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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Becker, Terror Management Theory and Wilber

Two Ways of Explaining Death

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The Same Human Problem, Two Very Different Answers

Few facts are more obvious about human existence than the fact that we die. Every human being eventually encounters illness, aging, loss and death, and every psychologically developed human being can anticipate their own eventual disappearance. Yet human beings do something extraordinary with this knowledge. We build religions, monuments, philosophies, families, nations, works of art and entire civilizations in its shadow.

Ernest Becker made this observation the center of his life's work. In The Denial of Death, published in 1973, he argued that the knowledge of mortality is so psychologically destabilizing that much of human culture can be understood as an elaborate attempt to manage the terror it produces. His ideas subsequently became the foundation for Terror Management Theory, developed by social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski. TMT turned Becker's existential insights into an experimentally testable research program.

Ken Wilber begins from something remarkably similar. His early work also asks why human beings cannot simply accept their finite existence. Why are we continually reaching beyond ourselves? Why do we seek permanence, fulfillment, transcendence and immortality? But Wilber's answer is almost the mirror image of Becker's.

For Becker, the human being is a finite creature who knows it is finite and therefore constructs symbolic defenses against death.

For Wilber, the human being is ultimately an infinite being who has become identified with a finite self and therefore seeks, however imperfectly, to recover its original identity.

The psychological symptoms are similar.

The metaphysical diagnoses are opposite.

Becker's Radical Starting Point

Becker's achievement was to take death seriously as a psychological fact without immediately converting it into a metaphysical doctrine.

The human being, unlike an organism that merely reacts to immediate threats, can anticipate its own future. We can imagine ourselves years from now. We can imagine our own aging. We can understand that our body will eventually stop functioning. We can imagine the absence of ourselves from the world.

That creates an extraordinary contradiction.

We are biological organisms organized around continued existence, yet our intelligence informs us that continued existence is impossible indefinitely.

The organism says: I must survive.

The intellect says: You will not survive forever.

Becker regarded the resulting conflict as fundamental to the human condition.

The important point is that Becker did not need an immortal Self to explain it.

Quite the opposite. The terror exists precisely because we are finite beings who understand our finitude.

From Becker to Terror Management Theory

Terror Management Theory takes Becker's existential insight and asks whether its consequences can actually be observed experimentally.

The answer, according to a large body of TMT research, is that reminders of mortality can influence attitudes, behavior and social judgments. When mortality is made salient, people may strengthen their commitment to cultural worldviews, seek self-esteem, and defend the symbolic systems that give their lives significance. TMT distinguishes between more immediate or "proximal" responses to conscious thoughts of death and more indirect or "distal" defenses that operate after death thoughts have moved outside focal awareness.

This is an important development beyond Becker.

Becker offered a sweeping existential interpretation of culture. TMT asks whether specific predictions can be derived from it.

The resulting research program has examined what happens when people are reminded of their mortality and then encounter challenges to their beliefs, identities or cultural groups. Reviews report hundreds of studies employing mortality-salience paradigms, although the interpretation and generalizability of such findings remain subjects of scholarly discussion.

Whatever the ultimate assessment of TMT, its methodological ambition is significant.

It does not simply say, "People believe in immortality because they fear death."

It asks:

What happens when death is made salient?

That is a testable question.

Symbolic Immortality

Perhaps the most interesting concept shared by Becker and TMT is symbolic immortality.

Human beings do not necessarily need to believe literally that their individual consciousness will continue forever. They can achieve a sense of continuation through participation in something larger than themselves.

Children carry part of us into the future.

Works of art outlive their creators.

Books preserve ideas.

Nations continue after individual citizens die.

Religions transmit beliefs across generations.

Scientific discoveries become part of cumulative knowledge.

Even one's reputation can provide a small form of posthumous existence.

A recent TMT discussion of historical myths, for example, describes cultural worldviews as offering people a sense of significance and endurance by connecting them with something that extends into the distant past and future.

This is a crucial insight because it means that immortality does not have to mean literal immortality.

Human beings can seek continuity without personal eternity.

That distinction becomes devastatingly important when we compare TMT with Wilber.

