SPEAKERS

Sheldon Solomon, Nippin Anand

Nippin Anand  00:01

Hello and welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand,

Nippin Anand  00:08

some of you may recall that I did a podcast recently, which is called Why dei caused an accident. This podcast was done in response to President Trump’s attribution to the DEI policy, which he believed caused the Washington river accident, the air accident. And I had used the framework of Ernest Becker, the famous anthropologist, in this in this podcast. And after I published that podcast, I actually got in touch with Professor Sheldon Solomon, who is a renowned professor in this space. He takes Ernest Becker’s theories and wisdom forward today, and I requested him for some time to share his wisdom with me on my podcast, and I’m glad he he accepted my request, and here we are having a conversation together on on understanding culture, and of course, you will get to Hear him in a minute or so. But what is so fascinating about this hour long discussion is the importance of drawing from different disciplines, be it academic, be it religious, be it political, be it from the practitioner world, but how important it is to pull from these different disciplines to kind of make any sense of what culture is all about. And it is very refreshing to me, at least because our industry has bought into a mono myth, which is, culture is all about structure. Culture is all about processes, about leadership and about systems. And I think it’s so misleading, even if you listen to the first 15 minutes of this podcast. I mean, if you it probably take you at least twice or tries to go back to sheldon’s wisdom, but if you listen to the first 15 to 19 minutes of the 20 minutes of this podcast, you come to understand how little we know about culture. So without much ado, let’s start a conversation with Professor Sheldon Solomon. I’m so excited about it. How should I address you? Sheldon is good.

Sheldon Solomon  02:44

Sheldon, please. My joke is I only use Dr Solomon when the police stopped me. So when they’re like, What are you doing, asshole? I’m like, well, that’s Dr asshole.

Nippin Anand  02:59

Oh, wonderful, wonderful. Well, I think in the last couple of minutes, I learned so much about you, but perhaps it would be good to for the audiences to know who you are, what’s your interest, and then we can take it from there. Yes,

Sheldon Solomon  03:13

yes, that would be great. Thank you so much for having me today. My name is Sheldon Solomon, and I am a psychologist at Skidmore College by trade and in New York, in the United States. And for the last 45 years or so, my colleagues were experimental social psychologists, and we’ve been captivated by Ernest Becker’s ideas about the extent to which our awareness of death and our general unwillingness to accept the reality of the human condition underlies a substantial proportion of human activity, such that whether we’re aware of it or not, mostly we’re not. We as human beings have an overriding proclivity to want to overcome death rather than accept it as an intricate part of a life well lived.

Nippin Anand  04:26

Yes, and perhaps it would be good to just unpack this, this bit, because I think this is a very, very solid foundation of of Becker’s theory. Is that, why the whole idea of Denial of Death in the first instance?

