Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist, a philosopher, co-developer of Terror Management Theory, co-author of The Worm at the Core. Please support this channel by supporting our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Sheldon's Website: https://www.skidmore.edu/psychology/faculty/solomon.php
The Worm at the Core (book): https://amzn.to/31hQAXH
Denial of Death (book): https://amzn.to/329Zxl4

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
5:34 - Role of death in life
22:57 - Jordan Peterson
53:02 - Humans are both selfish and cooperative
56:57 - Civilization collapse
1:10:07 - Meditating on your mortality
1:16:10 - Kierkegaard and Heidegger
1:33:25 - Elon Musk
1:36:56 - Thinking deeply about death
1:45:53 - Religion
1:56:59 - Consciousness
2:03:39 - Why is Ernest Becker not better known
2:07:09 - AI and mortality
2:21:07 - Academia should welcome renegade thinkers
2:36:33 - Book recommendations
2:43:23 - Advice for young people
2:48:17 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Sheldon Solomon, a social psychologist, a philosopher, co-developer of terror management theory, and co-author of The Warm at the Core on the role of death in life.

He further carried the ideas of Ernest Becker that can crudely summarize as the idea that our fear of death is at the core of the human condition and the driver of most of the creations of human civilization.

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Let me say as a side note that Ernest Becker's book, Denial of Death, had a big impact on my thinking about human cognition, consciousness, and the deep ocean currents of our mind that are behind the surface behaviors we observe.

Many people have told me that they think about death or don't think about death, fear death or don't fear death, But I think not many people think about this topic deeply, rigorously, in the way that Nietzsche suggested.

This topic, like many that lead to deep, personal self-reflection, frankly is dangerous for the mind.

As all first principles thinking about the human condition is.

If you gaze long into the abyss, like Nietzsche said, the abyss will gaze back into you.

I've been recently reading a lot about World War II, Stalin, and Hitler.

It feels to me that there's some fundamental truth there to be discovered, in the moments of history that changed everything.

If I bring up Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin in these conversations, it is never through a political lens.

I think for myself, deeply, and often question everything, changing my mind as often as is needed.

I ask for your patience, empathy, and rigorous thinking.

If you arrived to this podcast from a place of partisanship, if you hate Trump or love Trump or any other political leader no matter what he or they do and see everyone who disagrees with you as delusional, I ask that you unsubscribe and don't listen to these conversations because my hope is to go beyond that kind of divisive thinking.

I think we can only make progress toward truth through deep, empathetic thinking and conversation.

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And Now, here's my conversation with Sheldon Solomon.

What is the role of death and fear of death in life?

Well, from our perspective, the uniquely human awareness of death and our unwillingness to accept that fact, we would argue is the primary motivational impetus for almost everything that people do, whether they're aware of it or not.

So that's kind of been your life work, your view of the human condition is that death, you've written the book Warm at the Core, that death is at the core of our consciousness of everything, of how we see the world, of what drives us.

Maybe can you, can you elaborate like what, how you see death fitting in?

What does it mean to be at the core of our being?

And to be pedantic, I usually start my psychology classes and I say to the students, okay, let's define our terms.

And understandably, the students are like, oh, that means mind.

And I'm like, well, no, that's a modern interpretation, but in ancient Greek, it means soul, but not in the Cartesian dualistic sense that most of us in the West think when that word comes to mind.

And so you hear the word soul, and you're like, well, all right, that's the non-physical part of me that's potentially detachable from my corporal container when I'm no longer here.

But Aristotle's who coined the word psyche, I think, he was not a dualist, He was a monist.

He thought that the soul was inextricably connected to the body, and he defined soul as the essence of a natural body that is alive.

And then he goes on and He says, all right, let me give you an example.

If an ax was alive, the soul of an ax would be to chop.

And if you can pluck your eyeball out of your head and it was still functioning, then the soul of the eyeball would be to see.

You know, and then he's like, all right, the soul of a grasshopper is to hop, the soul of a woodpecker is to peck, which raises the question, of course, what is the essence of what it means to be human?

And here, of course, there is no 1 universally accepted conception of the essence of our humanity.

Aristotle gives us the idea of humans as rational animals.

Got Joseph Heusinger, an anthropologist in the 20th century.

