01:48 come to mind. I don’t know how I feel about that, though.
02:01:52 In a sense, this sounds weird, but in a sense, I feel like my mental conversation has always
02:02:00 been with death. It’s almost like another notion, like these visualizations of a death
02:02:12 in the cloak. I always felt like I am a living thing, and then there’s an other thing that
02:02:19 is the end of me. And I’m having a conversation with that. So in a sense, that’s the way I
02:02:27 construct the fact that I am a thing is because there’s somebody else that tells me, well,
02:02:36 you won’t be a thing eventually. So this feels like a conversation, perhaps, but that might
02:02:44 be kind of this mental stimulation kind of idea. It’s a conversation with yourself, essentially.
02:02:51 Sure.
02:02:52 Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about that, but I tend to be in agreement with you when
02:03:00 we’re talking about economics more so that we’re deeply social beings. It just feels
02:03:11 like we’re humans. I’m with Harari with the sapiens. We seem to construct ideas on top
02:03:20 of each other, and that’s fundamentally a social process.
02:03:23 Absolutely. I think that’s a fine book. It overlaps considerably with our take on these
02:03:30 matters, and the fact that we get to these points, drawing on different sources, I think
02:03:37 makes me more confident.
02:03:39 It’s so fascinating, just like reading your book, sorry, on a small tangent, that Sapiens
02:03:46 is one of the most popular books in the world. And just reading your book is like, well,
02:03:54 this sounds… I don’t know what makes a popular book.
02:04:01 Well, if you want me to be petty and stupid, I will tell you that from time to time, we
02:04:07 also wonder why our book… Like all books, people can take issue with it, but we thought
02:04:20 it would be a bigger hit, that it would be more widely read.
02:04:24 It’s funny because I’ve… I don’t know if I have good examples because I forgot already,
02:04:31 but I’m often saddened by Franz Kafka. I think he wasn’t known in his life, but I
02:04:37 always wonder these great… Some of the greatest books ever written are completely unknown
02:04:46 during the author’s lifetime. And it’s like, man, for some reason, it’s again, it’s that
02:04:53 identity thing. I think, man, that sucks.
02:04:56 Well, I’m comforted by that. So Van Gogh sold one painting in his life, and evidently Thoreau
02:05:04 sold like 75 copies of Walden. Nietzsche’s books did not sell well.
02:05:12 And how did Ernest Becker sell? His books are published by the free press
02:05:19 and have sold more than any other books that they have published.
02:05:26 So what does that mean? It’s a lot? I don’t know if it’s like Jordan Peterson
02:05:30 Millions, but it’s hundreds of thousands. Was he respected? I just don’t see him…
02:05:37 Okay. I don’t see him brought up as like in the top 10 philosophers of…
02:05:43 No, not at all. So how far away is he? Is he in the top 100
02:05:49 for people? I don’t think so.
02:05:51 He’s not brought up that often. Because again…
02:05:53 Like your work is brought up more often. Yeah.
02:05:55 I think he’s one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.
02:06:03 So what we say, Lex, is that our goal, certainly when we first started and now
02:06:10 just as much actually, but what I say at all my talks is, look, if these ideas have
02:06:16 interest you enough to go read Ernest Becker, then this has been good. I consider him to be
02:06:22 one of the most important voices of the 20th century who does not get the attention that
02:06:30 he deserves. Similarly, our work I believe to be important because point by point we provide
02:06:40 empirical corroboration for all of the claims. So that’s literally the students that read
02:06:51 The Denial of Death and then Escape from Evil. They’re like, yeah, wow, every chapter of the
02:06:57 book, you have studies. And I’m like, yeah, because for 40 years, if a Skidmore student said,
02:07:04 oh, that’s gotta be bullshit. I’m like, well, let’s do a study.
02:07:08 Let’s do a study. And my own dreams are in creating
02:07:14 robots and artificial intelligence systems that a human can love. And I think there’s something
02:07:20 about mortality and fear mortality that is essential for implementing in our AI systems.
02:07:26 And so maybe can you comment on that? So this is a different perspective on your work,
02:07:38 which is like, how do we engineer a human?
02:07:41 Yeah, so, no, this is awesome, Lex. I’m delighted that you said that. First of all,
02:07:45 and I may have mentioned this to you, and I can’t remember because I am seeing now, when you first
02:07:50 contacted me, I had just been told I have to learn more about your work because I’m working with some
02:07:59 very talented people in New York and they’re writing a screenplay for a movie about an artificial
02:08:12 intelligence. It’s a female AI set in like 30 years in the future. And basically the little
02:08:24 twist, this is how I had to read Heidegger. So these people call me and they’re like,
02:08:29 we’re making a movie. It’s based on Becker and your work and Heidegger and this other
02:08:38 philosopher, Levinas, and then another philosopher, Silvia Benzo, who’s an Italian philosopher.
