Terror Management Theory Suggests That a Unifying Worldview is the Solution to Tribalism, Political Polarization, and the Culture War.

This social psychology theory explains why we become more ideologically extreme and tribalistic during times of uncertainty, and why a "cosmic religion" that aligns our interests is the solution.

It’s been a long time coming, but the Road to Omega project—a plan to save the world with science, epistemology, and blockchain technology—is officially launching next week!

Subprojects will be announced one-by-one over the course of the next month, such as the Global Bayesian Brain Project, the Manhattan Peace Project, Operation Unlock Free Will, and others. Podcast interviews with scientists, philosophers, and other influential thinkers will be uploaded weekly, which will be focused on solving our collective existential challenges with actionable solutions (episodes have already been recorded with AI safety expert Roman Yampolskiy, author Howard Bloom, and Adrian Bejan, author of Design in Nature and creator of the constructal law). Additionally, there will be a series of talks given by members of the community who have their own projects and theoretical work that are aligned with the aims of R2O (TBA next week).

So while things have been quiet around these parts for some time, please don’t mistake that for inactivity. Big ideas require considerable planning and coordination, and everything always takes longer than expected. But when you do it right, a somewhat abstract idea can have a very real impact on the world. Of course, for an idea to spread it must have a community behind it, to optimize it with the power of a collective intelligence, and to figure out creative ways to amplify the message. For this reason, there will be a shift toward a focus on community involvement, and there will also be incentives to make that participation rewarding and fun. More details will be revealed in an announcement post that will be published next week, so be on the lookout for that as well.

In other news, The Romance of Reality turned one year old today, so happy birthday book! Here’s a little video I made to express my appreciation for everyone who has supported it in some way.

Before jumping into the topic of this article, I want to say thank you to all the paid subscribers who have stuck with R2O despite things moving a little slower than anticipated. My hope is all the content coming in July makes up for the sporadic posting, but I will say that the articles that have been posted in the last few months were quite long, such that each one could have been broken into multiple posts. In the future, I will try to post more frequently and keep the articles shorter, but with the first batch I felt it was important to try to convey the big picture narrative in each of them, so readers can start to see how all the topics connect to each other. Now that some key ideas have been established, new posts will always reference older ones, to create something like a wikipedia-style web of links that will make it easier to see the common threads between all the topics. Paid subscribers will also get an email this week with a couple of digital gifts. If you have written me but didn’t get a reply about something, please resend that email because that means I did not see it. There was one email in particular from a subscriber that I must have accidentally deleted before fully reading, so if that was you, please get in touch, because I really enjoy and depend on feedback!

Now that the news is out of the way, we can move on to the topic of this article. In the past, we’ve highlighted a number of existential threats that we must address as a society, such as the threat of WWIII, the emerging threat of general artificial intelligence, and John Vervaeke’s “meaning crisis.” But another threat that is potentially just as concerning as any of those is the culture war in America and abroad, and the problem of polarization that has resulted from it. If our civilization remains on the path we’re on, things are only going to get worse, and ideological division could increase so much that the resulting instability and chaos leads to societal collapse. So, that means we have to make a collective conscious effort to heal the division, and we have to do it soon, because if the division gets too severe, there might be a point of no return. We might already been on the cusp of that point. While this should concern all of us, it should not discourage us, as this is precisely what the Road to Omega project is for!

The problem is that our most popular worldviews—the major religions, political ideologies, and national identities—divide us into tribes, and emphasize our differences rather than our similarities and shared human interests. If the Unifying Theory of Reality outlined in previous posts is correct, then it could be the solution: a new cultural and political worldview that unites us all under a common existential goal. This worldview was described in the article The Paradigm of Emergence: A Unifying Worldview for a Divided World and a Solution to the Meaning Crisis.

But to see why this worldview is the solution to the problem of polarization, we must first become familiar with a theory from social psychology called Terror Management Theory (TMT), which provides a lens for understanding what worldviews are, and their relationship to the phenomenon of tribalism. This article provides an introduction to the theory, but in a future post we will see how this theory can actually be explained from the perspective of the Unifying Theory of Reality (The Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis/Poetic Meta-Naturalism). But showing exactly how TMT fits into the evolutionary story is beyond the scope of this article. That being said, let’s jump right in.

Since its creation by social psychologists in the 1980s, Terror Management Theory (TMT) has influenced a number of fields, including neuroscience, psychology, sociology, political science, and philosophy. But the premise of the theory has its origin in a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction literature called The Denial of Death, written by the Jewish-American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in 1973. Becker’s big idea was that most of human activity and creativity is motivated by our fear of death. This became the cornerstone idea of TMT, which tries to explain human behavior from this perspective.

While all animals are biologically programmed to survive and reproduce, Homo sapiens are capable of abstract thought and reflection. These higher cognitive processes allow us to see that death is not only inevitable, but can occur at any time for reasons that cannot be controlled or predicted in advance. This conscious awareness of our own mortality conflicts with our natural desire to live, and that paradox causes profound terror and anxiety.

It is difficult to live a happy life knowing that you will someday die and that not long after all traces of your existence will be erased from history. According to TMT, as a way of dealing with this perpetual existential terror, humans invented cultural worldviews, which instill our lives with meaning and purpose, and give us a sense of permanence. By adopting cultural worldviews that instill life with direction and value, one can effectively manage the subconscious dread that is always bubbling beneath the surface.

According to TMT, cultural worldviews—which can be religions, national identities, or political ideologies—further mitigate the fear of death by providing paths to immortality. For example, religions offer a path to literal immortality through the concept of an afterlife, a place where the conscious spirit can persist after the physical body is gone. On the other hand, secular cultural worldviews—like political ideologies and national identities—provide paths to “symbolic immortality.” This type of immortality refers to the feeling that one is part of something larger that will outlive the individual, such as a great nation or a movement with a collective identity and pursuit. For each and every one of us, our worldviews provide us with a moment-to-moment defense of a deep-rooted existential fear that would otherwise cause constant terror. Essentially, worldviews are death-anxiety buffers.

So what does all this have to do with the problem of polarization and the culture war that is seemingly moving America toward collapse? Well, everything really, but there’s still more to unpack—so just know we are getting there!