Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
Ernest BeckerRead
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that societies create narratives that empower individuals to overcome challenges and existential fears.
Ernest Becker's quote highlights the idea that every society constructs a framework or 'hero system' that enables its members to confront and transcend the inherent evils and mortality of life. In doing so, these systems instill hope and purpose, providing individuals with a sense of belonging and motivation to fight against despair and adversity.
Themes
SocietyHeroismVictoryEvilDeathPurpose
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
More from Ernest Becker
All quotes βThe artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.
Ernest BeckerRead
When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem
Ernest BeckerRead
All power is in essence power to deny mortality.
Ernest BeckerRead
If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.
Ernest BeckerRead
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
Ernest BeckerRead
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Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.
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