E70 - How do we deal with our Mortality? (with Professor Sheldon Solomon)

Sheldon Solomon is an American social psychologist. He is a professor of psychology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Solomon is best known for developing terror management theory, along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. This theory is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality.

Today we talk all about existential themes and how our mortality affects our psychology.We also discuss - the concept of death anxiety and terror management theory in some depth, the relationship between mortality and the meaning we extract from our lives, the right way to approach our mortality to improve our mental health, the relationship between death anxiety and political attitudes,the importance of self-esteem in getting through the ups and downs of life and many other topics

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi - Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychiatry, mental health and related topics. Today we're in conversation with Professor Sheldon Solomon. Sheldon Solomon is an American social psychologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He's best known for developing terror management theory with his colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Basinski. This theory is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality. So today we talk about a number of existential themes and how our mortality affects our psychology. We also discuss the concept of death, anxiety and terror management theory in some depth, the relationship between mortality and the meaning we get from our lives, the right way to approach our mortality to improve our mental health, the relationship between death anxiety and political attitudes, the importance of self esteem in getting through the ups and downs of life, and many other topics. If you like the podcast, there's a few ways you can support it. You can share it to the friend. Follow or subscribe on your podcast player. Follow us on social media or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening. 12s Welcome back everyone. Today I'm with Sheldon Solomon. Sheldon, thanks so much for joining me. 1s It is my pleasure, Alex. Thanks for having me. I was really interested to speak with you, because I think considering people's lives from an existential perspective can be extremely valuable when you're trying to help them psychologically. And I've found it very valuable when I'm working with people, when I'm working with my clients. And yet, despite that, existential perspectives seem to be largely lacking in the mainstream conversation about mental health. So, I mean, I've seen you describe in other interviews how our mortality is perhaps the most basic fact of our existence of our lives. But I'm curious, how did you first become interested in exploring existential psychology and existential perspectives? 1s Um, great question, Alex. And, uh, to be honest, I my initial encounter with existential notions was when I was eight years old, the day that my grandmother died. And I just remember vividly the night before she died, my mother said, oh, your grandma's sick. And, uh, she won't be around. And she died the next day. And we were all very sad. And I just remember sitting around that night thinking to myself, wow, okay, well, this means that. My mother is going to get old and die someday. And I used to collect stamps and I was looking at stamps of dead American presidents. I'm like, There's George Washington. He's not here anymore. There's Abraham Lincoln. And then all of a sudden I was like, well, wait a minute. You know, that means that some vaguely unspecified future moment. I, too, am slated for oblivion. And I honestly remember that being my first existential crisis of sorts. And I don't remember much thereafter until I finished my PhD and was a young professor at Skidmore College. My original training, uh, was an experimental social psychology, and I did a lot of work designing experiments to determine if non-pharmacological, um, interventions to reduce stress were effective or not. And I thought that was interesting work. But, uh, like a lot of things in science, I was the beneficiary of a happy accident. I was walking in the library at Skidmore College when I saw, uh, the bindings of books by a recently deceased cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker. And there were two books sitting next to each other, The Birth and Death of Meaning, where he said, I want to figure out why people do what they do when they do it. And I was like, yeah, me too. And then right next to that was the denial of death, where he insisted that, uh, it is the uniquely human awareness of death and our disinclination to accept the basic fact of our existence that might likely differentiate us from all other living things that that underlies it. It is the ultimate motivation for almost everything that we think and do. And I remember at the time, just saying, jeez, in my gut, I was like, at the very least, this helps me explain my own concerns. But I also felt that it helped me understand all of the social psychological questions that we were dabbling in at the time my buddies Jeff Greenberg and Tom Penske. And so I called them up. I was like, you, you need to read these books. I think Becker has the answer to our questions. And that started our now over 40 years of empirical research, uh, to provide evidence, one way or the other, for the veracity of Becker's claims about the role of death in life. Um. To what? What do you think were Becker's influences? And do you think that he was influenced at all by psychoanalytic thinkers like Freud or Young or people like that? Yes, absolutely. Alex, in his book The Denial of Death, um, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, uh, Becker said in the introduction. You know what? Um, I think everyone's always trying to be original and to find new truth, but I think there's plenty of truth floating around. And rather than each of us as scholars becoming hyper specialized in our own narrow areas of inquiry, what Becker claimed to be doing was an interdisciplinary integration and synthesis of evolutionary thought, uh, psychodynamic psychoanalytic thinking and and theological thought. He just said that if you step back that it sure seems like religion, philosophy and science all converge on this single point, uh, which is that, you know, death in some ways is the ultimate, um, to finding characteristic of our humanity and the way that we each as individuals as well as as cultures, manage the existential anxiety that the awareness of death in genders, that that's just a fundamental determinant of human affairs. 