Episode 287: Gods With Anuses (The Denial of Death Pt. 1)

[00:00:01] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:18] Conan! What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women? That is good. That is good. The Greatest Oz has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

[00:00:50] I'm a very good man, with no more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man, just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:20] Dave, even though haters like you have been doubting them all season, the Celtics have finally done it. They got their 18th championship. Care to apologize to this team and the city of Boston?

[00:01:34] No, but you know who the only person I'm going to apologize to, well first of all congratulations, he was well deserved, is your coach Joe Mazzulla.

[00:01:42] Now, I didn't like this guy, like he gave me a weird vibe, like I was not, I was always like what's wrong with him? He's like a weird guy. You know what won me over?

[00:01:51] Somebody was saying one time this season he won like NBA Coach of the Month, and maybe it was Tatum or somebody was like hey congratulations on winning Coach of the Month, and he looked at him and said no one gives a shit about that.

[00:02:06] And then just moved on. Like I like that. Yeah, he has his priorities right. The whole city of Boston actually owes Joe Mazzulla an apology. Yeah, for sure. Because we were not confident in his coaching as of just last year.

[00:02:22] We were like last year in the playoffs, if they had fired him I would have been fine with that. He has this just really intense look too, you know, it's kind of a weird look.

[00:02:31] I mean he's an intense, weird guy and he combines fanatical spiritualism and kind of weirdness with like a really hardcore quantitative analytic approach to the game.

[00:02:43] At first it was like this is just a weird nerd, nobody's going to listen to him and now it's like he's a guru. Like it's an amazing transformation actually. It's crazy what winning will do.

[00:02:55] I will say this, and maybe this is just too much basketball talk, I'm not sure that I enjoy that style. Well, first compliment, that team plays like a team in a way that a lot of teams really need to learn from.

[00:03:08] They show that you can't win by just picking good players and trying to get them on your team. Yeah, they have really high character guys and they all devoted themselves because they failed in the past and gotten close.

[00:03:19] Clearly they're making sacrifices to win, you know, like what we need to do to grow our audience that we've not been willing to do. But it's the shooting that many threes as part of that whole analytics trend that it just doesn't make for fun basketball for me.

[00:03:33] No, although I will say when their offense is humming like the way they do it with the drive and dish game and the ball movement,

[00:03:41] it can be beautiful like they're really good passers and they get to the rim so it's not like they're all just hanging out behind the three-point line.

[00:03:50] And you got to respect someone who trusts the numbers, you know, if you put up more threes than any team in the and you have like a 30 whatever percent success rate, you're going to win.

[00:03:58] I think the big thing is you have five guys that you have to guard and five guys that can play defense on the court like at most times like that's a big thing that most teams don't have.

[00:04:09] Our defense won the Dallas series, the offense wasn't that great. Yeah, some of those math things mattered because they weren't shooting that well. I admire when people are willing to stay with the system despite like a bad game like that. Like one of those games.

[00:04:23] Oh, the game four. Yeah, it was just horrendous and you know, just like stick to the system and I could picture Missoula just being like whatever doesn't matter how much we lost by like just stick to the system.

[00:04:34] Meanwhile, we're going to get JJ Reddick. We've turned into a sports podcast. I think on this podcast I congratulated you for at least not having JJ Reddick as your coach but I spoke too soon. Exactly. I blame you. Well, we're not going to talk about sports.

[00:04:50] No, we are going to talk about gun ownership and dick size in this segment. A new study. Finally, we're getting some empirical testing of the psychosexual theory of gun ownership.

[00:05:04] But we should say before we dive into it what the main segment is because our listeners have been waiting with bated breath. Yes, and it's quite related actually. The denial of death finally happening. It's happening folks.

[00:05:17] We're doing just part one of the denial of death and we'll do part two and a wrap up next episode. This was our Patreon listener selected episode after making the list of finalists maybe, I don't know, six or seven times in a row.

[00:05:34] It might have been a concerted effort of trolls to make it to number one. I'm excited to talk about it. I have slightly mixed feelings about part one but overall positive and I'm curious your thoughts about it with your well-documented conscious terror of death. Exactly.

[00:05:55] All right, let's talk penis. Let's talk penis. Penis dissatisfaction. It's not even penis size. It's just dissatisfaction. Penis dissatisfaction, that's right. Which is funny actually that distinction because you might feel like have a really small penis but man I'm just satisfied with this thing.

[00:06:14] This little tiny little penis is just works for me. It's charming. As an aside I knew a guy who would at the clubs hit on women but in a charming way like he would just be surrounded by them and he would call himself the angry inch.

[00:06:29] And when people would ask him why, I mean it was a reference to Hedwig and the Angry Inch for those who don't know. But when people would ask him why he would just say yeah I have a really small dick.

[00:06:42] And like women would just be like really? He'd be like yeah I swear. And I swear to God all that did was get him laid.

[00:06:49] I think in the Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Him, that's like one of the pickup lines that a guy uses in it and it makes sense. It's a perfect like. It's disarming. It assures that you're safe but also that you're funny and you have self-esteem.

[00:07:08] Which is related to the hypothesis that they're trying to test in this right? Which is the view that if you're insecure you're going to try to make up for it with in this case the clear phallic symbol as they say of owning a gun.

[00:07:23] Yeah let me read the abstract and then. Neuroskeptic once again by the way. Yes neuroskeptic of course. In this study we formally examine the association between penis size dissatisfaction. I love the formally. Yeah. It's going to be an informal.

[00:07:40] Just going to ask some friends you know whatever we'll just hang out it's a kickback. The primary hypothesis derived from the psychosexual theory of gun ownership asserts that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises will be more likely to personally own guns.

[00:07:59] To test this hypothesis we use data collected from 2023 masculinity sexual health and politics. MSAP survey 1840 men regression analyses blah blah blah. We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely. Oh liberals. Oh shit.

[00:08:22] Oh that didn't turn out the way you thought it would. Did it you MSNBC like addicts. Rachel Maddow report on this.

[00:08:37] We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns across outcomes including any gun ownership military style rifle ownership and total number of guns owned. The inverse association between penis size dissatisfaction and gun ownership is linear.

[00:08:56] However the association is weakest among men ages 60 years and older. I mean at that point you're probably always dissatisfied with your penis in general. In general. What is this thing. Our findings fail to support the psychosexual theory of gun ownership.

[00:09:15] OK. Do you want to talk about the four propositions of the psychosexual theory of gun ownership. Yeah sure. Four primary propositions. The first is that guns are phallic symbols. Sure I guess which they just sort of are like yeah of course.

[00:09:31] Yeah I mean obviously we'll be talking about Freud in the second segment but yeah. Second proposition is that guns are symbols and instruments of masculinity because they're primarily used by men and they can be used to project power and aggressive behavior.

[00:09:47] OK. Third proposition is that when men define their penises as small or below average they may experience psychological distress because these perceptions can undermine security self-confidence and masculinity.

[00:10:02] Sure I guess if they define their own penis as small or below average which I'm not sure what that exactly means but I guess just feel like they are right.

[00:10:15] And the final proposition of the psychosexual theory of gun ownership suggests that men who are dissatisfied with their penises may seek to obtain guns to compensate for the distressing effects of any perceived deficits in masculinity or sexual potency.

[00:10:29] So OK I get that this is something that you know like academics are going to be like yeah they're probably just they have their four inch dicks and so they need a gun to compensate.

[00:10:41] But did any was this a real theory. Did people really think that like people with smaller dicks or people who think they have small dicks are going to get guns as a way of dealing with that because that just strikes me as so just on the face of it implausible.

[00:10:55] Not as a insult and as a fun thing to say over drinks but as an actual empirical theory.

[00:11:03] I'm with you. I would never have thought this was formal. I think that they're just building on this other paper from 2021 that they talk about where somebody tested the association between sexual dysfunction and gun ownership.

