"For Žižek, anxiety emerges from the encounter with the Real, from the contradictions embedded in ideology, and from the impossibility of fully reconciling knowledge and social reality. Subjects may act “cynically” or engage in fetishistic disavowal to maintain symbolic order. Anxiety is structural, political, and social as much as it is existential. Ernest Becker’s lens is existential-psychological; Žižek’s lens is structural-ideological. Anxiety is ontologically central for Becker, whereas for Žižek it is a function of the symbolic order and ideological mediation. For Becker, culture is the symbolic system humans inevitably construct to manage mortality anxiety. It is a protective structure, creating meaning and immortality projects. Culture exists because humans must find ways to deny or manage mortality and other unbearable features of natural history. It is descriptive and explanatory: humans need culture.

For Žižek, Ideology is also inevitable, but it is performative rather than protective. Ideology structures social reality and mediates the subject’s relation to the inherently traumatic Real. Its inevitability is derived from the structural necessity of symbolic mediation. Ideology is constitutive of reality itself—it organizes what counts as reality and what counts as knowledge, including social hierarchies, norms, and authority.

For Becker culture has a protective-therapeutic function: it is an imaginative buffer that permits living at all. Anxiety is ontologically prior; culture responds to it. For Žižek ideology is not protective—it is constitutive. Ideology is not primarily a defense against a pre-existing anxiety; it is the very medium through which anxiety is structured and experienced as such".