Racism isn’t innate – Here are Five Psychological Stages that may Lead to It

I encourage you to take a look at this article from The Conversation. It references Terror Management Theory, which to me is one of the most overlooked—and ignored—frameworks for understanding the problems we face today.

From racism to war, from bigotry and xenophobia to jingoism and religious dogma, we seem almost determined to find “the other.” As the old saying goes, I’ll hate you for the color of your shirt or the shape of your nose. Anything will do, so long as it puts someone in the “out group.” America has been marinating in this for a long time, and at this moment, I don’t see the future looking particularly bright. If anything, I’d caution people to prepare themselves for more, and larger, terrible events ahead.

You can already see it unfolding: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and climate disasters that grow more relentless each year—wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. These events are not only catastrophic in themselves, but they remind us, again and again, of our own fragility and mortality. And when we are forced to face that, death anxiety tends to boil over into hostility, scapegoating, and division.

“We spend endless energy on the ‘what’ of our problems but rarely ask the ‘why.’ It’s like treating a cough while ignoring the virus that causes it.”

— Quinn Jacobson

Add to this the terrible political divide in America: the Kirk assassination, Trump sending troops into American cities, and the daily drumbeat of culture war rhetoric. Political party loyalties—red and blue alike—are tearing at the fabric of our society. Even in our everyday lives, people seem more standoffish, impatient, and cold (I’ve felt this for a few years). It’s as if the collective weight of death anxiety is bubbling up everywhere, pushing us further into our corners.

This is what my studies and interests revolve around: what the fear of non-existence means for people and how it runs outside of conscious awareness. Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker’s work hold so much explanatory power, I can’t understand why more people don’t embrace them—don’t bring them into their lives. Our world would be a much better place if we did.

Sheldon Solomon, building on Becker, put it bluntly: We will always need a designated group of inferiors.

What do you think? Do you see this drive to divide and “other” playing out in your own circles, communities, or even in the way strangers treat each other on the street? I’d love to hear your perspective.

And yet, I can’t help but believe there’s another path. If we had the courage to face death honestly, maybe we wouldn’t need enemies at all.

Update from PhD Land

Read This Article

This is a wonderful article that succinctly covers Becker’s ideas, TMT, and the state of the world:
https://newrepublic.com/article/199347/1-fear-death-wreaking-havoc-world

The Ernest Becker Foundation Guide

I've always been interested in what the EBF does. They are amazing at taking incredibly hard-to-understand, complicated things and putting them into words that make sense. Let's be honest: it can be hard to understand and remember these ideas. But this tutorial does something unique: it breaks everything down to its most basic parts.

What stands out to me the most is how they've made something that seems impossible to understand easy to understand. These aren't just ideas that people in academia talk about; they're real frameworks that can change how we think about and deal with the world.

I'm interested in what you think: Do you think it's worth it to think about these ideas? What is it about these notions that makes them worth paying attention to?

For reference

Ernest Becker Foundation. (2023). A communications toolkit for campaigners on death anxiety and societal change. The Ernest Becker Foundation.

About Becker's synthesis:

"Being aware of death makes people invest in our cultural worldviews, which help us feel like we have an important place in a meaningful world." "Feeling that we have contributed to something that will live on after us reduces the anxiety and discomfort that come with knowing that we will one day die" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

About cultural buffers:

“Culture can give us a sense of immortality that helps us deal with our fear of death and lets us live our lives and be part of society. For individuals who adhere to religious worldviews, a sense of immortality may be perceived literally (afterlife, heaven, reincarnation, etc.), whereas for others, immortality is understood symbolically (leaving a legacy, career advancement, attaining fame or notoriety, creating something of value, procreation, etc.) (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

About the beginnings of TMT:

Three social psychologists—Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon—came up with Terror Management Theory (TMT) in 1986 to see if Becker's ideas about how people use culture to deal with existential terror were true (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

On the breakdown of worldviews:

“If our cultural buffers are working right, most of the time people should feel pretty safe mentally. But when these cultural buffers are endangered or completely disrupted... worldviews can break down, and that underlying fear starts to come to the surface" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 1).

