X-Message-Number: 22202
From: "Steve Harris" <>
References: <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #22194 Becker and Death Denial
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 15:59:37 -0700

----- Original Message -----
From: "CryoNet" <>
To: <>
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 2:00 AM
Subject: CryoNet #22194 - #22198


 > The web site indicated that the late Becker has somewhat
of a fan
> club.  But I really doubt we are going to see much support
for cryonics
> from this direction, or even much insight into
understanding why cryonics
> does so poorly in the marketplace of ideas.
>
> Keith Henson

COMMENT:

I think you're wrong, Keith. Certainly, you should read the
book before offering your opinion. Becker's _Denial of
Death_ doesn't mention cryonics. But I think it does indeed
have a lot of wisdom for why the cryonics idea doesn't do
well in the marketplace of ideas.

I can't give you a full synopsis of this complex and
interesting book, but Becker's message is essentially that
Freud should have stopped for emphasis when he noted that
every human eventually comes up against the problem of the
reality of human existence. Which reality is that we
thinking creatures are basically organic tubes infesting a
ball of mud in the middle of nowhere, doomed to stuff food
into one end of ourselves while crap comes out the other,
until all too soon we each rot, fall apart, and are
obliterated. Nor is there anything any of us can do about
this really, really bad situation, also known as the human
condition.

Faced with this situation, nearly all humans reject it, as
being too horrible to contemplate. That is a primal
psychological problem and primal solution-- the latter much
more primal than even Freud (who had a lot of his own denial
systems working) was prepared to admit. Freud went on to
postulate that people have an instinct for death as a good
thing. Becker says baloney. He thinks Freud's pupil Otto
Rank came nearer the truth (that our instinct is purely for
life and death-rejection for ourselves), and Becker spends
much time in the book deciphering Rank for the average
reader.

Becker would probably say that cryonics is rejected
automatically by the average person, because cryonics is
materialistic and naturalistic. It thus simply forces
anybody who really thinks seriously about it, to renew his
or her acknowledgement of the reality of the actual human
condition, for long enough to consider cryonics as a
possible long-shot escape from it. And that is a damn hard
thing to do. It takes serious mental fortitude to get
through a couple of weeks of cryonics signup, in which you
need to consider your precious body as no more than a piece
of fancy and animated pile of atoms which is probably
without a separate immaterial "soul," and then go on from
there, though every variation of what to do with the thing
after your heart and your consciousness stop, and your mind
is reduced to a nonfunctional damaged and degraded hunk of
software, stuck somewhere on a 20 cm rapidly deteriorating
ball of meat.

Becker would probably have said that cryonics itself is just
one more way of mentally denying the human condition,
because in the end, cryonicists really cannot stand to face
up to the full reality of what our situation really is,
either. And I think Becker, right or wrong about the
workability of cryonics, would still have been onto
something there as regards why cryonicists practice
cryonics.

Becker said that _The Denial of Death_ was his first mature
work, and it does mark his Nietzschean slaying of the
dragons of all of his own formal educational props and
student illusions. Alas, two years after completing the
book, at about the age of 50, Becker he was dead of cancer
that he hadn't known he had, at the time of writing. So it
goes. That's the human condition again, but we can at least
admire the man for facing up to an unpleasant truth for a
little while, before he himself disappeared from our little
dust mote, and was gone. And before he left us with this
gem.

So why do cryonicists freeze themselves?  Because we have
given in and admitted to ourselves our organic plight, and
we have decided to take a long-shot gamble as regards a
science-based way out of the problem. We have done this by
placing our faith on the hoped-for medical and technical
abilities of people who haven't been born yet. Do we admit
to ourselves how long a long-shot it all really is?
Generally, no. Thus, Becker is correct. He is a psychiatrist
who has transcended his teachers, and no fool as regards
human psychology. It is my opinion that a reading of the
very readable Becker will not be wasted on anybody who is
seriously looking for the truth of this matter. If any on
this list there be.

Steve Harris

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