Wilber's Very Different Diagnosis

Wilber's Atman project starts with the same dissatisfaction with finite existence but interprets it differently.

The individual discovers that no finite object provides permanent fulfillment. Money does not suffice. Sex does not suffice. Power does not suffice. Fame does not suffice. Even ordinary personal relationships cannot provide absolute security because everything changes and eventually ends.

For Wilber, this endless search is not simply a defense against death.

It is a distorted expression of something deeper.

The finite self is seeking the Infinite because it is, ultimately, not merely finite.

The ego's hunger for permanence is therefore interpreted as a clue to its true nature.

The individual is searching for what it already is.

This is the heart of the Atman project.

And here the two theories separate completely.

Becker says:

We want immortality because we are afraid of death.

Wilber says, in effect:

We are afraid of death because we intuit that we are immortal.

Those statements look similar but point in opposite directions.

The Chicken-and-Egg Problem

This raises a fundamental question.

Which comes first?

Do human beings construct ideas of immortality because they cannot psychologically accept mortality?

Or do human beings resist mortality because they have an intuitive awareness of their deeper immortality?

Becker and TMT choose the first direction.

Wilber chooses the second.

But only the first can begin without assuming the metaphysical conclusion.

This is the crucial methodological difference.

TMT can investigate whether mortality reminders increase worldview defense, self-esteem striving, attachment seeking or other defensive responses.

Wilber's theory would need to establish something considerably more difficult: that beneath these behaviors lies an actual intuition of timeless Atman.

That is not impossible to believe.

But it is much harder to demonstrate.

The Same Religion Looks Completely Different

Consider religion.

From Wilber's perspective, religion can be understood as a partially successful attempt to reconnect the individual with ultimate reality. Religious symbols may express, however imperfectly, the intuition that the separate self is not the final truth.

From Becker's perspective, religion can be understood as one of humanity's most powerful systems for managing death anxiety. It provides a meaningful cosmic order, tells us where we came from, explains why we are here, tells us what happens after death and establishes a framework in which our individual existence has significance.

TMT explicitly recognizes that cultural worldviews can offer literal or symbolic immortality. People can feel that they participate in something enduring, and adherence to the worldview can provide self-esteem and existential security.

Notice how little metaphysics is required.

We do not need to decide whether heaven exists to explain why belief in heaven might be psychologically attractive.

That is a major advantage of the Becker/TMT approach.

It can explain the function of a belief without deciding whether the belief is true.

Explaining a Belief Is Not Refuting It

This point requires caution.

TMT does not prove that religion is false.

Suppose Christians become more committed to their faith when confronted with mortality. That would be perfectly compatible with Christianity being true.

A true belief can have psychological functions.

Likewise, the fact that a person finds immortality comforting does not demonstrate that immortality is false.

This is where a simplistic "TMT has debunked religion" argument would go too far.

The proper conclusion is narrower and more interesting.

TMT provides a plausible psychological explanation for why humans might develop and defend beliefs about meaning, immortality and cultural order even if those beliefs are metaphysically false.

Therefore, the psychological existence of the belief cannot itself be used as evidence for its truth.

That directly challenges Wilber's use of the Atman project as an explanation of why humans seek transcendence.

The Wilber Reversal

Wilber's move can therefore be understood as a reversal of Becker's.

Becker looks at the human demand for immortality and asks:

What does a finite organism have to believe in order to live with the knowledge that it will die?

Wilber asks:

What kind of deeper reality would make sense of a finite organism's persistent demand for immortality?

The first is psychological and evolutionary.

The second is metaphysical.

The problem is that the second does not follow automatically from the first.

We know that people desire permanence.

We know that people construct systems of meaning.

We know that mortality can affect behavior.

But none of these facts demonstrates that the object of the desire—Atman—is real.

The longing for immortality may tell us something profound about the structure of human psychology without telling us anything about the structure of ultimate reality.

TMT Makes Death Social

Another strength of Becker/TMT is that death anxiety is not treated as an isolated private fear.

It becomes social.

People do not merely defend themselves against physical death. They defend the worlds in which their lives make sense.

