"Modern psychology has shown that moderate levels of optimism, despite some distortion of reality, can be beneficial for mental health— which for Becker centers around significance-granting concepts.

Notice that in this quote he’s not speaking of a “maximally honest” perspective (which may lead to crippling anxiety/depression), but “honest enough” to avoid a self-deception large enough to be called an outright “lie”. Life has mysterious and awe-inspiring aspects—areas that we do not empirically understand. In these areas we can somewhat reasonably interpret/speculate significance-granting concepts without too obviously lying about reality. Pushed to its outmost extreme, this was Becker’s religious/spiritual “solution”, which would reduce the overall delusion of the individual by trading the big delusions arising out of narrowed/fetishized reality for an ostensibly smaller illusion involving God/divine reality. This is what he meant when he said that: “The ideal of religious sainthood, like that of psychoanalysis, is thus the opening up of perception: this is where religion and science meet.” Becker also tried significance-granting concepts within the “maximally honest” position, but he couldn’t come up with much. This is what he called: “The quality of perception of the absence of God [without] secure answer or hope, but only a yearning that has in it elements of both love and despair…an authentic religious consciousness for our time [achieved through] Communities of the abandoned… [the possibility of] a heroic human contribution to be made to cosmic life in a dialogue with a community of one's fellows”. Becker concludes by saying: “These are gigantic problems, to be sure, and I am not claiming they are answerable in today's world. But they seem to me to be the authentic problems of a fully critical and introspective modern consciousness.”

JS