Rachel E. Menzies - Mortals: How the Fear of Death Changed Human Society

About the Authors

Rachel E. Menzies completed her honours degree in psychology at the University of Sydney, taking out the Dick Thompson Thesis Prize for her work on the dread of death and its relationship to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Beginning in her undergraduate years, her work on fear of death and psychopathology has been published in Clinical Psychology Review, Australian Clinical Psychologist and several leading international journals. She has been invited to speak at distinguished international events and to deliver a workshop tour across seven cities with the Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (AACBT). She was the lead editor of Curing the Dread of Death: Theory, Research and Practice, and, having completed her masters and doctoral degrees in psychology in 2020, she has recently taken up a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Sydney. She can regularly be heard on national radio, popular podcasts and at relevant public events such as The Festival of Death and Dying.

Ross G. Menzies completed his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees in psychology at the University of NSW and is now a professor in the Graduate School of Health at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Over his career he has been founding Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the University of Sydney, National President of the Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (AACBT), President and Convenor of the 8th World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (WCBCT), and, most recently, founding Director of the newly formed World Confederation of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies (WCCBT). He has trained psychologists, psychiatrists and allied health workers in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) around the globe and is the previous editor of Australias national CBT journal, Behaviour Change. He continues active research and has published nine books and more than 200 journal papers and book chapters.

First published in 2021

Copyright Rachel E. Menzies & Ross G. Menzies, 2021

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For James William (Jim) Ovens, who showed us the art of dying

Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?

Epictetus

Send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

John Donne (15721631)

To have gazed at the stars of the Milky Way, and yet to die.

To have smiled at the face of your newborn child, and still to die.

To have touched another, loved deeply and been loved in return, and even so to die.

Life can feel so dazzling, so animated, so painfully vibrant that death seems impossible. From the moment we are born we will live our days with only one consciousness, never really experiencing the inner world of another person. It is this inner sensory experience that we come to know and cherishour overpowering sensate nature that will make us feel remarkable. We will pass people on the streets, in our homes, schools and places of work, and we will accept their existence. But it will always be in a somewhat detached manner. As the French existentialists taught us, we will always remain isolated from these other selves. An uncrossable bridge will lie between us and all others. We are destined to grow up overwhelmed by our own private worldan inner realm that will convince us that we are different from all others, and that our lives will obey different rules from those of the masses.

Death occursof course it doesbut surely it happens to other people. It happens to strangers in foreign lands, to our neighbours, the ageing widow down the road, the sick child at Number 26, perhaps even to our parents and grandparents, but not to us. And yet, at some level, we all suspect the truth from a very early age. Death is a universal that applies to all living things on Earth. And so, shockingly, it must logically apply to us. Despite the adoration we have for our inner sensory world, in the end death will come for us.

We are, as Shakespeare suggests, the protagonist in our own play, in our own theatre, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage. But the grim reaper watches from the dress circle and may rise to tread the boards with us at any moment. And when he joins us on our stage, like billions before us, we must bid the audience farewell. At that time, Macbeths couplet is completed and then we will be heard of no more.

How do humans cope with the spectre of death overhanging all that they do? Distraction? Denial? Engaging in immortality projects to leave their mark on the planet? We do all of the above and much, much more. But lets begin by exploring the problem in more detail. When does our death awareness develop and why do humans appear uniquely troubled by it? To answer these questions, we must come to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the evolution of the human brain.

Humans have extraordinarily large brains. Other mammals of around 60 to 70 kilos in weight have an average brain size of little more than 200 cubic centimetres. Even a newborn human, weighing only three to four kilos, has a larger brain than this, typically around 350 to 400 cubic centimetres. It appears that the entire evolution of humankind has favoured an ever-increasing brain size. Even 2.5 million years ago early men and women had developed brains around 600 cubic centimetres, far outstripping most mammals currently roaming the planet. By the 21st century, modern men and women could hope for an astonishing 1300 to 1400 cubic centimetres of neural networks.

The evolution of an ever-expanding brain came at several costs and Homo sapiens faced many associated hurdles in the fight for survival. A heavy brain uses considerable energyapproximately 20 to 25 per cent of the bodys energy intake is consumed by the human brain. The daily calories needed to support the brain is much higher in humans than in the other great apes such as orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees. For example, relative to resting metabolic rate, the human brain uses twice as many calories as the chimpanzee brain. With their brains sapping much less energy, other apes could dedicate more resources to supporting huge and powerful musculature.

In essence, the evolution of humans and our closest cousins appears to have diverged in strategy, with some biological lines of natural selection favouring brain and some lines favouring brawn. The strength of the great apes is something to behold. No one who has seen the man versus orangutan coconut challenge can easily forget it. Three men try to cut through a hardened coconut with machetes while a large ape watches and smiles. And just when the men near completion the orangutan turns gently to his coconut and peels it in half with the ease of a man breaking a mandarin orange in two. Make no mistake, it is abundantly clear who would win a fight if a man and orangutan were to battle in the proverbial dark alley.