A reminder of death can make cultural identity more important. Research associated with TMT has examined effects involving worldview defense, prejudice, reactions to people who violate cultural norms, and attachment to one's group.

This helps explain something that a purely spiritual interpretation can miss.

Why does mortality sometimes make people more nationalistic?

Why can religious identity become more intense when people feel existentially threatened?

Why do attacks on cherished values feel personally threatening?

Why do people sometimes become more hostile toward outsiders when their sense of meaning is challenged?

If death anxiety is involved, then the defense of a worldview is not merely an intellectual disagreement.

The worldview is functioning psychologically as a shelter against existential chaos.

This gives Becker and TMT a powerful account of why metaphysics can become emotionally charged.

People are not always merely debating propositions.

Sometimes they are defending the symbolic architecture that allows them to live with mortality.

Wilber's Spiritual Solution

Wilber's response is almost the opposite.

Instead of strengthening the symbolic self, one is supposed to transcend it.

Instead of constructing better defenses for the ego, one discovers that the ego was never ultimately real.

Instead of achieving symbolic immortality through one's culture, one realizes timeless identity with Spirit.

The problem of death is therefore solved at a higher level.

The individual does not have to survive.

The individual has to awaken to the fact that the deepest Self was never born and therefore cannot die.

This is much more radical than ordinary religious immortality.

Christianity can say that you survive death through resurrection.

Transhumanism can say that you might survive through technological continuation.

Wilber says, in effect, that the ultimate Self does not need to survive because it was never subject to birth and death in the first place.

It is an elegant solution.

But elegance is not evidence.

The Existentialist Objection

This is where Becker and Wilber come into their sharpest conflict.

The Beckerian response is:

Perhaps you are trying to escape death by redefining yourself as something that cannot die.

The Wilberian response is:

Perhaps you are unable to recognize what you really are because you are identified with the mortal ego.

Each can accuse the other of psychological defense.

The Beckerian says spirituality is denial.

The Wilberian says materialism is denial.

The Beckerian says you have invented eternity because you cannot tolerate mortality.

The Wilberian says you deny eternity because you cannot tolerate the dissolution of your separate identity.

How can we decide?

Not by accusing each other of having psychological motives.

By looking for independent evidence.

Where TMT Has the Advantage

This is where the comparison becomes asymmetrical.

TMT can generate empirical predictions about what should happen when mortality is made salient. Researchers can manipulate death-related awareness and measure subsequent changes in attitudes and behavior. Hundreds of studies have used such paradigms, and reviews report substantial evidence consistent with the theory, while also noting theoretical and methodological limitations.

Wilber's Atman project is not constructed in the same way.

It is a grand interpretive model of human existence.

Its central claims concern the ultimate identity of consciousness, the nature of Spirit and the direction of human development.

Those claims cannot simply be established by showing that people want immortality.

That only establishes the psychological phenomenon.

The metaphysical explanation remains to be demonstrated.

This is the crucial distinction between explaining why a belief arises and establishing what the belief is about.

Where Wilber May Have a Point

Yet Becker and TMT should not simply be declared the winners.

There is something potentially reductionistic about explaining all spiritual aspiration as death management.

People do not meditate merely because they are afraid of dying.

They do not compose music merely because they are defending against mortality.

They do not fall in love merely because TMT predicts attachment.

Human beings are enormously complicated creatures.

Mortality may be one deep organizing condition of human psychology without being the explanation for every human activity.

TMT itself has room for this broader picture. Its claim is not that people consciously think about death before every action, but that mortality concerns can influence psychological defenses outside conscious awareness.

Still, the warning is important.

A theory of death anxiety can itself become a kind of totalizing explanation.

If everything becomes "terror management," the theory begins to resemble the problem it criticizes in spiritual systems.

The Two Grand Reductions

This produces an interesting symmetry.

Wilber can reduce human striving to the Atman project.

Becker/TMT can risk reducing human striving to terror management.

Both are grand theories.

Both promise to reveal a hidden motive behind ordinary human behavior.

Both can therefore become vulnerable to the same criticism: if every behavior can ultimately be interpreted through the theory, what could falsify it?

This is where methodological discipline becomes essential.