[00:11:16] And they're just sort of doing it that way and like almost taking at face value that these people said that this is a view like I gun specifically is even weird. Obviously it's trucks right.

[00:11:26] Yeah. Yeah. For Broncos maybe. Who knows. But yeah. No like that's what I don't get. Like I can't believe that people really thought oh if you test gun owners they're going to because clearly this is something that's quite cultural.

[00:11:43] You know that there's just certain towns across the South where everyone owns a gun and a lot of guns and they're going to have penises across the range of penises and satisfaction with their penises. They're not.

[00:11:58] I would say the same the same thing like what are your chances of getting an effect when large swaths of the country defined geographically and politically. Like really the claim that you'd have to be making is that people who are more likely to live say in the country and own shotguns or people who are more likely to be conservative like that they actually have like smaller or less satisfied with their penis.

[00:12:22] So yeah. No I'm with you. It's like yeah it doesn't seem like there's a lot of room for variants to be captured.

[00:12:28] I just can't believe that there were people who actually thought as opposed to something that like would be an onion headline or something like that that this would be something that was actually empirically like demonstrable. It strikes me as like oh no people didn't mean that literally.

[00:12:45] Yeah. No. Yeah. I don't know. But they could but they looked at the data. They looked at the data. You know I guess it's not difficult. The data is already collected. So maybe they were just like oh you know it'd be fun. But then they had to write like a serious write up.

[00:12:59] Let's get into the weeds of the actual study though. So the big thing that you're going to ask here like it's easy to figure out if men own guns right. Like like that's not hard. But how do you assess penis size dissatisfaction.

[00:13:15] Well in two ways. So what they did in the survey is they were asked to indicate their overall level of dissatisfaction with the size of their penis when fully erect like that they specified from one to seven. One here is completely satisfied to seven completely dissatisfied. This is not a it's not a survey that we're going to take in real time.

[00:13:40] No probably not. When fully erect. I have to say I don't know what the like satisfied to reality thing but I'm from a six. No six is almost. Oh no no no sorry. Yeah I'm like a two.

[00:13:56] Which by the way is something that I suspect people might have gotten confused. Yeah because I'm the same like with you I was like wait seven is completely dissatisfied.

[00:14:05] And then to assess experiences with penis enlargement respondents were asked to indicate whether they had ever used any methods for penis enlargement such as penis pumps penis weights which what stretching exercises supplements creams or surgeries.

[00:14:23] Now first of all one of these is not like the other. Right. Like they're lumping all of these together and it might include actual surgery. Yeah. Improve your like to make your penis larger. But also creams. Creams exactly.

[00:14:38] Cream it's like oh this is definitely going to make my dick bigger. Rubbing this cream on it. I never even thought that people would believe that stretching exercises. I'm not even sure what that would be like. Do you just kind of yank it out.

[00:14:52] Like you're starting a lawnmower. Like a piece of taffy. You have your girlfriend just like stand over you on the bed and just like two hand like pull. Yeah like under a cot like she's on the floor like just yanking it down.

[00:15:11] Oh man. And so OK so this was coded as one or zero. A lot of these things are weirdly coded as one or zero. They lump together a bunch of stuff. But I would be very comfortable saying zero for all of these. Of course.

[00:15:25] Definite zero. And for the record since you already said your score I'm very satisfied. They do and I appreciate this but construct validity. They want to know if this is really picking out the construct of penis size dissatisfaction.

[00:15:40] But I will say I don't fully get their defense of the construct validity of this. So like I want to know what you have to say about this. So table two assesses the construct validity of penis size dissatisfaction and penis enlargement.

[00:15:56] Our analyses revealed several associations that are consistent with previous research. Men who were more dissatisfied with their appearance of their penis tended to be more dissatisfied with the size of their penises. And were more likely to have attempted penis enlargement.

[00:16:14] Men who were dissatisfied with their sex lives and obese men tended to be more dissatisfied with the size of their penises. While men who reported having more sexual partners in the past year and better mental health were more likely to have attempted penis.

[00:16:28] Were more likely to have attempted penis enlargement. Men who reported greater household incomes were less likely to have attempted penis enlargement. But what the fuck? Like what is this saying? Finally how does this establish the validity of the construct?

[00:16:46] Well the idea is that you know that if this construct means what you think it means it ought to be related to a number of other things.

[00:16:54] So if you say that your penis is smaller than you'd like you also ought to say that you're more dissatisfied and you also be more likely to say that you've tried things. Right? Like it's just trying to get a cluster of things.

[00:17:09] So this goes against what I was joking about like that people just got that one question wrong. Because if they'd gotten it wrong and reversed, used the reverse numbers then you wouldn't find these associations.

[00:17:20] Obese men tended to be more dissatisfied with the size of their penises. How does that establish the construct? I have no idea.

[00:17:27] So right like I think it's it's sound to say if this is really measuring what we say it's measuring it ought to also be related to these other measures.

[00:17:36] Right? Like you would just expect that that's true. If it weren't true then you would have to be like well what are we really asking?

[00:17:42] But yeah but they included a whole bunch of stuff so I'm not sure what you would expect this measure are you satisfied with your penis? How I would expect it to be related to obesity like you said having more sex partners in the past year. Yeah.

[00:17:57] That like the thing that you paused at which was that they were more likely to report more sex partners. Yeah. That doesn't make sense. And it certainly doesn't make sense as to establish the validity of this concept. No. Right.

[00:18:12] Men who reported having more sex partners in the past year and better mental health were more likely to have attempted penis enlargement. Yeah I mean it's just like that's an interesting little observation like but it has nothing to do with what they're talking about. Right. Yeah.

[00:18:29] Just a fun fact more. They also measured in the part where they're describing why they were doing this they said we measure penis appearance dissatisfaction by asking respondents to indicate their overall level of satisfaction with the appearance of their penis when fully erect.

[00:18:42] Which is a kind of a hilarious like is your penis like good looking guy? I love the distinction between that and the size of it. It's like are you Matt like do you think it's the wrong like color or shape? It's like there is a platonic penis. Yeah.

[00:18:59] You know yeah and then and then sex led to satisfaction which again it's not on a scale it's either one dissatisfied zero neither satisfied or dissatisfied or satisfied. It's such a weird way of coding these things it doesn't make any sense.

[00:19:13] Number of sex partners also they coded it as zero or one and in the past 12 months if you had zero to two then you were low and then if you had three or more you were high.

[00:19:26] I don't know why three is the cutoff in 12 months but whatever it's just all weird ways of assessing. Could have been a good year or a bad year. So here is the conclusion.

[00:19:35] The primary hypothesis derived from the psychosexual theory of gun ownership which I'm not fully convinced exists but if it does. They're just making it exist. Yeah. They're just talking about it until it exists.

[00:19:47] Stated that men are more dissatisfied with the size of their penis as would be more likely to personally own guns. Our analyses consistently failed to support the hypothesis.

[00:19:58] Instead we found that the rates of gun ownership were similar for men who had attempted penis enlargement and men who had had no experiences with penis enlargement.

[00:20:06] We also observed that the men who are less dissatisfied with the size of their penises were more likely to personally own guns across outcomes. Our analysis shows that men who are less dissatisfied with the size of their penises are more likely to own guns than other men.

[00:20:23] That's funny that they're just really happy with their penises and like fuck it. I'm now going to get a gun. You know I want to increase my power. So here's where they then justify the test like this whole line of research.

[00:20:36] He says these findings are important because they contribute to an evidence based understanding of gun ownership. Gun owners make a lot of claims about guns. Many will tell you that guns improve their lives make them happy help them sleep better at night.

[00:20:50] But none of these claims have been established empirically and the people who do not own guns will tell you that gun owners are motivated by fear or sexual dysfunction. But these ideas are unfounded in these instances gun culture rhetoric fun functions to justify guns. This is my favorite.

