Immortality

Abstract Human beings have an almost limitless craving for the perpetuation of their group, reaching toward the dream of immortality, an immortality provided most readily by religion and the nation-state. Thus, the basic motive of humanity, argue Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, against Freud, is existential. Today, the nation-state is a universal symbol of group immortality, a fervent ideology held by countless people around the world. During the inhumanity shown in war, said Rank and Becker, we kill those different from us because we have an unceasing, irrepressible urge to merge our lonely, separate selves into a larger group—a political ideology, religion, or nation-state—whose members we want to be as like us as possible. Every nation-state constructs the sacrosanct symbols of national culture to give its citizens the hope that their lives have meaning, that something permanent will outlast the decay and disappearance of their bodies.