Sheldon Solomon  04:40

Okay, good. I love let’s start at the outset. You know of what attracted me? Nippin To Becker’s work is in the in the first paragraph of the book, the birth and death of meaning, he says, I want to understand why people do what they do when they do it. So he. He was interested in a broad motivational account of, why do we do stuff. And his approach, as we were discussing earlier, was very interdisciplinary. He just said, Look, if we’re going to ask big questions, it would be unfortunate to not respectfully consider input from all disciplines, be they academic, religious, secular or so on. And he’s, he’s like, Alright, let’s start with Darwin. Darwin’s like, you know, humans are not that different than anything that’s alive because we’re biologically constructed to want to persist over time in the service of survival as well as reproduction. Well, that’s how we’re similar to everything that’s alive, but but we’re also uniquely different even Darwin realized, and Becker builds on this idea that without being overly arrogant, we do have a rather ginormous forebrain that gives us the capacity to think abstractly and symbolically to the point and it’s amazing where we can imagine something that doesn’t even exist, and then have the audacity and technical and manual skills to convert our dreams into reality. That’s awesome, and just sitting in a chair should make us grateful for the capacity to alter reality, to make it closer to adhere to our desires, and one of those abstract cognitive capacities is the awareness of our own existence. You know, we take that for granted, but in fact, it is arguably a uniquely human quality. You know, a rose bush is here and doesn’t know it. Raccoons here doesn’t know it, but each of us, we’re here and we know it. And here he’s relying on the existential philosopher Kierkegaard, who said, we’re so smart that we realize that we’re here. And then Kierkegaard goes on, and he says, Yeah, and when you realize that you’re here, that is both awesome and dreadful, awesome to know that you’re here, because at our best moments, and I like how Becker puts it, if you step back a minute, you know, what are your best moments? And it’s not when you want a Nobel prize or a million dollars. Even though those things might make us momentarily happy, it’s really just the spontaneous exuberance that arises from the awareness of our very existence. And why, most of us, if we get to choose between being like a person or a plant, would probably prefer to be people, all right, that’s the awesome part of it. And I’m always because I’m in the United States, I’m like, I have to tell the people that I teach, let’s remember that life at its best is just so fundamentally amazing that we need no more than that, to be remarkably grateful, right? On the other hand, it is dreadful to be alive and to know it, because the three things you realize that, like all living things, your life is a finite duration, and you too will someday die. That’s existential kick in the grind number one, number two is the concurrent realization that your death can happen at any time for reasons you can’t anticipate or control. And number three, and Becker adds this to just kick us in the psychological groin. He’s like, Yeah, and if you know you’re here, it’s hard not to notice that you’re an embodied animal, and you’re no more significant or enduring than lizards or potatoes and and what Becker said is that if that is all we thought about every day, I’m going to die. I can walk outside and get hit by a meteor and I’m a breathing piece of defecating me, we wouldn’t be able to stand up in the morning. We would be so devastated by existential terror that it would literally render us incapable of surviving in most environments. And so what Becker as a cultural anthropologist, proposed, is that the way that human beings manage existential terror is through the construction and maintenance of what he called culturally or cultural worldviews, you know, just humanly constructed beliefs about reality that we share. Here with the folks around us that give us a sense that life has meaning and we have value, and to unpack that just a little bit, and then I’ll stop talking. Is when Becker talks about meaning, he’s like, look, every culture has these amazing accounts of the origin of the universe, amazing prescriptions for how we ought behave while we’re here, amazing promises of the prospect of immortality, either literally or symbolically when we’re no longer here. And so common sense masquerading is psychological insight. If we’re going to do okay in the world, we need to perceive that life has meaning. I’ve never encountered anybody who said life is meaningless. That’s great. Let’s party. But Becker goes on and he says meaning is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to also perceive ourselves as having value in the context of that system of meaning. And here’s where our social roles come in. We do things in our society that have associated standards. If you’re a nurse, you’re supposed to save lives. If you’re a banker, you’re supposed to save money. You know, if you’re a football player, you’re supposed to score goals and so on. And if we meet or exceed those standards, that’s what Becker calls self esteem, the belief that you’re a person of value in a world of meaning. I know I’ve been long winded, but then Becker sums it up, he’s like, look, here’s the deal, whether you know it or not, and mostly we don’t. That is mostly quite unconscious. Our fundamental motivation throughout our lives is to maintain a sense of value in a world of meaning. And he goes on to say that when that carefully constructed system of existential meaning and value is threatened or disrupted that instigates a host of defensive reactions that are designed to restore a sense of meaning and value. I hope that makes sense as just kind of a general introduction of these notions. Oh, absolutely.

Nippin Anand  12:28

I mean, you know, you talk about interdisciplinarity right from the beginning, and look how much you covered in less than 10 minutes. And it’s nine minutes and 55 seconds. You start with imagination. Well, you start with Kierkegaard, and then you talk about imagination, and then you talk about the whole idea of, you know, the Baker’s three key points to understand. And then we slip into into the into the the unconscious. We talk about meaning. We talk about cosmic significance, and we talk about the whole idea of culture that that holds our world views together, and how when our world view is threatened, we start to to threaten each other as a speaker, as a group. It’s so fascinating. But I, I just wanted you wanted to say something. Did you want to say something?

Sheldon Solomon  13:17

Well, just that. Well, thank you for giving me some credit here. But this is what I have found so compelling about Becker Oh, yes. And what I say when I have an opportunity to talk about these ideas is that if we, if we have, if we’re in the least bit effective in our effort to disseminate these notions, my hope as a person or two will take a look at Becker due to both of our independent claims about how conceptually powerful this is, yeah, and moreover, I’m also when Becker in the introduction of the denial of death, then goes on to say, look, I’m not saying anything new. I’m just stepping back and I want to look at the wisdom of the ages. I know it sounds like a cliche, but the original title of Becker’s book The Denial of Death. I don’t remember it exactly, but it was long and dense, and after a colon, it was the integration of science and religion. Becker’s point is that there’s a lot of roads to the truth and when, and he’s like, we’re choking on truth, and academics are spending so much of their time egotistically trying to generate something new. Why don’t we step back and distill 1000s of years? Of insight and wisdom, and that that’s I’m equally amazed when I’m like, let me tell you what Becker says in the first two chapters of the birth and death of meaning, which is basically what I was doing. Yeah, is a really powerful conceptual punch, as it were,

Nippin Anand  15:20

and more than Well, of course, it is conceptual but, but it’s the synthesis of what you call the wisdom of ages and sages. Because I was actually, I we, we did a workshop last year, last, last, last week, Sheldon. And so part of this workshop was, or a lot of it was about semiotic walks and and going on for walking into a church, walking into a temple, and then ended up walking into the Apple Store to show how much of it is a quest for meaning, how much of it is is, is the commonality between the myths, the symbols and the rituals, is breathtakingly amazing. And it’s all quest for meaning. All of it is quest for meaning in a universe that has no meaning whatsoever, that doesn’t care for your meaning at all.

