Mortality Salience Hypothesis

In 1974 Ernest Becker won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction) for his book, The Denial of Death. Last year I received a copy of this book as a gift and it’s fair to say that it knocked me off my pins. So to speak. Thus it was with great interest that I rented the documentary Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality.

Following the work of the late cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Denial of Death, this documentary explores the ongoing research of a group of social psychologists that may forever change the way we look at ourselves and the world. Over the last twenty-five years, this team of researchers has conducted over 300 laboratory studies, which substantiate Becker's claim that death anxiety is a primary motivator of human behavior, specifically aggression and violence.

Although it’s a little heavy on imagery and light on discourse and revelation, I highly recommend it to anyone who may not have the patience to read the book. For those who have read the book, it will doubtless make even less tolerable your senseless, doomed and incontrovertibly accidental existence. Nonetheless, I was impressed by the associations that the filmmakers were able to draw between “Terror Management Theory Experiments” and 9/11.

That the collective American response to 9/11 was dread, coupled with a renewed attachment to symbolism and violence, underscored the work of the documentary’s subjects; that psychological motivations for violence are directly linked to our intrinsic terror of death. Death itself is evil, and we use evil to defeat evil. Of course, in the end we’re all completely fucking doomed anyway.

Well, that was depressing. But don’t despair — here’s your happy ending:

On April 27, an [undercover police] officer entered the shop and paid $60 for and received a full "body shampoo," which included genital and anal touching. The officer returned two other times for massages that also included masturbation — one session with two prostitutes — and again paid for the service.

A second officer also received a massage and was masturbated, according to charging papers.

Body shampoo?

ADDITIONAL READING (UNRELATED): Hacks + Man named Kelly.

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