Becker

life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms, if at the end of each person's life he
12:34were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested
12:48the horizon of a gourmet or even the average person would be taken up with
12:53hundreds of chickens flocks of lambs and sheep a small herd of steers
12:59sties full of pigs and rivers of fish the den alone would be deafening
13:08to paraphrase Elias Canetti each organism raises its head over a field of corpses
13:15smiles into the sun and declares life good
13:20beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment
13:26of simply continuing to exist continuing to experience physical
13:32stimuli to sense one's inner pulsations and musculature
13:37to delight in the pleasure that nerves transmit once the organism is satiated
13:45this becomes its frantic all-consuming task to, hold onto life at any cost
13:53and the costs can be catastrophic in the case of man this absolute dedication to Eros, to
14:00perseverance is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on
14:06this earth and because we are mystified by it we call it the instinct for
14:12self-preservation for man in the words of anthropologist
14:17A.M. Hockhart this organismic craving takes the form of the search for
14:23prosperity the universal ambition of human society. Now prosperity means simply that a high level of organismic functioning will be maintained and so anything that works against this
14:38has to be avoided in other words in man the search for repetitive satisfaction has become
14:46conscious he is an organism who knows that he wants food and who knows what will
14:52happen if he doesn't get it or if he gets it but falls ill and fails
14:58to enjoy its benefits once we have an animal who recognizes
15:03that he needs prosperity we also have one who realizes that
15:08anything that works against continued prosperity is bad
15:15and so we understand how man has come universally to identify disease and
15:21death as the two principal evils of the human organismic condition
15:26disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive and death cuts prosperity off coldly
15:36and this brings us to the unique paradox
15:42of the human condition that man wants to persevere as does any
15:48animal or primitive organism he is driven by the same craving to consume to convert energy and to enjoy continued experience but man is cursed with a burden no
16:01animal has to bear he is conscious that his own end is inevitable
16:07that his stomach will die