Finding Meaning and Purpose, even in the worst of times, is what makes us Human

 

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl (1946)

            In the past 6 years that I have published reviews of the books I read, there have been a few that dealt with the horrors of war as seen by people held in prison, concentration, and extermination camps.  In each narrative, the brutality and base evil that humans are capable of seems overwhelming, and unavoidable, but there are always people who manage to keep some semblance of humanity burning inside them, allowing them to continue to seek life where others seek oblivion.  This goes for both the oppressed and the oppressors.  Viktor Frankl was a doctor whose entire family ended up in the Nazi concentration camps.  Out of dozens of extended family members, only he and his brother survived the horror.  This book is not only an accounting of his experiences, but of how they shaped what he calls Logotherapy, his method of psychiatric therapy focused on the Search for Meaning.  Logos means “ideas”.  This therapy focuses on helping us reframe how we see the universe, our place in it, and the meaning found within.

             Viktor Frankl reached a very deep understanding of what it is that makes us human, and what keeps us moving forward in spite of insurmountable odds, or oppressive horror.  Because of this, he saw that what truly drives humanity to neurosis and makes life unbearable is the lack of meaning, especially during suffering.  In the early 1900’s, Dr. Sigmund Freud saw the source of man‘s neuroses as mainly rooted in failed Sexual development.  Other prominent psychiatrists of the era saw our neuroses as developing from our will to Power, especially what happens when the human is powerless over their own life.  Viktor Frankl realized something else far more important and pervasive.  Most human neurosis arise from the lack of Meaning in our lives.  He understood, and saw clear evidence of this in the concentration camps, that a human can survive, and maybe even grow, in the middle of endless suffering if only there is something which can provide meaning to their existence. 

            Some people find meaning in religion or spirituality.  Others find it in living for someone, like a child, or a lover.  Some of the people who managed to survive with their minds intact found comfort in helping those around them.  It does not matter what it is that provides Meaning in our life, as long as it is honest to ourselves and exists apart from us.  Humans need to know that there is something out there bigger than our suffering.  Dr. Frankl quotes Nietzsche often, stating the following: “Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘How.’”

            Dr. Frankl provides examples of individuals from the camps who each found their own reason for why to continue living.  One woman, suffering from Typhus, kept a peaceful air about her.  When asked about it, she mentioned that she talked to the willow tree outside their barracks, and that the tree talked back to her.  When asked what the tree said, she stated that the Tree told her, “I am Life.  Life continues.  Life is eternal,” and that these thoughts alone helped her deal with her slow, agonizing death.  She could not even see the tree, just a few branches through a dirty window.  That was enough for her to avoid true despair. True despair kills, and it kills quickly.  Viktor Frankl describes how they could all tell 24-36 hours ahead of time when a fellow inmate would die.  They saw the signs, clear as day, that this individual’s will to live had disappeared.  Perhaps they smoked their last saved cigarette.  Perhaps they failed to wake up on time and slept all day.  Perhaps they stopped talking their usual patter.   In the rigorously regimented routines of the death camps, any deviation was noted.  It was not the pain that killed these people.  It was not the starvation, the beatings, or the terror.  It was that they saw no further reason to continue living, to continue breathing and waking up.  Frankly, this was the end goal of these extermination camps, to make the poor people inside realize they were subhuman and deserved to be exterminated.

            The second part of this book details Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, and the way that helping people by adjusting their views on life and its meaning and purpose.  He describes many of his patients who had severe neuroses, and who he helped through Logoterapy. They received help in adjusting what they saw as the Meaning of their lives.  He also describes how the lack of Meaning causes neurosis. 

            For example, Viktor Frankl describes a study done among European and American university students.  The study asked the students to describe their level of boredom, to try and correlate why boredom leads to feelings of nihilism (that nothing matters, that there is no meaning anywhere).  About 12% of European students felt their life was meaningless.  About 60% of American students felt this way.  In Europe, social, familial, and regional ritual and tradition provide a framework by which European students frame their lives and the meaning of their lives.  These traditions do not exist in America.  Sixty percent of American students felt they had no real framework by which to assign meaning to themselves and their existence.  When a human feels disconnected from their surroundings, apathy abounds.  Nothing matters.  Alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual carelessness and deep rage fester.  Meaning is lost.