Sheldon Solomon  16:14

I couldn’t have said about let

Nippin Anand  16:17

me just show you something which you started off with imagination. So we enter into the into the into the the the Hindu temple. And the first thing is, I organize the ritual of Lord Ganesha. And this is something that blows the mind of Westerners, in particular, because in in Southeast Asia, this is part of life. This is what, this is what we are born with. But think about it, the head of the elephant and the body of a human being. Of a human being is this constant dialectic between material life and the spiritual life so and this is what evokes imagination. This is the center of all imagination. And what the priest does is Sheldon. He goes around putting a small little.in everyone’s prefrontal cortex. And people are asking, what is this? So I said This is to avoid knee jerk reaction. It keeps you cool here and tell me what instrument of risk management would be any more powerful than this constantly reminding you you are an animal at the end of it, be careful of all those knee jerk reactions so fascinating. You started with imagination and Kierkegaard, because that is really what brings the message home. And I think we have so misunderstood this whole idea of faith as what Kierkegaard calls is, I think it’s almost a swear word in our society, for example, would you like to say something along about that? Yes,

Sheldon Solomon  17:52

I could not agree more that we have in Western society demonized words that represent aspects of human experience that are fundamentally important and have literally nothing to do with mindless adherence to dogma, either in the abstract or through supplication to ideological demagogues that has So words like myth and faith. I say to my students that when you hear a lot of people in public use those words, you know it’s like gallons of excrement tumbling out of your face, rather than again, as Becker asks us to do, is to step back and realize the origin of those words and to understand which is very difficult for folks in the West, myself included, but less so for folks with an Eastern take on these matters, faith and reason are by no means antithetical, nor is myth and reality at their best there, as you’ve already intimated, they’re what make us uniquely human, the unbelievable capacity for a dialectical relationship between that which we imagine and that which ultimately happens. I love how Rollo may in a book called The crowd. For myth puts it when he’s like, hey, you know, it’s easy to dismiss myth as just something that the weak and limp wrist did adopt in, you know, defensive response to sheer terror. But that’s half of it, but you’re missing the other half, it is the way that we are able to collectively marshal the awe and the gratitude and the humility that is engendered by the awareness of our own existence that is then converted into a narrative account of reality that not only helps us understand the past, but perhaps more importantly, provides us with a blueprint for the future, you know. And while ama is like, I’m not just, I don’t mean that just allegorically, he’s like, Well, when you look at a lot of humankind’s accomplishments. You know, chemistry was started by, you know, the Chinese looking to figure out how to turn lead into gold in pursuit of the elixir of life. Similarly, the way that we got geography was not people saying, Oh, we have to make a map a reality. We were looking for the Fountain of Youth and so on. And people like Rollo May, they’re not being glib when they point out that true faith in these mythological conceptions of reality is, is, is necessary, and when we’re able to pull it off, it is what gives us, you said a couple of words earlier, that I think, is really important, and that’s that it’s the ultimate basis for a sense of Cosmic Connection. Well, these days, I’m really just preoccupied with that notion. When you said earlier, you know, it’s, it’s about imagination that slides into our pursuit of meaning, and that is, you know, of course, it’s radically important, but we do that individually but simultaneously, collectively, at least at our best. And what, what I find most compelling these days are psychologists who point out that there’s a lot of different ways of fostering psychological well being, but they all appear to have like one big thing in common, and that’s that they contribute to this fundamental sense of being connected to everyone and everything. And so like Otto rank Freud’s guy, he said, Oh, alright, human beings are conscious, and that makes us the temporal representatives of the cosmic, primal force. And and and then he’s he goes on, and he’s like, I’m not trying to be mystical. It’s just that if you’re alive, and if Darwin’s right, then every one of us is related to the first form of life. And if that’s true, then we’re related to everything that’s ever been alive to everything that’s now alive, to everything that will be alive and that that’s that’s not only happens to be just true, but it’s also radically consequential, because most of us in the West, unhap Unfortunately, in my opinion, we’re taught that if you’re not the absolute best at what you do, then you’re a failure, right? If you’re not as rich as Elon Musk, you’re a failure. If you’re not as tall as the tallest person on the basketball court, you’re you’re a failure. And, and, but what this idea of cosmic connection, I think makes very salient is that is just reality. Most of us are not Buddha or Jesus or mother, Teresa or Elon Musk, but that does not render any of us meaningless or inconsequential, because if we’re all literally cosmically connected, then it’s not for us to say what affects anything that we do are going to have on the world around us thereafter. So I mean my silly example, but I’m not sure it’s silly is, you know you might be walking on the. Street someday. And you know how sometimes you just see somebody, you don’t know them, you’ll never see them again, but your eyes meet momentarily, and you just have one of those mutual nods of I know that you know that we know that we’re here. Well it, they call it like casual social interaction and psychobabble. But how do I know? For all I know that person was walking to the George Washington Bridge in order to jump off it and kill themselves, but my momentary acknowledgement of their very existence that deflected them from that intention, and I don’t know. I may die tomorrow, but maybe that person who was going to kill themselves is the one who goes on and ends up being our next Buddha or Jesus or Martin Luther King. So there’s a every one of us is radically consequential, but it’s not for us to judge. It’s the rippling effect of our experience here, which is both the way I see it, an amazing opportunity as well as an amazingly poignant and potent set of moral obligations we are. You know, the way I put it these days again here in the United States is we’re always yammering for liberty, for freedom and entitlement, without any consideration whatsoever about our concurrent obligations to ourselves and those around us. And you