1s Yes. And I guess it goes beyond just the management of anxiety, because the way the thoughts that are occurring to me now are that, 1s you know, death and meaning are intricately linked because death is the thing that frames our lives. Therefore, that that is what gives us the opportunity to extract something meaningful. Because if our lives were infinite, it would be actually a lot harder to extract something meaningful. Excellent. And I, I don't know if you've come across much of, uh, Irving alums where obviously he was he liked existential perspectives, and he talks about the idea that the amount of death anxiety someone experiences is often proportional to the sense of unlived life, untapped potential. Is that something you agree with? I agree with that entirely. Um, you know, Ohm's work, we were very much influenced by his ideas, the existential psychotherapy book, um, that he wrote in 1980. Um is one of our favorites. And I do like, uh, the idea that basically, um, yeah, existential anxiety is directly proportional to unlived life. Uh, Abraham Lincoln, the dead American president. He just used to say, it's not the years in your life. It's the life in your years. And it is another one of Ernest Becker's points, which is that it? From the philosopher's. You look at Albert Camus, he says, come to terms with death. Thereafter, anything is possible. You've got Heidegger saying that a genuine confrontation with our mortality is the gateway to an authentic existence. And so too on, uh, almost every, uh, one of the world's great religions, uh, also suggests that, uh, in order to get the most of life, uh, we have to in a very ultimately protracted and deliberate way, uh, come to terms with the reality of the human condition. Yeah, absolutely. That's where it comes into play clinically, because people often present with fears, you know, fears that are in some way, I suppose, microcosms of the fear of death. And maybe this is what terror management theory is about, that small fears are reflections of larger fears we have about life and and death. And I suppose one of the most robust findings in psychotherapy is that. Fear avoided is fear magnified and fear confronted voluntarily somehow becomes more manageable. Our physiology, as long as the fear is confronted voluntarily and in a manageable way. Our physiology adapts and we become more courageous. Um, and perhaps this is one of the tenants of of terror management theory. Maybe you could expand more on this. Yes. Well, it certainly is, uh, central to terror management theory, Alex, noting that our work, uh, one of the things that we say is that, uh, you know, the only original thing about terror management theory is that we're not claiming to be original. Uh, we feel like that what we have done is to take Becker's ideas and to frame them in a way such that we can derive hypotheses that can be subjected to empirical scrutiny. And the same thing for Yale. Um, so, for example, in existential psychotherapy, and I like how you put it, Alex, the existential folks, uh, Rollo May, um, any alum and folks like that, they talk about, um, what they describe as universal exists social concerns. And, uh, the super ordinate one is about death. But then they also talk about concerns about choice and freedom that on the one hand, uh, as humans, we always want to choose. On the other hand, most of us get paralyzed by indecision, choking on our choices and our unwillingness to accept responsibility for them. Similarly of Yale, um talks about existential isolation, the idea that you can be in the middle of Tokyo, surrounded by 10 million people and still feel isolated, alienated and alone. And then finally, is the notion of meaninglessness, which I think is often misunderstood by folks because when they, existentialists, say that life is meaningless, uh, what they mean is that reality has no intrinsic meaning. And while that can be psychologically daunting, it could also be remarkably uplifting in that. It gives us the unique opportunity as individuals and as groups to impose meaning on the world around us. Well, be that as it may. What the what? According to the existential types, you can come into therapy and you can have years of, let's say, existential psychotherapy, and the word death might never arise. But that doesn't mean that concerns about one's mortality do not underlie an influence on all of the other explicit concerns that one currently possesses. And so I like the existential take of I. In my class, we read a book by Arnoldo Spinelli. I think he's in Italian Prep, but he practices in England. And yeah, he he talks about how it's not like anyone who comes in to an existential oriented therapist will immediately be asked about their thoughts about death. That may be a super ordinate concern. It may be one that underlies other concerns and might ultimately arise in a therapeutic context. But it may also be the case that the the someone may come in with a concern about the nature of their relationships and feeling isolated, or having difficulty forging a sense of meaning. Uh, in the world of themselves and the world around them. And a competent therapist will engage with their clients on that level and perhaps be very successful, restoring a sense of psychological equanimity. All right. But underlying all of that, we would argue theoretically and empirically, uh, is assuaging concerns about death, noting, as you already know, Alex, and this is important, that none of this is to suggest that we're conscious of any of these 1s ideas or concerns impinging upon us. I think that one of the most superficially difficult points when people talk about these ideas is someone will say, well, I'm not afraid of death. Therefore, everything that you're saying is either wrong or certainly does not apply to me. And our response, you know, to be silly as we go. Shakespeare, methinks thou protest too much. Uh, because we know empirically that it is sometimes the people who claim to be least afraid of death that actually respond most defensively when we remind them that they're going to die in our laboratory studies. And of course, they they might not be afraid of death. Itself as much as they might be afraid of life passing them by. And what I see. What I see clinically, especially when I worked in a in an addiction clinic for a year, I'd see people often as they were planning to come off drugs. So, for example, they might be planning to stop drinking alcohol or to come off heroin. And what would often emerge in that conversation was that they felt their life even, even perhaps before using drugs and during other periods of recovery, perhaps lacked gravity. It lacked a felt sense of high level, deep engagement with other people or with the world. So that's surprising because we don't talk about these things very, very often in our culture. I was really interested to hear you talk about this sort of we have this love hate relationship with freedom, don't we? But the hate seems to be all unconscious, especially, yes, the zeitgeist of 2020. I'm really cute. I love talking about different. Times in human history and what's what's kind of consciously prioritized in those times and what's below the surface. And it seems to me right now and outside Geist, it's all about freedom, individuality, self-actualization. But with none of none of the sophistication of actually how difficult it is to manage. Freedom as you outlined. Yeah, Alex, that's magnificent in my opinion. Because and not to get all too political, but we are in a volatile moment where democracy is on the wane and fascism is on the rise. And I like Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who wrote the book The Origin of Totalitarianism in 1951, where she pointed out that, uh, psychodynamic, uh, that what you need in order to get people to succumb to the allure of a populist or fascist demagogue is they have to have a sense of isolation and alienation. But we're calling that freedom. In other words, we're mistaking, uh, the fact that, uh, freedom is never an isolated, alienated, disconnected individual doing whatever they want, uh, oblivious to their responsibilities or obligations to those around them and under the guise of being proponents for freedom. Uh, I would submit, at the risk of being annoying, that at least on my side of the pond, uh, the people of America are generally narcissistic sociopaths, emulating our former president Donald Trump, and that this has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's the complete divestment of actual individual autonomy, which requires secure attachments to those around us, uh, to what is ultimately just lobotomized people in order to render them subject to authoritarian control. 