[00:21:07] In these instances gun culture rhetoric functions to justify guns discredit gun owners and further stigmatize men with smaller pieces. That's what this is further stigmatizing men with smaller penises.

[00:21:23] Like that's what this study will put a stop to these men with smaller penises who are already sad about the fact that they have these really small penises. They're just getting further stigmatized by this like theory. Just leave them alone.

[00:21:38] Yeah. Also doesn't it sound a little weirdly personal. I'm not saying anything about the I don't know these people. I'm not going to but further stigmatize sounds like it has some feeling behind. Yeah. It would explain anyway.

[00:21:51] Ultimately these kinds of discussions are counterproductive for society because they distract us from the observable realities of penis dissatisfaction and gun ownership. So can I say a bit before what you read there is a sentence that I thought was hilarious.

[00:22:09] Although our results for penis enlargement are consistent with a previous study of sexual dysfunction and personal gun ownership. Our results for penis size dissatisfaction are unprecedented. And I was like wait is that the word you're looking for? Unprecedented research on penis size satisfaction. That's so funny.

[00:22:30] It reminds me of I'll never forget for whatever reason you have these things with your kid where just when they were a little kid you'll never forget them. So I'm picking up the Liza from daycare when she's four and the time change had just happened.

[00:22:44] So it was like 445 and it was getting dark. And so she comes out of the daycare and she's like it is dark and it's not even five o'clock. This is unusual. And I was like what?

[00:23:02] I was like no this kind of happens every year you know like she's like no it's it's not even five o'clock. This is unusual. It's a sign of the end. I think what she meant was like unacceptable or something like that. Totally.

[00:23:21] She just like she just fixated on that word unusual. Yeah. That's what this sounds like. Unprecedented. Unprecedented. I mean it's true like nobody's run this particular study.

[00:23:36] It just makes me think there are other ways to make up for your small penis than gun ownership and one of them might be to call your studies unprecedented. And to bitch about the stigmatization of people with small penises.

[00:23:49] So Neuroskeptic made this point which I think is the obvious criticism of this that they don't really talk about which is isn't all that you showed that men who own guns are less willing to admit that they're dissatisfied with their penis? Fundamentally. That's the self-report issue right? Yeah.

[00:24:09] That's what construct validity didn't really address that. It didn't take care of that.

[00:24:14] Like I get that there is this construct that you might say like are you insecure about your penis but it does actually take some degree of comfort with the whole thing to agree on a national survey that you might feel a little bit some sort of way about your small penis.

[00:24:31] Yeah. And like if you wanted to do the MSNBC thing you could say well these people would never admit in a survey that they have small penises. Like yeah. Like there's so many confounding factors.

[00:24:44] Do you know by the way I'm pretty sure that this has come up on our podcast because of course it has.

[00:24:50] But there is like a bunch of research on objective penis size and they've found out that the best way to measure is you actually have to pull on the flaccid penis because if you're trying to. Like a stretching exercise? Yeah.

[00:25:04] If you're trying to assess what the erect penis size is of course you know you can't just measure the flaccid one. But apparently if you pull on it. You need a fluffer. You need two fluffers.

[00:25:19] Apparently if you pull on it that is correlated with penis size so you can use that with erect penis size. So you can use that as a reliable metric.

[00:25:26] So what this is really what we need is somebody to go and pull on the penises of gun owners and non-gun owners and see. Yeah. Although it wouldn't get you. I want to do the non-gun owners if I'm the penis puller.

[00:25:40] I'll take you do the gun owners I'll do the non-gun owners. Oh shit. That reminds me so vividly of that scene in the shield where the police captain is being held at gunpoint on his knees and he has to suck that guy's dick.

[00:25:56] And I love that his Hispanic wife is just like. You let him do that to you? Like what's wrong with you? That's a very very honor culture thing. She's like. Sepuku. She's like sepuku. She's like I don't understand how you could.

[00:26:17] And he's like because I wanted to live for you and the family. And she's like yeah but like you don't suck his dick. Pinpointed the exact moment where she lost respect for him it was so sad. I know. Like Ralph. Heartbreak. Exactly. I was exactly thinking that.

[00:26:35] So anyway there's some interesting logistic regressions. I had like when I was looking at this I was like wait how do you interpret this again? It's kind of it's a little bit confusing. But it is what it is.

[00:26:45] And now I think we can move past the psychosexual theory of gun ownership. And it goes back to being like this thing that like coastal liberals joke about. Exactly. And big trucks.

[00:26:59] Yeah and then who then try to compensate for their fear of small penises and fear of death in other ways. All right. When we come back it's finally happening. We can put it off no longer. David can put it off no longer.

[00:27:16] We are going to talk about the denial of death. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the predictable time where we like to thank everybody for their support. We really appreciate all of your messages all the ways that you reach out to us. Your tweets.

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[00:33:53] We're ready to set aside. Are you ready? Ready to set aside my deep terror of death to finally talk about The Denial of Death, 1973 book by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who passed away, you told me this, shortly after this was published. He was only 49 years old.

[00:34:11] Yeah, that's so sad. I know. He passed away before he got the Pulitzer Prize for it. Yeah, in 74, which is tragic. It's tragic. But this is a book, as you were saying, that's been consistently requested for us to do.

[00:34:24] It's a book that I had already read in college and I was mentioning on an Ask Us Anything that it had been very influential. But I just hadn't gotten back to it in years. Like I hadn't read it.

[00:34:34] And I was a little worried about going back to it because, you know, sometimes you read shit in college and it just doesn't hit the same way. And did it? It complicated. So let me just give like the briefest of overalls about this.

[00:34:48] So we read section one for this episode and we'll deal with section two. Part two, right? Part two, yeah. And three for the next episode. But here is where, this is the part where Becker is setting a stage.

[00:35:02] So this is a matrimony between a strand of existential thought and a deep psychoanalytic tradition where the central thesis is just that humans are this very unique part of the natural world because we find ourselves in this position of knowing that we're going to die.

[00:35:24] So we're animals like any other animal, but we have a clear knowledge that our time on earth is limited.

[00:35:31] And this terror as Becker refers to it, this knowledge that we're going to die when combined with this real feeling that we are spirits, that we are more than just our animal nature, it creates this paradox of just our state.

[00:35:46] And basically what we have to do, the crux of this argument is that we cannot persist with this terror constantly on our mind. What we have to do is repress that.

[00:35:58] So the existential part, knowing that we're going to die and having to deal with that, the psychoanalytic part saying we have to suppress these feelings, this fear of death. And the other psychoanalytic part saying this is a deep source of motivation.

[00:36:10] So Becker is going to try to build a case that much of what we do, everything from the personality, the character that we develop to our cultural institutions are all ways that we're dealing with this deep, deep terror of our own mortality.

[00:36:27] Yeah. It's an interesting use of the word terror because the whole point of the Hero Project, the Kazusui Project and the whole culture that we erect to make those projects possible, that's the thing that makes us repress the terror.

[00:36:45] But this is the thing that I struggle with with this book. We're not aware of the terror, but it does explain all these other things that we do. And it's because we do those things that we're not aware of this primal terror we have.

[00:37:00] And also just this inability to deal with this paradox of being gods with anuses. Yeah. Right. Yeah. One of the things that I like about this book is it's super expansive. He's trying to bring together lots of different strands of thought.

[00:37:14] And I think that he is doing a good job of unifying, right? Like this task that he set before him to unify thinkers spanning hundreds of years.

[00:37:24] And one of the things he points out is that a lot of people have said that fundamental to the human condition is we are animals. We have an animal body. We have to poop and we sweat and we have to eat. We're no different.

[00:37:38] We see the bones of our dead ancestors. We're worm food. We know that it's coming. We're food for worms. That's right. And that every culture and many, many thinkers have had to come to terms with this in some way.

