We Are Gods With the Bodies of Animals | Ernest Becker for Sleep
Everything we build, he argued, our characters, our loves, our nations and our wars, is an elaborate refusal to admit that we die. In a hospital bed on the Canadian coast, a dying man agreed to be recorded talking about death, the subject he had spent his whole life studying. This episode follows Ernest Becker, the anthropologist and outsider who was pushed from one university to the next and died at forty-nine, only weeks before his masterwork won the Pulitzer Prize. We trace his single great argument, that human beings are the animals who know they will die, then follow him through the vital lie of personality, the immortality projects by which we reach for a symbolic eternity, the hidden roots of human evil, and the quiet, lucid way he faced his own end. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.