1s Yeah. And is it is it freedom? Do you think that fascism is offering? Because I mean, from my perspective, I feel that fascism more than freedom, offers people a very concrete path to success and more of a sense of boundaries, restriction, uh, a sense of order, of course, that perhaps people find calming in the, in the face of freedom or as opposed to freedom. Yes, that's precisely right. So Eric Hoffer, uh, wrote a book called The True Believer. And his point is that, uh, fascism is what happens when our collective confidence in a prevailing worldview collapses. And then what you have is an enraged as well as a hyper anxious population, uh, that it has in some ways, quite understandably, latches onto a seemingly larger than life individual who proclaims that only they can fix it. So it really is more than anything, uh, it's psychological heroin. It provides the psychodynamic dispossessed with a strong sense of meaning and value, because there's a simple worldview where if you accept it, uh, you psychologically become protected by the larger than life leader. Moreover, all of your problems are attributed to some other individual or outgroup that are declared the all encompassing repositories of evil, the eradication of which would make life on Earth as it's purported to be in heaven. Um. Um. And so this is what I would propose we're now seeing, um, there's a book I recently read. I don't know if you've heard of this one, Peter Turchin. It's a book called End Times. I just ran into it, and he's, uh, he's an ecologist. It's not a political argument. Um, he studies how societies are built up and how they disintegrate over time. He started looking at animals, but then about 20 years ago, started looking at the, the, the dynamics of human societies. And so what he said is societies come and go. Every one of them originates, has its peak moment and then decline somehow. And he wrote in 2010, I think that America would collapse sometime between 2020 and 2025. And it's based essentially on a mathematical formula that's derived from the magnitude of income inequality. So he's like, look, uh, basically every 80 to 100 years, most societies collapse and they collapse when the rich extract. Uh, too much from the rest of the population. And basically, uh, if the if the income of the rich keeps going up while that of the average person stays the same or declines, that creates what he calls immiseration, which he says he's not. I'm like, I'm not being, uh, fuzzy here. He's like, people become miserable. They actually get shorter, their height declines, their lifespan gets lower, and they either get really angry or depressed. And so they start either shooting other people or medicating themselves into psychological rubble. And that's the ripe moment for the possible appearance of a populist leader. So a hundred years ago, we had Adolf Hitler riding a big lie, uh, to become the democratically elected, uh, ruler of Germany, saying, I'll make Germany great again. Well, fast forward to our century, and we have exactly the same psychodynamic and social processes. In fact, though magnified now by the recent pandemic. And so the point that I would make is that this is a potentially unique moment in human history that we are marinated as humans, um, by intimations of mortality, both conscious and unconscious. So if we think about. Um, you know, not to make ourselves miserable today or any of the folks listening to us, but, um, it is a fact that only the willfully ignorant or intellectually dormant can deny that we're about to encounter an ecological, um, apocalypse, that the last time it happened, 90% of the life on Earth was wiped out. Now, no big deal because it came back. But it took 50 million years for that to happen. So I'm not worried about nature and I'm not worried about Earth. But anybody worried about the perpetuation of humans in the relatively near future, what we should be anxious about the weather and we should be anxious about the pandemic, and we should be anxious that every one of us is dependent on a global supply chain, uh, in a specific kind of economic order, uh, that can collapse, uh, like, uh, Castle of Sand at any moment. Yeah. And that's before we think about the political polarization and the wars and the fact that we might be within a year of the end of democracy as we know it. So I think all of those things and for many people in Western countries, the students that I teach in the United States, when I say to them, look, you're the first generation of people in the United States that will not be better off than your parents. They understand they they get that the youth are in a terrible position right now, because here we are in a world of diminishing opportunities while their parents still have rising expectations. It is really, uh, quite a preposterous moment. And then on top of all of that, there's a Harvard philosopher, a guy named Michael Sandel, and he wrote a book called The Tyranny of Merit. And his point is that, you know, uh, 50 years ago, when I was young, it was okay to be average. After all, the average person is average. Now you're just a loser if you're not the absolute best at whatever you're doing. So it doesn't matter if you're rich, you got to be richer than Elon Musk. And it doesn't matter if you're fast. You got to be the fastest on Earth. But his point is that that that's psychodynamic crippling, because that means that in any category N minus one, people are failures. And I think that's, uh, when I look around and see the psychological dis ease, I always say, put a hyphen between dis and ease. And I see the young people just desperate, uh, desperately apprehensive and really pervasively preoccupied about whether or not they are adequate as individuals. And I'm like, wow, uh, yeah. In the world that you subscribe to, I don't see how you could feel anything but inadequate. And so I think we've got a lot of work to do, because on the one hand, we're surrounded by death conscious and unconscious. On the other hand, we are embedded in cultural worldviews that incline us to aspire to things that are, frankly, unattainable. 1s And to definitely not think about that while you're trying to aspire towards those things, to be distracted as possible. Yes. So there you go, Alex. And we know because we've done experiments, is that when when young, young people are reminded that they are unlikely to attain the levels of their aspirations, that makes unconscious death thoughts come more readily to mind. And so that shows empirically that what's ultimately at stake here, whether it's conscious or not, are death related anxieties. Um, if, um, political ideology like fascism exploits perhaps what you could call the the terror of freedom. Yeah. Other political ideologies like communism or more left leaning political ideologies. Are they exploiting more or less that same vulnerability, or are they exploiting different psychological vulnerabilities that we have? Yeah. No, I think that the extreme left and right are fairly identical in that regard. Uh, we just don't have that much on the extreme left anymore. In other words, Russia, they don't purport to be communist in any meaningful sense of the word. And so, yes, but I would say that the ideologues on both sides, uh, are, are different sides of the same psychological coin about. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if communism, I mean extreme communism and extreme fascism. They can certainly resemble each other as an outcome. And yet the parts are kind of different. And I wonder if the path to communism partly will exploit the terror of freedom. Because, you know, any ideology helps us escape the terror of freedom. But also, I feel communism help satisfy a need that everyone has for maybe a sense of communal justice, a sense of fairness, our need for like an ultimate. 