[00:37:53] And so, yeah, the key to this argument is that that terror has to be masked. That gets repression. Right. And he builds heavily on Freud, which I think we're going to dive into. But even just the poetry of being gods that shit, I forget how he puts it.

[00:38:07] Like upon every throne a king sits on his arse. Yeah. Here's my favorite of his descriptions of the paradox that we all face. We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature.

[00:38:27] He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He's a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity. I like that. Like to speculate about atoms and infinity. It's like Borges and Newton, you know?

[00:38:42] Who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. Very Nagel too, like this absurd. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this inferiority, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature as the Renaissance thinkers knew.

[00:39:04] Yet at the same time as Eastern sages also knew man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox. He is out of nature and hopelessly in it.

[00:39:15] He is dual up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill marks to prove it. His body is a material, fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways.

[00:39:30] The strangest and most repugnant way that it aches and bleeds will decay and die. Man is literally split in two.

[00:39:39] He has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with towering majesty and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

[00:39:51] It's a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. So good. That's really good. Should we talk about just general impressions and then dive into the details?

[00:40:03] Yeah, let's do that. I'm curious. I'm really curious what you—I mean, we talked a little bit, but what did you think so far?

[00:40:08] Well, obviously, like I really love the way that he talks about our transcendental yearnings and the tension between that and our kind of natural condition of knowing that we're going to decay and get old and die that you and I are getting a little too familiar with is awareness of aging, right?

[00:40:30] I like that whole analysis. I really like—you know, I've only read through part one, so I haven't even read until the end yet, but I really like the analysis of Freud. I liked the Kierkegaard.

[00:40:39] I struggle—like, and here's where, like, I'm at a bit of a disadvantage compared to you or at least we come at this differently because, like, I'm not someone that fears death in a conscious way.

[00:40:54] And so that passage I just read, it's like if that's true that I'm struggling with this at some deep, like, core level of my being and that most of the stuff I erect as part of my character is just a lie to, like, conceal that truth, I'm completely unaware of it.

[00:41:17] And it's not totally clear to me yet why I should go with the repression hypothesis versus just other explanations for why I do some of the dumb shit and the good shit that I do, you know?

[00:41:31] Right. No, I was curious about that too. I mean, reading it, it was very salient to me that this is something that I could relate to right away, whereas, like, I just wasn't sure how convincing or how powerful even those passages would be if you haven't sort of looked into the face of this and felt terror in the way that he described it.

[00:41:52] And yet part of the theory is that a lot of people are going to be like me. I'm like the dumb Philistine that Kierkegaard talks about. Like, yeah, I just live on autopilot and I'm practically an animal.

[00:42:05] He has a few times a nice description of how we can go about living our lives without ever thinking about death, even when, like, we should. Right. So there's a lot of this part where he's talking about something you mentioned, which is this hero system, like this desire to overcome death somehow.

[00:42:26] So a lot in mythology and religion, a lot of these tales are like about the hero who overcomes death. And he thinks that we're doing that maybe on a smaller scale by partaking in cultural practices and by doing what we do, our little jobs and our little relationships and our little patreons, making us feel like everything is good and fine.

[00:42:48] And then we have a moment where we face death. And there is like when it's right, right there. You know, you go to the hospital because you had a heart attack. You had a stroke. Sorry, not stroke, seizure. When you had a seizure after that time that you rode your bike, like, were you worried about any of this?

[00:43:07] No, it wasn't when I rode my bike. No, I think you're confused. There was a time I had a seizure, but like by the time I was conscious, it was clear that I was not going to die to me at least. But I also just like, that's how I am. Like, I don't think I'm going to die. Like, I've had a few. There was, I think what you're referring to with the bike, there was one time I was on my bike and a car, like I looked at him, like there was just a car coming that I didn't see. And it just came right by me. And for a second, I got a glimpse into your world.

[00:43:35] Like I got a glimpse into holy shit, I could die. What does that mean? You know, and then it just, but it kind of went away. Like maybe it stuck with me for like a couple of weeks, but it was just like, yeah, now I'm back to just saying, like, I die, I die. Like I'm playing with house money now anyway. Like, don't get me wrong. I want to live. I want to see where this world goes and what Eliza does and all of that. But I just don't feel that terror.

[00:44:02] So if he's speaking truth here, he's telling me a lot about my unconscious in a way that I find very appealing. Don't get me wrong. Like, but it's hard for me to know how much to trust in this particular theory of human motivation versus other ones, because at least in part one, we are not getting a lot of evidence. And I don't even mean studies of the kind they would do later on this, you know, the terror management theory stuff.

[00:44:32] I just mean like evidence besides saying like, like, thanks to Otto Rehm, we now know that, you know, the thing that really drives us is this. Like there's a lot of that in it. So that's the thing that makes me, it makes it a little hard for me to appreciate this on the level that I think it's being pitched, but I still find it full of insight and brimming with stuff that makes me, that inspires like ideas in all kinds of different directions.

[00:44:59] Yeah. I had the same issue as you, even as somebody who, who experiences death anxiety. It's sort of like a, an issue for me on the other way, which is if the whole idea is that we're consistently repressing our anxiety, then what the fuck is wrong with me? It's just leaking. Like I'm constantly staring into the abyss and worrying.

[00:45:17] You need another like immortality project, maybe psych season two.

[00:45:23] That's true. That is what I'll be remembered for. Right. But I, I'm with you and that's, those were my mixed feelings this time around. When I read it, I must've been like a sophomore or junior in college and it was a crucial part of a class and I was just committed the whole way through. Like this was, this was brand new to me. This was my real introduction to existential thought.

[00:45:46] I don't even think I gave it a second thought when he would say things like what scientific psychology has shown us is that repression is real or whatever. And now I'm reading and I'm thinking, wait, what scientific psychology? And there are sort of consistent references to clinical psychiatry having demonstrated definitively that this or this, but without even, it's not even that I'm like, oh my God, clinicians can't acquire truth.

[00:46:10] It's that there was no like accompanying defense of where he got that, that evidence. All that said though, like you read this and I'm just reminded of, of like our episodes that where we've talked about the absurd and, and meaning and our episode on Ecclesiastes that is very much focused on this problem. We know, we know that our life is limited and how do we make sense of this short life that we have?

[00:46:38] That has to be at the heart of so much of what we do. I think like, honestly, the things that might've turned us off about it is small things. Yeah, for sure.

[00:46:47] There's so many we now know, today we know, you know, and then some completely speculative thing that like there's absolutely no way that we know that person. Right. Yeah. You know, in terms of it being of its time, it felt very seventies to me.

[00:47:06] Absolutely. I was going to say, it's not a book from the fifties. It's not a book from the nineties. Like it's very clear.

[00:47:11] Yeah. It felt like you're like, you're watching an early Woody Allen movie just like the way that like the prose and it's in Andy Hall. Like they, he buys it. Yeah. Right. I saw that. Yeah. That's hilarious.

[00:47:24] The one thing like, and I'm surprised that you liked it so much on first go, the way they talk about these early psychoanalysts and I think Young in the first part at least comes out really well in this in terms of diagnosing certain things about Freud. Right.

[00:47:43] And, you know, like auto rank and these other ones that you've probably never heard of unless you've gone unless you're a psychologist, you know, they, they psychoanalyze the rivalries between like Young and he psychoanalyzes like Freud's fainting spells and their whole, his whole way of theorizing.

[00:48:00] Like, so it is kind of a gigantic psychoanalytic circle jerk in a way that I would think that you wouldn't, it would repel you, but you seem okay with it.

[00:48:10] Yeah. At the time. So one of my dear psych professors as an undergrad, Oben Fulton was a big, he was big into Freud, not because he endorsed it. I think he just loved it in the way that we've sort of come to love some things. Like we loved reading Freud when we read him.