About defensive responses:

People mainly seek self-esteem by becoming more entrenched in their worldviews, values, and ideas; more loyal to their own culture and in-group; and more antagonistic toward others (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 2).

On reminders of death in advocacy:

"Challenges to someone's cultural worldview or 'immortality project' can provoke death anxiety, leading to avoidance or, worse, aggression towards the message and the messenger" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 2).

About persuasive messaging:

"Most advocates know how important it is to send clear, persuasive messages, but does your approach take into account the fear of death?" Decades of TMT research have shown us that when we create messages, we should think about how people react to death dread. This can help stop defensive behaviors (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 3).

On framing for the group:

“Using language that reflects the worldview or core beliefs shared by your audience will make them feel like they are part of a ‘in-group.’ "This makes them feel more connected and less defensive" (Ernest Becker Foundation, 2023, p. 3).

Clarity on Direction for Doctoral Studies

As I move through this program, I’ll be posting here as part diary/journal and part research/reminders. I’m going to start at the beginning (first things first, in that order).

Despite existing research on death anxiety and Terror Management Theory, there remains a lack of understanding about how artists uniquely engage with mortality through their creative practice. Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.

While previous studies have examined the psychological strategies humans use to manage death anxiety, few have focused on the role of art-making as a direct and conscious confrontation with death (the main driver for me). The literature has largely prioritized quantitative measures of death anxiety and its behavioral outcomes, but less attention has been paid to qualitative, practice-based explorations of how mortality awareness shapes the creative process.

“I use mortality as a creative source, creating art that turns fear into connection and purpose.”

— Quinn Jacobson

I want my work to address this gap by investigating how artists’ engagement with death anxiety can lead to existentially authentic art. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines autoethnography, interviews with artists, and analysis of creative works, this study will explore how artistic practice functions as a site for mortality confrontation and how such engagement reorients artistic purpose and output. It sounds daunting, I know, but it’s really just asking questions about how mortality affects creative people versus those who don’t identify as creative.

The research will contribute to existential psychology, art theory, and creative practice by offering an integrated theoretical and practice-based model for understanding how artists process death anxiety. The findings are expected to inform theories of death anxiety, models of creative practice, and arts-based approaches to existential therapy, ultimately supporting artists, educators, and mental health practitioners in fostering deeper, more meaningful engagement with the realities of death.

“The life-giving question guiding me now is: How might confronting mortality through creativity lead us into deeper, more authentic ways of being human?”

— Quinn Jacobson

Vision Seed (short form)

Helping people directly confront mortality—not as a means to an end, but as a source of ingenuity, fortitude, and a closer bond—is my vision seed. I use historical wounds, grief, and death anxiety in my writing and art to demonstrate how facing our greatest fears can lead to purpose and service. My mission is to advance these discussions so that we can live more compassionately, reciprocally, and with greater presence.

My First Doctoral Retreat

“Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.”

— Quinn Jacobson

I just spent six days in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for my first residency in the doctoral program in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership (VPRL) at Southwestern College. The residency was titled Seeking, and that word couldn’t have been more fitting.

The time with peers and faculty was both enlightening and challenging. In many ways, it transported me back to my Goddard days, when I earned my M.F.A.I.A. degree. That experience was life-changing, and I chose Southwestern College because I sensed a similar depth in its pedagogy. These programs are rare. They carry an intimacy, a rigor, and a kind of searching that I haven’t found anywhere else. I believe these next three years will shape me just as profoundly.

“El Papacito,” the Chi Center dog. He was a little ball of love. He would come and hang out with my at meal times. A real little sweetheart.