1s A compassionate society where not only you know you can succeed like perhaps in a more fascist society, but everyone gets to succeed. So there's an alleviation of guilt, perhaps. Oh, absolutely. So now communism, as Marx understood it, and I think this is important, is substantially different than fascism in that it does emphasize and has as its super ordinate consideration. Uh, ah, the nature of our interactions with others. I mean, I always these days are annoying because most of the students who I teach, uh, have a very negative view of communism, but they've never read anything by Marx. Same thing about Darwin, same thing about Freud. But anyway, back to Marx and I. I remind them I was like, look, you know, the word communism comes from community. Marx didn't make that up. He got it from Aristotle and Aristotle's notion of the good life. Was really a couple of thousand years ahead of its time. And positive psychology these days, they call it flourishing. And, uh, there's a really, I think, important work that demonstrates, uh, the extraordinary potency of that notion. But for Aristotle, the truly good life, um, uh, it it did have something to do with our individual capacities. I think he called that practical wisdom. But that had to be embedded in the context of a community where your relationships with other people were characterized by, uh, mutual trust and respect. Yeah. And so I like how Aristotle and that you have a sense of meaning and purpose. So Aristotle, in my mind, was the first existentialist because he's like, hey, if you feel that your life has meaning and you have purpose, if you're comfortable with your relationships with the people around you, uh, that tends to foster individual, uh, efficacy and autonomy. But here, once again, this sense of freedom, this sense of autonomy, this sense of personal control is an embedded manifestation of being securely, um, surrounded by a cultural worldview that infuses your life with meaning and value and relationships with your fellow human being, you know? So back to your end of the world, Alex. When, uh, what's her face? Margaret Thatcher, uh, Ronald Reagan in a skirt when she said there's no such thing as societies. There's just individuals with all due disrespect that's backwards. There's no such thing as individuals. Except as we emerge from a psychodynamic interpersonal matrix. Individuality at its best, is a reflection of secure attachment. It's not that we're functionally independent of those around us, right? Did she not say there are not societies that are only families or. Yeah, just remember this. Yes. No. And in fact, yeah. No. Go ahead. Because that's kind of where where communism falls down. 1s When it's in, when it's enacted, when it's implemented. This is the scale. Of course that's correct. You know, in a family of four people, socialism and communism is a totally implement implementable philosophy because you can distribute the wealth evenly, pretty easily. And it falls down in cases like the Soviet Union, say, because you have a vast amount of resources to be dispersed among a vast amount of people, and corruption becomes endemic, and you ultimately end up with a just like extreme capitalism, with a small amount of people having control over a huge amount of resources. But in that respect, I actually agree with Thatcher that, um, families are the basic unit of society. And, you know, we've been talking about freedom a lot, but what we haven't perhaps underlined sufficiently is that total freedom is a fantasy. It doesn't exist because we're we're embodied because we exist in the physical world, even biologically. We have to exist at a certain temperature. We need a certain amount of hydration and food. So freedom is always going to be a fantasy. And weirdly, opposites, uh, are often joined symbiotically. So, so freedom and restriction or freedom and boundaries are joined at the hip. And this is something I learned from people like Jordan Peterson where he talks about you need to the freedom to express yourself. For example, in a game requires that the game has rules. If it doesn't have rules or restrictions, you can't even meaningfully express yourself because you have no shared consensus. So similarly, and as you pointed out with what you said last, an individual can express their individuality within the confines and safety of a family, nice or and then in a wider perspective of society. But. Yeah, I think it's really interesting to think about how these what we think of as opposites are joined at the hip, really. Yes. I wonder if maybe we've kind of gone off at, like ten tensions, and I'd really I'd love listeners to know maybe some of the most striking empirical findings of terror management theory, just just so they can get a really clear idea of how this might be impacting them in their day to day lives. What are some of the more striking findings you found over the years? Yeah, a nice like so to just back up for a moment. So basically we start with Ernest Becker's ideas that humans are like all other living things and that we're biologically constructed to stay alive. But unlike all other living things, we have the abstract and symbolic capacities to recognize not only ourselves, but time, the past and the future such that, um, we come to this. Kierkegaard said, look, if you're smart enough to know that you're here, that's awesome and dreadful. It's great to be alive and to know it, and it's dreadful to recognize that you're going to die. You can walk outside and get hit by a comet and that you're breathing piece of meat that's not any more significant or enduring than a lizard or potato. And his point is, is we wouldn't be able to stand up in the morning if that's all we thought about. And so the essence of terror management theory is that we manage existential terror by embracing our view of the world. That gives us a sense that life has meaning and we have value, and that ultimately what we're striving for is immortality, either literally or symbolically. And so now the question is, well, how do we know if any of this is true? Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for the Denial of Death, but couldn't get a job. People are like, that's just that's bullshit, if you'll pardon the expression. It's it's philosophical and theological speculation. There's no evidence for these ideas. And it would be impossible to provide evidence because Becker says that you can be anxious about death and not know it. And so here's the thing that's daunting. Uh, in terms of, um, how do we know about any of these things? And so here's where my buddy Jeff and Tom and I came in, and we developed some very simple paradigms. And the one that's most relevant to the question that you asked, Alex, is what we call the mortality salience paradigm. English translation. We were like, okay, if Becker's right, if our beliefs about reality mine to serve to minimize death anxiety, then if we remind people that they're going to die, they should cling more tenaciously to their beliefs. And we should be able to determine that. By measuring something that would vary in a predictable way. And I'll be more clear about what I mean by that momentarily. But so here's what we do. Sometimes people are in the lab and they're filling out a bunch of questionnaires. And then right in the middle, we ask them to write a response to two open ended questions. Just jot down your thoughts and feelings about your own death, and what do you think will be happening to you as you actually die in control conditions? We ask people to think about