How fear of death creates extremists
I talked to social psychologist Sheldon Solomon about something called Terror Management Theory.
I’ve been writing about political extremism and the rise of authoritarian movements for roughly a decade now, and I’ve been writing about psychology and sociology for longer than that. I’ve always been interested in the psychological origins of extremism, and I think it’s important for us to understand these things so we can better combat these problems.
An area of psychology I’ve been thinking about lately is called Terror Management Theory (TMT). This is a framework developed in the mid-1980s that claims that human beings are uniquely aware of their own mortality, and this knowledge can cause existential terror that can lead them to cling to cultural beliefs and a sense of personal value. At its worst, it can lead to prejudice and extremism.
I decided to reach out to one of the social psychologists who helped develop TMT to get a better sense of how it works. Dr. Sheldon Solomon is a professor of psychology at Skidmore College who introduced TMT alongside fellow social psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. He tells me that TMT can help explain some of the far-right extremism we see in America today. Solomon has seen how this can work through his experiments.
"Right now we’re in a world where we’re marinating in death reminders: impending climate doom, economic instability, ethnic conflicts," Solomon says. "When we remind people that they’re going to die—by asking them to think about death, interviewing them in front of a funeral parlor, or even exposing them subliminally to the word ‘death’ for 30 milliseconds—we find it makes people more harmful and hateful toward others who are different."
Solomon says when someone who is more conservative than liberal is reminded of their impending death, the potential for them to become "mindless adherents to ideological demagogues" increases. There’s obviously nuance and complicating factors here, but he says he’s observed that this can be the case.
"People that are phobic become more phobic. People with social anxiety have greater social anxiety, and so on," Solomon says.
We see this in many members of the right-wing movement in the United States. Many figures from the far-right in America seem preoccupied with apocalyptic visions of the future, paranoia surrounding who might become a threat to their well-being and a general sense that they’re fighting some kind of existential battle for their segment of humanity.
One of the core ideas of TMT is that being reminded of death can cause people to become more intellectually rigid or push them down an ideological path they may have already been walking down. Solomon says that this can happen with people on the left side of the political spectrum, too.
"When existential anxieties are aroused by reminders of mortality, it amplifies pre-existing cultural worldviews," Solomon says. "People who define themselves as progressive, who believe the world is getting hotter and that we should power down our energy use and become more cooperative and egalitarian, become more devoted to those directions when reminded of death."
Thor Benson
I asked Solomon if TMT can help explain "doomerism," or the tendency to think that humanity is doomed to a terrible future, and he says that’s not entirely clear. He says some level of doomerism might be a rational response to what someone is seeing with their eyes, while more extreme versions of it might be related to thoughts of mortality.
Technology has only increased our awareness of our own mortality. If you’re using social media a lot and see political content on your feed, you can become overwhelmed by the amount of bad news and suffering you’re exposed to pretty easily.
"Social media has exposed us to all of the traumatic things going on in the world that we’d have been mostly oblivious to for most of human history," Solomon says. "In one sense, it’s a prodigious and constant death reminder."
To be clear, thinking about death isn’t always a bad thing. Studies have shown that people from cultures that think about death more often and more intentionally can be happier, but it depends on how one is contemplating death. The positive version of this is often part of a spiritual practice.
"The defensive reactions to death shown in our studies, which literally bring out the worst in us, are very different from the idea, going back to antiquity in religion and philosophy, of consciously contemplating our finitude," Solomon says. "Genuine death acceptance is the realization that you can be obliterated at any time… This can give us a sense of character and existential maturity that lets us engage with life’s intrinsic challenges in ways that aren’t debilitating—personally or culturally."
It's important to be aware of how our fear of death or the fear of death in others can manifest itself. If it's intentional and thoughtful, thinking about death can be beneficial. If it's reactive and thoughtless, then being reminded of death can cause people to become more extreme and engage in bad behavior.