Why get up and go to work?  Why bother cleaning my house?  Why bother caring about anything at all?  These are all deep existential questions, and Logotherapy aims to help the individuals answer that for themselves, allowing them to understand that our lives are always a part of something greater, even if it all seems hopeless.  Even the least of us can find meaning greater than ourselves.  Think of the homeless man that still finds a way to feed a stray cat or dog.  Think of the political prisoner who uses their letter writing to achieve a greater end than just their release.  Think of the woman who suffer through a life with a horrible man, but still manage to provide their children with love and a home and a loving mother.  Why we live is more important than How we live.  We are all responsible for how we behave, regardless of the situation.  Even in the brutality of Auschwitz concentration camp, there were still some guards, although few in number, who stayed human, who still sought to protect the inmates, who would go out of their way, risking punishment, to provide some sick men extra bread.  They did not do these things because they thought they could change the system, but because it would make them INHUMAN not to do these things.  The very best of us live our lives for the greater good. 

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor E. Frankl

(This book is available for download as a PDF file here: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/mans-search-for-meaning.pdf )

Freeman Dyson describes his life and science, and his hope for humanity.

Disturbing the Universe – Freeman Dyson (1979)

            While exploring the bibliography section of some of the science books I have read recently, I came across a mention of this book, by noted theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, and thank goodness the amazing M.D. Anderson Library had a copy for me to check out.  I had previously read that Mr. Dyson wrote some very interesting books which did not stick strictly to equations and mathematical rigor, but instead explored the Universe through Mr. Dyson’s inquisitive mind.  These types of books provide a great insight into the minds that have shaped our modern scientific world.

            The preface to this book details the circumstances leading up to its writing.  The Arthur P. Sloan Foundation started a book series.  They requested eminent people, people who were the leaders in their respective fields, to write something for publication.  It could be a small tome on pure mathematics, or a detailed history of a great scientist’s life, or, as in the case with Freeman Dyson, an exploration of his own life in the sciences, mixed in with the wisdom and gathered insights that he developed through his life.  Because of this, the title of the book,  Disturbing the Universe, is very apt.  The story contained within is of Freeman Dyson and the many times in his life where a chance encounter, a choice made, or an accidental experience, have led to a shake-up, a disturbance, in the way he saw and understood the Universe at large. 

            I love how this book begins.  It pays homage to the written word and the human imagination as being the grounds upon which greatness is dreamed of.  Mr. Dyson begins by detailing a children’s science fiction story that really stuck with him from his childhood, The Magic City by Edith Nesbitt.  This story detailed an alternate world, and Dyson mentions one rule that the story’s citizenry needed to heed.  In this world, you are free to choose to use any type of technology available, but, once chosen, the individual would have to use that technology, and ONLY that technology, for the rest of their lives.  For example, should a person choose to use roller skates as a means of transportation, that person, once they chose, would be denied the use of any other transporting technology.  This idea became a metaphor for Freeman Dyson.  He came to understand that any technology that is created by humans has the power to alter anything and everything that comes after its creation.  The scary part is that, as Freeman Dyson explains, 99% of all new technology stays purely as a clever toy for the powerful and rich few.  Only around 1% of all created technology finds a wide use and spreads throughout the human world.  The problem lies in that there is no way to predict what tech will catch on, and what the moral and philosophical implications and repercussions will be.  Once the printing press was invented, there was no shortage of people who sought to destroy or abandon this technology because of the fear that printing presses would allow for the dissemination of ideas and knowledge contrary to what the powers-that-be wish the masses to read or know about.  Freeman Dyson understood that this same problem applies to even seemingly innocuous technology, such as household goods, and not just to new weapons or giant machines.

