Cultural worldviews structure conscious experience to mask death’s inevitability

Evidence

The scheme of things is so deeply ingrained that virtually everything we think, feel, and do is shaped by it. It not only provides each of us with our knowledge and explanations of the world, it also supplies the fundamental structure of our conscious experience. Right now, your current author and professor of psychology is writing this important book on Friday, October 10, 2014, at 1:55 P.M. sitting in his office in the United States of America. What could be more meaningful than that? But if he peers in from outside his cultural worldview and the meanings it provides, he sees just a warm-blooded animal pecking at a piece of plastic in the midst of an undifferentiated flow of experiences that will, sooner or later, inevitably be interrupted by a heart attack, cancer, car accident, or the ravages of old age. What time is it now for you, the reader? What does it mean that it’s some day of the week, some month, some year? Isn’t that all an illusory structuring of your conscious experiences provided for you by your culture to help you impose order and permanence on something chaotic and fleeting? If this is a Thursday, how comforting an illusion it is that there will be another Thursday, and another one after that. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 184

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The passage dissolves the taken-for-granted structure of time and daily life as nothing but an anxiety-management illusion — a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframing of ordinary experience.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘illusory structuring of conscious experience’ framing parallels how trees-as-infrastructure describes the cultural scaffolding that makes worlds feel permanent and meaningful.
• XREF: connects to: Realist and idealist philosophies conceive death differently as non-human limit or humanized ending; Attitudes toward death rest on a more fundamental project of living; Being-towards-death frames mortality as the source of authentic existence — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 933 (+1 more)

Related

• Realist and idealist philosophies conceive death differently as non-human limit or humanized ending (similarity 0.92)
• Attitudes toward death rest on a more fundamental project of living (similarity 0.83)
• Seeking ever-larger worldviews is a defense against death anxiety, not a search for truth (similarity 0.79)
• People are generally oblivious to death yet it shapes their experience (similarity 0.79)
• Death-awareness drives humans to cling to cultural worldviews and self-esteem (similarity 0.79)
• Accepting mortality can make life more meaningful and compassionate (similarity 0.78)
• Cultural worldviews evolved to buffer humans against death terror. (similarity 0.78)