He called us homo ludens, that were basically fundamentally playful creatures.

And I think it was Hannah Arendt, homo faber, were tool-making creatures.

Another woman, Ellen Dizanayake, wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus, and following Aristotle and his poetics, she's like, well, we're not only rational animals, we're also aesthetic creatures that appreciate beauty.

There's another take on humans, I think they call us homo narratans.

And I think all of those designations of what it means to be human are quite useful heuristically and certainly worthy of our collective cogitation.

But what garnered my attention when I was a young punk was just a single line in an essay by a Scottish guy, it was Alexander Smith, in a book called Dreamthorpe, I think it's written in the 1860s, he just says right in the middle of an essay, it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human.

And I remember reading that, and in my gut, I was like, oh man, I don't like that, but I think you're onto something.

And then William James, the great Harvard philosopher and arguably the first academic psychologist, he referred to death as the worm at the core of the human condition.

So that's where the worm at the core idea comes in.

And that's just an allusion to the story of Genesis.

Back in the proverbial old days in the Garden of Eden, everything was going tremendously well until the serpent tempts Eve to take a chomp out of the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, and Adam partakes also.

And this is, according to the Bible, what brings death into the world.

And from our vantage point, the story of Genesis is a remarkable allegorical recount of the origin of consciousness, where we get to the point where by virtue of our vast intelligence, we come to realize the inevitability of death.

And so, you know, the apple is beautiful and it's tasty, but when you get right into the middle of it, there's that ugly reality, which is our finitude.

And then fast forward a bit, and I was a young professor at Skidmore College in

My PhD is in experimental social psychology and I mainly did studies with clinical psychologists evaluating the efficacy of non-pharmacological interventions to reduce stress.

And that was good work and I found it interesting, but in my first week as a professor at Skidmore, I'm just walking up and down the shelves of the library, saw some books by a guy I had never heard of, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist, recently deceased.

After weeks before, actually, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his book, The Denial of Death.

I don't know how you pull this off, but he had 1 more after he died called Escape from Evil.

And evidently it was supposed to, originally The Denial of Death was supposed to be this giant thousand-page book that was both, and they split it up, and what became Escape from Evil, his wife Marie Becker finished.

Well, be that as it may, it is in the denial of death where Becker just says in the first paragraph, I believe that the terror of death and the way that human beings respond to it or decline to respond to it, is primarily responsible for almost everything we do, whether we're aware of it or not, and mostly we're not.

And so I read that first paragraph, Lex, and I was like, wow, okay, this dude's- You're

And then it reminded me, I think, not to play psychologist, but let's face it, I believe there's a reason why we end up drifting where we ultimately come to.

And the next thing I know, I'm remembering when I'm 8 years old, the day that my grandmother died.

And the day before, my mom said, oh, say goodbye to grandma, she's not well.

And I knew she wasn't well, but I didn't really appreciate the magnitude of her illness.

Well, she dies the next day and it's in the evening and I'm just sitting there looking at my stamp collection.

And I'm like, wow, I'm going to miss my grandmother.

That means my mother's going to die after she gets old.

After all, who's going to make me dinner?

And that bothered me for a while, but then I'm looking at the stamps, all the dead American presidents.

And I'm like, there's George Washington, he's dead.

Oh, I'm gonna get old and be dead someday.

And at 8 years old, that was my first explicit existential crisis.

I remember it being 1 of these blood-curdling realizations that I tried my best to ignore for most of the time I was subsequently growing up, but fast forward back to Skidmore College, mid-20s, reading Becker's book in the 1980s, thinking to myself, wow, 1 of the reasons why I'm finding this so compelling is that it squares with my own personal experience.

And then to make a short story long, and I'll shut up, Lex, but what grabbed me about Becker, and this is in part because I read a lot of his other books.

There's another book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, which is framed from an evolutionary perspective.

And then the denial of death is really more framed from an existential psychodynamic vantage point.

And as a young academic, I was really taken by what I found to be a very potent juxtaposition that you really don't see that often.

Yet usually evolutionary types are eager to dismiss the psychodynamic types and vice versa.

And maybe only John Bowlby, You know, there's other folks, but the attachment theorist John Bowlby was really 1 of the first serious academics to say

these ways of thinking about things are quite compatible.

