Quote Post - Ernest Becker
I'd like to try to post here every day but I know I won't be able to keep up with full essay-like posts every day so I've decided that sometimes I'll just post a quote from a book that I'm reading and share that with you. Sometimes I'll include a few quick thoughts on it.
This is from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. It's from the preface and I think it's worth sharing. It's incredible that this was written fifty years ago and we are no closer to solving this problem than in Becker's time. In fact I think it's gotten a lot worse.
"The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed. For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth. There has been so much brilliant writing, so many genial discoveries, so vast an extension and elaboration of these discoveries, yet the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career. I remember reading how, at the famous St. Louis World Exposition in 1904, the speaker at the prestigious science meeting was having trouble speaking against the noise of the new weapons that were being demonstrated nearby. He said something condescending and tolerant about this needlessly disruptive play, as though the future belonged to science and not to militarism. World War I showed everyone the priority of things on this planet, which party was playing idle games and which wasn’t. This year the order of priority was again graphically shown by a world arms budget of 204 billion dollars, at a time when human living conditions on the planet were worse than ever."
According to Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025 | SIPRI the world arms budget reached $2.887 trillion in 2025. This is 2.5% of the world's GDP. We have a ton of knowledge about what could help us all live peacefully and with a higher quality of life yet our penchant for violence and destruction towards each other continues unabated.