That said, this first step wasn’t easy. While the environment felt familiar, it was also the first time I’ve stood in front of a group of thoughtful, intelligent, and deeply considerate people and presented my ideas about mortality, creativity, and meaning. It wasn’t smooth. I stumbled. I second-guessed myself. Too much time in my own head made it harder to bring my thoughts clearly into the room.

At moments, I felt like Howard Hughes crawling out of a cave—disheveled, blinking at the light—shouting ideas about death that weren’t really about death at all. They were about life, meaning, and what it means to create in the face of the void. But that’s the point, isn’t it? You can’t do this work alone. You need community to test ideas, to sharpen them, to remind you that what feels like incoherence might just be the rough beginning of something worth saying.

I didn’t do a perfect job, but that’s okay. Seeking isn’t about having answers. It’s about showing up, risking failure, and trusting the process. And that’s exactly what I plan to keep doing.

This has got a UFO and alien vibes all over it!

600-800-year-old little man in the sky! I ended up doing a little watercolor painting of this one.

A 600-800-year-old bird petroglyph—these things made me wonder about humans and their activities to be remembered.

A Cholla Cactus walking cane leaning on a large granite stone.

We did this exercise on fractals—Earthflow & Fractal Pattern Explorations and Scales of Action, Scales of Influence, a micro-to-macro experiential art project. I saw fractals everywhere after that—I do love the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci numbers.

The Explanatory Power of Becker's Ideas and TMT

On the first page of Ernest Becker’s book, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), he wrote, “This is an ambitious book. In these times there is hardly any point in writing just for the sake of writing: one has to want to do something really important. What I have tried to do here is to present in a brief, challenging, and readable way the most important things that the various disciplines have discovered about man, about what makes people act the way they do.”

Terror Management Theory (TMT), developed as an extension of Ernest Becker’s work, posits that the uniquely human awareness of mortality gives rise to profound existential anxiety. As Becker argued in The Denial of Death (1973), this awareness creates the potential for paralyzing terror that must be managed if life is to remain bearable. To buffer against this anxiety, individuals construct and maintain cultural worldviews that provide meaning, order, and the promise of personal significance. These worldviews not only orient individuals within a shared reality but also serve as symbolic defenses against death anxiety. Consequently, human motivation is fundamentally tied to sustaining the belief that life has purpose and that one’s existence has value. When these worldviews are challenged—or when mortality becomes salient—individuals typically respond with defensive strategies aimed at reestablishing confidence in their cultural frameworks and reaffirming their sense of worth.

This is where my work enters the conversation. If culture at large defends us against mortality, art can turn toward it. My work is centered on art that metabolizes death anxiety into meaning—not by escaping it, but by dwelling in its presence. Over the next three years, I will be creating both a dissertation and a body of work that explore how creativity can transform existential dread into something we can live with, and maybe even live more fully because of it.

From Visions in Mortality to In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: Tracing a Life’s Work

In 1993, I put together a small exhibition called Visions in Mortality. At the time, I didn’t know Ernest Becker’s work, I hadn’t read The Worm at the Core (Terror Management Theory), and Ajit Varki and Danny Brower’s book Denial was still years away from being published. But even without the theory, I knew where my compass pointed. I wanted to make art about death anxiety and existential struggles.

Looking back now, those photographs feel like an instinctive first attempt to break through the evolutionary wall of denial. I didn’t have the language for it then, but what I was doing was confronting the thing most of us spend our lives avoiding. The work wasn’t about distraction or comfort—it was about holding mortality in front of myself and anyone willing to look.

That exhibition planted a seed. It revealed what would become the through-line of my entire practice: how do we live, create, and remain human in full awareness of our impermanence?

“Gone to Seed,” Whole Plate Photogenic Drawing on vellum paper (waxed). The work was created in 2022 as part of the project titled, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.”

Three decades later, In the Shadow of Sun Mountain is the mature expression of that same impulse. Where Visions in Mortality was raw, direct, and almost primal, Sun Mountain is layered—woven through with Becker’s insights on cultural worldviews, TMT’s evidence of our defensive psychology, and Varki and Brower’s claim that denial itself had to evolve in order for us to function as conscious beings.

