Man’s Search for Meaning Essay Assignment (Expanded)
Viktor Frankl argues in Man’s Search for Meaning that in the face of suffering (the dominant feature of existence), we must use our free will to choose the appropriate attitude toward that suffering. We can either see suffering as cause to be angry animals, looking at life as little more than a place of senseless futility that justifies an attitude of nihilism so that our life is little more than unleashing our beastly, hedonistic passions and live a life of alienated selfishness. Or in the face of suffering we can elevate our humanity by adopting an attitude that says we must find courage, conviction, and moral righteousness through a Higher Purpose or Meaning.
Viktor Frankl witnessed both attitudes in the concentration camps. He observed people either descended into moral dissolution, becoming dehumanized animals who lived a day-to-day existence without purpose, or they found a purpose that preserved and even elevated their humanity. His mission in Man’s Search for Meaning is to persuade us to become Destiny Seekers, people who becoming morally righteous by finding meaning.
However, there is a camp of thinking that is skeptical of the idea of meaning for four reasons.
The first reason that meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, that to discuss it as an essential life force therefore is absurd.
Secondly, the skeptic will argue that people don’t have any objective meaning. Rather, they pursue some illusion or other that gives them a sense of purpose—perhaps a false one—that gives them motivation. In other words, people motivate themselves by making up all sorts of incentives, but these incentives could be less about “meaning” and more about chimeras.
A third point of skepticism is that there are people who find meaning in very disturbing ways, most notably by being brainwashed and manipulated such as a person who converts to a religious cult or perhaps to some extremist ideology.
The skeptic’s fourth point of contention is that she will argue that we cannot choose meaning because we are not agents of free will; rather, we are agents beholden to forces we cannot control, namely, determinism, the philosophy that states our biology and environment affect our behavior and that “choices” are just an illusion. We say we “chose” to do something after the fact, but in truth, we were hard-wired to act in such a way.
Addressing the skeptic’s points above, support, refute, or complicate Frankl’s argument that we are responsible to be Destiny Seekers and find our own meaning in order that we make the appropriate response to a life of suffering and that failure to find meaning will doom us to the hell of the “existential vacuum.”
Suggested Structure:
Introduction: Frame the debate or write a compelling anecdote that transitions to your thesis.
Thesis
Paragraphs Address Each of the Skeptic’s Points
One or two paragraphs address the idea that meaning is too individual and subjective.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that meaning is an illusion we use to motivate ourselves.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that “meaning” or a found purpose can be the result of brainwashing and manipulation.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that we don’t choose meaning; some of us may have a sense of meaning, but only because we are hard-wired to. In contrast, some of us are hardwired to NOT have a sense of meaning and be okay with that.
Two counterargument-refutation paragraphs that address your opponents’ views.
Important Note
If you're refuting the skeptics point by point, the counterargument section is not necessary because your WHOLE essay is a refutation.
Conclusion
Conclusion is a more emotional (pathos) restatement of your thesis.
Critique Examples
D.G. Meyers, author of the above essay, writes about how he feels about his terminal cancer in the context of meaning.
Meyers makes the following assertions:
1. There is not always a "why" except on Frankl's misreading of Nietzsche.
2. The Holocaust represents a new order of reality that defies meaning and this is affirmed by other survivors who don't have a "meaning agenda."
3. Frankl does not "plumb the depths of evil" in the Holocaust because to do so would not support his thesis that meaning can be found in all circumstances.
4. Being worthy or not of one's suffering is an irrelevant point when one is being sent to the gas chamber.
5. The Holocaust is too extreme and too unusual to make Frankl's message applicable to the common reader.
Writing a Thesis for Your Essay
Qualities of an Effective Thesis
One. One sentence that declares or asserts a position that can be demonstrated with examples.
Two. The examples can be expressed in mapping statements or mapping components.
Three. Avoids being self-evident or obvious but creates new insights.
Four. A good thesis is visceral, from the gut, meaning you have an immediate emotional connection to it. The intellect comes later.
Five. A good thesis has a dependent clause that is the concession clause addressing the opposing condition. Examples:
While there is much to admire in Writer X's principle of the Noble Slacker, his argument fails when we consider ___________, ____________, ______________, and _____________.
While I can appreciate many of the fine and brilliant points Author X makes in her critique of Viktor Frankl, her overall thesis fails to be persuasive because _____________, ____________, _______________, and ________________.
There is much to be admired in Writer X's support of the Utilitarian Argument, but his supports fail to convince in light of ___________, _____________, ______________, and ___________________.
Class Exercise
Work on a thesis with a concession clause
Frankl Lite is a degraded or compromised meaning, but not the kind of "ultimate meaning" described in the book:
You don't need "meaning" so much as you need the basic human needs:
One. We need to believe in something larger than ourselves so we don't become crushed by the weight of our inclination for self-centeredness and narcisissism.
We can't believe in just anything. There's a huge caveat or condition: This "thing" we believe in should be good, conducive to our maturity and dignity and the dignity and respect of others.We can't, for example, believe in killing others to achieve some political goal motivated by a lust for power. Then we are monsters like Pol Pot and Stalin and Hitler.
If this thing is good, it doesn't necessarily create meaning. For example, if we develop an interest in martial arts, math, chess, bicycling, swimming, etc., all these things are good and help us get the focus of our self, but they aren't the Holy Grail of Meaning.
Two. We need self-awareness, AKA the Third Eye or metacognition so that we can make more intelligent and moral choices rather than being dragged down by the reptilian, primitive, irrational part of our brain. But this too falls short of meaning.
Three. We need humility to learn from our mistakes so we can become stronger and wiser. Again, humility is great, but not the same as meaning.
Four. We need a good job that uses our skills and makes us feel needed and pays us so we can buy stuff we want and feel secure and comfortable. This is good, too, but it isn't meaning.
Five. We need reproductive success. This means finding a mate whom we find desirable and attractive and a complement to our existence. This is great, but it isn't meaning.
Six. We need a sense of belonging and meaningful friendships. This too is great, but it is not meaning.
Seven. We need free time to play and enjoy recreation as a counterbalance to our hard work. Again, this is a need, but it isn't meaning.
Eight. We need moral character, the kind that compels us to have respect for others and ourselves and to have a reverence for life. In fact, we don't find meaning outside of ourselves. Meaning is born from our moral character.
We can have all these 8 things and achieve a certain satisfaction in our growth, maturity, and success and still not have meaning or at least not the heroic kind evidenced by Viktor Frankl in his book.
