Ernest Becker – Biography of the Father of the Science of Evil

Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist born on September 27, 1924, and died on March 6, 1974. He wrote several books that studied human nature, specifically trying to understand why man acts the way he does. He was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Denial of Death, which was published a few months before his death. Today, it is widely used in university courses in psychology, anthropology, and other fields.

Ernest Becker’s works were well known for their clarity and interdisciplinary nature, where Becker drew on multiple fields, from sociology to philosophy to child development. He felt that there was a deep schism between academic disciplines, and a fundamental synthesis was necessary for human knowledge and research to once again help solve human problems instead of seeking knowledge solely for its own sake.

Ernest was a private in the army in World War II and is said to have participated in the rescue of a concentration camp. Not only would it have been terrifying to be one of the first outsiders to see a concentration camp, Becker also had a Jewish family background. This experience, along with the zeitgeist that surrounded her after World War II, undoubtedly shaped Becker’s later intellectual and life works.

After World War II, Becker finally went to Syracuse University to earn his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. Becker is said to have chosen anthropology naively because anthropology means “study of man.” Later, he taught at various universities and was well liked by his students. However, their views and beliefs at the time often went against the university administrators. During these years, he wrote several books that culminated in his masterpiece The Denial of Death.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says that the main motivating force for human beings is the denial of one’s own mortality and the quest to overcome one’s own death through a project of immortality. Therefore, we focus our life around certain projects to transcend our physical death, be it our family or our accomplishments. These projects are the “vital lies” that allow us to function day by day without the paralyzing awareness of our impending death. This goes against other thinkers like Freud, who argued that our unconscious sexual desires dictated our lives. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker draws directly on psychologist Otto Rank and explicitly states that, at the very least, he hopes his book will inspire readers to choose the works of Otto Rank. Otto Rank was one of Freud’s students who did not receive as much attention as his peers such as Carl Jung or Alfred Adler.