“As far as we can tell - as I put it elsewhere - all organisms like to ‘feel good’ about themselves.”

— Ernest Becker , book The Denial of Death

They push themselves to maximize this feeling. As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating in its own joyful self-expansion. When we get to the level of man, of course, this process acquires its greatest interest. It is most intense in man and in him relatively undetermined—he can pulsate and expand both organismically and symbolically. This expansion takes the form of man’s tremendous urge for a feeling of total “rightness” about himself and his world. This perhaps clumsy way to talk seems to me to sum up what man is really trying to do and why conscience is his fate. Man is the only organism in nature fated to puzzle out what it actually means to feel “right.”
Source: The Denial of Death (1973), The Spell Cast by Persons—The Nexus of Unfreedom

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Ernest Becker 26

American anthropologist 1924–1974

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