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.

Otto Rank's Art and Artist is Beyond Praise

Ernest Becker mentions seeing Frederick Perl's call Otto Rank's Art and Artist "beyond praise', and he couldn't imagine any book dealing with science could be such a thing. He immediately searched it out and read it finding this to be true. He said Rank is "something else" as in he is ouot of this world or some other hip way to describe his genius. He warns us that Rank is hard to read but to experience the full joy you must go direct to the source and Becker only outlines the scope of Rank's system of thought.

From Wikipedia entry on Rank:
In 1974, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer prize for The Denial of Death (1973), which was based on Rank’s post-Freudian writings, especially Will Therapy (1929-31), Psychology and the Soul (1930) and Art and Artist (1932/1989). The feeling of anxiety, writes Rank in Will Therapy (1929-31), divides into two currents, running in opposite directions: one toward separation and individuation; the other toward union and collectivity.

Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Rank):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mbh/index.htm

The Synthesis of Ernest Becker

In 25 years of reading through so many different opinions it comes a time to pull together from all of these voices and speak my own. I feel drowned out by the opinions and assertions that bandy about while I am left silence or driving friends and family with my disjointed rants. No longer could I get by with rambling stories about all of the evils, mysteries, and fascinations in the world to be uncovered and examined. I needed to pull together something more cohesive. I needed to create a synthesis of all the pieces and find the patterns. I can get so bogged down by details and repetition that I lose sight of the underlying structure. Of course as I get my footing into the writing element over time my voice will come to the fore. In the meantime I apologize for my shortcomings in expressing my vision as it comes to me along the way.

A synthesis is a combination of parts that form a whole. With this in mind the beginning piece is very crucial and thus must be the cornerstone of the whole work. I push forth the cornerstone of my investigation revolves around creating harmony from the array of elements. In the book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, the word synthesis is used in 6 of the 12 reviews of the inside cover. They proclaim such things as; psychophilosophical synthesis, a new synthesis, a brilliant passionate synthesis of the human sciences, a desperately needed synthesis of the most important discipline in man's life, creative contribution to a synthesis if this generation's extensive explorations in psychology, a profound synthesis of theological and psychological insights about mans nature. Sounds mouthwatering doesn't it. It makes you want to read the book. The book is quite good and I plan to get into it during the course of things.

The quote at the start of the preface of Denial of Death is from Otto Rank who was a student of Freud and is the primary focus of Becker's book along with the work Of Norman O. Brown. The Otto Rank quotes is as follow:

"for the time being I gave up writing - there is already too much truth in the
world- an over-production which apparently can't be consumed!"

Becker defines his mission as:

"show that the fear of death is a universal that unites data from several
disciplines of the human sciences, makes wonderfully clear and intelligible
human actions that we have buried under mountains of fact, and obscured with
endless back and forth arguments about the "true" human motives.. here in the
end of the 20th century and we are choking on truth"

I venture to say it has only got worse.

Related Links:

Pulitzer Prize Winning Book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death

Documentary Film about Becker's Work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_from_death

Synthesis Defined
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/synthesis

Blog Essay regarding Becker, Rank, and Past Imperfect.
http://peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com/2006/06/past-imperfect.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rank