Neither "everything is Atman" nor "everything is death anxiety" should be allowed to become an explanatory blank check.

Human beings have many motives.

Death is one of the deepest.

But it need not be the only one.

Literal Immortality and Symbolic Immortality

The distinction between literal and symbolic immortality is perhaps where Becker/TMT provides the most illuminating contrast with Wilber.

Wilber ultimately points toward ontological immortality.

The deepest Self is timeless.

Becker emphasizes the human pursuit of symbolic immortality.

You may die, but your name can continue.

Your children can continue.

Your culture can continue.

Your work can continue.

Your values can continue.

Your civilization can continue.

This distinction gives us a much more ordinary explanation for why human beings care so intensely about legacy.

A writer wants to be read after death.

A scientist wants a discovery to survive.

A parent wants children to flourish.

A politician wants a historical reputation.

A nation builds monuments.

A civilization preserves its past.

None of these requires an immortal soul.

The human desire to transcend one's individual lifespan can be understood as a desire to participate in something larger and more enduring.

That is immortality without metaphysics.

The Strange Convergence With Transhumanism

This also creates an unexpected bridge to the transhumanist question.

At first sight, Wilber's spirituality and transhumanist technology seem to be opposites.

One looks inward through meditation.

The other looks outward through biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cryonics or life extension.

Yet both can share a common dissatisfaction with ordinary mortality.

The transhumanist says:

We should overcome biological death.

The spiritualist says:

We were never fundamentally subject to biological death.

Both refuse to regard ordinary mortality as the final word.

Becker provides a provocative interpretation of both.

Perhaps the human refusal to accept death takes different cultural forms.

One society promises resurrection.

Another promises reincarnation.

Another promises spiritual awakening.

Another promises technological longevity.

Another promises mind uploading.

The symbolic machinery changes.

The existential problem remains.

The Atman Project as the Ultimate Death Defense?

This is where Becker's theory becomes especially provocative when applied to Wilber.

What if the Atman project itself is the most sophisticated death defense of all?

Ordinary religion says:

"I will survive death."

Transhumanism says:

"I will technologically survive death."

Wilber says:

"The real me was never born and therefore cannot die."

The third formulation appears to escape the problem altogether.

But perhaps it solves the problem by changing the subject.

The mortal person disappears.

The timeless Self remains.

But is that really personal immortality?

If the things that constitute the person—memory, personality, biography, relationships and embodied individuality—are ultimately regarded as transient manifestations, then the claim "I am immortal" begins to mean something very different from what an ordinary person thinks it means.

It becomes:

The ultimate reality is immortal, and I am identical with that ultimate reality.

That is a metaphysical identity claim.

It may be spiritually profound.

But it is not an empirically established fact about personal survival.

Death as the Ultimate Test

There is therefore a useful thought experiment.

Imagine that science eventually established beyond reasonable doubt that individual consciousness completely depends upon the living brain and ceases permanently when the brain irreversibly stops functioning.

What would happen to Wilber's philosophy?

The Atman project would face a serious problem if it is understood as a claim about a personal consciousness surviving death.

But Becker/TMT would remain intact.

Indeed, it would become even more intelligible.

Human beings would still fear death.

They would still seek meaning.

They would still create religions.

They would still produce art.

They would still seek symbolic immortality.

They would still struggle with the knowledge that they are temporary.

Now reverse the thought experiment.

Suppose compelling evidence were discovered that a conscious personal identity survives irreversible brain death.

Would Becker/TMT collapse?

Not necessarily.

TMT could simply say that human beings have both a genuine psychological fear of death and, perhaps, a genuine postmortem continuation.

The psychological mechanism would still exist.

This reveals something important.

A psychological explanation of death anxiety is logically compatible with an afterlife.

The two theories operate at different levels.

That is why TMT does not need to "disprove" Wilber.

It only needs to show that Wilber cannot use death anxiety as evidence for Atman.

The Real Contest Is Epistemological

The deepest disagreement between Becker/TMT and Wilber is therefore not really about death.

It is about what kind of evidence counts.

Wilber gives considerable weight to transformative first-person experience, contemplative realization and the phenomenology of nondual awareness.