Nippin Anand  26:43

know, this is so fascinating, because I come from a culture Sheldon where everything and everyone is connected. Yes, everything and everyone is connected. You. You worship not only the animals, but you have so much respect for rivers, for rocks, for everything you know, in politic religions, for example, you have an archetype for everything you think of it, and the energy exists somewhere and and I think maybe this is, this is also down to to faith that we do believe that, that There is a God with a capital G that controls the universe, and there is no way you can be one with God. Whereas in polishetic religions, for example, you can choose to have the name of a god, and nobody will object to that at all. In fact, it’s encouraged to have the name of the God, so you can be equivalent with the God. But your point is so powerful that I think it was Thomas Fuchs who refers to the idea of inter effectivity, that we are all affected by each other. And I think Jung calls it collective unconscious, which is, you know, and what is it that brings Sheldon and Nippin on a conversation you know, miles and miles apart from each other because, but because we share certain things in common. Here’s a moment of synchronicity that we get to have a conversation with each other.

Sheldon Solomon  28:11

Yes, and I think that’s I find that very compelling, very comforting. And moreover, I see it as the primary source of the, you know, literally horrifying level of existential disease, not not disease. Put a hyphen between this and ease. It is the case right now that in many western industrialized countries that the level of existential distress is quite unbearable. And you know it, some of people say, Well, it’s the confluence the planets melting. The Fascists are taking over. Economic instability is rampant, as is our hostility to other people who don’t share our views of the world. Yeah. But underlying all of that is a malignant manifestation of death anxiety that persists, primarily, I would submit, because of a lack of this very cosmic connection. The average person right now, and part of this is the result of the pandemic, doesn’t have much in the way of genuine social connections, I tell my students, you know, take your fucking phone, if you’ll pardon the obscenity, and throw it in the toilet. You know, you’re sitting in a restaurant texting your friend who’s sitting across the table from you, why don’t you just drop the phone and look, I. I and I don’t mean that it’s not about, you know, customs or morality. So much is realizing how much we have become insulated and isolated from each other, in part, because of the lobotomizing and emotionally crippling mind meld that we now have with the algorithmically driven smartphones that are turning us each into narcissistic sociopaths, completely disconnected from our cultural, natural and interpersonal surroundings. And you know, I don’t want to sound too much like Frankenstein, but I see a lot of the world’s current difficulties that I just again, I’m just into the beginning of your book, but I really do think we’re on the same page that if we’re going to make much progress with the fundamental alteration of our surroundings, we better make big progress with the fundamental alteration of our take on life and to consider ways to acquire enduring senses of meaning and value that are not in turn, counterproductive, either individually or socially.

Nippin Anand  31:25

So perhaps this is a good time to discuss something that you brought up earlier. I think a lot of it also has to do with how we are taught, how we are educated in schools and colleges, and this egotistical methodologies, which is so brain centered, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, because this is your your core work. You educate people. How do you look at education? Let’s put it this way. How do you see true education?