As a result, we can have the 8 Essential Things and go through life happy enough without having meaning. Our life is full enough based on our moral growth, our work, our love life, our friendships, and our human connections that we don't seek any meaning beyond this.
However, some of us can attain the 8 Essential Things and still suffer, to some degree or other, the existential vacuum, the sense of emptiness and restlessness that "life is good but there must be something More."There is a sense of the Beyond, of Mystery, and Enchantment.
Some people seek this More in religion.
Others seek this More in creativity, such as writing or the arts.
Others seek this More with drugs, LSD, mushrooms, marijuana, etc.
Others say there is no More, that we are biological creatures who can be reduced to sexual and survival instincts.
Viktor Frankl says there is meaning in terms of our moral position, which is that we must fight to help others at the expense of our own safety and convenience. This is a morality rooted at the heart of his religion.
His religion states that we must fight to help others at the expense of our safety and convenience; otherwise, we will become self-preservational animals, losing our souls to our most primitive urges. The consequence of not following the moral dictate described by Frankl in his book is that we will suffer moral dissolution and the existential vacuum.
The challenge is that throughout human history something like less than 1 percent of the human race have chosen to live as heroically as Viktor Frankl.
Most of us pacify ourselves sufficiently with the 8 Essential Things but fall short of Meaning as described by Viktor Frankl. For Frankl, meaning is an absolute. For most people meaning is relative to the 8 Essential Things.
Full Potency Frankl goes further:
It's about sacrificing personal comforts and material success to serve others with a joyful attitude. Some would argue you can't serve two masters. You can't serve material success on one hand and meaning, as defined by Frankl, on the other. But that is a debatable claim, one worth addressing in your essay.
To sum up, Frankl Lite refers to a life of comfort by achieving the basic needs; Full Potency Frankl refers to a life of sacrifice to help others with no regard for creature comforts.
According to Frankl, the search for meaning is affirmation of respect of self and reverence for life.
Failure to live a life of meaning, according to Frankl, is a sign of self-contempt. How do we tot despise our lives?
Does Frankl gives us a specific guide in his book?
One. We often treat our lives with contempt without even knowing it. Reckless self-indulgence. Self-admonishment is at times appropriate.
Two. Taking Self-Admonishment Too Far.
Viktor Frankl argues that we are responsible for our attitude in the face of tough circumstances, that we are not helpless pawns, that our decisions have consequences, and that we should not despise our lives or at the very least we should not treat ourselves with contempt. But I see that most of us do just that. I’ll resolve to stick to healthy diet, for example, and then go to a family event where I’ll eat three slices of pumpkin cheesecake and overall consume five hundred percent more calories than I had allocated myself. Or I’ll buy a scintillating watch I don’t need because “it’s so damn cheap I can’t afford not to buy it.” Other times I’ll condemn myself for road-raging after I had promised myself I’d be “chill on the road.” Or I’ll berate myself for using ill-advised language in front of my young children right after promising myself I would not contaminate their ears with my salty sailor tongue and then suffer the embarrassment of them repeating my words in front of others.
Three. Self-pity is a form of self-contempt. To a degree there is something normal about the way we admonish ourselves for it is natural that we will consistently fall short of our standards and ideals. But take some more extreme examples that go beyond self-admonishment. My Shakespeare professor once told the class about a wealthy surgeon he knew whose wife had left him. The wife let the surgeon keep the house, but she took all the furniture. When my professor visited the doctor three years after the divorce, he said he was surprised to find the doctor in a tattered robe and his house was empty, still unfurnished. As my professor tried to offer words of counsel to the doctor, the still grieving man, with dried saliva in his beard, was holding a calculator and whispering the cost of the furniture to himself over and over. My professor said, “The doctor was dead and there wasn’t a shrink big enough in this world who could help him.”
This doctor must have hated himself for not being able to shake himself loose from the sense of betrayal and self-pity that consumed him after his wife divorced him. Clearly, his reaction to the divorce was worse than the divorce itself.
Another example: My wife told me about a radio advice show in which a man called in and said upon driving home he could not go inside his house. He would park his car in the driveway and drink from a flask of whiskey while listening to the commotion between his wife and children inside. Only after being sufficiently brain-numbed from the alcohol could he muster the nerve to go inside his own house.
Clearly, in both examples, the two men hate their life. They despise themselves and they see themselves as enslaved men, shackled to demons they are convinced they cannot conquer. Furthermore, they see their suffering and life as completely meaningless and therefore they despise their lives.
Four. Feeling trapped and having lost control of our lives in the extremes rendered above, we hate who we are and who we’ve become. There are other, equally compelling, reasons for coming to a point of self-loathing.
Example. Often we see ourselves as helpless to an addiction that is ruining our life. Or we hate ourselves for screwing up at a job interview because of anxieties.
Five. Childish view of success, all or nothing, which tells us we must ascend to an extravagant level of wealth and fame; otherwise we are merely ciphers unworthy of the esteem of others, including our own.
Six. Frankl argues we are never totally helpless. No matter what the scenario, we are challenged in Man’s Search for Meaning to not surrender to these forces that would cause us to despise ourselves. It is one of Frankl’s major tenets that we must reject the idea that we are completely helpless, lacking in self-control, and being subject to forces outside ourselves. We must not, he says, submit to powers that will steal our inner freedom. One of the dangerous consequences of submitting to those powers is that we will despise ourselves and come to believe, in error, that our lives are of no consequence. And why wouldn’t we come to this conclusion? Overcome with powerlessness and the sense of being a nonentity, what other emotions are there but ones of despair and self-hatred?
Seven. Frankl makes it clear that self-loathing is no option. In fact, we must live a dignified life, the very opposite of one full of self-hatred. For Frankl, the way out of self-hatred is not self-introspection but by finding a higher purpose, a way to fill the void with meaning. Only by working toward a higher purpose can we change our fundamental character and eventually become worthy of our suffering.
Part Five. Logotherapy: An attempt to find purpose as a way of eradicating self-loathing.
One. Meaning is not handed down to us on a silver platter. Rather, we struggle through logotherapy to arrive at meaning based on our individual circumstances. As Frankl writes:
Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.
