X-Message-Number: 11990 Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 16:09:25 -0700 From: Richard Gillmann <> Subject: Ernest Becker "The Denial of Death" and Alan Harrington Thanks to Thomas Donaldson for mentioning Alan Harrington. I wasn't aware of him before. I read Alan Harrington's "The Immortalist" - the 1969 original edition that I got from the library, not the 1977 revised edition that apparently exists. This Alan Harrington was an interesting fellow. He appears as the minor character Hingham in the middle of Jack Kerouac's famous novel "On The Road". He was one of original subjects of Timothy Leary's LSD experiments at Harvard in the 1960s. He wrote novels and worked as a journalist and ad man. There is an interesting tribute to him that appeared in the Tucson Weekly after his death. The tribute is online at: http://www.desert.net/tw/07-03-97/feat.htm He is buried near Tucson, AZ and was not suspended. I'm glad to have learned about him. I'll bet he would have been a great guy to have a drink with. What stories he must have had! I found The Immortalist to be a combination of immortalist manifesto, journalism and psychological theory. The psychology part is what overlaps some of Ernest Becker's book "The Denial of Death". Harrington's views are mostly personal, though he does cite quite a few sources (people have been writing on this topic since the ancients). I liked his "double entry bookkeeping" theory of personal honor and his ideas in general are interesting and presented in a witty fashion. But he doesn't attempt what Becker does, namely to recast all of mainstream psychology in terms of denial of death. The main parts of Becker's book, regarding Kierkegaard, Freud and Rank, are what interests me about his book, and these have no parallel in Harrington's book. (There is a little about Freud, but not much.) The really puzzling thing about cryonics is why more people are not interested in it. We need a lot more people interested in cryonics to support research, provide emergency response teams everywhere and so on. We need to understand how people are in denial about death, so that we can better understand how to persuade them to support cyronics. That's why I think Becker's book is important. Becker does not promote or even mention cyronics as Harrington does, but his insights into death denial are much deeper. Harrington's views are kind of flip, in effect dismissing those in denial as fools. Fools they may be, but dismissing them won't help - we need to persuade them. Becker makes the point that we are all terribly vulnerable creatures. Death could strike at any time from a sudden heart attack, an auto accident, etc. Anxiety about death is something that each of us must learn to deal with from childhood when we first realize that we too are to die. But here's the tricky part: our minds don't have to solve the problem of death, they only have to solve the problem of anxiety about death. It reminds me of the joke about two hikers who are chased by a bear in the woods. One of the hikers says to the other "Stop - why are we running? We can't outrun a bear." The other replies "I don't have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you!" Robert Ettinger, in Chapter 10 of "Man Into Superman" spends a few pages painting Harrington as a dilettante, summarizing him as "someone who enjoys mental games, talking about the future with no intention of participating. He shares, in the end, the common paralysis of will." This seems to have been prescient. IMHO Ettinger's books about cryonics are still the best, even after so many years. I'm planning to read Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death" next, a source important to both Harrington and Becker. While I'm writing, let me say how much I enjoyed reading Robin Hanson's message about why cryonics isn't popular. Medicine as a luxury good - yikes! Interesting stuff. I like the idea of viewing cryonics from the standpoint of economics. We may learn something new. And also let me give another link: http://www.msnbc.com/modules/quizzes/lifex.asp This is a form online (better than the Deathclock) which when filled out will tell you how long you can expect to live. ============================================================== Richard Gillmann http://www.nwlink.com/~rxg Issaquah, WA (USA) ============================================================== Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11990