02:08:45 And the long short story is the movie is about supposedly the most advanced artificial
02:08:53 intelligence entity, an embodied one, and who…
02:09:02 Human form?
02:09:03 Human form, who finds out, who is having essentially existential anxieties. And I think
02:09:15 the project is called A Dinner with Her or something, and it doesn’t really matter, but the
02:09:19 punchline is that she finds out that her creator has made her mortal. And so the question is what
02:09:34 happens phenomenologically and behaviorally to an artificial intelligence who now knows that it’s
02:09:47 mortal? And it’s actually the same question that you’re posing. And that is, is that necessary
02:09:57 in order for an AI to approximate humanity?
02:10:03 Yeah, I think, yeah. So the intuition, again, it’s unknown, but I think it’s absolutely,
02:10:08 I think it’s absolutely necessary. A lot of people, the same kind of shallow thinking that people
02:10:17 have about our own end of life, our own death, is the same way people think of, I think, about
02:10:23 artificial intelligence. It’s like, well, okay, so yeah, so within the system, there’s a terminal
02:10:30 position where there’s a point at which it ends, the program ends, there’s a goal state, there’s a,
02:10:38 you reached an end point. But the thing is, making that end a thing that’s also within the program,
02:10:49 like making the thing, and then it’s also the mystery of it. So the thing is, we don’t know
02:10:57 what the hell this death thing is. I mean, it’s not like we, I mean, the program doesn’t give
02:11:06 us information about the meaning of it all. And that’s where the terror is. And it feels like,
02:11:13 I mean, in the language that you would think about is the terror of this death, or like
02:11:21 anticipation of it, or thinking about it, is the creative force that builds everything.
02:11:24 Right. And that feels like, you know, that feels really important to implement. Again,
02:11:32 it’s very difficult to know how to do technically, currently, but it’s important to think about.
02:11:37 What I find is, you mentioned like screenplays and so on, is sci fi folks and philosophers are the
02:11:45 the only ones thinking about it currently. And that’s what these folks have convinced me.
02:11:50 Yeah. And engineers aren’t, which is, I get, yeah, most of the things I talk about, I get kind of
02:12:01 people roll their eyes from the engineer perspective.
02:12:03 Not these folks. They’re like, because again, I saw your name and they’re like,
02:12:08 wait a minute, I’ve just seen that. They’re like, here’s someone.
02:12:13 You should check out.
02:12:14 Yeah. So this was a delightful conference.
02:12:17 Yeah.
02:12:17 I was a huge fan of your work and Ernest Becker. And it’s funny that not enough people are
02:12:27 talking about it. I don’t know what to do with that. I think that there’s a possibility to create
02:12:33 real deep, meaningful connections between AI systems and humans.
02:12:37 Absolutely.
02:12:38 And I think some of these things of fear mortality are essential, are essential for
02:12:44 the element of human experience. I don’t, I don’t think it might be essential to create
02:12:49 general intelligence, like very intelligent machines, but to create a machine that connects
02:12:55 to human in some deep way.
02:12:57 What’s your view, not to make me the interviewer, but what’s your view about machine ethics? Can
02:13:07 you imagine an ethical AI without some semblance of finitude, let’s say?
02:13:16 Well, I think ethics is a, there’s a trolley problem that’s often used in the work that
02:13:26 I’ve done at MIT with autonomous vehicles in particular.
02:13:30 Oh, yeah, yeah.
02:13:31 That people, I think they offload, they ask, like, how would a machine deal with an ethical
02:13:38 situation that they themselves, the humans don’t know how to deal with?
02:13:43 Exactly.
02:13:44 And so I don’t know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions,
02:13:53 but I certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world is a very important
02:14:00 thing. Effectively in this world, it needs to be, have a fear of mortality and like be
02:14:06 able to even dance. Because I don’t think you can solve ethical problems, but you have
02:14:10 to, I think like ethics is like a dance floor. You have to just, you have to dance properly
02:14:17 with the rest of the humans. Like if people are dancing tango, you have to dance in the
02:14:21 same kind of way. And for that, you have to have a fear of mortality. Like I think of,
02:14:27 more practically speaking, as I said, autonomous vehicles, like the way you interact with pedestrians
02:14:33 fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality. So when pedestrians cross the road,
02:14:42 now I’ve watched, well, certainly 100 plus hours of pedestrian videos.
02:14:48 There’s a kind of social contract where you walk in front of a car and you’re putting
02:14:56 your life in the hands of another human being.
02:14:58 Yes, that’s right.
02:14:59 And like death is in the car, in the game that’s being played, death is right there.