How do we see the world as it really is when we are blinded by disgust, self-loathing, and self-pity? Frankl explains that one way of seeing is having a sense of doing something meaningful in our future. As an example, Frankl writes about his weariness in the camps, struggling day to day, and reaching a point where he had hit a wall, as it were, at the point of giving up:
I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics?—“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distintam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Two. What about the aforementioned doctor walking around his empty house in his robe as if he were living in a tomb? And what about the husband who needs to get drink before entering his house? How can these men get a “clear and precise picture” of their emotions? If they did have an objective grasp of not only their emotional state but how they were contributing to it, wouldn’t they then change? I don’t know. As a cynical person, I find it a difficult challenge to get an objective grasp of my own emotions, for it is the habit of a cynic to indulge in the masochistic pleasure in one’s despair and self-loathing. There is a huge amount of egotism in this kind of indulgence. Further, this ego-generated self-loathing is a compulsion and a habit, a very hard habit to break.
Three. Frankl didn’t just teach logotherapy; he lived what he said about suffering: “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”
Four. The opposite of Frankl’s tragic optimism: Being overwhelmed and enervated by the Sisyphean nature of life is not the orientation Viktor Frankl wants us to have. We are, Frankl says, to joyfully embrace suffering when we know it’s committed to our higher purpose, such as raising children.
But Frankl’s orientation toward suffering presents a challenge to me since my hardwiring evidences that I’m entrenched in the Sisyphean or Futility worldview. For example, I was sixteen in the summer of 1978. The past few months had been tough. My parents separated, and eventually divorced, and my grandmother had just died of leukemia at the age of sixty-four. It was decided I’d spend the summer with my grandfather in San Pedro. He was working for his friend, Forbes, in Carson. Forbes owned a machine shop and my grandfather and I would load and deliver parts in a flatbed truck to industrial centers and ports around Los Angeles. I hated the work. Long back-busting days starting at six and ending around four after which I’d drag myself to the YMCA to workout. I’d come home and go straight to sleep, knowing the monotony would be repeated all over again. I remember one night in particular as I tossed and turned on the pull-out couch, I thought to myself: “So this is what’s it’s going to be like after I get out of school. A full-time job. Misery day in and day out. And for what? So I can go home, catch a workout, steal a little dinner before bedtime, and go to sleep so I’ll have enough energy to drag myself through the same drudgery the next day? And for what? Nothing, that’s what. Life is shit.” In my mind, all jobs were the same, more or less. You had to show up, you had responsibilities, and you were essentially doing something you didn’t want to do. So at the age of sixteen I had found the truth of existence: Life is shit.
And here I am many years later trying to teach Man’s Search for Meaning, but at my very core I am, and always have been, a cynic and a nihilist. What does this make me, a vegetarian butcher?
The "Proper Life" Leads to a Meaningless Life
How Can We Avoid the Proper Life?
By proper, we mean common and ordinary, that which is acceptable by the mainstream.
One. According to Tolstoy, most proper people live a life of fakery. In other words, for most people are frauds or charlatans. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich opens its second chapter with the famous line: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
One of the novella’s themes is that most of us embrace the common, “ordinary” life and sad to say such a life is one of fraud and self-deception.
Two. A phony life is not perceived as an evil life because it is mainstream: The catastrophic fakery is not the product of evil people living on the fringe. Rather, it is the common lot of the mainstream who languish through a life of meaninglessness and charlatanism, clinging to this fake life as if it were the highest pursuit imaginable. And even worse, most people don’t even know they’re living this “proper,” that is, “horrible,” life.
Reading the novella, we see over and over that Ivan Ilyich lived a “proper” and “correct” life and it is precisely this conformity to that which is “proper” and “correct” that perpetrates a fraud and the existential vacuum discussed in Man’s Search for Meaning.
Three. A definition of the “proper” life: It is a life that emphasizes power, vanity, and selfish ambition dressed up behind the flowery garments of middle-class niceties and proprieties. When we live the proper life, we give implicit encouragement to power-mongering, vanity, and selfish ambition by praising others for their “achievements” and “success” while putting up an affront of piety, claiming to admire the more noble virtues, loyalty, courage, sacrifice, humility, etc. But these latter qualities are only important to us as a show, not as real substance.
For example, in the novella it is explained that when no one was looking Ivan Ilyich, a judge, was cruel and obnoxious to his underlings, but when his dealings with his subordinates were under the banner of “official business,” that is, those dealings would be seen and scrutinized by others, Ivan Ilyich’s behavior was “fair” and “decent.” We also read that he loved to withhold his power and authority, not out of humility, buy by showing others how remarkably restrained he was.
Four. The “ordinary” life, then, is one in which we want to be perceived as good, just, and generous even though we could care less if we our character is really worthy of being those things.
Again, we can look at Pascal’s observation of this hypocrisy to better see the ordinary life of fraud and self-deception:
We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire us a reputation for bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being that we are not satisfied with the one without the other and often exchange for the other!
Pascal’s description is of the ordinary human condition. And indeed it is a terrible one in part because such a morally bankrupts life is perceived as normal when it is lived by the majority and as such is “ordinary.”
Five. According to Frankl, conforming to this immoral and meaningless way of life creates the existential vacuum.
This imitation is not instinct but a learned behavior. As Frankl explains:
At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
In the case of Ivan Ilyich, he entire “proper” life was a conformity to a life he did not really want. It was an idea of a life that had been presented to him as a way of winning the approval of others and he did not realize he despised this life he had chosen until he was dying away in a home where he was held in contempt by his own family for imposing the rude inconvenience of becoming fatally ill. It is only as he endures a terrible, slow death and as he sees his own grave that he begins to ask himself, “What if my whole life had been wrong?” It’s sad that he does not ask this question until lying on his death bed.
Six. Like Ivan Ilyich, we are too distracted by all his diversions.
As philosopher Thomas V. Morris would tell us, we don’t face life’s important questions until death is knocking on his door. Morris explains this procrastination in Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life:
“How many of us would think about going to a gas station only after the car stalled for lack of gas? And yet too many of us never stop to reflect on what is needful for a good life until is too late.”
All the diversions Ivan Ilyich relied on to stave away the question that his whole life was a lie are explained as a universal problem by Morris in this way: “Our lives are empty. We cannot face the vacuum. So we fill our lives up with junk, with trash, with refuse.”
Explaining what the philosopher Pascal really meant when he explained what we fill our hearts with, Morris says it more bluntly: We fill our hearts with “crap.” Our lives of diversion and deception, the life that caused Ivan Ilyich to ask himself if his whole life had been wrong only when he was faced with his own mortality, made realize that his life was complete fakery.
