The Awareness of Mortality and Striving for Significance in the Personal and Political Realms: Examining the Illusions We Live By
Scientists tell us that humans are just another species of animal, shaped by natural selection to survive long enough to reproduce and care for their offspring before they die. Yet, people want to view life as something more and accomplish something more: to have lives that are meaningful and significant. Terror management theory posits that these desires also emerge from our biological heritage because they serve a fundamental imperative to endure. The human intellectual capacity to understand our own mortality –that ultimately we will not endure-- creates a unique ever-present potential for anxiety. To manage this potential for anxiety, cultural conceptions of reality imbue life with meaning and with possibilities for the individual to attain significance (self-esteem); this in turn provides people with the sense that they are more than just transient animals fated only to permanent obliteration upon death. Humans therefore function relatively securely as long as they sustain faith in such a worldview and in their value within the context of that worldview. I will briefly summarize prior support for this analysis and then present new research exploring the implications of terror management for understanding the appeal of fame and the nature of political preferences.
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