Can you comment on what a psychodynamics view of the world is versus an evolutionary view of the world, just in case people are

Yeah, absolutely, that's a fine question.

Well, the evolutionary types in general are interested in how it is and why it is that we have adapted to our surroundings in the service of persisting over time and being represented in the gene pool thereafter.

We used to be a fish, and now, yeah, and now we end up talking on a podcast, how we came to be that way.

And so, whereas the existential psychodynamic types, I would say are more interested in development across a single lifespan.

But The evolutionary types dismiss the psychodynamic types as overly speculative and devoid of empirical support for their views.

They'll just say, these guys are talking shit, if you'll pardon the expression.

And of course, you can turn right around and say the same about the evolutionary types.

They are often and rightfully criticized, evolutionary psychologists, for what are called the just-so stories, where it's like, oh, this is probably why fill in the blank is potentially adaptive.

And my thought, again, early on was, I didn't see any intrinsic antithesis between these viewpoints.

I just found them dialectically compatible and very powerful when combined.

I would ask here is about a science being speculative.

You know, we understand so little about the human mind.

You said you picked up Becker's book and it felt like it was onto something.

That's the same thing I felt when I picked up Becker's book, probably also in my early 20s.

You know, I read a lot of philosophy, but it felt like the question of the meaning of life kind of, you know, this seemed to be the most, the closest to the truth somehow.

So I guess the question I wanna ask also is like, how speculative is psychology?

How, like all of your life's work, how do you feel, how confident do you feel about the whole thing, about understanding our mind.

confidently unconfident to have it both ways.

What do we make starting with Freud's, you know, starting just our, or even just philosophy, even the aspects of the sciences, like my field of artificial intelligence, but also physics, It often feels like, man, we don't really understand most of what's going on here.

And certainly that's true with the human mind.

Yeah, well to me that's the proper epistemological stance.

Well, it's the Socratic I know that I don't know, which is the first step on the path to wisdom.

I would argue forcefully that we know a lot more than we used to.

I would argue equally forcefully, not that I have a PhD in the philosophy of science, but I believe that the Thomas Kuhns of the world are right when they point out that change is not necessarily progress.

And so on the 1 hand, I do think we know a lot more than we did back in the day when if you wanted to fly, you put on some wax wings and jumped off a mountain.

On the other hand, I think it's quite arrogant when scientists, I'll just speak about psychological scientists, when they have the audacity to mistake statistical precision for knowledge and insight.

And when they make the mistake, in my estimation, that Einstein bemoaned, and that's this idea that the mere accumulation of data will necessarily result in conceptual breakthroughs.

And so I like the, well, we're all, I hope, appreciative of the people who trained us.

But I remember my first day in graduate school at the University of Kansas, they brought us into a room and on 1 side of the board was a quote by Kurt Lewin or Levine, famous German social psychologist.

And it was nothing, and the quote is, there's nothing more useful than a good theory.

And then on the other side was another quote by a German physicist, his name eludes me, and it was all theories are wrong.

And of course, the point is that it's both.

Our theories are, I believe, powerful ways to direct our attention to aspects of human affairs that might render us better able to understand ourselves and the world around us.

Now, I also, as an experimental psychologist, I adhere to the view that theories are essentially hypothesis generating devices.

And that at its best, science is a dialectical interplay where you have theoretical assertions that yield testable hypotheses and that either results in the corroboration of the theory, the rejection of it, or the modification thereafter.

If we look at the existentialists or even like modern philosopher, psychologist types like Jordan Peterson, I'm not sure if you're familiar with.

If he were here with us today, he would be jumping in in I believe very interesting and important ways.

But yeah, we go back 30 years ago, he was basically saying our work is nonsense.

I'm sure I'll talk to Jordan eventually on this thing.

Going through some rough times right now.

Jordan was working on his maps of meaning, and we were publishing our work.

And I think Jordan at the time was concerned about our vague claims to the effect that all meaning is arbitrary.

He takes a more Jungian, as well as evolutionary view that I don't think is wrong, by the way, which is that there are certain kinds of meanings that are more important, let's say religious types,

and that we didn't pay sufficient attention to that in our early days.

So can you try to elucidate what his world view is?

So what was some of the interesting aspects of the disagreements that then?

I just said, Jordan was a young punk, we were young punks.