            Mr. Dyson goes on to discuss his education and development into one of the premier mathematical and theoretical minds of the 20^th century.  He details his involvement in the British Air Force during WWII, and how the omnipresent bureaucracy showed him the blind stupidity of man, the illogic of “leadership”, and the brutality of those that send our youngest to die in war.  He saw the stupidity of the Air Force equating mission successes with number of sorties flown, or number of planes involved, and not with whether the target was actually hit, whether the crews came back alive, or whether their methods were pure suicide for these air crews.  The crews were never told the amount of planes and airmen that came back or that died or that were lost.  They were fed lie after lie after lie to keep them motivated to enter unsafe flying targets and get blown the F up over some unseen and unimportant target.  This shaped him very much.  He stated that when he moved to the USA, it was not until the Vietnam war that the people of the USA lost their innocent and naïve belief in the inherent goodness of their leaders.  The British and most of Europe had lost this during the interminable First World War.

            One of my favorite passages deals with Freeman Dyson’s relationship with my idol, Richard P. Feynman.  The two worked together while at Cornell University, and shared a road-trip across the USA.  His descriptions of Feynman and their relationship are so cool.  Freeman Dyson was lucky to work with the greatest minds around, from Feynman to Hans Bethe, to Robert Oppenheimer.  He is very honest in his portrayals of these peers of his.  It is always reassuring to me to hear of how deeply scientists can disagree over issues and still maintain a collegial working relationship and even be very close friends.  More people could learn from such things.

            Much of the latter half of this book deals with the various political and social engagements that Freeman Dyson took up after his main work was complete.  He is candid about his failures and humble about his achievements.  The last chapters deal with Mr. Dyson’s vision for the future of humanity, of life itself, and make for very moving reading.  I wish his vision of our future indeed comes to pass, allowing humans to differentiate themselves by exploring our solar system, creating colonies, and spreading Life through the cosmos.  Dyson has done the math and he feels, much like I do, that, while Life existing on Earth seems to point to the ability of Life to be anywhere in our Galaxy and Universe, the truth may very well be that the myriad conditions needed, not only for cellular Life to develop, but for the planet to be stable enough for Billions of years to allow for the creation of “Intelligent” Life, are only found here on our Planet Earth, out of all the possible worlds of our Multi-verse.  If there are a quadrillion planets in our Universe, and the odds against Life arising are 1 in a quadrillion, then we are indeed alone.  If the odds turn out to be 1 in a septillion or bigger, then the very existence of Life on Earth can be seen as the ultimate miracle and all of our humanity as a blip in the vast expanse of space-time.  I too think we humans have a mandate to spread Life, in all forms, throughout the Galaxy and then the Universe.  I hope Freeman Dyson’s vision comes to pass.  I will definitely be on the lookout for more books by Mr. Freeman Dyson.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

The Horrors of the Soviet GULAG prison-camps and the humanity that survived

A World Apart – Gustav Herling (1951)

            Horror can come in so many ways.  It could be the sudden arrival of an incomprehensible terror.  It could also be the slowly dawning realization that hope is a feeling best left dead.  In many ways, the horrors experienced by Mr. Gustav Herling while serving in a Soviet GULAG hard-labor prison run the full gamut.  For several years, the author, a Polish native who had left for the Soviet Union after Poland had been annexed by the Third Reich, experienced horrors both physical and mental, and in sharing his story he helps us understand the true evil that totalitarian government inflicts upon the entire population.

            Reading Mr. Herling’s account of his time as a prisoner brought back memories of my youth reading Animal Farm and 1984, and of wondering in indignant rage why people tolerated the obviously absurd and illogical pronouncements of the ruling parties.  As a young teen, those books filled me with a deep hate for mindless subservience and for blind allegiance to any political system, especially those of a totalitarian state.  Mr. Herling’s life in this forced-labor camp shared so much of the idiocy and stupidity that the animals on Animal Farm or the citizens in 1984 had to accept or else be destroyed by the state.

