The One Percent’s Fear of Death Is Wreaking Havoc on the World

Once you start to see it, you see it everywhere. First, there is the spectacle of Bryan Johnson, who is spending millions to stay young, injecting his son’s blood plasma into his veins, electroshocking his penis, following a strictly regimented diet that looks for all the world like an eating disorder. When Katie Drummond interviewed Johnson for Wired, she asked him flat out: “True or false: You, Bryan Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day at some point in the future, will die,” to which he replied, “False.” He went on to talk about extending human life “to some unknown horizon” while simultaneously replicating himself as AI that will be such a perfect copy of him that it will be indistinguishable. In this, he echoes Peter Thiel telling Ross Douthat in The New York Times that, through technology and surgery, you should be “able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”

You see it in less flashy, more banal ways as well, such as in the refusal of the political gerontocracy—on both the right and left—to relinquish power, seemingly content to allow the country to rot with corruption and ineptitude because they simply cannot imagine a world without them in control. At some point, one starts to recognize that so much of today’s political and cultural environment is ruled by those who are visibly, pathologically, afraid of death. And many of these people, rather than face up to this fear and deal with it, are instead wreaking untold havoc on the world around us.

Just over 50 years ago, Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, an attempt to fuse psychology and religion with the goal of making a grand, unified theory of human culture’s relationship to mortality. Becker’s thesis was simple (it was right there in the title): Sigmund Freud was wrong to assert that all human behavior and culture can be reduced to questions of childhood sexuality. Rather, it is a fear of death itself that drives us—on both an individual level and a cultural level. What’s more, we do all we can to suppress that fear, to the point where we’re barely aware of it. But even suppressed, it continues to act on us, and it is this dread that defines us as a species. “We build character and culture,” Becker told psychologist Sam Keen, “in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death.”

Keen interviewed Becker as he was dying from colon cancer at the age of 49, a deathbed interview less than a year after The Denial of Death—what Becker called his “first mature book”—was published. It was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, arriving as part of a revolution in terms of how Americans looked at (and talked about) death. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (with its famous, and often misunderstood, five stages of grief) had arrived in 1969; two years before, Cicely Saunders had founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in London, helping to fuel the modern hospice movement.

But while Saunders and Kubler-Ross offered ways for people to better face their own impending death, Becker had more of a sociologist’s eye (his Ph.D. from Syracuse University was in cultural anthropology). Rather than focus on one individual’s confrontation with mortality in the face of a terminal diagnosis, Becker widened the lens to ask why and how our awareness of mortality, or lack thereof, shapes everyday life and culture at large. And while its language and methodology now feel quite dated, The Denial of Death’s central insights have never been more relevant, particularly in a world still hollowed out by a pandemic that we’ve never fully reckoned with. For what Becker understood was that when confronted with mortality, we not only tend to flee from that recognition, but we tend to act out in antisocial and authoritarian ways as an attempted hedge against our own impending demise.