something unpleasant but not fatal, like you're in a car accident and they had to chop off one of your legs. You had to have a a tooth pulled out, but they didn't have any anesthetic. And then sometimes we go outside of the lab and we stop people either in front of a funeral parlor or 100m to either side. And our thought is, if you're standing in front of a funeral parlor, death might be on your mind even though you don't know it. Right. And then in another paradigm, we have people come in the lab and they read stuff on a computer, and while they're doing it, we flashed the word death for 28 milliseconds. It's so fast you don't even see anything. So my point is that all of the things we're about to talk about, you don't even need to know that death is on your mind. All right. And so what does this help us understand? That would be hard otherwise. All right, well, the first thing is, how come we can't get along with people that are different? Why do we have to kill people? Because they worship a different God or pledge to a different flag? Well, according to Becker, it's because if I accept somebody else's beliefs about reality, I undermine the confidence in my own. And therefore whether I like it or not, people who are different are threatening. And the way that we respond is that we disparage and dehumanize people who are different. We try to get them to dispose of their ideas and accept ours instead. And if that doesn't work, we just kill them, thus proving that our ideas are superior after all. So how do we know if that's true? Well, when we remind Christians, for example, that they're going to die, they like Christians a whole lot more, but they hate Jewish people in Israel. If you remind Jewish people they're going to die, they love Jewish people more, and they hate Christians and Arabs. And this not only about attitudes, German people that are reminded that they're going to die sit closer to people who look German and further away from people who look like they're immigrants. Iranians reminded that they're going to die. They are more supportive of suicide bombing. Americans reminded that they're going to die, are more supportive of using nuclear and chemical weapons against countries who don't threaten us. So that's one area that I think is interesting, and that is that death amplifies our hostility and hatred towards those who are different. And I think what we're seeing right now in the Middle East is an unfortunate and glaring example of that. As the killing keeps going, the hatred keeps being magnified. But another area of inquiry is on political beliefs. I already told you that, um, the rise of fascist leaders is ultimately motivated by an increase in death anxiety. Well, sure enough, in in 2004, and this is when George W Bush in the United States said he believed God had chosen him to lead the world in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. What we showed that Americans did not care for President Bush, except if we reminded them that they were going to die first. They like John Kerry a lot more than George Bush in a cycle logically benign state of mind. But when we reminded them of death, they like Bush more than Kerry. I'd fast forward to 2016. Former President Trump I called him Orange Hitler at the time because psychologically he was saying the same thing. Uh, rather than emphasizing antipathy towards Jews, it was more towards people of color. But he's like, look, the Negro horde is taking over our country. Only I can fix it. Well, sure enough, in our experiments, people liked Hillary Clinton more than Donald Trump in a benign state of mind. But when we reminded them that they were going to die first, then they liked Trump a lot more. And so here's another area of inquiry death reminders produce radical alterations in political preferences. They also alter our attitudes about animals in nature. Uh, after all, animals are in nature and animals die. So when we remind people they're going to die. Humans deny that we're animals. Moreover, they have more negative attitudes towards animals. They're like, it's fine to kill animals for any reason. Uh, above and beyond food and medical research. And then when we remind people they're going to die, uh, they have no qualms whatsoever about destroying nature in order to increase profit. All right. And so back to. And you can't understand our destruction of the environment without noting our insatiable quest for money and stuff. And, um, this is another long story, but in in his in Becker's last book, escape from evil, he has a chapter called Mani The New Immortality Ideology, where he said, oh, economists see money as just this, uh, just an abstract symbol. That's a rational means of exchanging goods and services. And Becker's point is that that may be the case, but that is in shocking obliviousness to the fact that money did not originate as an economic entity. It originated in religious settings as a death denying symbol. And anyone who doesn't agree with that, I urge them to look at the back of a dollar bill in the United States, where it says, In God We Trust. And then there's a pyramid on the back of the bill where the top of the pyramid is detached, and there's a little eyeball. And that's an Egyptian symbol of immortality. All right. So sure enough, we remind people they're going to die, and they say that they need more money in order to feel comfortable. They're more eager to buy luxury items that confer high status. If you remind people of death and just ask them to draw a picture of money, they draw it bigger. And then the there's. And then the coolest study is one that my buddy Tom and some colleagues in Poland did, and in this one they just had some people count money, other people counted pieces of paper you didn't keep to keep. You didn't get to keep the money. You just had it in your hands for a couple of minutes. And sure enough, just having money in your hand reduced death anxiety. And I promise I'll stop soon. But one more area of inquiry, and this is based on your work that we talked about earlier. Uh, you referred to, um, to psychological disorders as the clumsy effort to manage existential terror. And sure enough, uh, we did. And now other folks have done a lot of studies showing that when we remind people of their mortality, it magnifies. Any pre-existing psychological disorder, at least the ones that we've looked at so far. So people who are afraid of spiders, they become more afraid of spiders when they're reminded of death. People with OCD, when we remind them of death and then put them in a situation where they can wash their hands, they use more soap and water. People who are socially anxious when we remind them of death and give them an opportunity to be by themselves in isolation, they stay alone. More than twice the amount of time people reminded of their mortality become more psychologically dissociated. And we know that to be a precursor of PTSD. And so this research has gotten to the point where there are some clinicians who have declared death anxiety a trans diagnostic construct. And their point is, they're not saying that death anxiety is the sole cause of every psychological disorder. But what they are saying is we should consider the very real possibility that intimations of mortality are relevant considerations in all of these cases. So I guess that would be my long winded. You know, here's a few areas where I think that these ideas are rather potent, with the caveat. Alex and I do think that this is important. We're not claiming that death anxiety is a unidimensional explanation. For anything. What we are saying is that any effort to understand ourselves and the world around us, that does not consider these existential