Sheldon Solomon  31:54

Yeah, well, so true education would be, well, the way I see it. So I’m an academic Egghead, and I like philosopher John Dewey, American philosopher who died a century ago, and a book called democracy and education, he says, Look, in my opinion, education is important. There’s no such thing as a human society where education isn’t fundamental. You know, whether there are schools or not, because humans are you know, we like to think that we’re here today because we’re so smart, but literally, crows and bees are smarter than many of my students and myself included, we’re here today. We are smart, but it’s our capacity to accumulate knowledge and pass it on over time. We are cumulative cultural entities, and that body of knowledge that takes 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of years to acquire that that needs. You need education of some sort to pass that over time. I call it transgenerational learning. But anyway, so Dewey’s like, Okay, well, education, well, and he’s like, Well, part of it has got to be socialization, just learning the language and the customs and traditions of the group to which we belong. And then he’s like, Yeah, but there’s gotta be more of it. There’s gotta be the acquisition of facts and skills. You know, what’s the basic knowledge toolkit of your time and place? But then he’s like, Yo, but somebody had to develop those that knowledge and the technical reality that surrounds it. So he’s like, okay, but then we need critical thinking in order, because facts and skills, once they’re there, that’s you learn that in a different fashion than the initiation creation or discovery of those ideas to begin with. And so he’s like, all right, you got socialization, facts and skills, critical thinking. But then he goes Aristotle, and that’s like, okay, but there’s more than just thinking. We’re also esthetic animals. And so it’s like, well, how do we create a world of beauty around us? And then he talks about education as the reconstruction of personal experience, the just the idea that, by virtue of education, you become a fundamentally different person. And then finally, he’s like, ideally, education would give us the capacity to be responsible citizens in a democratic civil society, and we lack all of those things right now in many educational settings, I see education as tremendously important. I’m being a little geographically limited here, but in the United States right now, which was a democracy a month ago, and a fascist country today, when now President Trump says I love the poorly educated, there’s a reason for that. Literate people who had accurate information. 80% of them voted for Kamala Harris. It was, and I don’t mean this as disparagingly as it sounds, but it was generally the highly poorly educated who have been immiserated by current economic and political conditions that were then prone to succumb to the allure of a fascist dictator who says, Only I can fix it. And the irony, of course, is that they’re fixing it by taking everything away from the very people that they were pretending to help anyway. I think education is critical. I think that unfortunately, there’s a negative correlation between authoritarianism and educational quality as the authoritarians take over, education is converted into a series of indoctrinations, and that’s what is befalling us in the United States as I speak.

Nippin Anand  36:32

It’s everywhere Sheldon, and the important thing is because, you know, we are so much into this space of culture and helping people understand culture. I think one of the problems with the way culture, at least the knowledge around culture, is disseminated, actually creates further divides, because the the it’s it’s not so much about helping people see that. You know, at the core of those differences that we have, and this was where Becker was so good, at the core of our differences lies the same myth, which is the Denial of Death. So why are we becoming so so so hungry about other person’s myths, symbols and rituals and and I think the more I think about it, the more I feel that. So the deeper you go into Becker’s ideas around the Denial of Death, the more you start to believe that there is no difference between Sheldon and Nippin, none, even though we come from a you know, they can’t be a more more different way of living and being than between you and me the way we have been brought up.

