Duck Lips

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Duck Lips and the Fear of Death In 1973, Ernest Becker, in his landmark book The Denial of Death said, “People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.” Americans spend much time and expense frantically discovering themselves through an odd obsession with celebrities. People magazine, one of the most popular celebrity magazines in North America, rakes in a whopping $997 million in advertisement revenue with 46.6 million subscribers. The average Hollywood celebrity makes approximately $30 million a year (“Hollywood Salaries Revealed”) while the average schoolteacher earns an annual salary of about $45,000 ("Teacher High School Salary”). Ordinary humans have always sought out others to worship, be it a god or another human…show more content…
Perhaps, teens are socially controllable by celebrities because they fear their own deaths and thus their own lives. This is a theory offered by Sheldon Solomon, a Ross Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College, known as Terror Management Theory (TMT). He built his ideas on the work of Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book from 1973, The Denial of Death. Becker was a cultural anthropologist and sociologist at University of California at Berkeley. Becker’s book proposes that human beings, at some point in their consciousness, become aware of their own mortality. But then, because of the anxiety such awareness evokes, humans must suppress those emotions and thoughts. This suppression helps most humans function in a terrifying world where everyone and everything will eventually die. Culture’s main function, according to Becker, is to help suppress those thoughts and feelings. Culture helps us feel immortal, invulnerable, and strong (“The Ernest Becker Foundation”). This denial of death, in a sense, is a denial of the authentic, mortal self, and it is pervasive in Western culture because it helps us to manage our sense of terror (“The Ernest Becker
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