factors. We argue that under those conditions you understand nothing. And this gets back to something that you said. Alex, at the beginning of our conversation, is that it is almost eerie that on the one hand, there is a rather substantial body of theory and empirical evidence suggesting that conscious and unconscious concerns about death do indeed have a pervasive influence on everything that people do on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, how infrequently existential notions are explicitly considered, even in really highly specialized and extraordinarily competent clinical and academic settings. Yeah, yes. And that's and that's the that's certainly the gap I've noticed when working in professional settings. But then if you go, for example, into mainstream entertainment, like some of the best mainstream entertainment, like TV shows are the ones that really take on existential concerns head on. So Breaking Bad must be the prototypical example where the whole. If you haven't seen Breaking Bad, please watch it. But it's so it's framed around that. That is the the looming prospect of death. Is what gets the protagonist to launch on this transformational journey, for better or for worse. That kicks off like the whole the whole yes series in terms, I mean, the the findings that you outlined in those studies sound fascinating. And one thing I'm thinking about is. I suppose this three ways. Maybe. Death can can come upon the individual. They can be reminded of it. Unconscious at an unconscious or semi-conscious level. They can be reminded of it. And that's that's kind of what your study sounded like. They can be reminded of it very consciously. Like here, we're going to get you to think about that. Here you go. Here's some death. And it's kind of involuntary but conscious. And then I suppose the third category could be conscious but voluntary. And I wonder, do you have studies that have made distinctions between the manifestations, the psychological manifestations of those three categories of death that is forced upon people unconsciously forced upon them consciously, or that they're allowed to step in to consciously? Yeah. Alex. Again. Magnificent. And you did it. So we basically, in our work, have established empirically the distinction between conscious and unconscious when it's, as you put it, when it impinges upon us involuntarily. And that inspires a dynamic interaction between what we call proximal and distal defenses. So basically, if I say to somebody, wow, um, you're sneezing, um, maybe you should go to the doctor and get a Covid test to be sure. Um, you're not, um, you know, you don't have the virus or whatever. Well, that would be a proximal difference. That would be okay. Uh, I want to I want to be sure I'm not actually dying. Right. And then. And, of course, it's not just a psychological defense mechanism. It's an actual defense mechanism, because it might prevent you from dying. There you go. So that's correct. This is an instrumental and generally rational approach to staying alive. On the other hand, when you walk past a funeral home and you don't even think about it, uh, that instigates distal defenses. So if you walk past a funeral home on your way to an experiment and then you don't like foreigners, uh, you like them less than you would otherwise, that would be an unconscious effect. That when death's on our mind but we don't know it. That increases efforts to bolster our worldview and augment our self esteem. And then what you pointed out is the ultimate, um, the amelioration of those processes. In other words, proximal and distal defenses are generally just automatic processes to push death out of the, the, out of our minds. And but any ultimate psychological maturation in the service of enhancing well-being that the philosophers tell us and the religious folks tell us, that requires a voluntary and sustained engagement with psychodynamic reality. And so, you know, philosophy, I think it was Socrates who said to philosophize is to learn how to die. Montaigne said the same thing a couple of centuries later. Then you've got all of the religious tradition. You've got the Tibetan Book of the dead, you got, uh, the priests and the monks in the Middle Ages working with a skull on their desk to perpetually remind them of the need to reflect on the reality of our transience. And now we've got, uh, lots of experiments that are producing evidence in accord with that view. And so we remind people in our studies that they're going to die, and then they hate people who are different. But when my buddy Tom and one of his students did the same thing with, uh, meditating Buddhist monks in Korea, no, they didn't find that the monks did not respond defensively to death reminders. Similarly, there's now evidence that mindfulness training and meditation, uh, are quite effective at minimizing some of the deleterious effects, uh, of death reminders that are obtained in our studies. So I think you've captured clinically precisely, uh, that tripartite distinction that's very important to keep in mind. 1s Yeah. I mean, on the point of mindfulness meditation makes sense because what you're doing in mindfulness meditation is you're studying impermanence, which is just another death, is a form of impermanence, perhaps the ultimate form of impermanence as relevant to human beings. That's right. But you're constantly witnessing the you're voluntarily. Witnessing the rising and falling, of sounds, of breath, of pleasant noises, annoying noises. And you wouldn't you wouldn't think this would necessarily translate onto bigger concerns, but strangely, it does, because you're training non-judgmental ism and somehow that that seems to work. And and of course, then there's Buddhist teachings and, and theory. And I think mindfulness obviously is hugely amplified by having that philosophical framework. And they go they obviously go extremely well together and they complement each other because in Buddhist theory, they can then talk explicitly about how impermanence causes suffering and, and causes us a lot of grief. And how do you become more okay with that. And then meditation is the actual practice. It's like sitting at the piano practicing scales of. Witnessing impermanence. Non-judgmental? Yes and no. That's lovely. And what we're trying to do, research wise is to figure out, as you said earlier, we're like, hey, we want to what is it that is happening that makes this so profoundly effective? And one of the things that we're pondering is this idea that it gives us a sense of cosmic connection, uh, basically, uh, you know, that, um, you know, the, the guy, Otto Ronk, one of Freud's guys, he says that consciousness makes us, uh, he says who we are. I can't even remember. But the temporal representative of the cosmic primal force, which sounds awfully obscure. But ROC's point is, if we take evolution seriously, then every every one of us, we are descended from the original first form of life, whatever it was. And so we're related to everything that's ever been alive, to everything that now is alive, and to everything that will be alive in the future. It's kind of like an epicurean view, you know, I consist of a bunch of molecules that were here long before my existence. When I'm no longer here, those molecules will continue to bounce around. Uh, but, uh, but from this point of view, I may be transient as an individual, but my connections to all that is and that all that will be, uh, are not obliterated by that fact. And I'm wondering and the folks I work with are wondering if that is not what contributes to the psychological equanimity that's produced by these practices. I'll let you know if we find anything. Yeah. I mean, the