[00:48:30] He just loved it in that sense. And so I had read a lot of Freud, maybe even Civilization is Discontents and I had read a biography about Freud. Like I was just all in with the soap opera drama at the time, like the rivalry between Freud and Young and, and the neurotic ways that they analyzed each other. Circle jerk is the perfect word.

[00:48:52] I don't even think I saw that as inconsistent with what other psychologists might be doing. But speaking of Freud, like this does, this whole argument is fundamentally indebted to ideas that Freud first introduced and that have been super influential. So I don't know how you felt when you were reading it, but when he talks about like Freud's views of the unconscious and of development and of the ego and of anality,

[00:49:19] I kind of noticed that he wasn't just like laying it all out there. Like he assumed some level of familiarity maybe.

[00:49:26] Yeah. And I think it was very good at telling you about the theories, even if he would then make a very confident, you know, like there are parts of Freud that he accepts and parts that he very confidently rejects. I actually thought one of the most fascinating things was that chapter on Freud and his character and why he wouldn't give up like the sex instinct thing and that how that relates to Becker's whole theory.

[00:49:55] And like it's just kind of interesting the way they go about it. Like I'm all for this as a good counterweight to a lot of those sort of rigorous quote unquote database research that people are doing. But I get why you might be like, wait, what? Wait, what?

[00:50:14] It's the confidence.

[00:50:16] Before we get into it, there was one quote from his preface that I wanted to ask you about. So he says, one of the main things I try to do in this book is present a summing up of psychology after Freud by tying the whole development of psychology back to the still towering Kierkegaard. I am thus arguing for a merger of psychology and mythical religious perspective.

[00:50:39] What do you think of this idea of a merger of psychology and a mythical religious perspective?

[00:50:45] You know, it's funny that you say that because as I was reading the section on Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's solution to this existential dilemma, I realized I was in such a different mindset when I read this. Like I was still a believer.

[00:51:02] So he's referring to Kierkegaard basically arguing that the solution, the way out of this dilemma is the leap of faith. And the way that he presents Freud is a guy who almost got it. You can't escape that. That's how he deeply feels about Freud. He's like, Freud got us so much of the way there and was unwilling to give in to some of these more mystical impulses.

[00:51:26] Because of his hero, that wasn't consistent with his hero project.

[00:51:30] Exactly. And I, as I'm reading this, because I only read through part one as well, I was like, wait, he's not arguing for a mythical religious solution, is he? You know, and I was like, I'm kind of on Freud with this. So I'm curious how I'm going to interpret the rest of the book. And like, I don't even remember how much he relies on some sort of mysticism.

[00:51:55] I think he just thinks it's all the same. Like he thinks science and mysticism are expressions of that same desire for transcendence. So I don't think it's going to be that he's arguing specifically for a mystical view. He's just trying to deflate the idea that there's a big difference between a more religious way of dealing with this dilemma and the kind of scientific naturalist materialist way of addressing it.

[00:52:23] Yeah, maybe. Okay, so I thought maybe it would be helpful to start with why is Freud being credited with so much of this deep thought? And it's clearly Becker is building on this and building on people who built on Freud. And so I thought maybe I'd just give a little like a little bit of the connective tissue.

[00:52:39] So Freud had this grand theory of human nature that explained what he believed everything from the development of a personality all the way to our cultural institutions and religious sentiments. It was a grand theory that he thought all boiled down to a dynamic with our unconscious mind.

[00:52:58] Freud's view was that the source of all of our psychic energy, our motivation, everything that we were motivated to do was from this fount of energy that was the unconscious. And he believed that the unconscious mind was driven by the pleasure principle that we were organisms that sought gratification bodily gratification and sexual gratification fundamentally.

[00:53:28] That is what we are at our core and that what happens throughout development and now development here is literally ages zero through school age like five six for Freud was that you progress through these stages where you build up a character and a personality and an ego that can take the impulses those sexual impulses and turn them into acceptable things.

[00:53:58] Forms of acting. So for Freud development was all about how that happens. So you proceed through these stages where at first you're the source of pleasure comes from your mouth, the oral stage.

[00:54:13] Then you go through the anal stage where you get the source of pleasure from from pooping and the genital stage where you start diddling yourself. All of this was what Freud believed an expression of the fundamentally sexual nature of the unconscious.

[00:54:29] Which is shaped by the culture, right? Like on cultural norms and expectations.

[00:54:57] And that will be that's crucial in the development of the super ego, which happens at the end of development. So so the ego is for Freud what it was defined by the reality principle. You want to eat, you want to diddle, you want to do whatever you can't like you're not allowed to. So your ego, you learn as a child that you can't just do whatever you feel like.

[00:55:16] You just finger your ass all day. Right. The part of the Becker thing that I was just dying was when he was talking about anal play. Yeah. And I was like, I think that means something different now.

[00:55:28] But he was talking about the fundamental importance of anal play. I was like, I could tell I'm very healthy. Like my acceptance of anal play. So you have the ego that's that's has this reality principle. And then at some point in development, the boy child who is is unconsciously yearning for his mother. He desires his mother as a sexual object.

[00:55:53] And Freud had a very broad definition of sex. It's not like he wants to bang his mom, but he desires his mother. His mother is the source of pleasure. But he realizes that the father is around and is in the way. Like, yes, he's competing with his father.

[00:56:07] And he realized at some point that the only way out of this is to identify with the father and all of the things that the father represents our system of morality, of cultural norms, all of that stuff. Identify with the father and because the father is powerful. And if you don't, he might cut off your dick. Like literally, this was Freud's view. And so you internalize your father's norms and morality and all that stuff. And that's your super ego.

[00:56:33] But you're but ultimately to kill him. Ultimately, you want to kill him, but you identify with him. Right. So you're like Donnie Brasco.

[00:56:39] Freud, yeah. Freud didn't think that you at the end of the Oedipal conflict, you wanted to kill your father. He thought that was over. Becker is going to say Freud had this right. Like, you do still like want to kill your father because your father represents that you're linked to somebody else.

[00:56:56] And it undermines the Caso Sui project.

[00:56:59] Yeah, right. Okay. So for Freud, like this is the heart of it. Freud thought that your unconscious motivation was sexual. That was all the energy that you came from. But the only way that we deal with it is through defense mechanisms like repression. We can never let the thought into our minds consciously that we want to have sex with our moms because that's such a bad thought to have that it would be devastating.

[00:57:23] So we repress all of the darkest thoughts. And it only comes out sometimes like he believed it came out in dreams or in slips of the tongue or in jokes. Those were little clues about what was going on.

[00:57:38] But as Becker points out, this was all really a belief that sexuality was what was the fundamental motivator of humanity. And that's where Becker says, okay, like he got all that stuff right about unconscious motivation, about being a creature that was dependent on his body, on what the importance of sexuality was and of poop and discovering that you're an animal, the importance of the father. What he didn't realize was this was all actually a way to deal with the knowledge that we're going to die.

[00:58:06] That's right. He clearly respects Freud and the whole framework that he's approaching this is Freudian, like because it's it's involves the unconscious and involves repression and it involves transference and all the different ways that we won't face our true nature and all the mechanisms that we have to avoid doing that. Because of that, it has some of the same problems, which at times he acknowledges.

[00:58:33] He admits to, right. Yeah. He's like, how do you prove that repression is going on? Like I can't it's hard to say, well, like Tamler, your lack of an explicit fear of death is evidence of the power of repression. Right. It seems unfalsifiable. And he sort of owns up to that, but he thinks that he has other ways of providing it.

[00:58:54] Here's a spot where he says, so the argument of those who believe in the universality of the innate terror of death rests its case mostly on what we know about how effective repression is. The argument can probably never be cleanly decided. If you claim that a concept is not present because it's repressed, you can't lose. It's not a fair game intellectually because you always hold the trump card.