Sheldon Solomon  37:42

Yes, again, really well put, I don’t remember which philosopher or if I’m making this up, but you know, death is the ultimate democratizing. Whatever that word would be. It is our commonality, and again, at our best, it is the underlying impetus to bring out the best in us as well as the worst. And I think that’s where, you know, I see you and folks like you, heading my buddies, Jeff and Tom and I, you know, we developed what we call terror management theory to test Becker’s ideas. And, you know, originally, we just wanted to point out how malignant manifestations of death anxiety, you know, really make it quite possible that humans are going to be the first form of life to be responsible for our own extinction. Right when death is on our mind, we hurt and kill people that look different. We’re more apt to vote for Hitler or Donald Trump. We are hostile to nature and at the same time, become preoccupied with the mindless accumulation of insatiable piles of wealth the when that’s on our mind, as Kierkegaard put it, we get tranquilized with the trivial. We sit in our houses watching TV, eating sugar, drinking alcohol, popping a few Xanax, while we do Tiktok and so on and so that that’s the downside is that, you know, death anxiety, when we bury it under the psychological bushes, it comes back to bear bitter fruit. But this is not to say that we need to eliminate death anxiety with massive doses and narcotics, because anxiety is not always pleasant, but I love Kierkegaard point, which is that sometimes anxiety is yourself calling yourself to find yourself. It’s literally kind of a heads. Up, and I find that amazing, and I like how Becker describes both Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s take on these matters, which is what we are, you’re going to die, whether you like it or not. That is going to make us anxious, whether we like it or not, but we don’t always have to engage in a mindless flight from death. We can rather engage in a conscious set of ongoing reflections about and contemplations of our mortality and as current research now connecting with ancient wisdom tells us, yeah, when we do that, we’re infused with a sense of awe. And when that happens, that gives us an amazing sense of gratitude. And when that happens, we’re humble. And again, I’m being a little pedantic, but when my students hear the word humble, they’re like, oh, that’s bad. I’m like, No, it is not self deprecating. Humility is the realization of your microscopic and ultimately inconsequential place in the overall scheme of things. But that doesn’t make you meaningless or invaluable. Rather, it just puts things in a better perspective, which gets back to the point I was ranting about earlier, which is our job. We’re not all here to change the world immediately. We’re all here to be as a verb, not a static noun, and if we do that with a sense of grace, and I’m using that word intentionally, because the one the Bible tells us about these things, you know, rather, I like how Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, put it. And it’s like, you know, the Bible is great, but when we run amok is when people take the symbols too literally, and that’s when you have to kill somebody because they’re not worshiping the same icon or flag or so on. But anyway, I think that these are things that are tremendously important and directions that we can now be going in. So you get this sense of awe and gratitude and humility. And I like how Heidegger put it. I’m going to mess up some of these words, but he’s like, you know, if we get to the point where we accept the reality of the human condition, and that is that we can die, and again, Heidegger’s like, Well, when I say to people, well, you’re going to die someday, or you’re going to die. And people respond, yeah, excuse me, I know I’m going to die someday. Heidegger’s point is, no, you’re still denying some days kick in the can down the temporal road. Death acceptance means that with for all we know, the Meteor has crashed through Earth’s atmosphere and will vaporize each of us before the end of that sentence. And if we know and accept that and accept responsibility for our subsequent decisions in life, despite realizing that we didn’t get to choose where we got born and when and what Corporal container we reside in, and so on. Heidegger says, okay, it gives us a stance towards life. It doesn’t remove negative stuff or anxiety or suffering, but he’s like, it gives us anticipatory resoluteness we look forward to life with persistence and dedication. And then he’s like and that gives us solicitous regard to everyone and everything around us. English translation for American students, it means that we care about things, everyone, everything. Excuse me again, and then he says, and and when you’re in that state of mind, life feels like just this ongoing adventure, perfused with unshakable joy. And I just I love those words, and I love them in part because he gets there from a secular perspective the religious folks who I admire, get to the same place from a spiritual one.

Nippin Anand  44:49

Yeah, and isn’t it interesting that the entire discourse today is complete the opposite, which is to move from uncertainty towards order and. Yes, if you look at the Greek myth, for example, or the Christian myth, which is what we have been sold to today, it’s all about moving from uncertainty to certainty, from chaos to order, and it’s a linear path. So I work in the Risk and Safety world Sheldon and the entire symbolism of the risk and safety world centers around the idea of, I am here to save your life. That’s what every expert in every organization is selling, every consultant is selling. And the moment you say that that you know that death is real, and there’s no no real there’s no real escape from it. Let’s make the most of our time here together. Let’s try and, you know, see us through our differences. I think it’s so so unreal for many people to think along those lines. No,

Sheldon Solomon  45:49

that’s correct, but is it not ironic that it is reality that is unreal. In other words,

Nippin Anand  45:56

absolutely, Oh, absolutely, yeah, there’s a there’s a very wonderful symbol here in my in my semiotic cupboard, and this is the notion of an expert. The trouble is that this expert is the reason for most deaths, yes, the man with the longest penis, because he knows it all. He controls death, which is, as you very rightly said, it’s more unreal than any unreality.

Sheldon Solomon  46:32

So this is great. I’m not sure if you can see

Nippin Anand  46:36

this. I can see it. Yes, yes. Oh, wonderful. You see one

Sheldon Solomon  46:39

of my students in evolutionary psychology who was an art major, yeah, after I had talked about the same thing, exactly,

Nippin Anand  46:49

exactly. So it’s the it’s and this is all symbolism of Denial of Death, absolutely. And you very right, the masses take it very literally, the whole meaning of Denial of Death. And if you look at the ancient symbol of uroborus, it is such a wonderful thing to think about, because there is no living without destruct destroying yourself. You know, when we go into the Hindu temple, you have to literally break a coconut on the floor, because it you cannot learn until you shatter the ego. The Greeks break the plate. The Indians crack the coconut. But these myths have such powerful meanings because today, in today’s world, nobody is willing to let go of this, of the ego, what they already know. It’s this is why I was, I was so keen to hear from you about what is your take on Becker’s work such a powerful thesis of Denial of Death. What? What should leaders and policy makers and people in decision making space? What should they take from his wisdom?

