–Maybe suicides are part of a homeostatic mechanism in groups that helps maintain the illusion of immortality for the living at the expense of individuals who carry too much of the group’s repressed shame, anger or fear.
I’d like to suggest that talk about mass death as nature’s corrective response to overpopulation is itself a way of denying the reality of our own individual deaths. It may not be true that the world can’t physically sustain us, only that our current social systems (based on elimination and stratification, rather than integration) are not meeting everyone’s needs adequately. Not nature’s wrath, but man’s.
Taken from the Ernest Becker Listserv Discussion Archives