02:15:07 It’s part of the calculus. It’s not, but it’s not like a simple calculus. It’s not a simple
02:15:11 equation. I mean, I don’t know what it is, but it’s in there and it has to be part of
02:15:20 the optimization problem. Like it’s not as simple as, so from the computer vision, from
02:15:25 the artificial intelligence perspective, it’s detecting there’s a human estimating the trajectory,
02:15:34 like treating everything like it’s a billiard balls, as opposed to like being able to calculate
02:15:40 it, being able to construct an effective model, the world model of what the person’s thinking,
02:15:47 what they’re going to do, what are the different possibilities of how the scene might evolve,
02:15:52 I think requires having some sense of, yeah, fear of fear of mortality, of mortality.
02:16:00 I don’t see the, the thing is, I think it’s really important to think about, I can be
02:16:05 honest enough to say that it’s, I haven’t been able to figure out how to engineer any
02:16:12 of these things. But I do think it’s really, really important. Like I have, so I have a
02:16:17 bunch of Roombas here. I can show it to you after that. Roombas is a robot that does
02:16:25 vacuums the floor and I’ve had them make different sounds. Like I had them scream in pain
02:16:32 and it, you immediately anthropomorphize and it creates, I don’t know, knowing that they
02:16:45 can feel pain. See, I’m speaking, like knowing that I immediately imagine that they can feel
02:16:52 pain and it immediately draws me closer to them, the human experience. And that there’s
02:16:59 something in that that should be engineered in our systems, it feels like. I believe,
02:17:06 personally, I don’t know what you think, but I believe it’s possible for a robot and a
02:17:11 human to fall in love, for example, in the future.
02:17:14 Oh, I think it’s, yeah, it’s already there.
02:17:18 No, there’s a certain kind of deep connection with technology. I mean, a real, like you
02:17:23 would choose to marry.
02:17:24 I mean, again, it sounds, I’ll find a book title and I’ll send it to you. And it’s a
02:17:30 serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls, but it turned into
02:17:41 a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing
02:17:48 to dismiss as a perversion.
02:17:50 Yeah, that’s what, you know, people kind of joke about sex robots, which is funny. Like,
02:17:56 it’s a funny, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff about robots. It’s just kind of fun to talk
02:18:00 about that is not necessarily connected to reality. People joke about sex robots, but
02:18:06 if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare these days, are used, they’re
02:18:12 not used by people who want sex.
02:18:16 Precisely.
02:18:16 They’re actually,
02:18:17 They’re kind of,
02:18:18 They’re actually,
02:18:20 They’re companions.
02:18:21 They become companions.
02:18:22 Yeah.
02:18:24 It’s, yeah, it’s fascinating. And they’re just, we’re not even talking about any kind
02:18:29 of intelligence. We’re talking about just, I mean, human beings seek companionships.
02:18:33 We’re deeply lonely. I mean, that was the other sense I have that I don’t know if I
02:18:37 can articulate clearly. You can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there’s
02:18:42 a deep loneliness within all of us.
02:18:44 Absolutely.
02:18:45 In the face of death, it feels like we’re alone.
02:18:48 So, you know, the, what drew me to the existential take on things, Lex, was the,
02:19:00 who is it, Rollo May and Erwin Yallem write about existentialism and they’re like, look,
02:19:09 what, there’s different flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common, what is it,
02:19:16 four universal concerns. The overriding one is about death. And that next is choice and
02:19:26 responsibility. The next one is existential isolation. And they’re like, that’s one of the
02:19:35 things about consciousness that, and the last one is meaninglessness, but the existential
02:19:41 isolation point is, you know, we are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend that unless
02:19:55 you’re a Siamese twin, you are fundamentally alone. And because it is claimed, it’s Eric
02:20:03 Fromm in a book called Escape from Freedom. He’s like, look, you’re smart enough to know that the
02:20:11 most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language.
02:20:18 But you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior
02:20:25 phenomenological existence. Therefore, there’s always going to be times in our lives where even
02:20:33 under the best of circumstances, you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and
02:20:40 feelings and somebody listening could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you’re
02:20:47 like, you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. So you can be desperately lonely in a house
02:20:55 where you live with 10 people in the middle of Tokyo where there’s millions.
02:21:02 Yeah, it’s the Great Gatsby. You could be alone in a big party.
02:21:06 Exactly.
02:21:07 Maybe this is a small tangent, but let me ask you on the topic of academia,
02:21:13 you’re kind of, we talked about Jordan Peterson, there’s a lot of sort of renegade type of thinkers,
02:21:20 certainly in psychology, but it applies in all disciplines. What are your thoughts about academia
02:21:29 being a place to harbor people like yourself? People who think deeply about things, who are
02:21:40 not constrained by sort of the, I don’t think you’re quite controversial.
02:21:46 No, not really.
02:21:47 But you are a person who thinks deeply about things and it feels like academia can sometimes
02:21:55 stifle that.
