According to Terror Management Theory the awareness and terror of death is the determining factor behind all human thoughts, feelings, and actions. How can this be so?

In his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book “The Denial of Death” Ernest Becker shows how psychological insight merges with religious doctrine at the furthest and most fertile lands

The notion of personal death is the most central, the most determining organizing theme in man’s existence. But while the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death can save him