Seven. Mutual deception becomes the common life, a life of fakery:
When we reach the point, like Ivan Ilyich, that our lives are full of fakery, we tend toward nihilism, the belief that there is no meaning.
Ilyich’s life was one rife with pretentiousness and ornamentation, a façade, a deception, or, if we want to cut to the bone, complete fakery. Not until he was dying, horribly alone without any love from his own family and “friends,” does he contemplate that his whole life was built on a sham.
Eight. The common condition: We desire things because others desire them, not because we do.
Ivan Ilyich has fallen into the trap of lusting over things, not for their own sake, but because he perceives they are desired by others. A job position that he wants is increased in desire when he sees that others want it and when the job is denied him he becomes bitter and obsessed, childishly so.
Upon losing the promotion, he goes into a sullen rage and the narrator explains “that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.” Feeling victimized, Ivan Ilyich languishes in a condition of “ennui,” chronic depression and boredom with life. Throughout his adult life, his mood oscillates between elation and self-pity depending on his fortune. This is the way most of us are and this is the common life.
Nine. One of the dangers of the “ordinary” and “terrible” life:
Cynics see these lives as the true human condition and as such the cynic embraces a life that rejects the possibility of meaning, that is, a life of nihilism.
Ten. To reject the ordinary life and to pursue meaning is to join a small tribe of people. The percentage who go on a meaning quest is so small that some argue this quest is religious. Is Man’s Search for Meaning a religion?
Is Man’s Search for Meaning a Religion?And if so, what is the nature of this "religion"?
One. We crave meaning over power. This is a religious idea, some say. The rabbi Harold S. Kushner writes in the 2006 edition Foreword that Man’s Search for Meaning is indeed a profoundly religious book. It’s a book, he writes, that has the power to change lives. It’s a book that demands we find a higher purpose. It’s a book, he writes, that dismisses Freud’s insistence that life is primarily the drive for pleasure and equally dismisses Alfred Adler’s theory that life is foremost a quest for power. These sensual and vain things must take the back seat to First Things, and one such thing is the search for meaning.
Two. Another argument in Man’s Search for Meaning that many might consider religious is Frankl’s rejection of determinism and the responsibility we have toward our own free will.
For Frankl and many religious writers, the doctrine of determinism, that we are the product of environmental and biological forces we cannot control, contributes to a degraded image of humanity and as such it lowers expectations and diminishes the human spirit. As Frankl writes about the dangers of “pan-determinism”:
By that I mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
Man’s decision to shape who he becomes makes him accountable and this, according to Christian apologist and Catholic writer Peter Kreeft, is an idea rooted in his faith, an idea that uplifts humankind. Yes, we are accountable for our actions, Kreeft writes, and this accountability and this judgment of us a sinners renders a higher view of man than saying we are helpless pawns to determinism and have no accountability for our actions.
Three. Peter Kreeft, a Christian, and Viktor Frankl, a Jew, also share another important idea about meaning that has a strongly religious component: We cannot find meaning until we have been stripped to our bare existence. Frankl observed prisoners, and himself, finding their strongest spiritual reservoirs when subject to the most excruciating conditions in the concentration camps. Being stripped of everything, according to Frankl and Kreeft, makes us find life’s Higher Purpose.
Four. Another idea about meaning that Frankl and Kreeft share is that meaning requires radical self-transformation and this transformation requires a suffering that we must embrace. Frankl argues we must change so that we become worthy of our suffering.
Five. Frankl believes in the soul, a religious idea. Can Viktor Frankl’s view of the soul, which can either flourish and blossom or whither and decay, be discussed only in religious terms? For Frankl, the matter of the soul is a very real thing. He saw spiritual death in the eyes of too many captives in the camps. His concern for the soul goes far beyond theories and abstractions. He call us urgently to “save” our souls by making the right choices. For many, including Rabbi Kushner, Frankl’s message is a religious one. Kushner writes in the Foreword that we must use our freedom to find meaning. Otherwise, we will succumb to spiritual death. Kushner writes: “I have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and, without, they spend day after day sitting at home, depressed, ‘with nothing to do.’”
Six. The sick soul must be healed by meaning.
Kushner writes that Frankl’s doctrine of logotherapy cures the soul “by leading it to find meaning in life.” As a process, logotherapy isn’t necessarily religious. But the context of logotherapy, one that Kushner and others would argue, is very religious because it concerns the sickness of the soul, the concern chiefly of theologians and the clergy, and adhering to the moral absolutes that determine the soul’s development or retardation. We might say a soul without meaning is trapped in ennui, existential boredom, or worse, acedia, the spiritual enervation, listlessness, and torpor resulting from an absence of purpose.
A soul without a purpose is a soul in a vacuum and in this empty state the soul, the theologians inform us, grabs on to misguided forms of happiness: consumerism, sensuality, power-mongering, etc., when in fact what the soul really craves, we are told, is God.
Seven. Frankl uses meaning therapy or logotherapy:
Unlike psychotherapy, logotherapy does not emphasize introspection, regression, and retrospection; instead, as Frankl states in his chapter “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” logotherapy is a “meaning-centered psychotherapy” that focuses on what the patient can do in the future to find meaning as a cure for the sickness of his soul. Frankl explains that the Greek Logos translates into “meaning” and that logotherapy is the quest to find meaning.
Frankl cannot emphasize this enough: “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives.”
Eight. But meaning is not all the same.
Frankl goes on to write that for every person meaning is “unique and specific” and can only be fulfilled by that person alone. The ideals and values generated from meaning are so vital to each person that they represent the most urgent principle of that person’s life. To argue that we and we alone must define what meaning is for ourselves strikes me as more humanistic than religious since we are not reading dogma to finding meaning; rather, we are searching for meaning based on our individual circumstances.
For example, I am a community college instructor and I have certain opportunities for helping people, such as helping students transfer to universities, or becoming a mentor and these roles might not be available to a plumber or carpenter. However, they might have opportunities that I don’t have.
For example, a plumber might help a needy family in a plumbing crisis at a reduced fee or free of charge.
According to Frankl, meaning is dependent on our specific opportunities and skills. If you want to define religion as a moral imperative to find meaning—whatever that meaning may be—then Frankl is professing a sort of religion.