The difference is scope. Visions in Mortality was a solitary confrontation with death, denial, and culture. Sun Mountain is a confrontation with collective denial—the way cultures rewrite history, erase peoples, and commit violence (genocide) in the name of permanence. It’s about how our fear of death doesn’t just haunt us as individuals but shapes entire societies.

But the continuity matters more than the contrast. Both projects spring from the same recognition: that art is one of the few places where denial can falter, where we can face mortality directly without looking away. That has been my practice from the beginning, whether I had the theory to explain it or not.

Now, in my doctoral studies, I’m taking this inquiry a step further. I’m asking not only how artists confront mortality differently than others, but also what that confrontation makes possible—for art, for ethics, and for the way we live together. If Visions in Mortality was the initiation and Sun Mountain the culmination, this research is the extension. It’s an attempt to turn decades of practice into a framework that others—artists, scholars, anyone willing to face the void—can use to think differently about mortality, meaning, and art.

Visions in Mortality was the beginning. Sun Mountain is the continuation. The dissertation will be the next turn in the spiral—returning to the same question from a higher vantage: what does it mean to create, to love, to exist, knowing all along that the universe is indifferent and that everything vanishes?

A Conversation I've Had Many Times

Them: “Quinn, what are you talking about? I don’t think about death. I’m not afraid of it.”

You: That’s a bold claim. But let me ask—what do you think happens when you die?

Them: I don’t know. I guess nothing. You just stop existing.

You: And imagining that—your body gone, your projects unfinished, your name forgotten, your consciousness erased—doesn’t stir anything in you? No unease at all?

Them: Not really. I don’t think so.

You: That’s fascinating, because Becker would say that’s exactly how denial works. The fear doesn’t disappear—it sinks below awareness. And then culture steps in with buffers: religion, family, nation, career, personal projects, lifestyle, and even the idea that progress or legacy will carry you forward. You’re protected from having to feel the dread directly.

Them: Maybe. But I still don’t feel afraid.

You: And yet you live inside projects of meaning every day—your work, your relationships, the things you deeply care about, and your hopes for the future. Why do those matter if death doesn’t? Becker would say they matter because of death—because without them, the nothingness is unbearable. So I must question: does your confidence truly embody fearlessness, or is it the most potent form of denial—one so subtle that it remains invisible to you?

My Core Values

Scottish essayist Alexander Smith wrote, "It is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human.”

My core values guide the way I live and create. I’m driven to seek truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. I want to live authentically—without masks, aligned with who I really am. I hold justice, mercy, and empathy close, because they rise from lived experience and connection with others. And I try to practice existential courage: facing mortality and absurdity without turning away.

For me, everything starts with mortality. It’s the one truth we all share, yet most of us spend our lives trying not to think about it. My work—whether it’s photography, painting, or writing—circles back to that truth. I want to face it, learn from it, and make something honest out of it.

I believe in telling the truth of lived experience, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially then. Those moments where we’d rather turn away are often the ones that shape us the most.

Creative integrity is everything to me. I have no interest in chasing trends or borrowing someone else’s voice. The work has to come from my own place in the world—my own questions, my own struggles, and my own search for meaning.

I think artists have a responsibility to remember. To hold on to the stories, the histories, and the human realities that others might prefer to forget. That means confronting the psychology of othering and refusing to let erasure win.

I’ve always valued depth over distraction. I want my work to stick with people—not just be glanced at and forgotten, but to stay with them and maybe even shift something inside.

Mortality is the one thing we all have in common. Facing it honestly can open us up—make us more compassionate, more awake, and maybe more fully human.

And then there’s courage. Not the loud kind, but the quiet willingness to walk into the places most people avoid—genocide sites, philosophical voids, the edges of my own life—and come back with something worth sharing.