The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change

By Janis Dickinson. 2009

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist cross-trained in philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry, invoked consciousness of self and the inevitability of death as the primary sources of human anxiety and repression. He proposed that the psychological basis of cooperation, competition, and emotional and mental health is a tendency to hold tightly to anxiety-buffering cultural world views or "immortality projects" that serve as the basis for self-esteem and meaning. Although he focused mainly on social and political outcomes like war, torture, and genocide, he was increasingly aware that materialism, denial of nature, and immortality-striving efforts to control, rather than sanctify, the natural world were problems whose severity was increasing. In this paper I review Becker's ideas and suggest ways in which they illuminate human response to global climate change. Because immortality projects range from belief in technology and materialism to reverence for nature or belief in a celestial god, they act both as barriers to and facilitators of sustainable practices. I propose that Becker's cross-disciplinary "science of man," and the predictions it generates for proximate-level determinants of social behavior, add significantly to our understanding of and potential for managing the people paradox, i.e., that the very things that bring us symbolic immortality often conflict with our prospects for survival. Analysis of immortality projects as one of the proximate barriers to addressing climate change is both cautionary and hopeful, providing insights that should be included in the cross-disciplinary quest to uncover new pathways toward rational, social change.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/221edc37bfe297a0507c7b0bd6fa2bfd9051e7ee

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Social Psychology

1. Pihkala Panu
2. Z. Leviston
3. P. Pihkala
4. Iain Walker

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Pihkala
2. Pihkala Panu
3. Z. Leviston
4. Susie Wang
5. Mark J. Hurlstone
6. Iain Walker
7. C. Lawrence

Citations in the corpus

• ECO-ANXIETY, TRAGEDY, AND HOPE: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE (2018, background): “It is possible to turn this close connection between mortality and climate change into an asset, as Dickinson (2009) is proposing.”
• Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety (2020, background): “There are also several studies which explore the relations between death anxiety and “mortality salience” with the ecological crisis, often through such frameworks as Ernest Becker’s theories or Terror Management Theory [20,36,79,80].”
• Emotions predict policy support: Why it matters how people feel about climate change (2018, background): “And while proximatising climate change can lead to greater emotional responses, the effect is reversed too: distancing oneself from climate change is thought to be a coping mechanism for potentially overwhelming feelings (Caillaud et al., 2015; Ojala, 2012a; Norgaard, 2006; Dickinson, 2009).”