But logotherapy and Frankl’s general philosophy that you must find meaning—without dictating what that meaning should be—doesn’t on the surface seem tied to this or that organized religion. However, I will argue later that there are, at the very least, implicit moral absolutes he presents that provide a criteria for judging the value of one’s meaning and these absolutes have much in common with religion.
Nine. Without meaning, we distract ourselves with acts of self-destruction:
Of course, the world’s religions are concerned with the same crisis Frankl addresses: the crisis of the human condition that results from a lack of meaning. When meaning is frustrated, the person suffers “existential frustration,” which results in all forms of neuroses and extreme forms of behavior. Without meaning, we meander into all sorts of self-destructive projects and obsessions. I think this is the real meaning of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s famous aphorism: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.” Pascal is looking at man’s restlessness in the face of existential frustration and this restlessness causes man to act in ways that result in his unhappiness. He strays from his room and gets into all sorts of mischief because he is bored and desperate to find something to fill the vacuum.
Ten. Examples of self-destruction in the absence of meaning:
For example, we’ve all heard of couples who fight over trifling things because they are bored and are looking for some drama to fill their superficial existence. Or put another way, experiencing the existential emptiness from a life without meaning compels people to dig themselves in a deep hole so that they can find “meaning”—which in truth is a distraction—from the process of escaping their chasm. One of my favorite opening lines from a novel articulates this self-destructive tendency. I am talking about Jim Harrison’s novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent in which the narrator begins by saying, “The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” I have a student who wrote an essay about his friend engaged in such a squandered life. This friend spends over twelve hours a day on a famous shoe website that allows you to chat with other fanatics of this shoe brand. The friend in question has a shoe collection worth tens of thousands of dollars, a fine showcase for people who values such things, but this person is in his early thirties, marginally employed, and still living with his parents. It would appear to me that his life could be characterized by existential frustration that compels him to “piss his life away on nonsense.” Such nonsense is in abundance. I’ve heard of people on the social networking website facebook confess to feeling jealous that their “facebook friends” have accumulated more friends than they have. It is rather self-evident that this accumulation of “friends” creates the appearance of popularity and meaningful connection when in truth these facebook members may be rather deluded on these points.
Eleven. Even though Frankl is a Jew and not a Christian, his therapy, called logotherapy, shares the life of sacrifice with Christianity.
Another trait that logotherapy shares with religion, or at least Christianity, is that Frankl says “we must bear our cross,” meaning that we must embrace challenge and suffering to pursue our ideals and values. Pursuing a life of challenge, and the stress that comes with it, is in conflict with a lot of feel-good psychotherapy that promises tranquility and a stress-free existence. In contrast, logotherapy sees conflict and stress as natural components of a meaningful, fulfilled life; therefore, the patient doesn’t seek to be “blissed-out”; rather, the patient seeks fulfillment through meaning and he embraces that all the conflict that meaning creates for him. The strength to navigate through conflict and suffering comes from the lucidity of one’s life purpose.
As Frankl quotes the Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” If we don’t have a higher ideal, one that takes us out of our self-centeredness, Frankl says our souls are doomed to atrophy.
Twelve. We need a higher purpose to engage in conflict, which is the essence of life: Frankl gives a specific example from his own life of a purpose that kept him his drive for survival sharp while he suffered in the concentration camps. He wanted to survive so he could rewrite a manuscript that had been confiscated by the Nazis. He writes that his mental health, and that for all of us, is dependent on “the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” We need struggle and conflict in our lives, Frankl argues. We need to fight for a “worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.” Otherwise, we must face the restlessness and despair resulting from the “existential vacuum.”
Without meaning, Frankl points out, man is fated to try to blend in with society, becoming a conformist, or be obedient to an authority and suffer the lack of development that comes from living in the shadow of totalitarianism. More often than not, the existential vacuum results in boredom and it is in boredom where we get into trouble, devising all sorts of self-destructive schemes to fill the vacuum.
Thirteen. We don’t choose meaning; meaning chooses us. So how do we fill this vacuum with meaning? Frankl argues that we cannot come up with a general definition of meaning: “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.” He warns us not to turn meaning into an abstraction. Rather, he writes: “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”
Frankl emphasizes his point further by explaining that we are not even in a position to ask what meaning for our lives is. Meaning is a calling. As he writes: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of us life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of life.”
So it is our responsibility to find out what life demands of us to find meaning whether we are religious or not. And it is our responsibility to define our own specific meaning depending on our own set of circumstances.
In summary, Man’s Search for Meaning is not a proselytizing book about believing in God or embracing one of the world’s religions. However, it shares a lot of the same concerns as religion: The book is intended to make us change our lives, to find a higher purpose, to reject pleasure and power as the primary motivations of life, to acknowledge the strengthening or the withering of the soul, to be cautious of misguided forms of happiness, to be leery of the imaginary happy self we project to others and ourselves, to bear our own cross, to embrace a life of challenge and conflict, and of course to find our own meaning based on our individual circumstances in which only we can decide our meaning’s legitimacy.
Defining our own meaning in this manner doesn’t sound religiously prescriptive to me, but if everyone is defining their own meaning, what if some forms of meaning seem superior to others and what if some forms of meaning seem very inferior and even dangerous? In other words, is all meaning equal and in the context of Man’s Search for Meaning how do we measure the quality of someone’s chosen meaning?
Addressing Someone Else's Arguments Elevates Your Essay's Sophistication
The Reptilian Instinct Vs. the Meaning Quest
Peter Singer's persuasive essay strips us bare of our selfish wants as he equates our tendency to accumulate all the stuff we don’t need with ignoring the plight of drowning children and as such being responsible for the death of those children. We are, Singer convincingly argues, products of our fortunate “social capital”; therefore, we have an obligation to those who do not have a social capital.
Furthermore, because we patronize and live in a state of interdependence on international corporations for our goods and services, we are obliged to help the poor in developing countries. For after all, these countries, led by despots and other unsavory characters, make deals with international corporations, selling raw materials for a higher price than they would by keeping their resources in their own countries. The result is that people living in developing countries starve as their resources are leeched by international corporations.
Now if we follow Singer’s logical moral imperative to its ultimate conclusion, then we are forced to accept that we must renounce our worldly desires and achieve a spiritual condition that is so disdainful of personal comforts and luxuries that we must live only on bare necessities while giving all else to the poor. Anything short of this ideal would be, to use Singer’s analogy, equivalent to being responsible for the deaths of drowning children.
