Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Our immortality strategy is an expression of our desire to stand out in our culture and establish some
meaning to our existence. Our desire to stand out Becker calls heroism. We either will use our culture to
find some way to prove ourselves as an individual hero within it, or we will immerse ourselves in a group or
someone else‟s ideology who belong to our culture which presents us with the space and opportunity to
stand out; to emerge heroic. All cultures allow for us to perform some degree of heroism, “from the „high‟
heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the „low‟ heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple
priest … whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific,
and civilized … people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value” (The Denial of Death, 5).
People are mostly unconscious of their death anxiety but it is there as the underlying reason to our
existential issues and it is the underlying motivation for our heroic pursuits, and our heroic pursuits come
with dangers. Our immortality strategies can make us feel guilty for doing too much or too little in our
culture, and how we ease our guilt is usually on others. We can use others to advance our own heroism and
then have our life affirmed; by the gods, by our families, by the nation-state (Escape from Evil, 100-104). In
order to not feel guilty for using others and putting others down, to save ourselves and assure that we are
right, we will dehumanize others. Guilt is therefore solved by making others the victimizers. In our
attempts at some claim to superiority and immortality, in our attempts to live the heroic, virtuous life, we
find targets for our inevitable hatreds, “Since everyone feels dissatisfied with himself (dirty), victimage is a
universal human need” (116). A human being can make someone else the victimizer or can go along with
whom the group or person he/she has immersed themselves in declares is dirty, wrong, or immoral.
Now, I am going to explain how Ledbetter‟s incomplete theory can be expanded on using Becker.
Ledbetter‟s theory ends abruptly without explaining what exactly it means for the character to reject the
virtue and only briefly states that the character, in accepting the virtue, is then able to live the good life. If
virtues are means for characters to extract meaning from existence, we should address how those virtues
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