Escape from Evil is a book about the mental mindset of societies and how their mindset puts the people of that society into a condition of subservience to their generally accepted world view. The view that has brought humanity from its pre-agricultural existence up to our modern world is the concept of the hero, which Becker claims dramatizes personal power and exploitation of the members of the group for its aggrandizement over other groups. By exalting a hero the group gains cohesion, develops an identity of self, defines the enemy, and gives the individuals absolute rights over the lives and bodies of the alien groups. Also it gives protection of the group’s people to walk among enemies, because those others will be afraid of the power of retribution of that person’s potent backup group. The blow-back of this style of social formation is that the individual becomes a slave to their group and must endure its constrictions and punishments. On average the members of groups consider it a good bargain, but it is at a price of incursions into their personal liberties.
The individual’s fear of personal injury and death is soothed by being a member of a grandiose social entity, because they become more than their own perception of a puny self, they are an entity of great respect. This identification forms an unending quest for safety of body, security of selfhood and ultimate meaning of the universe while living within an apparently uncaring world. Try as we might to create an emotionally satisfying being out of the vastness of the Universe it remains obdurately consistent to its own obscure principles of behavior. Our supplications to it are not even met with a cold stare of conscious contempt; they are met with complex rules of actions and reactions that soon become so intertwined as to appear malicious and unpredictable, in other words our supplications are met with reality.
Men behave as human beings, but that includes the possibility, in the long run the inevitability, that some of their actions will be hideously inhumane. And yet, we humans seek solace in the workings of the universe and propitiate postulated gods in an effort to ease our fears, but it is, and should be, fears of other humans where our concern for malice should be placed. And thus it is we generate our heroes whom we hope and expect to protect us and guide us to a happier new world, even one of an uncaring world populated with enemies.
Becker’s book “Escape from Evil” was an effort to transcend his “Denial of Death.”
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