approaching something voluntarily is going to be totally different. You could think about it nearer, nearer biologically, of course, you're using. Approach mechanisms rather than defense mechanisms. I guess psychologically it's having something forced on you is kind of a tragedy. You know, something came upon me and I had no control. I had no agency. When you approach something instead of tragedy, it's more like audacity and hubris. Like I had the audacity to, yes, inject myself into a dangerous situation, whether that's, for example, having a spider on my hand if I have a spider phobia, whatever it happens to be. But I had the audacity to inject myself into a situation, and I came out the other side and I'm still okay. And not only am I okay, but I've actually extracted knowledge and experience. So the next time I'm in that situation, I have more competence about what to do. So I suppose this is maybe where because I was interested to see that self-esteem fall is quite an important concept in in terror management theory. I've been thinking about self-esteem a lot this year because my clinical practice, I just see it over and over again. People are very successful, very competent actually, and they have actually gone into the world and done risky things or difficult things. And yet at their core, they feel a very pronounced low self-esteem or also with. Within the context of because, I mean, self esteem has a lot of different definitions depending on the context. In the context of terror management theory, what is self esteem and what's it? What is its role? Yeah. So we follow Ernest Becker who in turn follows William James. So William James wrote the first book, Principles of Psychology in the 1890s, I think, and he said, self esteem is the single most important psychological attribute that humans could possess. And, um, but he didn't go much further than that in terms of defining it or explaining why he just said. I think for a human self esteem is as fundamental as fear and anger are for the rest of the organic world in terms of, um, being able to stay alive and to have a successful life. All right. Becker. 80 years later, comes around and he defines self esteem as the belief that you're a person of value in a world of meaning. And then he proposes that the primary function of self esteem is to minimize anxiety, particularly about death. And these were the first studies that Jeff and Tom and I did, uh, because, uh, we thought this was, uh, we knew how to test that notion. We manipulated self esteem momentarily, uh, by making people feel better about themselves, either giving them feedback about their personality or intelligence that they would welcome, and then we threaten them with electrical shocks while we measured physiological arousal. And we found that when self esteem was raised and people were expecting to be shocked, first of all, they said they were less anxious. But who cares about that? You can always misrepresent your feeling. Uh, even though we took self-report seriously, more importantly, we measured sympathetic nervous system arousal, uh, specifically skin conductance. And we found that people with elevated self-esteem were less aroused in the wake of a physical threat. And we've always felt that that's pretty compelling evidence for the power of self esteem to ward off existential anxieties. Um, I'd like to, um, run past you. How I think about self esteem a little, and just see if that resonates with any of the work you've done. 1s I like to think that we need to kind of embrace a bit of a paradox when it comes to self esteem. One half of the self-help psychology community is all about sort of unconditional self love and and self acceptance, self-compassion. I think there's a lot of value to that. Yeah. The other, the other half of the self-help, self-development world is all about, you know, building confidence and your self esteem shouldn't be unconditional, should be built on results and should go out into the world and do stuff. And that's the proof that you're worth something. And that's a sort of self-fulfilling cycle. And I kind of think you need both. There needs to be a you need to. You need to have a relationship with yourself that has an unconditional nature, where even through the ups and downs of life, because life has so many ups and downs and so much potential for misfortune, you need to kind of have an unconditional sense of self-worth. And yet at the same time, this is the paradoxical part. You need to challenge yourself and hold yourself to standards which slowly creep up across time so that you can get better and get more confident. Because I think self-compassion can make you confident. It can make you feel. Whole maybe feel good, but it doesn't make you better at things, or more confident about entering into situations where competence is required. So I've found it's really this very delicate paradox. And knowing when to employ which one can be tricky. But you need both on some level. And is this something that's kind of is corroborated by your research, or are there important distinctions to be made? Um, our research has nothing to say about that, which is um, 1s unfortunately, that in no way undermines the importance of the point that you just made, which I believe to be of really central importance and to be repetitive. This gets back to Aristotle. You know, he was, uh, he was big on just feeling okay and equally big on the notion of self efficacy and, and the, you know, the things that I'm reading these days about developmental psychology suggests that we need both and that they come from distinct developmental pathways. In other words, we get this unconditional sense of regard for ourselves at our best from a secure relationship with our parents. And then we get a sense of more, uh, practical excellence, uh, from the competence that arises in our relationships with our peers starting in childhood. And but forgetting about that developmental notion, I think the point that you just made is really radically important. There are people for whom the only thing that matters, it is self care. And, you know, my point is that that gives us the self absorbed, uh, nihilistic. People that are there's no shortage of. And then we get the other folks for whom it only matters. Again, if you're the bust and there you get the narcissistic perfectionists. And so, yeah, I like how you put it. Um, it's, uh, this is kind of a stretching it, but one of my phrases these days is like left and right or both beside the point. Um, if everybody were liberal, we'd be dead. If everybody were conservative, we would be dead. Well, same thing with this. If we were only preoccupied with caring for ourselves. Yeah, we would all be encapsulated, isolated, alienated. Um, again, just the preoccupation, uh, with ourselves generally wallowing in self-pity. On the other hand, if the only thing that matters is the practical outcome that, according to Michael Sandel, is what turns us into morally challenged individuals happily willing to abandon any sense of right or wrong in order to be successful. Yeah. Um, what are the more common criticisms or critiques that people make for terror management theory? And and do any of them have any validity in your view? 1s Well, um, yes and no. So first of all, critiques of a theory are and this may sound odd because people tend to like their own ideas, and that's why we're not in the best position to judge them. But one thing that's important to note, uh, the for just people that are not practicing scientists, but even to remind ourselves, is that the best sign that you might be doing something interesting is when people take the time to criticize your work. And so there's been a number