Sheldon Solomon  48:01

Well, to just as silly as it sounds, to just be aware of what it is that is the overriding motivational determinant of human activity. I just you know, in in Ernest Becker’s book escape from evil. He starts the book by saying, I’m pessimistic, but I’m not cynical. And he’s like, look, humans. Gets back to the point Robert J, that Robert J, Lifton, the psycho historian, made, which is that we may destroy, you know, we may literally destroy the human race in our egotistical claim that we’re doing so in the service of destroying evil. So he’s like, most of the evil in the world is because of these hyper arrogant, narcissistic sociopaths saying they’re going to rid the world of evil and Becker’s like, you know, now that we have the technology to reduce the earth to a smoldering heap, it might be tempting to get cynical, but he’s like, I’m not. I want to, you know, think about how we can extricate ourselves from these concerns. And I can’t remember if I made this up or if Lifton did, but you know, it’s like, okay, the counterpoint is, humans have a pretty good track record of getting ourselves out of some pretty difficult situations when we have an accurate understanding of what’s causing them. And the example I use in our book is the plague in the Middle Ages. It killed half of the people in Europe. And as long as we thought that it was just because of evil spirits, which is what they thought at the time, yeah, people kept. Dying. But then, when somebody suggested it was bacteria, you know, that led to the development of penicillin, and many of us are alive today by virtue of that discovery, well, Becker’s thought was that it would be good if the average individual, he’s like, I’m not trying to get famous myself. I want these ideas to enter public discourse at all levels. Oh, I’m not saying we should be in kindergarten telling the kids in diapers they’re going to die. But he’s like, why is it not a part of our educational curriculum? Why is it not diffused throughout our culture? And then he was he really stressed, why isn’t it that every world leader is is unaware, profoundly unaware, of these ideas, and as we were corresponding in anticipation of today, yet 20 or so years ago, 25 years ago, I was part of a project with another Becker scholar, Greg Bennett, where, where? And it was Greg’s idea. He’s like, Well, this may sound silly, but let’s write to the leader of every country on Earth and say we think these are important ideas, and we just want to come and talk to you about what Becker’s saying in and we’re not saying we have any solutions, but what we are saying is that history tells us that really profound understanding of what’s going on can sometimes be useful. So anyway, we wrote a letter. This was back in the days of mail. We sent it 180 countries. I think. I don’t know. I could be wrong on that, but every country in the United Nations that had an address for where you sent correspondence to, and this was in the year 2000 and we only got about 10 responses, and most of them were quite Cavalier. Canada’s like, no, the United States wrote back and said that peace is bad for business, so fuck off. They didn’t quite say it that way. China’s like, we’re not doing that will kill you. They were Luxembourg was like, We are officially offended by your request. And and then, anyway, and then two countries, Belize and Guyana, we got faxes from their government saying, Yeah, well, come see us anyway. We were going to go to Belize the week after September 11, 2001 and that got canceled. But a couple of months later, we went to Guyana and spent an afternoon with the president of Guyana, an amazing gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten, of Indian heritage because, again, I’m so ignorant, I did not realize that Guyana was like half Indian and half Anglo. Saxon, an amazing gentleman, profoundly interested in these ideas. But who also said, I think these ideas are important. And equally important is that the people in my country have enough to eat today, and and he then went on to point out, and it was, it was one of the most amazing experiences, frankly, I’ve ever had, because I don’t want to sound glib, but most of the politicians that we elect in our country are literally, if not, morons, just ideological demagogues. Here was this amazingly well educated, thoughtful human being seriously engaging with these ideas, while noting that any radical change on the internal level will need to be predicated, or at least coincident with radical structural changes in the global economic system, which, as he described was basically wealth and resource extraction machine, diverting materials from most of the world to, you know, the individuals that have a narcissistic. Sociopathic, infinite desire for wealth. Anyway, it was just amazing. And we have thought about trying to resurrect that idea from time to time, yeah, but I think it’s a good idea for the moment. I think we’re in a different world right now. I don’t know how one gets the attention of people in positions of authority or power, yeah, but it would be interesting if someone were given an opportunity to summarize Becker’s ideas in an hour in the General Assembly at the United Nations again, back to the rippling effect that we referred to earlier. There might be a world leader who is struck by these notions, just like you and I were, and and might realize, by virtue of that recognition, that that we really do, that that leaders really do, have an obligation to simultaneously attend to the practical and concrete concerns along with the more spiritual ones you know. Again, back to America Jimmy Carter, who was an American president who just died in the 1970s he was the last president that I admired, because this is when there was a gas problem. There was no petroleum at the pumps. And he gave a very famous speech in the 1970s where he’s like, it’s not about gas prices. This is about a crisis of meaning and value. And he asked Americans to consider the possibility that we behave in accordance with our professed values, that when we say that people are entitled to equal opportunity, well, why don’t we actually act that way? And instead, you know, right now in my country, what we have is the opposite. We have an administration in place that is literally asking people to be more angry, more cruel and more fearful. And again, I would submit that that’s in the interest of making the external superstructure of that which surrounds us, politically, economically, religiously, educationally, uh, less useful to the average individual, yeah,

