S6E6 - The Terror (Terror Management Theory)

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Kayla: Hey Chris.

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Chris: Hey Kayla.

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Kayla: What do I always say?

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Chris: There are a lot of things that you always say. You are a woman of aphorisms. There's just a lot of kaylaisms.

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Kayla: Well this kaylaism is, and I quote, everything we do because we're afraid of dying.

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Chris: Oh yeah, you do say that. You know the other thing that you always said before, like way before we did this podcast is what was religions or just cults that have just made it. Whatever.

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Kayla: I was saying that from the beginning, I'm very smart but r I am very smart. R slash I am. I am very smart. But we are today talking about everything we do. We do because we're afraid of dying. And I really believe that like every human action can probably be traced back to the core motivation of death's scary. Must avoid, must cope, must overcome, must block. Like I'm talking, going to work, participating in society, creating art, having sex, following trends, being mean, being nice, being charitable.

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Chris: It's horny. Cause I'm afraid of death.

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Kayla: Yes, we're all, this is my belief, we're all, we're doing all of it because we're scared of dying.

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Chris: Is this disputable in your opinion or is this like everybody's dumb if they don't think this?

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Kayla: I might be a little militant in this belief. It's not totally out of the realm of possibility that there's other things going on in our psyches, but whenever I think about it a little bit too long, like, yeah, or think about why I'm doing the things that I'm doing, it does always come back to the core statement. Everything we do because we're afraid of dying.

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Chris: I mean, certainly seatbelts and wouldn't you.

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Kayla: Know it, Chris, im not the only person to have that thought.

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Chris: Yeah, you werent the only person to have the no cults or just, or religions or cults that just made it either. I got news for you.

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Kayla: In fact theres an entire social and psychological evolutionary theory that posits most human activity is undertaken to avoid or ignore thinking about death. The terror of knowing we will die. The human ability to understand the profundity of death and the nothingness that follows triggers such a powerful unconscious anxiety in human beings. We exert a tremendous amount of energy trying to manage it. This theory is aptly called terror management theory. Welcome to cult or just weird. I'm Kayla, I'm a tv writer.

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Chris: I'm Chris, I'm a game designer and I also manage my terror and fear.

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Kayla: Don't we all? We're so glad to have you back at the show. If you would like to support us at culture, just weird. You can find us@patreon.com culturjisweird. And if you want to talk to other weirdos about cults, you can find us all over on discord. And the link to both of those are in the show notes.

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Chris: We also have an Instagram page where we post pictures of things.

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Kayla: We do.

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Chris: We do?

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Kayla: Since when?

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Chris: I know. It's crazy.

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Kayla: I've never posted on there. Okay, Chris, we finished up our series on our dive into cryonics. So what comes after?

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Chris: Okay, well, I can see the transition here because clearly you freeze your own body after you legally die if you're afraid of death. That motivation, that terror management theory. Motivation makes sense.

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Kayla: I don't want to put any theories into people's mouths, but like.

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Chris: Yeah, no, I mean, that's like a direct.

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Kayla: Yeah. So what comes after that? The future, of course. And we're going to get to the future by way of terror management theory. Originally proposed by social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pisniewski, TMT terror management theory posits that a profound psychological conflict arises from the dual human state of understanding death as an inevitability we have no control over and possessing a self preservation instinct. So this conflict leads to terror that we humans must then manage. Like it's having that being able to hold both in our brains an understanding of death and an understanding of our need to self preserve that butts up against each other and makes us.

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Chris: They rub against each other and create a byproduct that is terror that we then have to do something with.

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Kayla: We have to manage it. TMT proposes that we manage it via a two pronged attack of escapism and cultural beliefs that allow us to build meaning and value that endure far beyond our individual selves.

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Chris: Wait, so does bang and fall under escapism or cultural beliefs?

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Kayla: I think there's an argument for both, my friend. Okay, we'll get to that. Hold on. Okay.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: From Wikipedia, quoting a paper on theory quote, basically countering the personal insignificance represented by death with the significance provided by symbolic culture.

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Chris: Okay, I see.

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Kayla: Being a part of something bigger.

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Chris: Counterbalancing.

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Kayla: Yeah. Okay, let's play a little game.

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Chris: I also play games to not think about dying.

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Kayla: Same. What do you think are some cultural beliefs? TMT posits quell anxiety around death.

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Chris: Okay, well, like, obviously religious beliefs.

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Kayla: Yeah, yeah. But like what?

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Chris: Like afterlife?