02:21:56 I think so. So my concern right now, Lex, for young scholars is that the restrictions and
02:22:09 expectations are such that it’s highly unlikely that anybody will do anything
02:22:18 of great value or innovation except for, and this is not a bad thing, but stepwise improvement
02:22:29 of existing paradigms. So in simple English, I went to Princeton for a job interview 40 years
02:22:38 ago and they’re like, what are you going to do if we give you a job? And I’m like, I don’t know,
02:22:42 I want to think about it and read. And I saw that that interview was over, the window of
02:22:52 opportunity shut in my face and they actually called my mentors and they’re like, what are
02:22:59 you doing? Tell this guy to buy some pants. I had hair down to my waist also. He’s like,
02:23:03 this guy looks like Charles Manson in Jesus. But the expectation is that you come to a
02:23:12 post, you start publishing so that you can get grants.
02:23:20 That’s certainly true. But there’s also kind of a behavioral thing. You said like long hair.
02:23:24 There’s a certain style of the way you’re supposed to behave. For example, I’m wearing
02:23:30 a suit. It sounds weird, but I feel comfortable in this. I wore it when I was teaching at MIT,
02:23:38 I wore it to meetings and so on, the different, sometimes a blue and red tie, but that was an
02:23:47 outsider thing to do at MIT. So there was a strong pressure to not wear a suit.
02:23:52 No, that’s right.
02:23:53 And there’s a pressure to behave, to have a hair thing, the way you wear your hair,
02:23:57 the way you, this isn’t like a liberal or a left or anything. It’s just in tribes.
02:24:04 That’s right.
02:24:04 And academia to me or a place, any place that dreams of having like renegade free thinkers,
02:24:12 like really deep thinkers should in fact, like glorify the outsider. Should welcome
02:24:20 just, should welcome people that don’t fit in.
02:24:25 Yeah.
02:24:26 No, that sounds weird, but I can just imagine an interview with at Princeton,
02:24:32 I can imagine why aren’t people, why aren’t you at Harvard, for example, or MIT?
02:24:40 Yeah. Well, so that, look, I would love to, I haven’t lectured at MIT, but I’ve lectured at
02:24:48 Harvard. I’ve gotten to lecture at almost every place that wouldn’t consider me for a job.
02:24:55 And I, well, a few things. I’m lucky because I go to Princeton, I’m like, I don’t know what I
02:25:04 want to do. And then two days later I go to Skidmore and I’m like, I don’t know what I want
02:25:08 to do. And they offer me a job later that day, which I declined for months because of the
02:25:15 extraordinary pressure of my mentors who right mindedly felt that I wouldn’t get much done there.
02:25:24 But what they told me at Skidmore was take your time, show up for your classes and don’t molest
02:25:31 barnyard animals and you’ll probably get tenure. And I’m like, I’ll show up for my classes.
02:25:35 We’ll talk about it.
02:25:37 That was the negotiation.
02:25:39 Yeah, I negotiated, I drove a hard bargain. But honestly, Lex, that’s, I feel I’m very committed
02:25:47 to Skidmore because I was given tenure when our first terror management paper wasn’t published.
02:25:57 It took eight years to publish. It was rejected at every journal. And I submitted it as like a
02:26:03 purple ditto sheet thing. I’m like, here’s what I’ve been doing. Here’s the reviews. Here’s why
02:26:09 I think this is still a pretty good idea. And I don’t know that this would happen even at Skidmore
02:26:15 anymore. But I was very lucky to be given the latitude and to be encouraged. I took classes
02:26:23 at Skidmore. That’s how I learned all this stuff. I graduated, I got a PhD unscathed by knowledge.
02:26:29 We were great statisticians and methodologists, but we didn’t have any substance. And I don’t
02:26:39 mean this cynically, but we were trained in a method in search of a question. So I appreciate
02:26:46 having five years at Skidmore basically to read books. And I also appreciate that I look like
02:26:54 this 40 years ago. And my view is that this is how I comported myself. Other people, the guy I learned
02:27:10 the most from at Skidmore is now dead, a history professor, Ted Kuroda. He wore a bow tie. And
02:27:18 there’s another guy, Darnell Rucker, who taught me about philosophy. And he was very proper. And
02:27:25 he had his jacket with the leather patches. But these guys weren’t pompous at all. They were,
02:27:34 this is the way I am. And I always felt that that’s important that somebody who looks at you
02:27:44 and says, oh, what a stiff, he’s probably an MBA. Well, they’re wrong. And someone who looks at me,
02:27:52 when I first got to Skidmore, other professors would ask when I’d be coming to their office to
02:27:58 empty the garbage. They just assumed, as in my twenties, they assumed I was housekeeping.
02:28:04 I always felt that was important that the students learn not to judge an idea by the appearance of
02:28:10 the person who pervades it. I guess this is such a high concern now because I personally still
02:28:22 have faith that academia is where the great geniuses will come from and great ideas.
