Culture cannot fully repress death terror, driving people to localize threats in fetishized evil.

Evidence

The fact is that self-transcendence via culture does not give man a simple and straightforward solution to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression … The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to ‘fetishize evil’, to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled … men make fantasies about evil, see it in the wrong places, and destroy themselves and others by uselessly thrashing about. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory, 54

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Humans deflect death anxiety onto cultural symbols, and defending those symbols produces real-world evil — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 25; Cultural worldviews evolved to buffer humans against death terror. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 61; Character and culture are built to shield us from death-terror — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 18 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Humans construct cultural identities to deny mortality. #corroborates (0.92) — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory, 5
• Death concerns strengthen appeals to kill culturally designated evil groups. #expands (0.90) — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory, 68
• Cultural worldviews evolved to buffer humans against death terror. #qualifies (0.85) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 61
• Character and culture are built to shield us from death-terror #qualifies (0.85) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 18
• Death awareness would have been lethal without simultaneous cultural adaptations to deny it #qualifies (0.80) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 279
• Calling terrorism transcendent evil blocks the worldly analysis needed to counter it #exemplifies (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1430
• Culture talk explains terrorism as flowing from cultural essence rather than economics or politics. #exemplifies (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 77
• Evil as a category has become tedious and politically useless in contemporary culture. #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 633
• Vague, unidentifiable threats like terrorism prove harder for victims to comprehend or counter #expands (0.73) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4172
• Civilization cannot be separated from the terror that sustains it #expands (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 188
• Groups are judged more threatening than the individuals composing them #expands (0.72) — Blake M. Riek, Eric W. Mania, and Samuel L. Gaertner, Intergroup Threat and Outgroup Attitudes, 172