While part of me would like to embrace Singer’s moral imperative and spread Singer’s gospel of uncompromising charity throughout the world, the skeptical part of me questions just how realistic Singer’s ideal is. For what Singer is arguing for is nothing short than a form of spiritual socialism, that is a condition in which human beings renounce their selfish desires for the “finer things in life” in order that they distribute their wealth as evenly as possible. This is a noble, saintly ideal indeed, but it contradicts our reptilian hard-wiring.
I’m sad to say this, but without selfish motivation, most of us will not be creative or innovative. A world in which we all share our things in a communal potluck and don’t aspire to materialistic excellence is a banal and dreary and colorless world without creativity and innovation. Only when we are enticed by technological razzle-dazzle and model dream homes and exquisite clothing glorified by the silky-tongued fashionistas do we find the reptilian sparks in our brains’ creative nerve centers exploding in glorious paroxysms and it is in these nerve explosions that we create and innovate. Sad as it is, my friends, selfishness is high-octane rocket fuel for creativity.
I’m not arguing that we should be selfish pigs in order to encourage our creativity and aspiration. What I am arguing for is a balance. It was Aristotle who wrote about finding the golden mean. If we error too much in selfishness, we’re thoughtless imbeciles, moral gnats, and reptilian subhumans. On the other hand, if we strive to become spiritual socialists, we will become drab, stagnant and bovine. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Forces Against Meaning:
The Reptilian
Moral Relativism
The Cult of Youth
The Cult of Youth Denies That Our Lives Our Finite
Viktor Frankl makes it clear that we must have a sense of our finiteness and our limitations to find meaning. If we live day to day with no ultimate goal in mind, we will find ourselves trapped in a “deformed time” warp and begin to “decay,” our spirits starving from lack of meaning. A word that defines this phenomenon is acedia, the condition of apathy and lethargy resulting from a lack of purpose and focus. I can remember my friend and I, when we were about ten, argued with our mothers who both wanted us to go to summer school. We made our case that we deserved a rest, won the argument, and did not have to attend school during the summer months. For the month of June, we were fine, but as late July set in, we were miserably bored and aching for the school year to begin. Daily watching of Mr. Ed, Kimba the White Lion, and Speed Racer did little to disrupt the agonizing monotony. We were jealous of our friends who went to summer school and listened enviously as they described their projects, guitar lessons, cooking classes, and sports activities. They had what we didn’t have. A daily focus on something that required discipline and commitment. We knew deep down they were getting something out of their summer that we weren’t: an opportunity to learn and grow as human beings.
One of the strongest renderings I’ve seen of the despair of living a provisional day to day existence is Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray plays a misanthrope, Phil Connors, who is fated to live is despairing, empty life over and over, seemingly for eternity, unless he can connect with the human race and grow up beyond his adolescent self-absorption.
Two. The Cult of Youth Leads to stagnation, the centripetal cycle: In Thomas S. Hibbs’ Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld, he contrasts the many films and TV shows that show characters trapped in a cycle of “entrapment” in which the characters never learn freedom and maturity with Phil Connors, who breaks out of his recurring private hell: “Predictably, Murray eventually learns the difference between love and self-gratification and comes to acknowledge the humanity of others.”
The private hell of sloth and stunted emotional growth is indeed a sort of time warp, referred to by both Frankl and Hibbs. This time warp is the direct result of the obsession with youth as the highest ideal, a time for which we must always place ourselves. Obsessing over one phase of life, the time of adolescence, has dangerous consequences that pertain to a failed search for meaning. For one, as explained in Joseph Epstein’s essay, “The Perpetual Adolescent,” we lose a meaningful narrative to our existence. As Epstein writes:
Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle--adulthood--was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake. To violate the boundaries of any of the three divisions of life was to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one's world somehow out of joint, to be, let us face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque.
Epstein argues that is in adulthood where so much is at stake, but we forego the meaning of adulthood if we intractably cocoon ourselves in the attitude and façade of adolescence. This façade is actually encouraged by the majority of advertising. Epstein explains:
All this is reinforced by the play of market forces, which strongly encourage the mythical dream of perpetual youthfulness. The promise behind 95 percent of all advertising is that of recaptured youth, whose deeper promise is lots more sex yet to go. The ads for the $5,000 wristwatch, the $80,000 car, the khakis, the vodka, the pharmaceuticals to regrow hair and recapture ardor, all whisper display me, drive me, wear me, drink me, swallow me, and you stop the clock--youth, Baby, is yours.
Our longings for eternal adolescence, Epstein argues, are reflected not just in our consumer habits but in our favorite TV programs.
Three. Seinfeld is about centripetal time: One of the most popular sitcoms ever, Seinfeld, captures our hunger to live in a time warp where no one grows up, no one assumes responsibility, and no one holds anyone to a high aspirations. If anything, one’s low aspirations become a badge of honor. It is a form of catastrophic self-betrayal to never aspire to anything far-reaching, to capitulate to a slacker mentality, and to veil one’s shortcomings behind a veneer of adolescent youthfulness. As Epstein writes:
The greatest sins, Santayana thought, are those that set out to strangle human nature. This is of course what is being done in cultivating perpetual adolescence, while putting off maturity for as long as possible. Maturity provides a more articulated sense of the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of life, a more subtly reticulated graph of human possibility. Above all, it values a clear and fit conception of reality. Maturity is ever cognizant that the clock is running, life is finite, and among the greatest mistakes is to believe otherwise. Maturity doesn't exclude playfulness or high humor. Far from it. The mature understand that the bitterest joke of all is that the quickest way to grow old lies in the hopeless attempt to stay forever young.
Epstein and Frankl agree that it is dangerous to blind oneself from the finite and to live perpetually a warped time bubble in which one is trapped in a vacuum.
Four. Centripetal time is about “nothingbutness.” Not so, argues Frankl. He writes “there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies man is free.”
The appeal of this “nothingbutness,” as Frankl calls it, is that is suggests a life of freedom, freedom to do nothing, which is really no freedom at all. Surrendering to hopelessness and sloth is hardly a worthy definition of freedom. Real freedom, Frankl argues, is our responsibility to find meaning in the face of suffering. However, our freedom is not unlimited. As Frankl explains: “To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”
Five. The cult of adolescence encourages nihilism, the belief that we are helpless and doomed to a life of stagnation, so this cult dismisses the idea of maturity and meaning and to embrace nihilism as one’s core belief.
