Human cultural forms—including scholarship—are generated as a flight from death. Thus, a primary function of culture is denial of—the truth. Human beings construct culture as a flight from truth.

There is little talk of “the individual” in contemporary social theory. We are “subjects of the symbolic order.” The symbolic order is that domain of existence to which the individual attaches in his flight from death. “You are nothing, your nation is everything,” as Hitler put it. Culture is the realm of immortality—that which lives on: the individual dies, but the nation lives.

Attachment and relationship—this is the order of the day. Human beings are so embedded within society that they barely know they exist apart from it. Brown says that human sociality represents a flight from independence: denial of separateness. Society was not constructed, Brown claims, for the sake of life and more life (as Aristotle said), but rather from defect, from death and the flight from death; from “fear of separation and fear of individuality.”

The idea of culture implies attachment or no separation: the individual is “at one” with the symbolic order. Individuals die, but the group lives on. Thus, Brown says, there are “no social groups without a religion of their own immortality,” and history-making is always the “quest for group immortality.”

According to James Joyce, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” Yet we cling to history, to our nightmare. The fantasy of immortality and the nightmare of history are two sides of the same coin. We project psychic energy into that which we imagine will “live on.” Human beings create “history”—they kill and die—in the name of preserving symbols into which the fantasy of immortality has been projected.

The ambition of civilized man, Brown says, is “revealed in the pyramid.” In the pyramid reposes the hope of immortality. Death is overcome by the real actuality of life “pass[ing] into these immortal and dead things.” Egypt, the pyramids and kingship constitute the template for Western civilization: to create monumental structures that will live on: to build immortal Empires: the dream of history (and of historians). Actual existence pales in the face of these gigantic entities.

Where can evolutionary psychologists say about the pyramids? At the dawn of history, human beings sought to become more than animals: history is flight from our animal nature. Becoming conscious of ourselves as individuals, we sought to soften the blow of our demise—by building symbolic entities with which we fused our existence.

According to Brown, the modern psychology of possession is superimposed over a “deeper psychology of giving.” Economics goes beyond the pleasure principle. We create an economic surplus in order to build pyramids: human labor drained into symbols of immortality.

An economic surplus is created, Brown says, in order to have something to give: “Gods are sacred and the gods exist to receive gifts.” We create gods in our flight from death. Human cultural forms allow us to project our fantasy into a realm that—we imagine—is eternal.
The symbolic order, discourse and culture seem to be coming from “out there,” or “up above.” Society is the god to which we devote our existence. Brown claims that human culture exists in order to “project the infantile fantasies into concrete reality.” This “in order to” makes all the difference in the world (distinguishing Brown from the Frenchmen): it reflects an understanding that we are the source. What exists, exists because we human beings have created it.

What would it mean for social science to acknowledge that we are the source? What changes might occur once we acknowledge that we have created that which exists? We are the source of cultural creations, but also separate from them. We may study culture and history as something other-than-the-self. Thus, we are capable of becoming conscious of the fantasies that we have projected into the symbolic order: how we seek to keep our collective nightmare alive in order to deny the end of history.

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