We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.

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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 →

Themes

  • Philosophy — Deep thoughts on existence, knowledge, and the nature of reality

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