02:28:27 I love hearing you say that. I still, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m really
02:28:35 apprehensive about the future of education right now in the context of the pandemic is that a lot
02:28:44 of folks, a lot of these are Google type people who I don’t, they’re geniuses also, but I don’t
02:28:53 like this idea that all learning can be virtual and that much could happen. I’m big on embodied
02:29:00 environments with actual humans interacting. I mean, there’s so much to the university education,
02:29:08 but I think the key part is the mentorship that occurs somehow at the human level. Like I’ve
02:29:16 gotten a lot of flack, like this conversation where in person now, and I’ve even with Edward
02:29:25 Snowden who done all interviews remote, I’m a stickler to in person. It has to be in person
02:29:33 like, and a lot of people just don’t get it. They’re like, well, why can’t, this is so much
02:29:38 easier. Like why go through the pain? Like I’ve traveled, I’m traveling in the next month to Paris
02:29:46 for a single stupid conversation. Nobody cares about just to be in person. Well, it’s important
02:29:52 to me. I honestly, I was like this, and thank you for coming down to it. It’s my pleasure,
02:30:01 but again, it’s very self serving. I’ve enjoyed this. I knew I was going to, but
02:30:06 it’s not about our enjoyment per se. Again, at the risk of sounding cavalier,
02:30:13 there are a host of factors beyond verbal that I don’t believe can be adequately captured. I don’t
02:30:24 care how much the acuity is decent on a zoom conversation. I feel again, I felt within five
02:30:35 minutes that this was going to be for me easy in the sense that I could speak freely. I just don’t
02:30:45 see that happening so easily from a distance. Yeah, I tend to, well, I’m hopeful. I agree with
02:30:52 you on the current technology, but I am hopeful on like some others on the technology eventually
02:30:58 being able to create that kind of experience or quite far away from that, but it might be
02:31:03 able to, my hope is, you know, I’m hopeful. I was at Microsoft in Seattle and I can’t remember why.
02:31:13 And no, I can’t. I, that’s how I’m in my early Mr. Magoo phase. And somebody there was showing us
02:31:24 like a virtual wall where the entire wall, you know, when you’re talking to somebody, so it’s
02:31:35 life size and they were beginning the, get the appearance of motion and stuff. It looked pretty.
02:31:44 Yeah. With virtual reality too, I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside a virtual world.
02:31:47 It’s to me, it’s I can just see the future. It’s quite real in terms of like a terror of death.
02:31:57 I’m afraid of heights. Me too. And there’s, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, you should,
02:32:03 if you haven’t, there’s a virtual reality experience where you can walk a plank. Yeah.
02:32:07 You can look down and man, I was on the ground like, I was like, I was afraid. I was deeply afraid.
02:32:15 I was, it was, it was as real as, as anything else could be. And I mean, these are very early days
02:32:23 of that technology, relatively speaking. So yeah. I mean, I don’t know what to do with that. Same
02:32:30 with like crossing the street, we did these experiments across the street in front of a car
02:32:35 and, you know, it’s being run over by a car. It’s terrifying. Yeah. It’s just that, yeah. So there’s
02:32:45 a rich experience to be created there. We’re not there yet, but, yeah. And I’ve seen a lot of people
02:32:53 try, like you said, the Google folks, Silicon Valley folks try to create a virtual online
02:32:59 education. I don’t know. I think they’ve raised really important questions. Absolutely. Like what
02:33:04 makes the education experience fulfilling? What makes it effective? Yeah. These are important
02:33:12 questions. And I think what they highlight is we have no clue. Like, there’s, Thomas Sowell
02:33:24 wrote a book about, a recent book on charter schools. Yeah. I would like to talk to him. Yeah,
02:33:31 he’s an interesting guy. We will disagree about a lot, but respectfully. Yeah. Such a powerful mind.
02:33:37 Yeah. But he, I need to read, I’ve only heard him talk about the book, but he argues quite
02:33:46 seemingly effectively that the public education system is broken. That we blame, he basically says
02:33:57 that we kind of blame, like the conditions or the environment, but the upbringing of people,
02:34:05 like parenting, blah, blah, blah, like the set of opportunities. But okay, putting that aside,
02:34:13 it seems like charter schools, no matter who it is that attends them, does much better than in
02:34:20 public schools. And he puts a bunch of data behind it. And in his usual way, as you know, just is
02:34:27 very eloquent in arguing his points. Yeah. So that to me just highlights, man, we don’t, education
02:34:34 is like one of the most important, it’s probably the most important thing in our civilization,
02:34:39 and we’re doing a shitty job of it. Yeah. In academia, in university education and, you know,
02:34:49 younger education, the whole thing. The whole thing. And yet, we value
02:34:59 just about anyone or anything more than educators. You know, part of it is just the
02:35:07 relatively low regard that Americans have for teachers. Also similarly, like just people
02:35:18 of service. I think great teachers are the greatest thing in our society. And I would say,
02:35:26 now on a controversial note, like Black Lives Matter, you know, great police officers is the
02:35:33 greatest thing in our society. Also, like all people that do service, we undervalue cops severe,
02:35:40 like this whole defund the police is missing the point. And it’s a stupid word. I’m with you on
02:35:47 that, Lex. Our neighbors to one side of our house are three generations of police, our neighbors
02:35:54 across the street are police. They know my, you know, political predilections. And we’ve gotten
02:36:08 along fine for 30 years. And I go out and tell them every day, you know, when you go in today,
02:36:14 you tell the people on the force that I appreciate what they’re doing. I think it’s
02:36:25 really important to not tribalize those concerns. I mean, we mentioned so many brilliant books and
02:36:36 philosophers, but it’d be nice to sort of in a focused way, try to see if we can get some
02:36:45 recommendations from you. So what three books, technical or fiction or philosophical had a big
02:36:54 impact in your life and you would recommend. Spent four hours driving here, perseverating about
02:37:02 that. I didn’t, I, everything else you sent me as fine. And I actually, I skimmed it and I’m like,
02:37:08 I don’t want to look at it because I want, I want us to talk. The ones in blue. I’m like, all right.
