John Rember on The Seneca Effect

How many 20th centuries do we need to convince us that humanity has a death wish? Apparently more than one. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents gives us insight into how fascist dictatorship, once it starts, transforms into a death cult in a predictable sequence. The sociologist Ernest Becker adds a codicil in his posthumous meditation Escape from Evil, in which he notes that humans happily clutch at the lie that we can compel others to experience our deaths and our sufferings for us. That unconscious mechanism, Becker notes, gives rise to human evil in all its cruel and self-defeating manifestations. Unless interrupted by conscious courage, humanity's unconscious periodically escapes the prison of normalcy. When it does, lots of us die, physically or otherwise.