[00:59:15] This type of argument makes psychoanalysis seem unscientific to many people. The fact that its proponents can claim that someone denies one of their concepts because he represses his consciousness of its truth. And so like very good description, as we were talking about before, of the problem that I have with it. And then he says, but repression is not a magical word for winning arguments. It's a real phenomenon.

[00:59:39] And we have been able to study many of its workings. The study gives it legitimacy as a scientific concept and makes it a more or less dependable ally in our argument. For one thing, there's a growing body of research trying to get the consciousness of death denied by repression that uses psychological tests such as the measuring galvanic skin.

[00:59:58] I don't know if he, in what we read so far, just gets past that initial issue. And it's not going to be by galvanic skin responses that he gets by it. It's just got to be, do you buy it? Like at some level? And I'm a little agnostic on that. Like I might though.

[01:00:17] No, that's totally it. It's fundamentally, I think, do you buy it? So he tries a little bit by saying like, okay, let's look at kids like before they're fully formed. Like, do they have some fear of death? Like what is their thinking of death? But it didn't seem as if that was super convincing as a way. I don't see a way around his problem of circularity. You just, you read this and like we've said many times, science isn't the only source of insight into the human condition.

[01:00:42] And so it almost reads like more of a crock to tell me that galvanic skin response is going to tell me something about this than it is to just say, look, I think this is like a deep truth because you know, like look at Augustine said it and Kierkegaard said it and William James said it. Like there is something that everybody's pointing to that seems right.

[01:01:01] Yeah. This is like an unfortunate issue with all of the terror management theory work that emerged as a direct result of this book, which is very much like unreplicable social psychology from the early aughts that to me detract from the thesis of this book more than they add to it.

[01:01:19] Absolutely.

[01:01:50] And so, you know, I think that's the thing that we try to make ourselves immortal because we can't face the fact that we're going to die. We have to live in the illusion that we will live on somehow. At the most basic level, this manifests itself in our quest for self-esteem. Right? Like we want to know that we're different. We're more valuable than these other animals, these other things that are going to die, human and non-human.

[01:02:16] So he says, we've learned from mostly from Alfred Adler. I like that. Like this one guy has taught us this, that what man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter.

[01:02:38] His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically. His cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, images in the air, in the mind, on paper. That's, I think, pretty interesting and pretty central to what he's saying.

[01:02:57] We need to feel special. We need to feel individualized. We need to feel like even though we're going to die, we're still kind of a God. We're not just another squirrel running around indistinguishable from anybody. And this plays out in sibling rivalry. It plays out in pretty much everything that we do.

[01:03:19] We need that self-esteem. But the way we get that is entirely culturally determined, like how we're going to get self-esteem. That's what society is essentially, is a coded system where people can derive their self-worth from whatever rules that society has set up for this exact thing, whether society does this consciously or not.

[01:03:45] Whether it's through religion or through owning your own company or— Rooting for the Celtics. Rooting for the Celtics, exactly. That's a classic way that we try to elevate ourselves. And it's because we can't accept that we're worm food.

[01:04:05] We have the God part. We feel that, the transcendental yearnings, the need to make an impression. But we can't accept, I guess, the fact that ultimately this is all not going to mean anything in the grand scheme of things.

[01:04:22] Yeah. He has a section there on narcissism where he's sort of reinterpreting what narcissism is, is like this basic urge to be special. He says, look, we all just feel special. He quotes Aristotle, like luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. And he says at some point, the reason that we can march off all these young men to go to war is that deep down, none of them thinks they're going to die. They just feel sorry for the guy next to them because they know they're going to die.

[01:04:50] That's me. Yeah, that's what you were saying. It's the other guy that's going to die.

[01:04:56] And he has a kind of a chilling description of until you're covered in blood and you're looking down at yourself, that reality hits that it might be you. The fabric rips open and you see your true animal nature.

[01:05:09] I was going to be fucked then because I'm not like, you've prepared for this your whole life. I don't think we're going to react the same way, I'm sure.

[01:05:18] So crucial to this view that Becker is like this, this view that he's building is that all of these things are lies.

[01:05:26] So your personality is a development that is in response to this unconscious terror of death. Our cultural institutions, everything that we do, all of this is just a mountain of lies that we've created in order to deal with this.

[01:05:44] You know, he repeatedly emphasizes that character is just a lie. Character here meaning personality. It's just a lie. Character traits are secret psychoses, he quotes twice actually. I don't know how to like, I don't even quite know what that means that these are lies.

[01:06:02] Like I had trouble with this part in figuring out even what was being claimed. I think again this is a Freudian sort of like view that personality is essentially just a way that we cope with the world around us.

[01:06:19] And so different styles of dealing with the world around us are sort of manifest as these different personality characteristics. So Freud's theory of psychosexual development is essentially a theory of personality at the end. Like how do you become who you are? But why are they lies or psychoses?

[01:06:36] Right. So I don't know if I have a clear answer to that, but I have, I think what gives some clarity for me is when he talks about when our personalities break.

[01:06:46] So he thinks that schizophrenia and depression, like severe depression, are when those normal character traits have failed us completely. And so like in schizophrenia, it literally is like a ripping open into like this flooding of like we have not developed the proper defenses against reality.

[01:07:06] And reality is too overwhelming. And so the person with schizophrenia is not able to deal in the same way that we are. I love that passage. I don't know if I wrote it down.

[01:07:16] This idea that, yes, character traits are a lie. They're a defense mechanism. They're an illusion we erect to deal with things we don't want to face.

[01:07:25] But to not have them would be worse. It would be psychotic and schizophrenic and just like you would just be in the void then. Right.

[01:07:35] My initial read on character traits are psychoses or they're a lie is to think of it as like the illusion of a self, like a stable self. You know, like to think of it in more Buddhist or no self terms. But I don't think that's what he means.

[01:07:52] So I think one of the things at least that he might mean is if you're an extrovert and you get value from your relationships with other people and your ability to be charming and talk to other people,

[01:08:03] that is a source of value that you're getting as a way of aggrandizing yourself or like you're gaining value from this way that you're facing the world.

[01:08:14] But if you're an introvert, it might be a very different way. But all of those are like coping mechanisms for making us feel OK in the face of the truth.

[01:08:24] But here's where like why I call these lies. So let's say people like you at work. They think you're funny and they generally feel good around you and you value that.

[01:08:36] You're happy that people like you and that they respect you. I feel like we can do that. It's certainly not in principle impossible to do that without thinking, oh, this makes me immortal or this makes me like OK with the fact that I'm dying.

[01:08:49] Or this helps me deny that I'm going to die. Like you could just be happy that people like you and treat you well. You know, like it's not like does it have to be this grand delusion?

[01:09:03] What makes it that rather than just a good natured person that enjoys when people like him and doesn't when they don't?

[01:09:13] Yeah, I know. It's a good question. And part of me wants to say it's from the rhetorical power of insisting that everything at our core is like some sort of lie.

[01:09:22] I think to be fair to him, he might say this is what keeps your eyes closed, so to speak. The value that you're deriving is temporarily just keeping you away from the harsh truth.

[01:09:35] In what sense? Because you can ask me at any point and I'll say, yes, I'm going to die. I know that.

[01:09:42] Yeah. You know, this is where maybe his Kierkegaardian analysis might come in handy, which is that you have to sort of shed whatever dependence you have that's propping you up, that's making you feel good.

[01:09:54] Like you have to shed that as a source of feeling good. I don't know. I'm with you. I'm just trying to give some sort of defense for why he keeps saying this.

[01:10:02] I think it might be even right. Like, I'm not even saying that it's not right. I just don't get why we have like how you jump to that.

[01:10:10] So the other way I was going to say is that maybe it's a more straightforward reason is that because he thinks that personalities develop as a way of dealing with that unconscious motivation.