02:37:15 And you know, I’ve already said that I’ve found backers work and I put the denial of death out
02:37:24 there. Um, is that his best, sorry, a small tangent. Is there other books that of his?
02:37:31 Yes. If I could have this count as one that the, the birth and death of meaning,
02:37:36 the denial of death and escape from evil are three books of Ernest Becker’s that I believe to
02:37:44 all be profound in a, in a little sort of brief dance around topics. Um, I’ve only read denial
02:37:53 of death. Like, well, how do those books connect in here? Yeah. Nice. So the, the birth and death
02:37:57 of meaning is where Becker situates his thinking in more of an evolutionary foundation. So I like
02:38:07 that for that reason. Escape from evil is where he applies the ideas in the denial of death
02:38:17 more directly, um, to economic matters and to inequality and also to our inability to
02:38:27 peacefully coexist with other folks who don’t share our beliefs. So I would put Ernest Becker
02:38:32 out there as one. Um, I also like novels a lot. And here I was like, God damn it. No matter what
02:38:42 I say, I’m going to be like, yes, but, but the existentialists, do you like all those folks?
02:38:48 Come on. You like that literary existential? I do. But I mean, you know, I, I’ve read all those
02:38:56 books. I will tell you the last line of the plague. We learn in times of pestilence that there’s more
02:39:03 to admire in men than to despise. And I love that. Yeah. Plagues such a, I don’t know. I,
02:39:10 I find the plague is a brilliant before, before, uh, the plague has come to us in 2020.
02:39:17 I, it was just a book about love about, but I’ll toss a one that may be less known to folks. I’m
02:39:25 enamored with a novel by a woman named Carson McCullers written in 1953 called clock without
02:39:32 hands. And I find it a brilliant literary depiction of many of the ideas that we have spoken about.
02:39:41 Fiction?
02:39:42 Fiction. Yeah.
02:39:43 What’s, uh, what kind of ideas are we talking about?
02:39:45 Oh, it, it, all of the existential ideas that we have encountered today,
02:39:51 but in the context of a story of someone who finds out that he is terminally ill,
02:39:59 it’s set in the South and the, um, heyday of like segregation. So there’s a lot of social issues,
02:40:06 a lot of existential issues, but it’s basically a novel, a fictional account of someone who finds
02:40:14 out that they’re terminally ill and who reacts originally as, um, uh, you might expect anyone,
02:40:23 uh, becomes more, um, hostile to people who are different, like petty and stupid denies that
02:40:32 anything’s happening. But, uh, as the book goes on and he comes more to terms, um, with his own
02:40:41 mortality, um, it ends lovingly. And then, uh, back to your idea about, you know, love being
02:40:51 incredibly potent.
02:40:53 That’s the, the nice thing, as you mentioned, uh, before with, with Heidegger,
02:40:59 I really liked that idea. And I’ve seen that in people who are terminally ill is they bring,
02:41:06 you know, the idea of death becomes, uh, current. It becomes like a thing, you know, I could die.
02:41:14 I really liked that idea. I, I can die. Not just tomorrow, but like now, now, now.
02:41:20 Yeah.
02:41:21 Uh, that’s a really useful, I don’t even know. I think I’ve been too afraid to even think about
02:41:28 that. Like, like, like sit here and think like in five minutes,
02:41:34 in five minutes, it’s over.
02:41:39 This is it. This is five minutes. It’s over.
02:41:41 Yeah. So that would be my most recent addition as I really am struck by Heidegger.
02:41:50 Would you recommend that?
02:41:51 Well, okay. Well, if you have a few years,
02:41:53 I remember I tuned out being in time. I was like, I tried to read it. I was like, that’s it.
02:41:57 It took me 40 years to read Ulysses that could not get past the first five pages. And it took
02:42:05 me 40 years to read being in time. It’s a slog.
02:42:10 And I took a James Joyce course in college. So I’ve, uh, I, I even, uh, I, I guess read parts
02:42:18 of Finnegan’s Wake.
