Long-term worldview security makes everyday death-distraction strategies workable
Evidence
Think of psychological security as a way of keeping the inside of a leaky old house dry in a heavy rainstorm. You need to place some buckets around the house to catch whatever raindrops might be coming through the roof. The rain represents death thoughts; the roof represents your distal defenses; and the buckets represent your proximal defenses. If the roof, which serves to keep water from cascading into the house (just as distal defenses function to prevent death thoughts from becoming conscious), has just a few leaks, the buckets (proximal defenses) will suffice to collect the water and keep the house dry. But if the roof leaks profusely, or is blown completely off in the storm, the buckets won’t be able to keep up with the influx of water. Your psychological house would then be swamped by a raging river of death fears in exceedingly short order. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 630
Categorization
- XREF: The bucket/roof analogy resembles Katherine Hayles’s ‘interpassivity’ and other systems where distal substrate conditions make local coping tools viable — similarly, distal beliefs scaffold proximal coping.
Related
- Distal defenses minimize the occasions that proximal defenses must handle (similarity 0.81)
- Without proximal defenses people would be perpetually panicking about death (similarity 0.80)
- People unaware of their death fears are nonetheless governed by layered psychological defenses (similarity 0.79)
- Worldview and self-esteem defense is bidirectional with death-thought accessibility. (similarity 0.78)