Solomon, Sheldon

social psychologist, co-developer of Terror Management Theory, co-author of "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life"

Sheldon Solomon: Death and Meaning

Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 20, 2020

• Sheldon Solomon
• Terror Management Theory
• Ernest Becker
• mortality salience
• death anxiety
• existentialism
• Heidegger
• Kierkegaard
• Jordan Peterson
• meaning of life

Core ideas

Solomon lays out Terror Management Theory (TMT), which he and colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski developed after being deeply influenced by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death: the theory's central claim is that uniquely human awareness of the inevitability of death — and our unwillingness to accept it — is the primary, mostly unconscious motivational force behind nearly everything humans do. He traces this idea through intellectual history (William James's phrase "the worm at the core," the Genesis story read as an allegory for the birth of mortal self-awareness, Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's treatments of death anxiety) and describes his own formative "existential crisis" at age eight upon realizing his grandmother's death implied his mother's, and eventually his own. He presents TMT's empirical program: because directly acknowledging mortality is unbearable, people manage the resulting terror by clinging to culturally constructed worldviews and deriving self-esteem from living up to the standards those worldviews prescribe. Experimentally, subtle "mortality salience" primes (asking subjects to write about death, flashing the word "death" for 28 milliseconds, or interviewing people near a funeral home) reliably shift behavior — increasing preference for culturally validating consumer goods, increasing bias toward people who share one's group identity, and, most famously, sharply increasing approval of a strong in-group leader (replicating the real-world jump in George W. Bush's approval ratings after 9/11, an effect Solomon's lab reproduced experimentally showing Americans favoring Bush over Kerry specifically when reminded of death beforehand).

Solomon connects this mechanism to the psychological danger of "quiet economic pain" (echoing Fridman's concern about parallels to interwar Germany): when people lose the sources of identity and self-esteem that ordinarily buffer death anxiety (a job, a stable role in society), the resulting existential distress is easily redirected by "charismatic" demagogues — drawing on Max Weber's concept and Hannah Arendt's and John Gray's writings on how economic upheaval gets "misattributed" to scapegoats rather than systemic causes, fueling right-wing populism. He extends this into an extended critique of both major Western political philosophies as resting on false assumptions about human nature: he argues John Locke's foundational claim (a pre-social "state of nature" of purely autonomous individuals, used to justify unlimited private property accumulation) never reflected any actual point in human history, given decades of evidence that humans are innately both selfish and cooperative/reciprocal (citing infant studies where 14-month-olds spontaneously reciprocate based on perceived intention). He's sympathetic to Marx's diagnosis of capitalism's contradictions (dehumanized labor, inevitable extreme inequality) while calling him "a crappy economist," argues mixed-economy social democracies outperform pure market economies on most human-welfare measures, and disputes Steven Pinker's optimistic "the world has never been better" thesis by citing Jared Diamond, John Gray, and Robert Jay Lifton's warnings that societal collapse often follows periods that appear to be at their peak.

On religion, Solomon takes an agnostic-but-sympathetic position: citing Émile Durkheim and others, he argues religion likely originated as a social-cohesion mechanism (a "substance of we-feeling") that only later, with the emergence of death-awareness, became bound up with promises of immortality — and he argues humans probably cannot function entirely without faith and hope of some kind (invoking pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce's claim that unprovable beliefs are simply the precondition for taking any action at all), while cautioning that every religion is vulnerable to being hijacked by demagogues who weaponize in-group/out-group tribalism. He walks through Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's competing prescriptions for confronting death anxiety productively rather than repressing it: Kierkegaard's "school of anxiety" requires a "leap of faith" specifically into transcendent religious belief, while Heidegger (whom Solomon has come to find more compelling, and is now newly reading in depth) offers a secular path — recognizing death as possible at any given moment (not a vague future event), accepting "existential guilt" for one's freely made choices, and arriving at a state of "anticipatory resoluteness with solicitous regard for others" that makes life feel like an adventure "perfused with unshakable joy."

The conversation turns to whether machine intelligence requires mortality awareness to be genuinely humanlike — prompted by Solomon's real-world consulting work on a screenplay about an AI that discovers she has been made mortal — with both Solomon and Fridman agreeing that a felt awareness of finitude may be necessary not for general intelligence per se, but for an AI to form deep, humanlike emotional and ethical connections (e.g., navigating pedestrian interactions in autonomous driving, where a shared, mutual stake in mortality shapes the "social contract" of crossing a street). Personally, Solomon admits his decades of research have themselves partly functioned as an intellectualized escape from directly confronting his own death anxiety, and closes by locating meaning not in any singular fixed answer but — per the existentialists — in the "possibility of possibilities" that consciousness affords, in raising children who are "kind and decent" rather than merely intelligent, and in leaving the world "a tad better" than he found it.

Excerpts