Is culture really all about terror management?

Sorry, found the poster.

To the thread's question, culture is a tool box one can use to manage all sorts of stuff we are confronted to, including indeed death and sorrow but also pleasures, resources and opportunities. Cuisine is a big deal in many cultures. Art and literature start with a pleasurable story, etc. No to undue cultural pessimism!

To expand that one step further, it's interesting to see cultural taboos. One is the culture of bowing in Japan.

Body language in general is almost as varied as spoken language. Afghans carress each-other's beard to express foundness and respect.

Two interesting 'terror management' aspects to the article linked below.

Britain is considering building replacement Trident submarines but equipping them with non-nuclear missiles (thus lowering the 'terror' of more nuclear weapons). Using These unimaginably expensive subs for that purpose is like using a 16" Navel gun on a destroyer to fire a 22 caliber rim fire bullet, it makes no sense at all to anyone aware of all the facts.

But - producing the Tridents eliminates the 'terror' of all those ship yard job losses. This is a classic case of societal 'terror management'.

Even more interesting to me is that it illustrates that our economies have entered an era of almost complete artificiality. None of the conventional economic theories of either the left or the right apply anymore. We simply have the capability to produce all the population's needs with far less than the workforce we have.

This reality places us in a very vulnerable position where it could crash badly if the political leaders either don't get this or make a miscalculation in handling it. Hiding this economic reality from the public is probably the greatest terror management task in the world.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/17/jeremy-corbyn-trident-compromise-no-nuclear-warheads

There are currently several terror management topics that there will be 1. a world stock market crash of at least 50%, 2. dramatic climate change that will destroy many low level cities, and 3. the Chinese currency will become the world currency. Fear works.

I'm not sure I do subscribe to that theory.
I see culture as inevitable, but not progression; attacking culture is easy, and truth is the recognition that progression requires effort.
If people aren't going to make an effort, why should others be attacked for creating culture?

I don't subscribe to fear either. Fear is used by many writers whether it's about the stock market, the US economy, or the drowning of cities along the coast all over the world.
Many writers are now telling people who own stocks to sell, because there will be a stock market crash that will wipe out 50% of their value.
We own stock investments, and it's done very well for us. Our investment has stayed at the same level for over ten years even though we have withdrawn 40% of the original value of our investment. Scare tactics just will not work for me.
If anyone has taken Econ 101, there is no way any person can predict the world's economy. That's because economics is not science, and nobody can come up with a mathematical formula to predict future economic performance. Nothing remains static in economics. Everything is always in flux.

Who could have predicted Brexit just a few years ago that resulted in currency value fluctuations after the announcement, and how that ended.

This is the poor man's version of

The Denial of Death
by Ernest Becker
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