[01:10:20] And so they might not be a lie in like any propositional sense that you and I would call it a lie. They're inauthentic is what he means. So what is authentic is that Kierkegaardian you are stripped naked of all and now just facing the fundamental existential dilemma. Yeah.

[01:10:41] Like in what sense is that more authentically me than the me that knows that, but also like doesn't give it the weight that a Kierkegaard or an Ernest Becker gives it? Because like at some level you need some way of interacting with the world around you.

[01:10:59] So I think that he would have to say that like whatever Kierkegaard's talking about going through this like fear and trembling and taking this leap of faith,

[01:11:08] whatever you are after that that allows you to both have come to terms with this true deep existential fear and still like maintain some sort of ego coherence. Like that's your authentic self. When you're not deluding yourself any longer.

[01:11:24] Yeah, right. Kierkegaard's analysis by the way like I was like I'm asleep. Like I'm asleep at the wheel and I don't mind. Like I don't want to go through all that.

[01:11:34] Yeah. Some of his descriptions of like the dumb Philistine, like dumb ass Philistine. Like yeah, that's me. Thanks. So he uses repeatedly this term the armor of character. Yeah.

[01:11:48] So he says it was not until the working out of modern psychoanalysis that we could understand something the poets and religious geniuses have long known, that the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness.

[01:12:00] It is not hard to reason out if character is a neurotic defense against despair and you shed that defense you admit the full flood of despair,

[01:12:07] the full realization of the true human condition. What men are really afraid of, what they struggle against and are driven toward and away from.

[01:12:13] Freud summed it up beautifully when he somewhere remarked that psychoanalysis cured the neurotic misery in order to introduce the patient to the common misery of life. Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery but reality is the misery.

[01:12:27] It's a very pessimistic book at times. So I guess like it's just that he thinks that there has to be a way that we filter out or we suppress or we tamp down this constant terror. And the way that we do that is just what becomes our personality.

[01:12:50] Whereas Freud thought it was repressing your sexual instincts that made you act the way that you do. He just thinks it's repressing this terror of death.

[01:12:59] Yeah, he has this line. The revelation in the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up and is the basic reason that we will strain against Freud. We don't want to admit that we're fundamentally dishonest about reality. So here is my best defense of it.

[01:13:17] The lie is that we are actually successfully immortalizing ourselves by following some cultural script. Doing what the culture says is good. We now feel ourselves to be not creatures that die.

[01:13:34] We feel ourselves to be something that will live on in spite of the fact that this is a very culturally local and historically local thing that we're doing that actually doesn't, if we're being honest, address the fact that we're going to die. It doesn't make us immortal.

[01:13:52] Like as Woody Allen said, I don't want to be immortal through my works. I want to be immortal through not dying. That's the thing that we actually want. Maybe that's what it is and maybe it's the fact that we're also not Kazasui. Kazasui meaning self-caused, self-created.

[01:14:11] I really like the idea of recasting the Oedipus Complex as the Kazasui project. Like the father is in the way of us creating ourselves out of nothing. Because the father, it's very male by the way this book. I feel like it's only about men.

[01:14:28] Very consistent with the psychoanalytic tradition. Probably right. But the idea of the father as being like this thing that stops you from being able to be created out of nothing I thought was kind of interesting.

[01:14:41] When he says the essence of the Oedipus Project is the project of becoming God or Kazasui. But it's also a kind of narcissism. And then maybe our character is just the frame through which we do that.

[01:14:56] And the lie then the character enables is that we're successful in turning ourselves into gods. Something like that. Yeah. We're like constantly temporarily finding what we think at some level is a solution to this problem. But it's a very local solution. And it's also false.

[01:15:17] Like we're not gods, we're not immortal, we're not getting out of this. Yeah. And I kind of buy that Freud might have just gotten this wrong. Like if you ask why do we do Very Bad Wizards?

[01:15:29] And one answer is like at some deep level we want like to have sex with women. Or you say like well at some deep level we want to contribute to this thought that we are. Leave a mark. Immortal. Yeah. And I think like that second one seems right.

[01:15:47] I mean the first one might be a little right. But that second one seems like the better account. Yeah. I want to talk about two other things but we should wrap up quickly and we can talk about all of these in part two.

[01:15:58] But Young's analysis of why maybe we could talk about that now. We could talk about Kierkegaard next time because I think he's going to build on that. So I thought that it gets very into the Young and Freud.

[01:16:10] I don't know about rivalry because the way he presents it is that, you know, Young was kind of his student and very deferential but also a little confused about why Freud was so obsessed with the sex aspect of his theory.

[01:16:28] So one of the things he says, he says, to me the sexual theory was just as a cult. That is to say just as unproven in my hypotheses as many other speculative views.

[01:16:39] As I saw it, a scientific truth was a hypothesis which might be adequate for the moment but was not to be preserved as an article of faith for all time. And yet Freud kind of preserved it as an article of faith.

[01:16:52] And the chapter is well why did he do that? And what he says is today it is very clear to us what was at stake.

[01:17:01] Freud evidently had the most intense belief that his authentic talent, his most private and cherished self-image and his mission for that talent was that of a truth teller on the unspeakables of the human condition.

[01:17:15] He saw those unspeakables as instinctive sexuality, instinctive aggression and the service of that sexuality. Won't they get a surprise when they hear what I have to say to them? He explained to Jung. This is like me as a free will skeptic.

[01:17:31] They are not going to like this but they are going to have to face it. The occult was anything that lied about man's basic creaturelessness, anything that tried to make man out of a lofty spiritual creator qualitatively different from the animal kingdom.

[01:17:45] This kind of self-deluding and self-inflating occultism was ingrained in the human spirit, a matter of smug social agreement. And so psychoanalysis is all alone had to attack this, smash it with a counter dogma securely placed on an unshakable bulwark. And so this was Freud's hero project.

[01:18:07] It's like I have to take all the elevated ideas and illusions and delusions that human beings have about themselves and crush them. That was absolutely true of Freud.

[01:18:20] Freud had an attitude that I respect which was like look we are deluding ourselves, somebody needs to point out the bullshit and he thought of himself as that person.

[01:18:31] In fact there is a good discussion, like a small discussion about Freud's mother telling him he was going to be great and Freud's clear narcissism. With his own family. Yeah and thinking that he was special.

[01:18:43] But Freud liked to compare himself to Joseph from your Bible who was the interpreter of dreams. So the story is that Joseph was willing to tell the Pharaoh sort of the real interpretation of his dreams and Freud viewed himself as a sort of prophet in this sense.

[01:19:00] Like the clear link to dreams like he was able to tell you what the dreams were saying about the human condition. But he definitely, he was like Joseph, like Copernicus, like I'm here unseating your views about reality.

[01:19:14] And he thought that fundamentally this was all a facade, like we had to face this nasty kind of part of who we were. And yet Jung, like he does come across as a like the smart one in this chapter right.

[01:19:29] I think that betrays Becker's views of how Jung expanded with his sort of like broader acceptance of cross-cultural studies of mystical and religious traditions and trying to find the universalities there. Something that Freud did not at all like. And it was a bitter rivalry.

[01:19:48] Like it was nasty with both of them accusing each other of all kinds of, like Freud saying you just, I am the father that you have to kill, like I can see it. And Jung saying this about Freud, which I think you're right.

[01:20:01] He sounds like the smart one here. Freud never asked himself why he was compelled to talk continually of sex. Why this idea had taken such possession of him.

[01:20:11] He remained unaware that his monotony of interpretation expressed a flight from himself or that other side of him which might perhaps be called mystical. So long as he refused to acknowledge that side he could never be reconciled with himself.

[01:20:25] So I think that's like so interesting and this is the thing I think Becker is ending part one on.