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Kayla: Yes. That's my first one. Belief in an afterlife. Like religion specifically, religions that promise in afterlife, which I think honestly are a lot. Like, I don't say most, but like a lot. Obviously we have Christianity, which is like, hey, believe in this and you literally won't die. You'll literally live forever. Immortality. And then you have things like Buddhism where it's not the same, kind of like, oh, you're going to live in heaven. But there is a, like, becoming one with everything escaping samsara.

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Chris: Yeah, it's a different existence than just like being a physical live person. It's, you know, it's some sort of like energy transcendence or whatever. But it's still a post. You're still looking forward to something, post the termination of that first thing.

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Kayla: Other spiritualities, like believing in ghosts or angels or anything like that. Anything to indicate that there is something beyond our depth, something waiting for us beyond that. Even like thinking of reincarnation, which again, a lot of Buddhists doing a seance. That's TMT to its core, my friend. What are some other ones kind of already?

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Chris: When you say TMT, I think of tmnt, I think of TNt. Is it teenage mutant ninja terrors? Terrors? I don't know. I mean, according to this, no, but according to this theory, it's like everything, right? So, like, literally anything I say could fall under that.

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Kayla: Let me give you some biggies, though.

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Chris: Well, I mean, I'll. Here, I'll tell you. Okay. I had just in my head, like, doing some sort of, like, significant work of art or like, building a monument. I think that's why people try to, like, become super wealthy and like, name a college building after themselves type of thing.

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Kayla: That falls under the category of posterity, which is posterity.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: The easy one there is like having kids where you, like, I was gonna say having kids literally, like, have a. Have that, like, lineage legacy, but then building a financial legacy, like having an estate or. Yeah, creating art that will outlast. Or creating a building or. Yeah, putting your name on a fucking building legacy in like, that literal sense of the word.

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Chris: Making a podcast.

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Kayla: Making a podcast. Oh, we'll get to that. Any others you can think of? Right away?

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Chris: I mean, also everything. I don't know.

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Kayla: So just some biggies are like, national identity. Participating in a national or ethnic culture.

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Chris: That would fall under maybe posterity, right. Because you're participating in something larger than yourself that will outlast you.

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Kayla: Right, exactly. There's also cultural perspectives on sex. So again, that has to do with having kids. Cultural norm of like, oh, sex is reserved for this thing, or sex is reserved for that thing, or sex means this, or sex means that. Or sex is distraction. So kind of all of those thoughts around that can really tie into culture or tie into how we control ourselves and other people as part of culture.

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Chris: I totally get the, like, if you're, like, a sex essentialist, sex centralist, like, you know, fundamentalist Christian, and you're like, well, sex is only for making babies. That I see the tie in there, but I'm having a little bit of trouble with the, like, I guess sex as distraction makes sense, but, like, I don't know, I feel like there's some sort of drive for pleasure that's.

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Kayla: So you and I have had this conversation before, and you fall. You are wrong. And you fall on the side of. No, we're motivated by death or sex, and I'm on the side of. It's all death.

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Chris: Yeah, I just. There's something that feels different, like, just because, like, there's so much sex.

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Kayla: Cause we're trying to get away from.

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Chris: The fact that we're gonna die, but only because baby. Which is, like, not why a lot of.

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Kayla: Oh, I disagree.

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Chris: Most people have sex. Most sex is not baby making at this point. So then it's. I mean, I guess. Yeah, you put it under, like, playing a game or, like, eating something delicious in terms of, like, the pleasure wards off, like, the sense of impending doom.

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Kayla: But also how alive. But I don't think you're how alive animal it makes you feel. Yeah, but it almost takes you out of the headspace of being animal that is aware of its impending death. And instead of that, you're animal that is simply being animal.

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Chris: Right. You're purely in the moment, and you kind of eliminate one side of that I'm conscious, but also survival equation.

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Kayla: It's funny because my next one and the last one we'll talk about here is human superiority over animals is something that's posited by TMT really interesting, like, putting ourselves on a level above animals. Therefore, we are superior. Therefore, we are part of something bigger than them. Like, the separation between human and animals, TMT theorists believe, are part of that. And I'll get more into that in a second.

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Chris: Yeah, I guess I just will put my. Like, I totally see where this is coming from and where you're coming from. I'm just not sure I'm fully on board all of the time, for all reasons.

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Kayla: Well, that's why you're wrong.

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Chris: That's why I'm wrong. Yeah, I know. I know. Go ahead.