of criticisms that I think are worthy of, uh, serious consideration. Uh, one of them I already mentioned and it's like, well, I'm not afraid of death. Therefore your theory must be bullshit. And I've already said that. I think that's easy enough to rebuff by pointing out that there's both conscious and unconscious death anxiety. Another criticism is that death is just one. Of a lot of things that are on our minds and that we're really misguided. By pointing out that death is uniquely different than any other concern. And this is a long story, but here we object on two grounds. One is is if you go on the inside of a pyramid in Egypt, you'll see plenty of ancient Egyptian, uh, pursuits of immortality, like some people say. Oh, we're not really interested in denying death. We're interested in pursuing meaning. That's what really matters. But my point is that meaning would be meaningless if there wasn't death. I don't see anybody in the pyramids on a little boat. Uh, looking for meaning. Uh, Ponce de Leon was not looking for the fountain of meaning. He was looking for the fountain of youth. So, in our view, historically, uh, most folks that are roaming around Earth are looking to stay alive. And then there's plenty of empirical evidence. And I talked about this earlier. Maybe. But a lot of things that we appear to value that have nothing to do with death, in fact, do have something to do with death. So when people think of the loss of a loved one that increases non-conscious death thoughts when they think about, uh, themselves being devoid of meaning and purpose, that also increases non-conscious death thoughts. So for the people who say, oh, you're too preoccupied with death, uh, we argue that there are reasons for that. And then most recently, and most prominently, is the wholesale dismissal of terror management theory because of what's called the replication crisis. And so now, um, there are people who say, uh, that term management theory is wrong. Because if you use 21st century statistical techniques, that the experiments that we did 40 years ago are not as potent as we purported them to be at the time. And our response to that is, well, okay. Um. Uh, we can't help that. We used this this the methods and statistics that we were taught half a century ago that are no longer held in the same regard. And but that in no way, in our opinion, undermines the validity of these ideas. What it means is that, uh, now when people do studies, essentially they need to be done under much more rigorous conditions with much larger sample sizes. And so we're not disputing that we should be using, uh, more contemporary methods. What we are proposing is that researchers who do that are finding similar effects, and that, moreover, people who are eager to dismiss terror management theory have not yet come up with empirically verifiable explanations for the findings that they're eager to discount. Yeah, so my joke is I'll be long dead, floating in a jar of formaldehyde in the front of a science building, and we can't know, uh, what, uh, how scientists are 100 or 200 years from now might think of this work or our point, at the risk of sounding defensive, is it would be premature to summarily dismiss over a thousand published studies. Uh, since largely because they do not adhere to a set of statistical methods that didn't exist at the time that we did that work. And so, yes. So you would obviously encourage these studies to to be redone with current methods and larger sample sizes. Yeah, that that'd be science, right. Stuff that we did under a microscope. Well, now that there's an electron microscope, well, we can look much closer. And do you get this, the sense in the scientific community that there is just an inherent, um, inertia to exploring the subject because of the subject matter, because people find it difficult, because there is almost a bit of stigma around this. Yeah, I think so. And again, myself included. But, uh. And it does annoy people, Alex. But I often say, well, if if Becker's ideas are right, then there should be a particular disinclination to engage with these ideas directly. And, um, and yet having said that, though, and this is not about becoming popular or famous, I don't really care about that. I care about the fact that these are potent ideas that I believe would be suitable for broad dissemination, in the hopes that they're of interest and value, both personally and professionally. And we are seeing that happen. Our work, um, was not particularly well known outside of academic psychology. Uh, frankly, until a few years ago when we started, uh, getting the opportunity to talk on these kinds of podcasts, which I think are at the vanguard of what is interesting and valuable for the moment. And I always joke, I say to folks, look, if you're having trouble sleeping, I'll send you one of our experiments and you can read about it and you'll be passed out in a paragraph. Um, most of our experimental papers, you know, have been read by a few dozen people. All right, that's good. But. But I get the opportunity to exchange ideas with someone like yourself. And I don't care if ten people watch this or if a million people watch it. If a single person, it's definitely in between those two. I can guarantee it's in between those two. Yeah, no, that would be great, but I just it doesn't for me. So some of the, you know, this has been splendid and so selfishly to just to be in an interesting conversation has uh, been a great experience. And yet I do sincerely hope that I do guess just from looking at some of your other programs that. Yeah, I'm hoping that there's some folks that will find these ideas sufficiently interesting, uh, to become dynamically engaged. And while we're talking, I hope folks will feel free, uh, to write to me. Uh, you know, they know how to use email. I'm in the psych department at Skidmore College. Happy to send you, uh, any of our work, including an electronic copy of our book that's called The Worm at the core. So I hope that this is just the beginning of an ongoing exchange of ideas, including you and I. If there's ever, uh, if you have any inclination to continue this at some point or you know how to find me. 1s Absolutely. I think that would be wonderful. I think if there's one take home message from this particular episode, you know, I like it to have some practical applicability. I like every podcast to have something practical. And one take home message for this podcast would be, you know, when you're afraid of things. Unconsciously or consciously. They actually, if you don't make any movement towards you, they have much more power over you, whether you realize it or not. And if you make a move towards things in slow, incremental ways, towards things which scare the living daylights out of you, you find your life will probably get a bit better. 1s Up magnificent. I like that you know our way. I say that I'm like, hey, when you try and bury your death anxiety under the psychological bushes, it comes back to bear bitter fruit. And yeah, very nice. Well, Sheldon, it's been wonderful to spend some time with you. Uh, thank you very much. And we'd love you to have you back on at some point in the future. Yes. My pleasure. Alex. And to be sillier, I hope we get to be in the same physical space someday. Whether it be on your side of the pond of mine. 9s Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch. If you enjoyed the episode, why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? Because it really helps other people to find us. If you want to get in touch, you can find us on Instagram or Twitter, or you can drop us an email. And if you value the show more generally, why not by us? Coffee. Thanks so much.