Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Sheldon Solomon. I heard him on Lex Friedman's show and fell in love reached out to him any very graciously decided to join me today.

We're talking about the denial of death, a seminal book by Ernest Becker, and then the subsequent work which has taken up most of Sheldon's life.

You might not be aware of it, but death drives an awful lot that we do. Humans are a unique animal in that we are aware of our own mortality. One day we will die and we know it, and that fact has a huge impact on how we love our lives. Perhaps it's the most important fact that we know.

So today expect to learn how Sheldon's experiments have proven that death anxiety is a crucial driver of behavior. Why we can hate somebody for the shape of their nose. How death anxiety causes people to be tribal. What would happen if a child grew up without any human contact and much more.

Very calm, existential conversation today. Definitely a multiple listener. I adore this and I'm definitely getting Sheldon back on. We only scratch the surface of how deep and weird I think me and him can go today.

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But for now it's time for the wise and wonderful Sheldon Solomon.

Ladies and gentlemen welcome back I'm joined by Sheldon Solomon Sheldon I'll keep the show.

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here Chris really really happy to have you on are we going to talk about death today.

I believe that we will hopefully not for the sake of death per se but in the interest of enhancing life.

How does death enhance life?

Well at our best the existentialist tell us since time immemorial it is necessary to come to terms with the most basic fact of human existence and that is that look that we like all living creatures are of finite duration and theologians philosophers you know people just sitting on a rock back in the

in antiquity have wrestled frankly with this idea of you know every other form of life is unperturbed by the reality that of finitude but we necessarily are and the claim very simply is that whether we're aware of it or not that anxiety

that pervades every aspect of our existence and malignant manifestations of death anxiety are arguably responsible directly or indirectly for a considerable proportion of human foibles.

So the claim is that both for the benefit of ourselves as individuals to get the most out of life as well as for the benefit of society in general it is necessary both individually and collectively to come to terms with our mortality.

What are some of the manifestations of how they can militantly manifest?

Yes so great question I'll back up a little bit just to give folks some detail the work that we do is derived from a cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker who in the 1970s want to pull it surprise for a book called the denial of death and what becker argued you know very simply is that you know humans are like all other living things.

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