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As Nietzsche (1873) writes, if people wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then they will believe. If people wish to be devotees of truth, then they inquire (p. 29). These last bellicose individuals, consequently, have been the rarest and most heretical, deviant, and threatening. Whence our need to believe? What is so frightening about ideas? Why do we need illusions? Why does truth have such a quiet breast?2 The poets knew the trepidations of uncertainty. They knew that men were of flesh and blood, and apprehensive,3 that pomp, rule, and reign were but earth and dust,4 and that man can call nothing his own but death.5 And yet it is our consciousness that makes cowards of us; the world must be deceived with ornament.6 Why does conscious awareness react to reality with fear and trembling? What is it about reality which makes it so unacceptable that human consciousness cannot endure it without the deception of ornament? Why must the world be a mirage, fantasy, or desperate lie?
In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (1973) asserts that illusions are virtually ineluctable. We dread our mortality, the ravagement of our bodies by decay, and the loss of our being, and therefore cannot survive without fantasizing our way out of reality.
The simple fact is that we live in an impersonal world, but the more sensitive among us do not like it. After all, what bothers us most about our strange career on this planet is that our lives are subject to complete catastrophe by the simplest accident, the merest chance occurrence. This is the first thing we can't stand…. Those among us who protest against the impersonality of their world are really trying primitively to banish some of its senselessness. (1969: 138-9)
Becker suggests that people have a false comprehension of reality simply because they are limited, fallible people who can only assimilate a finite amount of data and understand that in a correspondingly limited way. But Becker's thesis declares, more radically, that