Sheldon Solomon — Social psychologist at Skidmore College and co-developer of Terror Management Theory. He co-authored 'The Worm at the Core' and built decades of experiments on how mortality awareness shapes human behavior, extending the ideas of Ernest Becker.
The gist
Sheldon Solomon explains Terror Management Theory: humans alone know they will die, and most of culture, self-esteem, religion, and politics exists to manage that terror. He traces the idea from Ernest Becker, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and recounts experiments showing that subtle death reminders shift how people vote, consume, and treat outsiders. The conversation ranges across Locke and Marx on economics and inequality, the rise of charismatic demagogues amid economic pain, consciousness, and whether an artificial intelligence would need mortality to become truly human. Solomon and Lex close on love, faith as a leap, the loneliness of consciousness, and the value of confronting death to live fully.
Big reveals
- Solomon traces his life's work to an existential crisis at age eight, triggered by his grandmother's death and staring at a stamp collection of dead presidents.
- After 9/11 functioned as a giant death reminder, George W. Bush went from the lowest to highest presidential approval rating, illustrating Terror Management Theory.
- In experiments, Americans preferred John Kerry over Bush in control conditions, but when first reminded of death they liked Bush far more.
- Solomon admits his decades of death research may itself be a way of avoiding directly confronting his own death anxiety by turning it into an intellectual exercise.
- A publisher offered to buy 'The Worm at the Core' only if Solomon could write it without mentioning death because 'people don't like death.'
- Solomon reveals he's consulting on a screenplay about an embodied female AI who discovers her creator made her mortal, mirroring Lex's own questions.
- His Skidmore tenure negotiation was simply: show up for classes and 'don't molest barnyard animals'; his foundational paper took eight years and was rejected at every journal.
- Solomon previews an unwritten book arguing both liberal and conservative political philosophy are 'intellectually and morally bankrupt' because both rest on false assumptions about human nature.
Things worth remembering
- The phrase 'worm at the core' comes from William James describing death as the worm at the core of the human condition.
- Ernest Becker was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 'The Denial of Death' weeks after dying in 1974.
- The Greek word 'psyche' originally meant 'soul,' and Aristotle, who coined it, was a monist who tied soul inseparably to the body.
- Yale studies show 14-month-old babies will reciprocate kindness and refuse to help those who behaved unfairly, responding to intention.
- Some Solomon experiments flash the word 'death' for just 28 milliseconds, too fast to consciously see, yet it changes later behavior.
- Subtle death reminders make people drink more water, eat more cookies, want fancier clothes, and sit closer to people who look like them.
- Studies suggest a half-second delay between when something happens and our conscious awareness of it, raising questions about free will.
- Nietzsche claimed a solitary creature would not need consciousness, and called consciousness 'the most calamitous stupidity by which we shall someday perish.'
- Locke argued money is 'funky' because it has no intrinsic value and, unlike food, doesn't spoil, justifying unlimited accumulation.
- Real-world sex robots are mostly used as companions by lonely people rather than for sex, Lex notes.
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