TMT gives priority to observable psychological behavior and experimentally testable predictions.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

First-person experience can be genuine data.

But the interpretation of that experience is another matter.

A person may genuinely experience timeless awareness.

TMT can investigate what psychological conditions make such experiences more likely.

Neuroscience can investigate their neural correlates.

Phenomenology can describe their structure.

Philosophy can analyze their implications.

Advaita can interpret them as Atman.

Buddhism can interpret them through anatta.

Wilber can incorporate them into an Integral model.

The experience does not come with a metaphysical label attached.

The label is supplied afterward.

What Happens When We Put Becker and Wilber Together?

Perhaps the most fruitful conclusion is therefore not to choose one grand theory and discard the other.

Put Becker beside Wilber and something fascinating happens.

Becker asks why finite beings desperately seek transcendence.

Wilber answers that they seek it because their deepest nature is transcendent.

TMT asks whether the psychological mechanisms behind this search can be observed.

The research suggests that mortality reminders can indeed influence worldview defense, self-esteem striving and other forms of existential coping.

This does not settle the metaphysical question.

But it does place an important constraint on Wilber's argument.

There is no need to invoke Atman to explain why human beings might become obsessed with immortality.

There is already a plausible psychological pathway from mortality awareness to meaning-making, worldview defense and symbolic immortality.

Atman may still be someone's interpretation of that process.

But it is no longer necessary as its explanation.

From Denial to Acceptance

And perhaps this is where Becker himself points toward something deeper.

If human culture is partly an elaborate response to death, then maturity might consist not in finding the perfect immortality story but in becoming less dependent upon such stories.

That does not mean becoming indifferent to death.

It means recognizing the defenses without being completely governed by them.

We can know that we are mortal and still love.

We can know that our projects will end and still create.

We can know that our names may be forgotten and still write.

We can know that our civilization is temporary and still improve it.

We can know that our individual consciousness may be finite and still experience wonder.

This is a very different kind of transcendence.

It does not transcend death by escaping it.

It transcends death by refusing to let the knowledge of death prevent us from living.

The Final Comparison

Becker's great insight was that human beings are caught in an extraordinary existential contradiction: we are animals that know we will die.

Terror Management Theory turned this insight into an empirical research program examining how mortality awareness affects worldview defense, self-esteem and social behavior.

Wilber's great insight, if stripped of its metaphysical certainty, is that human beings often experience their ordinary identity as insufficient. We seek something beyond the isolated ego, and some people experience states of consciousness in which the boundaries of the self become radically altered.

The two insights need not be enemies.

The disagreement begins when Wilber says that this dissatisfaction is evidence that our ultimate nature is Atman.

That conclusion does not follow.

The human longing for immortality can be explained without assuming immortality.

The human experience of timelessness can be explained without assuming a timeless Self.

The human search for transcendence can be understood without assuming a transcendent cosmic destination.

And the human construction of religion can be understood without deciding whether God exists.

This is where Becker and TMT provide an indispensable corrective to Wilber.

They bring the discussion back down from the metaphysical heavens to the frightened, finite organism that actually has to die.

The Uncomfortable Possibility

Perhaps the deepest irony is that both Wilber and Becker are trying to explain why human beings have such difficulty accepting death.

Wilber says:

Because the finite ego is secretly trying to recover the Infinite.

Becker says:

Because the finite organism has become conscious of its own mortality.

The first interpretation turns death into a clue about eternity.

The second turns death into a clue about ourselves.

And that may be the crucial difference.

We do not need to decide here whether Becker ultimately got the whole story right, or whether Wilber's spiritual interpretation is metaphysically impossible. We need only insist on one distinction.

A human longing for immortality is evidence that humans long for immortality. It is not, by itself, evidence that immortality exists.

That single distinction separates psychological explanation from metaphysical projection.

Perhaps we are not eternal beings desperately trying to remember who we are.

Perhaps we are temporary beings desperately trying to make peace with the fact that we are temporary.

And perhaps the most profound achievement is neither denial nor metaphysical escape.

It is learning to live fully while knowing that we will die.