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Kayla: TMT states that these values provide symbolic immortality by allowing us to participate in something that will outlive us, or it puts our identity on a higher plane than our biological reality. So it's like, that's where the human superiority over animals. I'm not gonna explain it well, but just, like, trying to escape our biological reality of, like, yeah, we're gonna die the same way that animals are gonna die.

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Chris: Right? But we have souls, though.

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Kayla: But we have souls and animals don't, and that's why we eat them in a tasty burger.

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Chris: Mmm. I don't know. Souls are probably pretty tasty.

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Kayla: I mean, if Ursula taught me anything.

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Chris: Oh, yeah.

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Kayla: If the dark crystal tv series taught me anything.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: A fundamental. That's actually, why is there not more, like, eating souls? Being very, like, a delicacy should be more of a trope.

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Chris: I think there is no, I mean, like you said, dark crystal is basically.

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Kayla: That a fundamental facet of TMT is self esteem, which I thought was very interesting. The researchers define self esteem as one's belief. They are living up to the cultural standards of their specific worldview, predicated on the belief in the validity of that worldview. So self esteem in this paradigm is a way to manage anxiety around death and allows us to become something more than a scared animal trying to outrun the inevitable. So if you have high self esteem, it's probably because you are considering yourself to be living up to the cultural standards of the culture that you either believe in or were born into or have been enculturated in. Yada, yada, yada. I see your skepticism.

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Chris: You see my face right now? Just that. That's a big assumption that if you have self esteem because part of that sentence, if you have self esteem, it's because you're living up to your culture's standards. I think that is a very hefty assumption that probably doesn't always hold. I don't know.

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Kayla: I think that you're thinking of it, too.

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Chris: It sounds like gymnastics to me a little bit.

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Kayla: One of your problems with that is like, well, what if I don't agree with the cultural norms of the culture that I'm in? I have self esteem. I have high self esteem because I don't think that I should be at work for 18 hours a day. No, but you have high self esteem because you're subscribing to a different kind of belief.

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Chris: Right, too. I'm part of a different, not a dominant subculture that believes that work is good, by the way. This is not necessarily true for me.

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Kayla: But just an example.

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Chris: Right? As an example, even though all I do is this podcast. So I am a lazy piece of shit.

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Kayla: We all are.

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Chris: But your point is that I'm thinking of it in terms of. Well, I'm just not. I'm not getting my self esteem from, like, national cultural identity all the time because I'm part of these other subgroups.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: But these other subgroups are things. I have self esteem because I'm living up to their standards. That's what you're saying.

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Kayla: Yeah. And that's my understanding of how they're talking about self esteem. I'm still wrapping my mind around it. I also don't know if I agree with their concept of self esteem in TMT, but it is. I just wanted touch on it because it's a very important part of theory for them.

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Chris: I also want to say that's not necessarily what I was thinking. I was not necessarily.

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Kayla: It's one of the things you were thinking.

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Chris: It's one of the things I was thinking. But. But I agree that is a very effective counter to that line of. That line of thought. But the other thing I was thinking is more just like some. Like, sometimes self esteem. I don't know, it feels like self esteem can also be self. It's self generated, like, something that, like, I'm living up to some standard. Like, I guess maybe I'm always living up to some kind of standard, even if it's like, maybe I. You know, I read Marcus Aurelius, and I'm, like, living up to his standard, and that gives me self esteem. I guess you could still argue that's part of something greater that I'm living up to. I don't know, I just. It just feels weird to say that, like, self esteem is always about living up to some standard, but maybe I'm.

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Chris: Maybe I'm not. I don't know. Maybe I have to talk to a.

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Kayla: That's just how they're defining it. I think that self esteem is, like, a very nebulous word and concept, but this is their definition within this framework. While TMT was developed by the social psychologists we mentioned, up top, Greenberg, Solomon, and Pisniewski. They got their idea from anthropologist Ernest Becker, who won a Pulitzer in 1973 for his book the Denial of Death.

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Chris: The book the Pulitzer?

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: I thought that was, like, a reporting prize.

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Kayla: It's a nonfiction book.

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Chris: Oh, okay.

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Kayla: The book argues that almost everything people do is undertaken to ignore or avoid the all consuming and inevitable nature of death.

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Chris: It sounds like they just stole his idea. Then.

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Kayla: It's that. Do you know how, like, science works?

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Chris: Yeah, great artists steal.

