on terror and other mambos

The meaning of life is that it ends. -Franz Kafka
What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?... People were ready to have their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. -World Controller Mustapha Mond, explaining the origins of the dehumanized but anxiety-free dystopia in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good... What worries you masters you. -John Locke

I was attracted to its title, "The Fiddler In The Subway," right away.  It brought the city into my mind.  I'm still walking in my imagination the journey that Gene Weingarten outlined in this hipnotizing collection of stories, of memoirs. I haven't read yet the story that gave the book its title.
I'm reflecting in one in particular, Fear Itself.  Here some quotes:
A quarter-century ago, a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker, wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called The Denial of Death. For a time, during the primacy of Freud, it was huge. It's not about terrorism, it's about the psyche, and its central thesis is one of the most disturbing analyses of human behavior ever set in print.
Everything we are, Becker argued--our personalities, our attitudes, our very being--is an elaborate lie, a carefully crafted self-delusion constructed to avoid having to face a fact so terrifying it would drive us mad: Not only are we certain to die, but death could come at any moment, followed by an eternity of nothingness. Lower animals, blessedly unaware of their mortality, plod thoughtlessly through their lives on instinct alone.
Lacking their ignorance, Becker says, we compensate by making ourselves stupid. We tranquilize ourselves with the trivial; we make friends, raise families, drink beer, follow the Redskins, find comfort in religions promising eternal life, all of wich takes our minds off the potentially paralyzing truth...Paranoiacs and drepressives are in some ways the sanest among us, according to Becker, because their layer of denial is so fragile it fractures. Most of us, though are able to retain our sanity so long as our anxiety is held at bay, and our anxiety is held at bay so long as our bold illusion remains manageable.
Is that right? Is it about self-delusion or is just helplessness?