The worm at the core
Demonstrates how an unconscious fear of death motivates nearly all human goals, behaviors, and cultures, examining the role of mortality awareness in prompting social unrest and war.
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4recommend
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2019–2025years
100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- The same reason all of them compulsively toil despite not needing to.
The denial of death, they can’t have physical immortality so they build legacies and monuments and etc.
There’s a few books on it, the worm at the core, the denial of death, they don’t specifically speak to the foibles of billionaires but it’s a logical extension.
- The Worm at the Core
- yeah, this is mostly true...see for example the entire academic school of existential psychology known as Terror Management Theory...there are a number of good books in this area, such as The Worm at the Core: The Role of Death in Life...also see the book Corruption of Reality by Schumaker...
basically these books and the entire TMT field derives from anthropology and sees mankind as a social animal adapted to his environment, and that we are shaped by evolution to be adapted to our environment as a social animal and that nearly everything about mankind is some sort of evolutionary adaption, including our definition of reality...you might say that reality is defined socially...we are social animals, after all...
one of schumaker's arguments is that because of our awareness of inevitable death, we filter and corrupt reality as part of an adaptation to our environment...we do this as cultural entities and not as individuals
- Is it possibly due to a lot of the psychoanalytic language Becker uses? I'm uncertain how psychoanalysis is generally viewed by the presumably relatively young twitter psychologists, but I wouldn't expect it to be in fashion.
The Worm at the Core presents a more modern, evidence-based to TMT, but I don't know if it's widely read.
