Resume: Ernest Becker’s Argument That Evil Resides in Human Consciousness

The Psychological Root of Evil: Death Awareness and Denial

At the heart of Escape from Evil lies the same insight that powered Becker’s Pulitzer-winning The Denial of Death: human beings are the only creatures conscious of their mortality, and this knowledge produces unbearable anxiety. Every person lives with the cognitive contradiction of being simultaneously a biological creature, fragile, decaying, and finite, and a symbolic being capable of imagining infinity, meaning, and moral order.

To manage this contradiction, the human mind creates what Becker calls “immortality projects” or “hero systems,” cultural and personal structures that promise to lift one’s life beyond mere mortality. Religion, nation, ideology, wealth, and even creative achievement all serve this symbolic function. They assure the individual that he or she participates in something enduring.

Evil, Becker argues, arises when these symbolic defenses become absolute. When individuals or groups defend their particular “immortality project” as the only valid one, they necessarily perceive others as threats to their meaning system. Thus, evil begins as the defensive posture of a self-aware creature terrified of death, a psychological reflex of the consciousness that cannot bear its own finitude.

The Transformation of Anxiety into Destruction

Becker defines evil not metaphysically but dynamically:

“Evil is the movement by which one’s own death anxiety is transferred into the destruction of others.”

Because death anxiety cannot be eradicated, people project it outward. Enemies become the carriers of death, chaos, and meaninglessness. To destroy them seems to restore life and purity. This projection mechanism, familiar in psychoanalysis, operates collectively through religious crusades, nationalism, racism, and ideological warfare.

Becker thus locates evil in the mental process of projection. Consciousness, desperate to maintain its heroic self-image, represses fear and guilt by objectifying them in others. What the Hebrew text calls “the imagination of the thoughts of the heart” (יֵצֶר מַחְשְׁבֹת לִבּוֹ) corresponds to this inner theater of symbolic transference: consciousness invents enemies and rationalizes violence to preserve its illusion of immortality.

Civilization as a Collective Denial System

Where Freud saw civilization as a system for taming instincts, Becker sees it as a system for denying death. Every culture offers a framework of meanings that promises transcendence, through law, art, religion, nationhood, or moral virtue. But since no culture can finally deliver literal immortality, its symbols must be constantly defended, often by violence.

Becker writes that civilizations produce evil as a byproduct of their own self-maintenance. Wars, inquisitions, genocides, and ideologies are the “collective armor” of death-denying societies. The Holocaust, for example, was not an eruption of irrationality but the logical extension of a symbolic system that sought purification through destruction.

In this view, evil is not the opposite of civilization, it is civilization’s shadow. Human consciousness, seeking meaning and security, inevitably constructs boundaries between “us” (the bearers of life and truth) and “them” (the bearers of death and falsehood). Every organized culture contains this potential for evil because it originates in the same psychological need to escape finitude.

The Idolization of the Self and the Other as Object

Becker extends this argument into a critique of modern individualism. The self becomes a miniature immortality project, obsessed with success, fame, and recognition. Consumer culture, political ambition, and narcissism all express the same structure: to be somebody, not nobody, to overcome death symbolically.

But because this project depends on comparison and superiority, others are constantly reduced to instruments or obstacles. The self’s expansion often requires the diminution or annihilation of others, economically, socially, or literally. Thus, evil in modernity is psychologized and institutionalized: a normalized aggression flowing from the anxiety of being insignificant.

Religion and the Paradox of Salvation

Becker respects religion as humanity’s most profound attempt to face death honestly, yet he criticizes its degeneration into systems of exclusivity. True religion, in his view, should expose the human ego to its mortality and thereby humble it before the mystery of being. But when religion becomes an “ideological immortality project,” when it claims exclusive truth or divine favor, it becomes a source of evil.

He interprets the biblical insight about the “evil imagination” as describing this very human tendency: the religious consciousness, aware of good and evil, creates idols of its own righteousness. In this sense, evil is not rebellion against God but the self-deification of the human ego. Every time humans absolutize their finite symbols, nation, church, ideology, they commit the original sin of substituting the self’s projection for ultimate reality.

Evil as Self-Deception

Becker’s most chilling observation is that evil operates under the illusion of virtue. Because the mind’s defense mechanisms are unconscious, individuals and societies sincerely believe their actions are good. Persecutors imagine themselves as protectors; conquerors as civilizers; terrorists as martyrs. Evil becomes banal, the ordinary function of the human will to meaning.

Here Becker converges with Hannah Arendt’s insight into the “banality of evil.” Evil is not monstrous in intention but systemic in consciousness, the routine execution of one’s culturally sanctioned duties while denying the underlying motive: the need to feel righteous and immortal. Hence, Becker concludes, “The root of evil is the need of man to justify himself.”

The Possibility of Transcendence

Although bleak, Becker’s analysis is not purely fatalistic. He holds that awareness of death can also become a source of compassion and creativity. When consciousness recognizes its own mechanisms of denial, it may transcend them, not by abolishing fear, but by accepting mortality and the equality it implies.

For Becker, true heroism is not domination but surrender, the courage to affirm life in full awareness of death. The spiritual task of humanity is to replace idolatrous immortality projects with a humble participation in what he calls “the mystery of being itself.” Only such consciousness can dissolve the psychological roots of evil.

Evil as the Price of Self-Awareness

In summary, Becker redefines evil as the inevitable shadow of self-consciousness. To know we will die is to live under a permanent tension between animal vulnerability and symbolic aspiration. This tension generates culture, meaning, and morality, but also violence, repression, and cruelty.

Evil, therefore, is not a metaphysical stain nor an external force; it is the distortion of consciousness that arises when the fear of death turns into the will to power. Every ideology that promises salvation through superiority or exclusion manifests this internal mechanism.

In this light, Genesis 6:5 and Becker’s thesis converge: the yetzer machshevot libo, the “imagination of the human heart,” is continually producing rationalizations for evil because it is continually producing rationalizations for immortality. The divine observation that humanity’s thoughts are “only evil continually” becomes, in Becker’s anthropology, the existential recognition that the very structure of consciousness carries both creativity and corruption within it.

Conclusion

Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil transforms the ancient moral insight of Scripture into a psychological and anthropological framework: evil originates not from demons or destiny but from the human attempt to transcend death through illusion. Every act of destruction is a misguided reach for immortality.

Thus, Becker’s work stands as a modern commentary on Genesis 6:5. Where the text laments that the human heart imagines evil all day long, Becker explains why: consciousness itself, haunted by mortality, cannot cease inventing defenses, symbols, and enemies. Until humanity learns to live consciously within its limits, without turning fear into hatred, evil will remain the shadow cast by the light of human self-awareness.