Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles—my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.
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About Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker was a 20th-century American cultural anthropologist, author. Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. Read more on Wikipedia →