Escape from Evil
Ernest BeckerSözler ve Alıntılar
Hitler’s rise to power was based on his understanding of what people wanted and needed most of all, and so he promised them, above everything else, heroic victory over evil; and he gave them the living possibility of ridding themselves temporarily of their real guilt.
The thing that makes man the most devastating animal that ever stuck his neck up into the sky is that he wants a stature and a destiny that is impossible for an animal; he wants an earth that is not an earth but a heaven, and the price for this kind of fantastic ambition is to make the earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is.
all warfare and revolutionary struggle are simply a development of feuding and vendettas, where the basic thing at stake is a dramatization of the immortality account.
In this book I attempt to show that man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
The logic of killing others in order to affirm our own life unlocks much that puzzles us in history, much that with our modern minds we seem unable to comprehend, such as the Roman arena games...The Roman arena games were, in this sense, a continued staging of victory even in the absence of a war; each civilian experienced the same powers that he otherwise had to earn in war
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And why was the crucifixion such a favorite form of execution? Because, I think, it was actually a controlled display of dying; the small seat on the cross held the body up so that dying would be prolonged. The longer people looked at the death of someone else, the more pleasure they could have in sensing the security and the good fortune of their own survival.