Money Can't Make You Live Forever

The human urge for immortality is seen in the creation of monuments strewn among our planet. By taking the physical materials of brick and mortar the Eternalist fashions their record of existence for the generations to come. Fame, I want to live forever is how the movie said it, and so goes it with the names of philanthropists, saints and scholars that have paraded through history. Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil, his sequel to Denial of Death asserts that Money has taken over as the new God. As our cultures adapted from its primitive forms the loss of ritual became replaced from the power of churches out into the hands of the secular via coinage. As royalty developed out of these early cultures the common men began to imitate the Kingly desire to collect:

silks, courtesans, fine swords, horses, and monuments, city palaces, and country estates - all the things that can be bought with gold.

Not only do we pass on our life's work through our children but also through the things we leave behind and this is how money has replaced religion. As money filled the vacuum of the lost rituals of early man churches began to harness the power of money as churches became the first banks, priests the first bankers, and Juno Moneta in Rome the first mint. This flow of power justified with God-like powers held sway over the secular world as counterfeiting became a sin equal with sacrilege.

The temple's became clearinghouses for all the materials that can be bought by gold, and now backed by the apparent Divine authority of the Church you can now carry God with you home, thus secularizing society. Money set a trend where the material world becomes king and the invisible world is denied. What you can't see doesn't exist and there lies the great repression. This is the concept of sin, as the arising of guilt from the separation from the power and protection of the Gods, and the creeping in of uncertainty and doubt.

The failures of any system such as Religion, or Economic structures as the end all solution to the predicament of the human condition to bind time and satisfy our actual experience blows up in our face as we attempt to fashion a meaningful role in the passage of our life.

More Eros, Less Strife

Creating harmony out of the array of views. We don't want to bog ourselves down in arguing or closing in around our beliefs self-righteously but rather search for the unifying thread of truth and logic that permeates throughout all of the fields of human inquiry. So much is staked out in our petty wars and ego plays for no resultant good. Becker sees this basically as the engine propelled by the denial of our fear of death.

According to Norman O. Brown the world needs more eros and less strife.

What is Eros? Becker defined it as "the urge to unification of experience, to form, to greater meaningfulness."

Wikipedia Link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_(love)

More Becker quotes from the Preface of Denial of Death: knowledge is "strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competitive voices." "there is no throbbing vital center.", "there has to be revealed the harmony that unites many different positions."

"harmonization of the Babel of views on man and on the human condition, in the belief the time is ripe for a synthesis that covers the best thought in many fields from the human sciences to religion."

"not to oppose and to demolish opposing points of view but to include them into a larger theoretical structure."

"the problem is to find the truth under the exaggeration, excess elaboration, and distortion."