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Kayla: No, you build on the work before you. And I don't know if he was doing science or not, like they did. They were doing, like, science around it, whatever science around this idea. He's anthropologist. He wrote this book. The other guys are social psychologists. They wrote up this theory. They're all best friends. The book argues that almost everything people do is undertaken to avoid or ignore the all consuming and inevitable nature of death. So he's talking individual actions and things we spend our entire lives doing, as well as large scale undertakings. Laws, religion, culture, belief system. These are all attempts to make life significant and reject anything that threatens that attempt. So clashes that result from belief systems that are incompatible can lead to intense global conflicts, wars, world wars, cold wars.

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Kayla: My belief system must dominate your belief system, or else it's not enough to stave off the fear around death.

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Chris: So wars are also based on fear of death?

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Kayla: Everything is.

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Chris: Everything is.

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Kayla: And an interesting fact for Ernest Becker. He actually died quite young. He died, I want to say he was in his early fifties, not that long, I think, after the book was published, because as he was, like, dying in his hospital bed, he did a series of interviews with, I think, an editor from psychology today about the book as he was dying.

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Chris: So is that, what is that? Is that irony? Or is that him fulfilling his. It sounds like he was basically. Yeah, he was, like, walking the walk, right? He was like, I'm afraid of death, so I need to do something significant. So I will write a book. It just happened to be meta. About the fear of death.

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Kayla: Yeah, like, literally in the foreword of the book written by Sam Keene from psychology today starts like, the first words Ernest Becker said to me when I walked into his hospital room were, quote, you are catching me. An extremis. This is a test of everything ive written about death, and ive got a chance to show how one dies. The attitude one takes, whether one does it in a dignified, manly way, what kind of thoughts one surrounds it with, how one accepts his death.

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Chris: What's a manly way to die? Is that like, is that like flexing your bicep and like eating a slab of bacon while you die?

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Kayla: However, Gaston did it.

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Chris: Did Gaston die at the end?

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Kayla: Doesn't he die at the end? Doesn't, like Beast knock him off the. I always get the end of beauty and the beast confused with Edward scissorhands. Cause they're like, kind of the same movie.

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Chris: Sorry, what?

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Kayla: Those are like, the same movie. They're very similar.

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Chris: Why? Just because there's like a. Like, she's not kidnapped person with, like, physical abnormalities that.

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Kayla: Yeah. And there's a castle and the bad guy gets knocked to his death. I think that happens in both of those movies.

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Chris: Okay, maybe we need to watch those movies again. Anyway, clearly those were about fear of death.

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Kayla: I thought that it was very interesting that, like, some of the work around the denial of death happened whilst Ernest Becker was dying.

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Chris: Yeah, no, that is poetic. It's very interesting.

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Kayla: Yeah. TMT argues that it's compatible with evolutionary theory, anxiety around death and attempts to alleviate that selects for better survival odds.

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Chris: But, okay, what. What's the. Just because, like, if you don't. If you're not able to manage your terror, then you like it. You're just a gibbering mess. The camp.

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Kayla: You're not scared of death and you're just like, I wonder what these train tracks are.

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Chris: Oh, if you're not even scared of.

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Kayla: I wonder what this cliff is.

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Chris: Yeah, but like, that. That fear of death goes back to, like, single celled orchestra.

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Kayla: Yeah. It goes back to your little brain cells.

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Chris: That's the survival side of the equation. That is a presupposition of TMT.

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Kayla: Right. But humans, our ability to, like, be so creative and symbolic, like, I think better. I think what they're saying is that better selects for your. Your survival rate if you are doing things like participating in culture, which animals generally don't have. If you are doing things like, you know, I think that a TMT would argue that our. Our medical apparatus comes from TMT.

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Chris: Yeah, see, you're talking me out of it a little bit again. Because when I think about, like, there's sort of like a psychological, like, what a psychologist might say, and that kind of feels like this TMT bit.

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Kayla: Sure.

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Chris: And then there's, like, what an evolutionary biologist might say, and it feels like you're, like, wading into that territory now.

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Kayla: Sure.

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Chris: And an evolutionary biologist might say, yeah, our ability as humans to work in large numbers and plan ahead and, you know, do things that are. That only, like, 20 humans could do and one human couldn't, it's simply an evolutionary advantage and allows us to procreate more and whatever and pass on our genes has nothing to do with whether we're, like, doing that because we're scared or not.

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Kayla: No, we're doing it because we're scared of death.

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Chris: It's just a, like, we will have a tendency towards more cultural evolution that allows us to build pyramids and skyscrapers.