But is nihilism really a belief, that is, something that someone really believes is real, or is it a rationalization for choosing to take the easy way out? Take the example of a student I had ten years ago or so. Against her father’s wishes, she enrolled in college to become an education major. He didn’t believe in college or education of any kind, both of which he called a “waste of time.” He was an alcoholic, she explained in one of her essays. He’d drink beer and do bench presses in the garage while she got ready in her bedroom to go to sleep. She wrote that sometimes he’d come in with alcohol on his breath, look down at her while she feigned sleep, and shouted, “Think you’re better than me!” Then he’d look up at himself in her mirror, flex his muscles, take a swig of beer, and return to the garage to resume with his chest workout.
Did he really believe education was a farce or was he rationalization away his own fear of it and his own lack of discipline? It seems his behavior was guided less by belief and more by self-justification and delusion. And these attributes impeded her father’s search for finding meaning, for maturing, and as such he was jealous of her daughter’s desire to carve a better place in her life.
Six. Maturity, not adolescence, leads to meaning.
My student soon after told me she planned on moving out of her father’s house to escape his constant hostility. Her focus and commitment to her education in the face of her father’s discouragement and hostility attests to her strong character and maturity.
In fact, it is clear that to find meaning, in the sense that Frankl describes it, we must become mature. The more meaning we have, the more mature we are. And vice versa. Therefore, we cannot talk about a Meaning Scale without talking about a Maturity Scale.
Part Two. Nihilism is an obstacle to achieving meaning
One. Nihilism is Anti-Frankl: Generally speaking, nihilism is against everything Viktor Frankl stands for because it is a philosophy that explicitly states there is no meaning, that values are relative, that the way we are is the product of environmental and biological factors and we are helpless in shaping who we are, which is essentially animals, and that since we experience nothing after death, “anything goes.” Additionally, nihilism tells us, “morality” is a middle-class affectation, a cunning invention of the Powers at Be to keep the masses, the peasants, and the dumb, toothy hordes in check. There are variations of this view but it seems there are two major divides of nihilism, disingenuous and sincere. Both forms can impede our search for meaning but the former is the far more pernicious variety while the sincere form, while providing a stumbling block, can actually strengthen our search for meaning.
Two. Nihilism means we have no free will, no freedom: We have no freedom to choose our dignity or a life of high moral purpose. There is no purpose in life except for the maniacal mirages and chimeras that we become obsessed with unless we reasonably accept the “nothingness” of existence. Our lives are of no consequence at all and any our belief in our consequential existence is a sign of phony sanctimony and delusional grandeur.
Three. One cause of nihilism is depersonalization: Viktor Frankl writes about the forces that led to this type of nihilism in the concentration camps. The first cause of nihilism was the loss one’s individuality and self-respect leading to depersonalization. As Frankl writes:
A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)—under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people: his existence descended to the level of animal life. The men were herded—sometimes to one place then to another; sometimes driven together, then apart—like a flock of sheep without a thought or a will of their own. A small but dangerous pack watched them from all sides, well versed in methods of torture and sadism. They drove the herd incessantly, backwards and forwards, with shouts, kicks and blows. And we, the sheep, thought of two things only—how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food.
Four. Other causes are fear, loss of faith in the future, and bitterness. The second cause of nihilism is fear, the kind that made camp inmates believe they had no free will but were the pawns of merciless fate. Such feelings led to apathy and helplessness and in this state it was impossible to find any meaning in their suffering.
Nihilism’s third cause is losing faith in the future, which, Frankl says, made the prisoners lose their “spiritual hold.” Once a prisoner gave up any possibility of hope in his future, his system would shut down and he would accelerate his own death. Over and over, Frankl gives examples of prisoners who died shortly after losing hope for their freedom.
Finally, bitterness and disillusionment experienced by the prisoners when they returned to their former life contributed to nihilism. They became bitter when after they returned to their home towns, they met people who, ignorant of the atrocities the prisoners faced, seemed lacking in empathy and the imagination to comprehend the suffering endured by the survivors. And they became disillusioned with their God or life itself when they could not reconcile the amount of cruelty they had witnessed with a life-affirming worldview regarding God, fate, or both.
These prisoners and survivors of the concentration camp put up no pseudo-intellectual façade of nihilism; they had through their experiences become nihilistic to the bone.
Part Three. Consumerism Impedes Our Meaning Quest: No doubt our DNA is coded for self-preservation, the instinct to ferociously pursue and protect our self-interests. But in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explains that this coding does not totally define us. In fact, if we ignore our responsibility to find meaning, and the values required to create meaning, our self-interest degrades us into an animal existence stripped of all dignity as we become a corrupt, denigrated version of ourselves. A wise form of self-interest, according to Frankl, focuses on an ultimate goal in life.
Two. Self-Interest Diminishes When We Have a Future Goal:
To define ultimate, Frankl explains the two meanings of the Latin word finis, “the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.” If we cannot reach for a higher goal, a commitment to some higher ideal greater than ourselves, he says, we will be trapped in the cycle of living a day to day “provisional” existence. When existence becomes “provisional,” as Frankl calls it, we live only to survive and kill time as we having nothing to look forward to. In such a state, our lives become consumed by self-interest and apathy as we turn inward, recoiling from the burden of ongoing suffering. Always feeling burdened by overwhelming hardships, we become fatigued and what little energy we have is devoted to placating ourselves and filling the “existential vacuum.”
Three. Filling the Existential Vacuum with Consumerism
The misguided attempts at filling this vacuum are, Frankl writes, forms of “neurotic” behavior, which include all sorts of distractions, the “Sunday drive” phenomenon in which people drive because they are bored and consumer addictions, which have become worse since Man’s Search for Meaning was first published. The danger of being bored and living a provisional day to day existence is that we focus too much on our misery and the selfish attempts to quell our misery backfire and make our condition worse and worse. Selfishness as a reaction to the existential vacuum endangers us by creating a hoarding impulse, other wise known as a consumer addiction; asserting vain displays of Darwinian superiority over others, and exaggerating our suffering to the point that we see our personal distress as especially bad, a type of exceptional pain that compels us to ignore the pain of others and assume the temperament of a petulant malcontent. Selfishness can be about investing all our energy on devoting our thoughts to ourselves.
Four. The Three Stages of Consumerism. In the realm of consumer addiction, it appears there are three stages of the disease. Stage One is the ways we waste our time “researching” sales and rationalizing unnecessary purchases within limits that don’t endanger our finances.
