"[M]an cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses... "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out... to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world" that the child learns and in which he lives later as a... grim equanimity."
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Sources
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973) p. 23.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Equanimity
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Equanimity
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