02:42:19 No way.
02:42:20 But like, there’s a difference between reading and like, I don’t think I understood anything.
02:42:27 I like his, uh, short stories on the dead, the dead. Yeah.
02:42:30 Yeah. I love that. And, um, I like Faulkner, Absalom. Absalom is a, is a fine book.
02:42:37 But would you, uh, is there something Heidegger connected in a book you would recommend or no?
02:42:43 No. So maybe I got to abandon him. I mean, I mean, being in time is, is awesome. Um,
02:42:51 but here’s an interesting thing and not to get all academic, but, you know, it’s,
02:42:55 there’s two parts to it. And most of the, most philosophers are preoccupied with the first part.
02:43:02 It’s in the second part where he gets into all the flight from death stuff and this idea of,
02:43:09 you know, a turning and philosophers don’t like that.
02:43:14 And I’m like, this is where he’s starting to really shine, to really shine for me.
02:43:19 So, yeah. Yeah. All right. That’s a beautiful set of books. So what, um, advice would you give to
02:43:27 a young person today about their career, about life, about, uh, how to survive in this world
02:43:36 full of suffering? Yeah. Great. Um, my advice is to get competent advice. That’s what I tell my
02:43:45 students that don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to me. Well, you know, I think, um,
02:43:53 my, my big piece of advice these days is, you know, again, it’s at the risk of sounding
02:44:01 like a simpleton, but it’s to emphasize a few things. One is, um, you know,
02:44:12 so, uh, one of your questions I think was, you know, what’s the meaning of life. And of course,
02:44:17 the existentialists say life has no meaning, but it doesn’t follow from that, that it’s intrinsic,
02:44:24 that it’s meaningless. You know what the existential point is not that life is
02:44:30 meaningless so much as it doesn’t have one inevitable and intrinsic meaning, you know,
02:44:38 which then it opens up, uh, you know, I think it was Kierkegaard who said consciousness gives us
02:44:44 the possibility of possibilities. And, but there’s another lunatic Oswald Spangler who wrote a book
02:44:52 called, uh, decline of the West. And he says that the philosopher, the German philosopher Gerta,
02:44:59 he says, the purpose of life is to live. And I let that’s, so that’s one of my pieces of advice.
02:45:07 So the possibility of possibilities, it’s interesting. So what do you do with this
02:45:12 kind of sea of possibilities? Like, well, this is one of the, when, when young folks
02:45:18 talk to me, especially these days, uh, is there swimming in a sea of possibilities?
02:45:24 Yeah. Well, so this is great. And so that’s another existential point, which is that
02:45:30 we yearn for freedom. We react vigorously when we perceive that our choices have been curtailed
02:45:40 and then we’re paralyzed by indecision in the wake of seemingly unlimited possibilities,
02:45:46 because we’re not choking on choice. And, and I’m not sure if this is helpful advice or not,
02:45:53 but what I say to folks is that the fact of the matter is, is the, you know, for most people,
02:46:03 choice is a first world problem. And sometimes the best option is to do something as silly as
02:46:16 it sounds. And then if that doesn’t work, do something else, which just sounds like my mom
02:46:21 torturing me, uh, when I was young. But you know, part of the thing that I find myself singularly
02:46:28 ill equipped is that we’re at the, I may be at the tail end of the last generation of Americans
02:46:38 where you like picked something and that’s what you did. Like I’ve been at a job for 40 years
02:46:45 where you can expect to do better than your parents cause those days are gone.
02:46:49 Yeah.
02:46:50 And where you can make a comfortable inference that the world in a decade or two will have any
02:46:59 remote similarity to the one that we now inhabit. And so.
02:47:05 But still you recommend just do.
02:47:08 Yeah. And to do so I’m again, I’m, this is, I’m so back to the Heidegger guy because,
02:47:15 all right, I may, you know, I consider myself a professor, but what happens if most of the
02:47:22 schools go out of business? Somebody else may consider themselves a restaurant tour,
02:47:28 but what happens if there’s no more restaurants? So what I, this is negative advice, but I tell
02:47:36 folks, don’t define yourself as a social caricature. Don’t, don’t limit how you feel about yourself by,
02:47:51 through identification with a host of variables that may be uncertain.
02:48:01 Maybe temporary.
02:48:02 And temporary.
02:48:03 What,
02:48:04 let’s say. No, but of course that gets back to your point earlier, Lex, where you’re like, yeah,
02:48:08 but when you step out of that, it’s extraordinarily discombobulating.
02:48:15 So what, I think you talked about an ax of chopping wood and soul from Socrates.
02:48:23 Yeah.
02:48:24 What is your soul? What is the, the essence of Schellen?
02:48:33 Wow. That was like, awesome.
02:48:36 Like when God, when you, when you show up at the end of this thing, he kind of looks at you,
02:48:41 he’s like, oh yeah, yeah, I remember you.