Stage Two is taking the addiction so that our basic needs our sacrificed.
And Stage Three is engaging in outright sociopathic behavior to get what we want.
I appear to be an example of Stage One. I relish in the exhilarating delights of consumerism as much as the next person and as a result I have seen how consumerism can intoxicate and make me behave irrationally, exhibiting behaviors that do not protect my self-interests. I once bought a $300 watch, for example, and swore as was on a watch-buying hiatus, for at least six months, but then a $400 that I had been lusting over suddenly became available for $130. This was too good to be true. I violated my self-sworn hiatus and explained to my wife that by purchasing a watch that I had planned on buying anyway, the cheaper price was in essence giving me $270. It felt like some invisible lever had placed $270 cash in my hand after I bought the watch. Let me repeat that. After paying $130 on a watch I wasn’t supposed to buy at that time, I felt like had been paid money to buy it. When I explained this to my wife, she explained that I suffered from a condition known as “creative budgeting,” a form of self-justifying my compulsive purchases. Fortunately, my family obligations have curbed my appetite for indulging my watch obsession so that I still have money for my nine-month twin girls’ diapers, formula, and organic baby food.
Of course, the more destructive form of selfishness, Stage Two, causes people to undermine their priorities so that they buy the object of their desire but have no money left for basic necessities. I can recall the student essay I read about a young man who was hell-bent on living in the chic condo in Brentwood and leasing a BMW. However, he had no money for food and clothes, so he depended on his siblings’ hand-me-downs and a diet of crackers and sardines. According to Frankl, if this young man had an ultimate purpose in life, he would not be compelled to buy things he cannot afford. His overspending is a misguided attempt to fill the void.
When the void becomes truly aching and the person in question has no scruples whatsoever, we’ve arrived at Stage Three, the level of the sociopath. About twenty years ago, a student wrote an essay about her sister whose fiancé was a struggling auto mechanic. The bride to be cancelled her wedding three times because she wanted her fiancé to have more money to make the wedding more elaborate. But the sociopathic element isn’t evident until we consider that this bride to be was, months before her wedding, already planning on divorcing her fiancé. What she wanted from him was a posh ceremony, nothing more, and she was willing to trick him into believing she cared about him enough to make a marriage commitment if doing so got her what she wanted.
Five. Consumerism as an expression of dominance.
Selfishness isn’t just about hoarding and desire for material things. It’s also about the need to assert dominance over others. We’re talking about the Darwinian instinct gone awry when compounded by the compulsions of the ego. When real meaning is replaced with false meaning, like the striving to be superior to others, these misguided attempts often lead to self-destruction. For example, one of my students had a friend, a man in his early twenties, who bought a very fast car, a Subaru WRX STI, and his obsession with having the fastest car in town compelled him to lighten it by removing the front passenger seat. Where there was once a leather-bound cushion, there was now a metal stub, not a comfortable arrangement for the young man’s girlfriend who, after one insufferable ride, gave him an ultimatum: Put the seat back or I’m gone. She ended up leaving him.
Compromising relationships because of the obsession with power is bad enough, but this obsession can even be fatal as one student explained to the class: He and his father were shopping one summer at a bazaar in Buenos Aires. The temperature was over 105 degrees and there was an old woman wearing a full-length fur coat, presumably for no other reason than to show everyone how rich she was. The father and son noticed she was sweating profusely and her eyes rolled into the back of her head before she collapsed and died of heat stroke.
Six. Consumerism becomes a substitute for meaning.
Most of us don’t die a physical death from consumeristic addiction, but a spiritual death, one in which we substitute real meaning with false meaning, is more prevalent as described by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed. As he explains:
People look to their goods not just of pleasure but for meaning. They want their stuff to tell them who they are. They ask that inanimate things, mere objects, serve as stand-ins for momentous notions. Not just pretty flowers but a built-in serenity is taken to exist in the pattern of a Laura Ashley wallpaper. Not just style but stateliness of person is presumed to be made manifest by a Ralph Lauren blazer. “Taste” becomes a sort of cult by whose expensive magic such eminently human traits as sensuality, dignity, even humor are transubstantiated into consumer goods; and since those traits are taken to exist in such readily accessible and uncomplicated form on store shelves, there is less reason to search for them in other people or even in oneself. People disappear into their clothes. Their conversation becomes merely a part of the ambience of the restaurants they frequent. The pen they write with is taken to be more revealing than what they might scrawl.
In the throes of consumerism, our soul appears to be leeched away by our shopping obsessions until the soul completely dissipates and is replaced entirely by our arsenal of products, a feeble bastion for warding off the existential vacuum. To drive his point home, Shames uses the example of two shopping fiends:
Shopping, for some, had become a macabre detour in the otherwise unstylish quest to find oneself. Consider the “Sonia Sister”—women who frequented designer Sonia Rykiel’s boutique at Henri Bendel in Manhattan, and who, according to the floor manager there, “gradually . . . bec[a]me obsessed with acquiring all the right pieces” and took on a “spooky resemblance to one another.” For them, the clothes became a sort of exoskeleton, which, as in the case of insects, was the sole protection and support of the gelatinous and trembling critter inside. When you bought “taste,” you bought yourself a personality, and it was that, over and above the much-blabbed-about “quality” of the goods, which justified the price.
Seven. Selfishness becomes an expression of an undeveloped personality.
The hunger for personality, identity, and meaning, and the misdirected ways we try to satisfy that hunger, makes us selfish. Of course, selfishness raises its ugly head in more ways than materialism and dominance. There is the simple lack of consideration for others, which requires all sorts of rules to be imposed where consideration for others is lacking. Take the example of gyms putting 20-minute limits on their cardio machine during peak hours so that some members don’t hog the cardio equipment, doing an exercise for two hours straight while a long line of members wait their turn. Or take the all-you-can-eat buffet that has a sign telling people to stand in an orderly line and avoid touching the buffet food with their hands.
There is also the selfish impulse to be heard, to lecture, to talk over everyone and never learn to listen to others. Living insulated in a Universe of One is perhaps the ultimate selfishness.
So the selfish personality looks like this: He is someone whose needs must always be met; he is someone who constantly jockeys for attention; he is someone with in insatiable craving for power; he is someone forever hoarding his trinkets and trophies. This is not the picture of a happy person but a disturbed, lonely child, an adult suffering from arrested development. And once again we are looking at the Maturity Scale as a way of measuring our success, or failure, in finding meaning.
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