            Mr. Herling meets prisoners from all walks of life.  One is a former diva of Soviet theater who was sentenced to ten years hard labor.  Her stated crime was being a traitor to the Soviet State.  What was her actual crime?  She danced for too long with the Japanese ambassador at a gala event in Moscow.  That was it.  Several of the inmates were there merely because they were not Russian.  These were Poles who got stuck in Russia avoiding the Nazi takeover of Poland.  There were people whose jobs pre-revolution were in education and intelligentsia, and of course a totalitarian state cannot abide having anyone else be an authority on anything.  The state must the ultimate authority on anything!  How fucking horrible.  With the Soviet Union officially banning all organized religious activities, priests and nuns were also laced in these ruthless work-to-death camps.  All kinds, even those that believed themselves deeply committed to the Communist Party, found out they were worthless pieces of a machine in which they had no control.

            The life in the camp is terrible, with surreal and illogical precision running everything.  The prisoners were fed according to their crimes, and according to how much they worked daily.  Those that worked heavy labor were lucky to receive a few grams of bread and a thin barley “soup” at the end of the day.  Those that were unfit for heavy labor received solely a thin warm liquid with no meat and no vegetables.  If you were sill or injured you spent some time in an unheated “infirmary” where you received the bare minimum food portion, and minimal medical care.  If you were unable to get better enough to work, they would send you to the Mortuary, where the dying waited to die in relative peace.  Mr. Herling spent time in the Mortuary and describes the twisted sense of calm and rest combined with the foreknowledge of your impending death.  There is no comfort anywhere. The paranoia, the pain, the SMELL of countless rotting, sickly, and dying men and women, awash in their own feces, ever-seeping sores, malnutrition, night-blindness from lack of vitamins, and eventually the complete loss of their conscious ability to think all wash over the narrator, as he slides into this horror himself.  Throughout all this, Mr. Herling manages to share any and all wisdom he gained, most of it bleak, and brutally honest about what a man has to deal with when hope is gone yet life continues interminably.  It is a brutal story, and the fact that we know he managed to survive and publish this a few years later does nothing to diminish the trauma of his and all of the other prisoner’s experiences.

            Prison for actual criminals is bad enough.  When the state sets up prisons for those who do no crime other than political opposition?  Evil.  When the state punishes people pre-emptively, trying to weed out supposed traitors before they even have a chance to act?  Evil.  When the state’s own reasoning is so twisted and flawed and fucking pointless that they have to retroactively invent methods to protect their own lies?  Evil.  Under Stalin, Soviet/Russian history was turned into a pathetic joke, with whole secret government entities erasing people’s entire lives from the historical record, solely to appease the whims of the mustachioed madman controlling everything. Whole families disappeared.  Whole generations of educated people were sent to Siberia to die in labor camps.  This same shit happens in all totalitarian states, and is happening right now in Saudi Arabia (religious rule by an autocratic family of assholes), North Korea (totalitarian rule by a fat man-boy with a tiny pecker and total control of his starving population), etc.  It could happen anywhere.  It could happen in the USA.  The only thing that prevents dictators is the willingness of brave people to stand up to them, to the death.  Never expect a despot to “make sense.”

            During WWII the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans all had forced-relocation camps.  The Germans used theirs to attempt a mass genocide of European Jews, as well as anyone deemed undesirable by the Reich.  This included the homosexuals, religious leaders, Romany, mentally and physically handicapped people, and anyone else deemed as “the Other.”  Russian forced labor camps were barely any better.  Their goal was not to solely exterminate enemies.  It was to suck out as much forced labor as possible with the bare minimum of food and support, thereby killing the state’s enemies while also benefiting the state’s GDP.  In the USA, our forced-relocation camps consisted of thousands and thousands of Japanese-Americans, many of them full citizens of the nation, including children and the elderly.  They were treated as if just because they were of Japanese ancestry, they were a treasonous threat to the nation.  While they were not treated as inhumanely as those in German or Russian camps, the very existence of such places in the supposed “Land of the Free” should be enough to strike terror in the hearts of free-thinking humans anywhere.  Who knows how bad it could have gotten for the Japanese-American prisoners if the war had raged on, or if the Japanese had managed a full on attack of the USA mainland?  Totalitarianism is a slippery slope indeed.  We must be ever-vigilant against it, even if it is an unpopular stance to take.

(This book is available for download as a PDF here: https://archive.org/download/worldapart007324mbp/worldapart007324mbp.pdf )

(This book can also be purchased here:  A World Apart  )