Ernest Becker was Kirkegaardian Christian lmaooooo0

[Anonymous No.20672315]

WTF? I thought he was a neurotic nihilist but what is this?

"We might say that there were roughly four levels of power
and meaning that an individual could “choose” to live by:
1. The first, most intimate, basic level, is what we could
call the Personal one. It is the level of what one is oneself, his
“true” self, his special gift or talent, what he feels himself to
be deep down inside, the person he talks to when he is alone,
the secret hero of his inner scenario.
2. The second or next highest level we could call the Social.
It represents the most immediate extension of oneself to a
select few intimate others: one’s spouse, his friends, his
relatives, perhaps even his pets.
3. The third and next higher level we could call the
Secular. It consists of symbols of allegiance at a greater
personal distance and often higher in power and
compellingness: the corporation, the party, the nation,
science, history, humanity.
4. The fourth and highest level of power and meaning we
would call the Sacred: it is the invisible and unknown level of
power, the insides of nature, the source of creation, God.
These levels, of course, are not discrete for most people:
most of us live in several of them, and the importance we
assign to each level gives the general orientation and
dimensions of our self-world. I said that the individual could “choose” the levels he would live by, and it is obvious why I
put the word in quotation marks: usually the person doesn’t
ask himself this basic question: this is decided for him by the
accidents of his birth and training and by the energies of his
heredity, his constitution. Taken together they propel him
into a character structure that operates comfortably on certain
levels of power and meaning.

[Anonymous No.20672321]

>>20672315
The great tragedy of our lives is
that the major question of our existence is never put by us—it
is put by personal and social impulsions for us. Especially is
this true in today’s materialist, objectifying, authoritarian
society, which couldn’t care less about a person answering for
himself the main question of his life: “What is my unique
gift, my authentic talent?” As the great Carlyle saw, this is the
main problem of a life, the only genuine problem, the one
that should bother and preoccupy us all through the early
years of our struggle for identity; all through the years when
we are tempted to solve the problem of our identity by taking
the expedient that our parents, the corporation, the nation
offer us; and it is the one that does bother many of us in our
middle and later years when we pass everything in review to
see if we really had discovered it when we thought we did.
Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is
found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society
rewards us for. The way things are set up we are rewarded, so
to speak, for not finding our authentic talent. The result is
that most of our life is in large part a rationalization of our
failure to find out who we really are, what our basic strength
is, what thing it is that we were meant to work upon the
world. The question of what one’s talent is must always be
related to how he works it on the world: “Into what hero-
system do I fit the expression of my talent?” It is worked on
some combination of the four levels of power and meaning."

-The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective by Ernest Becker

[Anonymous No.20672324]

>Ernest Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents.

[Anonymous No.20672352]

>>20672324
You don't know nothing about this meme so lurk the fuck more, newfaggot