Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil: The Psychology of Death and Destruction

In Escape from Evil (1975), Ernest Becker extends the existential and psychoanalytic argument that made The Denial of Death a landmark of twentieth-century thought. Whereas his earlier book explored how human culture is constructed to shield consciousness from the terror of mortality, this final work turns toward the darker side of that same defense. Becker proposes that our fear of death, the inescapable awareness of our creatureliness, does not merely generate art, religion, and civilization; it also engenders violence, hatred, and organized systems of evil. As he puts it, “Evil is the movement by which one’s own death anxiety is transferred into the destruction of others.” This deceptively simple statement encapsulates a radical synthesis of psychology, anthropology, and moral philosophy: a theory of evil rooted not in metaphysical sin or divine rebellion, but in the biological and symbolic conditions of human life itself.

1. The Problem of Death and the Birth of Culture

Becker begins from the premise that to be human is to be both animal and symbolic. We are, as he writes, “gods with anuses,” creatures capable of envisioning eternity while bound to a body that decays. This paradox produces what he calls “death anxiety”: an existential dread that drives the creation of cultural meaning systems. Culture, for Becker, functions as a symbolic “hero system” through which individuals imagine themselves participating in something that transcends death, be it the nation, the church, art, science, or family lineage. Each symbolic system provides a promise of continuity, a sense that one’s life contributes to an enduring order.

The problem, however, is that these cultural hero systems are finite and conflicting. When one group’s sacred symbols contradict another’s, the confrontation strikes at the very foundation of meaning. To question a society’s heroic narrative is to threaten its denial of death. Hence, Becker argues, societies are compelled to defend their immortality projects with ferocity. The anxiety that would otherwise turn inward, confronting one’s own mortality, is displaced outward, onto others who symbolize chaos, impurity, or evil. Evil thus becomes the mirror image of heroism: the destruction of what is different in order to reaffirm one’s own symbolic worth.

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. When this translation falters, the impulse to project and destroy takes its place.”

2. From the Denial of Death to the Creation of Evil

In The Denial of Death, Becker argued that culture was a collective defense mechanism—an elaborate symbolic construction that allowed humans to imagine themselves as more than mortal. Escape from Evil exposes the inevitable consequences of that same defense. Once we recognize that all symbolic systems are ultimately arbitrary, the fragility of meaning becomes intolerable. To restore a sense of certainty, people externalize their inner fear onto scapegoats. The Jew, the heretic, the “barbarian,” the unbeliever—each becomes a vessel for projected anxiety.

Becker integrates insights from Freud’s notion of projection and Rank’s theory of heroism, arguing that “projective identification” is the root mechanism of human evil. What the individual cannot bear in himself—weakness, decay, dependency, mortality—is imagined in others, who can then be controlled or annihilated. Evil is thus the by-product of man’s futile attempt to purify himself of death.

3. Evil as the Transfer of Death Anxiety

Becker’s central formulation, “Evil is the movement by which one’s own death anxiety is transferred into the destruction of others,” expresses both a mechanism and a moral diagnosis. The mechanism is psychological: death anxiety, repressed and denied, seeks an outlet. The moral diagnosis is existential: by destroying others, humans attempt to symbolically destroy death itself. The crusader, the inquisitor, the ideologue, and the terrorist all share this logic. They fight, kill, or sacrifice in the name of a cause that promises immortality, purging what threatens the sacred order.

What distinguishes Becker’s account from purely sociological explanations is his insistence that the root of evil lies in the structure of consciousness itself. The capacity for symbolic self-awareness is inseparable from the capacity for cruelty. To know oneself as mortal is to long for transcendence, and to fail in that longing is to lash out at whatever reveals one’s finitude. Thus, the very gift of self-consciousness, the spark that makes civilization possible, also contains the seed of destruction.

4. The Socialization of Evil: Institutions and Ideology

Becker extends his analysis from the individual psyche to the collective. Institutions, he argues, are codifications of death denial. The church, the state, the army, and the corporation all offer participants a symbolic extension of life: to die “for God,” “for country,” or “for progress” is to merge one’s small self with an immortal abstraction. But when these institutions define their immortality against rival systems, the logic of destruction escalates into organized evil, war, persecution, genocide. Becker writes, “Society sanctifies the heroic deed and calls it good, even though it kills. But the killing is the very essence of its evil.”

The great irony, Becker notes, is that even the most enlightened societies remain caught in this paradox. Technological and ideological progress may replace old myths with secular ones, science, capitalism, nationalism, yet the same death-denying structure persists. Each new ideology demands allegiance and demonizes its enemies. Thus, modern evil is not the residue of primitive superstition but the inevitable mutation of humanity’s symbolic defenses.

5. Becker’s Definition of Evil

For Becker, “evil” is not a metaphysical principle but an anthropological process. It is the systematic redirection of existential fear into acts that harm others under the illusion of self-preservation. Evil originates in the denial of our shared vulnerability; it thrives wherever human beings refuse to accept their finitude. In his words, “Evil is the urge to kill that which reminds us we are not gods.”

This definition collapses traditional dualisms. Evil is not opposed to good in a moral cosmos ordained by divinity; rather, both good and evil emerge from the same human striving to overcome death. Love, art, and cooperation are creative sublimations of this striving; hatred and cruelty are its destructive distortions. The difference lies in whether the denial of death is acknowledged or repressed. True moral awareness, for Becker, begins with the courage to face mortality without scapegoating others.

“The only cure for the evil of man’s projective urge is the full acceptance of one’s own death and the brotherhood of all who share it.”

6. Religion, Redemption, and the Limits of Denial

Although Becker often writes in secular terms, his vision borders on the theological. Religion, he argues, originally offered a symbolic means to accept death through ritual, myth, and transcendence. But when religion becomes literalized, when symbols are mistaken for absolute truth, it degenerates into idolatry and holy war. The same process occurs in secular ideologies that promise redemption through revolution or progress. Whether divine or political, every system that denies mortality risks turning its salvation narrative into a rationale for destruction.

In his closing chapters, Becker speaks of the possibility of a new kind of heroism: one grounded not in immortality but in humility. He envisions an ethic of “cosmic heroism” that recognizes the shared destiny of all living things. Such an ethic would require what he calls “the creative acceptance of death,” a willingness to live fully within finitude rather than to flee from it. Yet Becker himself doubted that humanity could collectively attain such maturity. His diagnosis remains tragic: evil is the price of awareness, the shadow cast by self-consciousness upon the world.

7. Conclusion: The Tragic Anthropology of Evil

Escape from Evil concludes Becker’s lifelong effort to fuse psychology, anthropology, and existential philosophy into a single vision of the human condition. His statement that “evil is the movement by which one’s own death anxiety is transferred into the destruction of others” crystallizes a profound insight: that the violence of history is inseparable from the terror of mortality. By locating evil within the very structure of human self-consciousness, Becker reframes moral philosophy around the management of death anxiety rather than metaphysical sin.

In Becker’s view, the path beyond evil lies not in conquering death, nor in denying it, but in embracing it as the common horizon of all life. Only through such acceptance can the human project escape its cyclical pattern of projection and destruction. His anthropology is thus both despairing and redemptive: despairing, because evil is intrinsic to the human condition; redemptive, because self-knowledge offers the faint possibility of transcendence through understanding.

— Adapted analysis of Ernest Becker’s Escape from Evil