[01:20:32] That Freud, like you said, he came almost all the way to the point but then in the end was just doing, like because he's a genius, but doing better than what other people are doing at trying to make himself immortal and doing this Kazasui project.

[01:20:49] Replacing Copernicus, replacing Isaac Newton, replacing the enlightenment but also religious scholars in figuring out what we're actually doing.

[01:21:00] And he had to just double down, triple down on our creatureliness at the cost of doing the very thing that he was saying that we all do which is repressing one part of him. But not his, you know, whatever sexual perversions he had when he was two.

[01:21:19] It's just the fact that he has this call to transcendence, the mystical side. I think that's so interesting.

[01:21:26] It's like he couldn't let himself accept that and you see this paradox in a lot of the kind of new atheist people and a lot of the kind of, can you?

[01:21:36] Yeah, I'm a scientist and I'm hardcore and I'm a natural materialist, you know, but then there is this other part that yearns for something else. For the transcendental. Yeah. For the infinite as Kierkegaard would call it. Yeah. Well, two things.

[01:21:52] I feel like it's unfair to attack a scientific view based on the personality of the person defending it. You know, I think that's cheater material. And when he faints. Like when there's two incidences of fainting that Becker uses as evidence.

[01:22:05] I was thinking like, how do you know that he just didn't take like too many edibles? You know, like he just didn't figure out the dosage. Yeah, he's a little dehydrated. You know, like if you started doing all the times I like, you know, go down.

[01:22:21] Yeah, it's incredible that and Becker is certainly not unique in this regard. I think even modern psychoanalytic people write about Freud and about these other psychoanalysts with this like deep respect and almost sort of religious view of the origins of psychoanalysis.

[01:22:39] Like you could just nobody in their right mind would think that here's one. I want to talk about the fundamental human condition, like the deepest truth of what it means to be human in this universe. And here's a chapter on when Freud fainted and what, you know.

[01:22:54] It's Talmudic in the way they kind of like refer to each other and previous scholars. Totally, he's a big circle jerk. Yeah, he's a huge circle jerk. Yeah, but so that said, I still also find it deeply interesting.

[01:23:07] And so one of the things that he says that was going on that reminded me of you was Jung really believed that Freud was actively repressing his like brush with the infinite, with the transcendental.

[01:23:18] And the way that Freud would do it was every once in a while he would admit to some sort of superstitious view. Right.

[01:23:27] And Jung saw this very clearly as him kind of like in a defense mechanism sort of way, like minimizing what was clearly some sort of deep seated desire to believe in something bigger than him. He just couldn't allow himself to believe it. So he would mock it.

[01:23:44] But there is a bunch of like these little pull quotes of when Freud kind of hinted at some sort of supernatural belief, which of course if you're spilling the tea about Freud, this is gossip that like if you're a staunch believer in Freud's like strong materialist atheistic view, this is shocking.

[01:24:01] Right? Yeah, yeah, no. And I think that's right. And I think that's honestly with me when I was in my worst, most annoying like new atheist phase, I always kept like jinxing as a real belief.

[01:24:14] I always kept like a lot of things, you know, like and I think that was my way of just like, like tossing a bone to my transcendental part of my character that I was repressing. And now it's out. Like. I'm out. Now there's like a touch of ghost.

[01:24:30] Now it's just like, like there's a ghost in my kitchen. Fuck it. You know what it reminds me of? The visual metaphor for you.

[01:24:38] Have you ever played Marco Polo in the water and you could like cheat by keeping your toe in the, in the water and technically you're still in there. Like, did you ever do that?

[01:24:49] Because you can say fish out of water, you know, but if you kept your toe in, it's like you're just touching the transcendental, you know, you're not, you're only dipping your toe. Yeah.

[01:25:00] So, and I think it's fair to say like Freud is such a deep character who's writing about all of this, like the human condition.

[01:25:06] It is kind of weird that he never dealt head on with death and what clearly must be an important part of human psychology, like the knowledge that we're going to die.

[01:25:16] Like he seemed to, to not deal with it until sort of toward the end of his career when he proposed the death instinct. And it does seem like a weird sort of patchwork that Freud introduced to try to explain some stuff.

[01:25:31] And, you know, he basically believed that we had an urge to die, that we had both the energy of life, that sexual energy that was the, at the heart of all human motivation.

[01:25:41] But he believed that there was something in an organism that had the urge to like just stop that whole thing, like just like not deal with it anymore and die. And Becker says, oh man, it's so sad that he got so close to dealing with this.

[01:25:58] But he had like, he adopted this weird opposite view, not that humans were repressing a terror of death, but that somehow humans were repressing their urge to death. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

[01:26:11] He says the same about like the Buddhists who think that like ultimately annihilation, like we want to stop the cycle of rebirth. He thinks that's just like a reverse psychology way of saying that we want to just keep living forever.

[01:26:24] Like that's what he calls those kinds of views. All right. We should wrap up because we're going to do another part on this at least. I do want to get your comment on one quote.

[01:26:35] Today we generally see homosexuality as a broad problem of ineptness, vague identity, passivity, helplessness, all in all an inability to take a powerful stance towards life. Your comments. Clearly he was talking about being the bottom because I don't think that's the right description of a top.

[01:26:58] I think that the tops really grab life by the scruff. They have more than a vague identity. Yeah. Or maybe he just didn't think that was homosexual. It's not gay. It's striking.

[01:27:16] Like it's like, you know, if it weren't for the fact that it might have actually like deeply hurt somebody, like it would be more hilarious. But it's kind of hilarious. It's kind of hilarious that it's in a book that won the Pulitzer Prize.

[01:27:29] And not in like 1920, but in like the 70s. And it's kind of just dropped there. Like it doesn't need to be there. It's another one of now we know. Like now we're aware. Today we understand. Okay.

[01:27:43] So like, yeah, like people thought a lot of things about homosexuality before, but now we just see it as a broad problem of ineptness. I wonder if that was a progressive view at the time, you know.

[01:27:54] But there is that, you know, in his discussion of homosexuality, it is almost like actually homosexuality is like one of the most efficient ways to deal with death anxiety.

[01:28:04] Because like what homosexuality is, is a rejection of like the body because we were so tied to the mother when it came to the body that like rejecting the female is a way of embracing that we are spirits and not just bodies. And I was like, wow.

[01:28:21] So like basically, basically being gay is like a great, great way to deal with the terror of death. Like being straight is actually like the way of just lying to yourself. You're still very reliant on the female body that gave you nurturance from when you were little.

[01:28:37] But like when you're just love the soul of another man, like that's like true. Angelic. Yeah. Plato. Yeah. Like that's the way Socrates left. Right. Yeah. You like pussy? Pssssh. Wait till you get to stage six of existential.

[01:28:56] Again, a psychology that ignores what are women supposed to be doing? It is like bizarrely not about as being a woman. No. Because it's like a Borges story in that it almost just takes for granted that everybody is a man. Everybody in the world, everybody reading it.

[01:29:14] Like there's just like they have mothers, but this book isn't about like what the mothers do or how they. Mothers exist as obstacles to be overcome in our existential. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's incredible. All right.

[01:29:29] I'm actually excited to dive into like, because we know the problem now, but what's the solution? What are the solutions? Is there a solution? I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that there might not be a perfect solution to this tragic dilemma.

[01:29:42] All I know is I love the various ways that we can continue to deceive ourselves in a very Philistine way. Like I'm embracing my inner Philistine. Yeah, you always have. I try to elevate you just enough to appreciate straw dogs. I don't want to see the terror.

[01:29:58] I don't want to see the terror. The reason you think straw dogs isn't great is because you fear death. Yeah, that's clear. That's clear to me. All of our disagreements are because you fear death.

[01:30:10] We'll be back next week to wrap up our discussion of the denial of death. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:30:53] Anybody can have a brain. Very bad men. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.