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Kayla: Death. All fear. Look, no, it's true. This is a theory. It's not one that's necessarily adopted by all social psychologists. Some critics claim that experimental results in TMT are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate, or that human psychological responses to terrifying cues can be explained by other reasons, such as search for meaning, fear of the unknown, theories of collective defense. All the stuff that you've been talking about. Kind of, yeah, they're all critics. It is a theory.

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Chris: I mean, while we're on. Are we. Is there another section for critics? Because I have another question.

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Kayla: No, critic. It.

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Chris: I have to. Okay. I think it's actually a very compelling theory.

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Kayla: I'm not saying I'm a very compelling theory. I'm just saying I'm right.

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Chris: I know that you're right and I'm wrong. And anybody that doesn't agree with you is also wrong. But also, I wanted. I'm just. I'm just putting out there that I think that it's a very powerful explanatory framework.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: And also I have criticisms of it.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: And I want to level one more criticism is that it sounds a little. One true cure.

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Kayla: Oh, okay. Is that what you say about evolution, too?

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Chris: I have not really thought about that in terms of evolution, but maybe. But no, just, you know, why does.

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Kayla: That bird look like that? Oh, evolution. Why am I scared of dying? Oh, evolution sounds like one true cure to me.

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Chris: All right, we have to talk about this offline because now I'm thinking, oh, no.

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Kayla: Am I going to convince you to be creationist just because I'm so. Dug my heels into TMT?

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Chris: That's right. Next episode, I'm going to be like, guys, here's why creationism is right.

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Kayla: Look, you're not wrong. You're absolutely not wrong. I think that the scope of TMT is insane. I just am happy to know that it exists because it supports my own biased worldview that everything we do because we're terrified of dying. Chris, what are some things that you engage in that might fall into the TMT paradigm?

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Chris: I already called it podcast.

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Kayla: Yeah, I literally said this podcast writing for me in my career, like, I literally have thought about, of, like, if I can just get my name on a tv show that says written, by then it'll all be. It'll all have been worth it. That'll. That'll be there after I'm dead.

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Chris: Look, I have a whole wall of boxes of games that I shipped while I was at Blizzard, signed by, like, the dev team, like the designers and the artists and whatnot. Why do I keep those up on the wall? Like, why am I displaying those? Because it gives me a sense of, like, I have been part of this. I helped make Starcraft two, I helped make overwatch. Right? Like, that gives me that sense of significance that maybe, according to TMT, staves off some of the terror, because, yeah.

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Kayla: It'S like, this thing will. This thing is greater than me. This thing will live beyond me. I mean, that's why. That is definitely a reason why I participate in certain social justice or political causes. I spend a lot of my time working on establishing universal healthcare in the state of California. And one hand, I want that for myself. On a bigger hand, there's a really big part of me that is not certain that I will live to see something like this. But I want it to. I want it to be here whether I'm here or not.

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Chris: And if you did get it for yourself, it would still just be for death, according to tmTs.

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Kayla: Give me some medicine so I don't die. And then I think one that a lot of people participate in is. Yeah. Trying to have kids.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: There's a lot of reasons. There are a lot of reasons to have children, and not all of them are because I need something to not be scared of death by. But I think that every animal, a very animal reason to have children is the legacy, the posterity, the whatever.

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Chris: Yeah, I need to. There's a really funny comic. I think it might be like House of decline. I forget what webcomic it is, but where it's just, like, four panels, and it's like, man, my life feels empty. What should I do? Maybe I should have kids. And then they have the kid, and the kid grows up, and it just goes back to the first panel.

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Kayla: Yep. Now, why exactly are we talking about terror management theory at this point in the show? We've already done cryonics, so why didn't we talk about it before? Why are we talking about it now?

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Chris: Yeah, Kayla, what are we, delinquent? What did we do?

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Kayla: Well, I think we can give, like you said, TMT, a read to what we have talked about so far. You know, cryonics, afterlife, blah. But I actually think TMT does so much more. I think it underpins almost everything we're going to talk about on this show this season, and I think it especially underpins what a particular group of people are thinking about right now when it comes to humanity. Particularly what comes after humanity.

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Chris: Hold on. Wait. Yeah, I see why we're talking about this. Okay, so the scope of TMT lets us talk about anything this season?

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Kayla: Well, yeah, but I think that it's guiding us towards what we wanted to talk about next. So next time on culture, just weird. Transhumanism, expanding our human abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints and possibly escaping death, or at least the fear of it. I'm Kayla.

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Chris: And I'm Chris. And this has been cult or just weird.

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Kayla: I.

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Chris: Cause I'm TMT dynamite.