Nippin Anand  57:50

yes, wonderful. And you are so right. I, you know, I live in the world of risk and accidents and safety, and one of the things that I find very, very powerful in Becker’s work is that, of course, every time there is an accident in an organization, there’s a complete cognitive dissonance, because, you know, it’s, it’s like, it’s like the death of an organization, it’s complete death. But from there comes very good things sometimes, when you, when you when you face the reality, the plague that you mentioned, when you look into the plague and you see, it’s not the witchcraft, it’s not the evil is the bacteria. When you face that reality, I think some great things come out of there, of of that experience. The thing is that we are not always very good at broadcasting those things. We keep them internal. We like to sort them out internally, but to the outside world, we show no, no, no, nothing has gone wrong. Everything is intact. But I think even that recognition within is a very powerful thing, because it brings some some, some really powerful changes, like it happens to us in in personal lives. You know, we get hurt, we get wounded, and then we suddenly, there is a realization. And I think at that level, I feel at a very, very individual level, these are very powerful theories to to to help to to push people to the level, to the cliff, to the to the edge of their dissonance. And maybe one out of 100 will will look at themselves. And I think it’s every worth it.

Sheldon Solomon  59:22

I like that thought, and I think that I’m not trying to be, yeah, I’m not trying to be or to romanticize this, but I really do think that that’s where there’s grounds, grounds for hope that, obviously, there’s a lot of major structural changes that I believe will be necessary for humankind to persist in a satisfactory fashion. But i i. I’m really convinced of the merits of what you just intimated, Nippin, which is, it’s gonna be a bottom up resurrection of our humanity at its best. I’m the I don’t think it’s like, oh, we have to change and become fundamentally different creatures. I think it’s we’ve got to spin the existential gyroscope a bit and get us back to embracing culturally constructed visions of reality, as you alluded to earlier, not linear, circular. That doesn’t mean you’re not going anywhere, but it means that you are not in the unfortunate position of aiming for an unattainable standard that, you know, we call it progress, but it’s really a death denying vision of reality that is claiming that, yeah, at its best, there’ll be no problems because there’ll be no death and so on. Yes, yeah, but again, and that’s why, to put it back in perspective, I feel like what folks like you are doing, both in your work and in these kinds of podcasts, or whatever we call them, I think it is at the vanguard of with a cutting edge of not only technology, but psychosocial necessity, you know, Like I tell people, you know, if you’re having trouble sleeping, I’ll send you one of our experiments, and you’ll be napping within a paragraph. But the real goal is back to the connection. You know, it’s been, it’s lovely that you wrote to me, and then here we are having a conversation, and I can’t speak for you, but I find our interests and views on these matters to be remarkably in parallel, I’ve enjoyed talking to you immensely, and selfishly, I’d be delighted to do that again. But let’s say there’s one person out there that is like, Oh, wow, I thought about these things, and this really has enlivened and excited me. Yeah, that’s, I think, the step by step hope. And I, yeah, I, I know the folks who make these kinds of programs, yeah, you’d be like, Well, I hope there’s a few million people that listen me too. But if there’s six people that listen, that’s okay, also, as long as one of them was, you know, fired up a neuron in response to something that we saw that matters. That’s it is all that matters. And I’ll go one more step and speak for both of us and tell me if you disagree, I hope that this that we’re not saying that we’re the all the, you know, the all encompassing repositories of wisdom, the ultimate arbiters of truth and beauty. We’re saying that we find these ideas compelling, and though we’re hoping to disseminate them in order to foster constructive engagement, if we’re wrong, let us know. In other words, you know. You know how to find us, and this is just an invitation to to get in touch to at the moment, it’s kind of a unilateral we’re spewing ideas to too often what’s construed as an audience of passive listeners. But that’s not our intention. Oh, we want to connect in the cosmic fashion with the folks around us in the hopes that will generate some ripples. Yeah,

Nippin Anand  1:04:14

wonderful, wonderful. What a wonderful meeting with you. What a beautiful time spent together. Is there anything you would like to say as we close this wonderful conversation?

Sheldon Solomon  1:04:25

No, just that, I’m very grateful for having it being a little selfish, because I’m going to read your book now and then I’ll be back in touch. And if there’s ever grounds for another conversation, it would,

Nippin Anand  1:04:37

oh yes, I would love to. I think it would be so good that once you have read through the book, yeah, maybe we can have another another conversation like

Sheldon Solomon  1:04:47

I would. I would love that, because I feel like this has been of necessity, one sided, because I’m eager to talk about what I’ve been. Up to but like I’ve said, it 10 pages into your book, we need a or I would like to have an engagement where we can center around what you’ve been up to, let.