02:48:45 Yeah. Well, you know, I, to be honest, what I muse about,
02:48:51 is to me, the, when, when people are, I told you, I have to, we have two kids, late 20s, early 30s.
02:49:05 And over the years, when people, when we meet people that know our kids and they’re like, oh,
02:49:13 your kids are kind and decent. And I’d be like, that’s what I would like to be.
02:49:22 Because I think intelligence is vastly overrated. You know, the Unabomber was a smart guy.
02:49:27 Yeah.
02:49:28 And I do admire intelligence and I do venerate education and I find that to be
02:49:35 tremendously important. But if I had to pay the ultimate homage to myself,
02:49:43 it would be to be known as somebody who takes himself too seriously to take myself too seriously.
02:49:51 Again, as corny as it sounds, I’d like to leave the world a time when I can be known as somebody
02:50:01 who takes himself too seriously. Again, as corny as it sounds, I’d like to leave the world
02:50:09 a tad better than I found it, or at least do no harm.
02:50:14 And, I think you, I think you did all right in that, in that regard.
02:50:20 I love that question, Alex. That’s a good one. I think everyone should be asked that.
02:50:25 What is your soul?
02:50:26 I think there’s a lot of lingering questions around it.
02:50:33 So, I mean, on the point of the soul, you’ve talked about the meaning of life. Do you have,
02:50:45 on a personal level, do you have an answer to the meaning of your life, of something that brought you
02:50:54 meaning, happiness, some sense of sense?
02:51:09 No, I mean, yes and no. I mean, I’m 66, so I’m in the kind of
02:51:16 and not ready to wrap it up, literally or metaphorically, but you look, I look back and
02:51:27 just really with a sense of awe and wonder, gratitude, and
02:51:35 Is there memories that stand out to you from childhood, from earlier, that like,
02:51:39 it’s like, you know, stand out as something you’re really proud of or just happy to have been on this
02:51:48 earth, because that stuff happened.
02:51:50 Yeah, that. I mean, you know, my family, also a chunk, my folks, my grandparents are from Eastern
02:51:59 Europe, you know, Russia, Austria. As far as we know, some of them never made it out. I consider
02:52:08 myself very fortunate to have been a so called product of the American dream. You know, my
02:52:22 grandparents were basically peasants. My parents, my dad worked two full time jobs when I was growing
02:52:32 up, and I would see him on the weekends. I’d be like, why are you working all the time? He’d be
02:52:37 like, so you won’t have to. And he said, Look, the world does not owe you a living. And so your first
02:52:45 responsibility is to take care of yourself. And then your next responsibility is to take care of
02:52:54 other people. And I think you did a pretty good job with that. I don’t know. But I so that those
02:53:03 are the things that I’m proud of.
02:53:07 Well, it’s funny. You’ve been, you’ve talked about just yourself as a human being. But you’ve
02:53:16 also contributed some really important ideas for your ideas and also kind of integrating and maybe
02:53:27 even popularizing the work of Ernest Becker of connecting it of making it legitimate scientifically.
02:53:34 I mean, you know, as a human, of course, you want to be you want your ripple to be one that makes the
02:53:43 world a better place. But also, I think, in the span of time, I think it’s of great value. You’ve
02:53:51 contributed in terms of how we think about the human condition, how we think about ourselves,
02:53:57 assuming as finite beings in this world. And I hope also in our technology of engineering
02:54:04 intelligence, I think, at least, at least for me, and I’m sure there’s a lot of other people
02:54:11 like me that your work has been a gift for so well, thank you.
02:54:15 Oh, I like that. And we have described ourselves as giant interneurons. I’m like,
02:54:22 we have had no original ideas. And maybe that’s the only thing that’s original about our work is
02:54:29 we don’t claim to be original. What we claim to have done is to integrate and to connect
02:54:38 these disparate and superficially unconnected discourses, you know, so existentialists,
02:54:45 they’d be like, evidence? What’s that? And yeah, there’s now a branch of psychology, experimental,
02:54:52 existential psychology that I think we could take credit for having encouraged the formation of.
02:55:02 And that, in turn, has gotten these ideas in circulation and academic communities where they
02:55:10 may not have otherwise gotten. So I think that’s good. Well, Sheldon, it’s a huge honor. I can’t
02:55:17 believe you came down here. I’ve been a fan of your work. I hope we get to talk again. Huge honor
02:55:25 to talk to you. Thank you so much for talking today. Thanks, Lex. We’ll do it again soon, I hope.
02:55:29 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sheldon Solomon. And thank you to our sponsors,
02:55:34 Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and CashApp. Click the links in the description to get a discount. It’s the
02:55:40 best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with
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02:55:50 at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Vladimir Nabokov that Sheldon
02:55:56 uses in his book, Warm at the Core. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us
02:56:04 that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
02:56:09 Thanks for listening, and hope to see you next time.