Why We Fear Death | Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death for Sleep

Fall asleep to the story of Ernest Becker, who traced all human striving back to the fear of death.In a hospital bed on the Canadian coast, a dying man agreed to be recorded talking about death, the subject he had spent his whole life studying. This episode follows Ernest Becker, the anthropologist and outsider who was pushed from one university to the next and died at forty-nine, only weeks before his masterwork won the Pulitzer Prize. We trace his single great argument, that human beings are the animals who know they will die, and that we build our entire world, our characters, our loves, our cultures, and our wars, out of the long effort to deny it. We follow him through the vital lie of personality, the immortality projects by which we reach for a symbolic eternity, the hidden roots of human evil, and the quiet, lucid way he faced his own end. It is a long and calm walk to the center of what drives us.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Scientist of Death0:11:44 Chapter 2: The Animal That Knows0:17:53 Chapter 3: The Making of a Person0:26:48 Chapter 4: The Schooling in Dread0:35:24 Chapter 5: The Body That Betrays Us0:42:10 Chapter 6: The Meaning of Madness0:50:09 Chapter 7: The Neurotic and the Artist1:03:15 Chapter 8: The Great Reversal1:11:51 Chapter 9: The Vital Lie1:23:55 Chapter 10: The Spell Cast by Persons1:32:42 Chapter 11: The Immortality Project1:44:45 Chapter 12: The Partner as God1:50:29 Chapter 13: The Ritual Against Death1:59:45 Chapter 14: The Price of Heroism2:12:09 Chapter 15: The Test of a Life2:18:44 Chapter 16: The Worm at the CoreIf this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded