Writing Assignment
Essay 4: In a 6-page research paper, analyze the life of Ivan Ilyich in the context of Man’s Search for Meaning
Sample Thesis
Ivan Ilyich suffers from the existential vacuum as described by VK evidenced by _______________, _______________, ___________________, and ___________________.
Introduction: Describe the existential vacuum.
Ivan Ilyich is dead because he doesn't own his life.
What does it mean to live a correct and proper life, the kind that Ivan lived?
1. It means to "play the game."
What does it mean to "play the game"?
Ivan Played the Game and Took Orders from the Assumed Consensus
Playing the game means the following:
1. Conforming to the established ideals of what is assumed to be the most desirable life as dictated by the assumed consensus, the conventions that we learn to believe are the "thing to do."
Examples
Getting married, having children, buying a new car every 3 years, buying a house, taking your children to gymnastics class, etc. This becomes a vicious cycle: The more you conform and get positive feedback, the more you want to conform, so that you become something that isn't necessarily you. You often lose yourself.
Non-thinking people obey the assumed consensus, which upon close inspection DOES NOT EXIST.
"Why are you in this line for the movie?"
"Because they said that's where the line is."
No one knows who they is, but everyone assumes there is a they. THERE IS NO THEY.
But cultural pressures to be thin, or to wear a certain fashion label or to drive a certain car are driven by the INVISIBLE THEY, the assumed consensus.
The assumed consensus is often wrong. When we bow down to the consensus, we're guilty of groupthink, sacificing our critical thinking skills to obey those in power or the majority.
All trends and false beliefs come from the Assumed Consensus, which often goes unquestioned in the form of Groupthink.
We often laugh at jokes that aren't funny because we assume we're supposed to laugh at them.
Music, fashion, TV shows, film, even our college major are often determined by the Assumed Consensus.
There was an ugly time in American history when the Assumed Consensus, the majority, gave moral justification to slavery, which was a convention supported by the Assumed Consensus of its time.
Other Examples:
4-winged butterfly,
low-fat diet, vegetarian and vegan diet,
taking vitamins,
DDT,
Nuke drills,
airport security scanners vs. being pat down
2. Another part of living the "correct" life is living a life devoted to impressing the Assumed Consensus. We call this impulse vanity and it results in spiritual death, thus the title The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
3. Wearing a mask of politeness and decorum in order to establish alliances to propel your ambition. The Assumed Consensus admires this mask and ambition.
4. Maintaining your reputation in the community.
Most people do not own their lives because they live in accordance with the Assumed Consensus, AKA, in its most deragatory word construction, AssCon.
Ivan Ilyich's spiritual death resulted from basing his entire life on AssCon, the Assumed Consensus. He was conned and he made an ass of himself. Over 90 percent of the human race are beholden to AssCon and have no Third Eye to question it.
Personal Example
I recently made an ass of myself for conforming to the Assumed Consensus. I bought a refrigerator with the ice-making function that I didn't need. Now I have a noisy fridge and when you include the plumbing costs for a new water line I overspent by $900.
The Assumed Consensus Kills You by a Thousand Small Cuts
You need an ice fridge
You need a smart phone, unlimited texting, movies, wireless Interent, etc.
gym membership (often not used)
You need a Kindle Fire
You need a iPad
You need a new car every 3 or 4 years
You need cable with all the premium channels
You need to buy all your family and friends presents during the holidays
You need all those Internet subscriptions and one-day sales
Before you know it, you're a slave to financial debt over things you don't need because you slowly became beholden to the "rules" of the Assumed Consensus
A Failed Life (Ivan's)
Living a proper and correct life, that is playing the game and conforming to the dictates of the Assumed Consensus, and taking the game too seriously so that the game becomes your ENTIRE LIFE.
A Successful Life Means Owning Yourself
Owning yourself: This means you play the game (because to a certain degree you know you have to) but you know the game is a joke. Therefore, you don't base your identity on playing the game.
The wise man plays the game and knows it's a game. In contrast, the fool plays the game lets the game take over his whole life, resulting in a life of vanity, narcissism, egotism, solipsism, and loneliness.
The fool is blind to his vanity, his vain motivations, which make him compulsive. He is the opposite of self-possessed.
Types of People Who Own Themselves
Misfits, the persectuted, outcasts, people who were bullied in high school.
They never enjoyed approval from the assumed consensus so they had to create themselves and in essence own themselves.
Lexicon
1. "proper" or "correct" life: The facade we build based on others' expectations of success and happiness that always cuts a wedge between our inner life and our outer life. The more we commit to the "proper" life, the greater our self-betrayal and eventual self-destruction.
2. Provisional self-interest: selfishness based on a futile attempt to compensate for a failed inner life by committing with all our desperation to the "proper" life.
3. schadenfreude: The disgusting and perverse pleasure we experience when we see others fail or suffer humilation, rejection, or some other setback. Schadenfreude attests to our Darwinian hard-wiring, which compels us to see others as competitition suitable to be destroyed as we dominate Planet Earth.
4. Immortal Hypnosis Disorder: The majority of the world sleep-walks under the cloud of IHD, a denial of death so engrained that we don't even know we're in denial.
The Assumed Consensus reinforces this denial. "It's impolite to bring up death, our mortality."
We commit our entire lives to reinforcing this denial and become hostile and fearful when anyone compromises our condition of IHD. Even a person getting cancer is threatening our IHD and as a result we resent the sick and the dying.
5. Sycophantic decorum as dictated by the Assumed Consensus: The kind of BS and butt-kissing that becomes so common that we take it for granted as the way we have to be in order to ascend the social and professional ladder. In turn, if we should reach a high position, we expect our underlings to kiss our butts with the same commitment we used when we were butt-kissers.
6. Petulant malcontent: A whiner who sees the world as owing him pleasure while this parasitic whiner does not have any plans on giving back ANYTHING to the world from which he expects everything.
7. Intractable Marital Hostility Immune Disorder: When the husband and wife learn over time to hate each other and only relate to each other as enemies causing so much constant stress that they slowly kill each other by breaking down the other's immune system. This is why Ivan Ilych came down with cancer and died. His marriage was a hell that compromised his immune system.
8. Existential Vacuum: We are born to crave meaning as our ultimate goal. When we lack meaning, we experience the existential vacuum: We become anxious, desperate, and too often compelled to fill the void with misguided obsessions, goals, chimeras, mirages, distractions, and false panaceas.
These misguided passions can be broken down into 4 overlapping categories.
One: hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. Hedonism always fails us because we acclimate to pleasure so that more and more of the stimulus is required to activate our pleasure sensors. When we become more and more sensitized and numb to pleasure stimulus, we experience the "hedonic treadmill."
Two. Darwinian Dominance, the pursuit of power as the highest good.
Three. Libido Ostentandi, the preoccupation with creating a facade that makes others convinced we are happy and good and successful so that we can, by watching others' admire us, fool ourselves into believing we are happy and good and successful.
Four. Reckless nihilism, the pursuit of addiction-induced oblivion and mindlessness to take away the agony from languishing through a life without meaning.
9. Frankl's Ultimatum: Either live a life of service to others and be worthy of your suffering or live a futile, lonely existence in which you are committed to the feeble pursuit of satisfying your pleasures, your appetites, and your vanity.
10. Short Version of Frankl's Ultimatum: Either be worthy of your suffering by committing yourself to a purposeful life of service to others or act as if life is about consuming your selfish pleasures.
11. Ache, the adult realization that you are not Number One in the universe and the understanding that your desires will always outstrip your capacity to satisfy them. Recognizing Ache is the first step to becoming an adult and developing a viable orientation to the world, an orientation based on meaning.
12. Mutual Marital Commodification: Ivan Ilyich and his wife Praskovya Fedorovna hate each other because the foundation of the marriage is based on MMC: Deep down they know they don't love each other as human beings. Rather, they use each other as commodities. Thus the very foundation of their marriage is based on mutual disrespect.
And what are they using each other for as commodities? Trophies essentially or to refer to an earlier lexicon term, they use each other to achieve the libido ostentandi.
McMahon's Thesis
What is really Ivan's "death"? It is spiritual in nature and results from his slavish devotion to conforming to the Assumed Consensus evidenced by ____________, ___________, ____________, and ______________.
Ivan Ilyich never owned his life, as McMahon likes to say, which translates into a life without meaning, a life doomed to languish in the existential vacuum, evidenced by ____________, ________________, ______________, and ________________.
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