He was just kind of flailing in an animated way at some conferences saying that

We were in Canada at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival where we were asked to be on a Canadian broadcast system program, I think we were talking about Macbeth from a psychodynamic perspective.

And I hadn't seen him in a ton of years and we spent 2 days together, had a great time.

You know, we had just written our book, The Worm at the Core, and he's like, you know, you're missing a big opportunity.

Every time you say something, you have to have your phone and you have to film yourself and then you have to put it on YouTube.

Yeah, he was onto something that, just as a small tangent, it's almost sad to look at Jordan Peterson, somebody like yourself, after having done this podcast, I've realized that there is really brilliant people in this world.

And oftentimes, especially like when they're, I mean it with love, are a little bit like punks.

They kind of do their own thing and the world doesn't know they exist as much as they should.

And it's so interesting, because most people are kind of boring.

And then the interesting ones kind of go on their own, and there's not a smartphone

He was onto something that, I mean, it's interesting that he, I don't think he was thinking from a money perspective, but he was probably thinking of connecting with people or sharing his knowledge, but people don't often think that way.

So maybe we can try to get back to, you're both brilliant people, and I'd love to get some interesting disagreements earlier and later about in your psychological work, in your worldviews.

Well, our disagreements today would be along 2 dimensions.

1 is, he is, and again I wish he was here to correct me when I say that he is more committed to the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly Christianity, and in a sense is a contemporary Kierkegaard of sorts, when he's saying there's only 1 way to leap into faith.

And I would take ardent issue with that claim on the grounds that that is 1, but by no means, not the only way to

What is, like, so we're talking about a little bit of a higher level of discovering meaning.

And this is where it would be nice to have him here.

He has, you know, from a distance, criticized our work as misguided.

Having said that though, when we were together, he said something along the lines that there is no theoretical body of work in academic psychology right now for which there is more empirical evidence.

The other thing that we will agree to disagree about, rather vociferously, is ultimately political slash economic.

So I remember being at dinner with him, telling him that the next book that I wanted to write was going to be called Why Left and Right Are Both beside the point.

And my argument was going to be, and it is going to be, that both liberal and political, no, liberal and conservative political philosophy are each intellectually and morally bankrupt because they're both framed in terms of assumptions about human nature that are demonstrably false.

And Jordan didn't mind me knocking liberal political philosophy on those grounds.

That would basically be like Steven Pinker's blank slate.

But he took issue when I pointed out that actually, it's conservative political philosophy, which starts with John Locke's assumption that in a state of nature, there are no societies, just autonomous individuals who are striving for survival.

That's 1 of the most obviously patently wrong assertions in the history of intellectual thought.

And Locke uses that to justify his claims about the individual right to acquire unlimited amounts of property, which is ultimately the justification for neoliberal economics.

What's the, can you describe this philosophy again as view of the world?

So basically, these days, anybody who says I'm a conservative free market type, you're following John Locke and Adam Smith, whether you're aware of it or not.

So here's John Locke, who by the way, all of these guys are great.

So for me to appear to criticize any of these folks, it is with the highest regard.

And also we need to understand in my estimation how important their ideas are.

Locke is working in a time where all rule was top down by divine right.

And he's trying desperately to come up with a philosophical justification to shift power and autonomy to individuals.

And he starts in his second treatise on government, 1690 or so, he says, okay, let's start with a state of nature.

And he's like, in a state of nature, there's no societies, there's just individuals.

And in a perfect universe, there wouldn't be any societies.

There would just be individuals who, by the law of nature, have a right to survive.

And in the service of survival, they have the right to acquire and preserve the fruits of their own labor.

But his point is, and it's actually a good 1, he's following Hobbes here.

He's like, well, the problem with that is that people are assholes.

And if they would let each other alone, then we would still be living in a state of nature, everybody just doing what they did to get by each day.

But it's a whole lot easier, you know, if I see like an apple tree a mile away, well, I can go over and pick an apple.

But if you're 10 meters away with an apple in your hand, it's a lot easier if I pick up a rock and crack your head and take the apple." And His point was that the problem is that people can't be counted on to behave.

Moreover, he argued, if someone takes your property, you have the right to retribution in proportion to the degree of the magnitude of the transgression.

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Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #117