Put On Your Big Boy Pants

The Rodney Dangerfield Factor

Manderlin's Search for Meaning Chapter 2

 

The Rodney Dangerfield Factor

 

 

Here’s how I summarize Man’s Search for Meaning to my students on the first day of class: Subject to endless tortures and exhaustion in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl observed that some people, including himself, became stronger in spirit, held on to life, and maintained their moral values while others became dehumanized, apathetic, and spiritually dead. While identifying these two camps of people, Frankl came up with his book’s main argument about the nature of suffering, which is really a moral imperative for all of us: No matter how torturous our circumstances, no matter how deeply we are thrown into the vortex of evil, no matter how utterly meaningless our freak show of a life seems to us, we must find meaning by choosing the appropriate attitude that uplifts our humanity in a way that radically changes who we are, discarding our false necessities, and stripping ourselves bare of all our illusions. The constant and often overwhelming suffering that the world dishes out to us every day is not reason to despair or to become a vicious animal or to embrace the philosophy of nihilism; rather, all the world’s pain and suffering is an inevitable part of life that affords us the opportunity to find meaning, to connect to others, and to become a stronger person so that our new self doesn’t even resemble its previous incarnation. We can and must make this radical change, Frankl argues, by finding a higher purpose, an ideal larger than ourselves. Quoting Nietzsche, he says, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life’s cruelty and evil is what Frankl calls “Tragic Optimism.”

 

I have yet to make this radical change. Look at my childhood photos and look at me now, and it’s the same expression: a brooding, pissy-faced creature forced to endure This Mistake We Call Life. My parents tried to cheer me up when I was a kid. They took me to circuses, carnivals, puppet shows, but these entertainments only made me worse. Frustrated by my gloominess, my father would say, “Jesus, son, it looks like a birdy went poo-poo on your lip.”

 

My father was taken back perhaps by my undying sadness, which he didn’t want to see in me. So angered by my moping about, he’d often shout at me “to grow some balls” and “to stop moving like an old lady.” These admonishments in turn made me feel even more inadequate, a condition that I tried to hide by being intimidating and when I couldn’t hide my feelings of self-loathing and rejection I was desperate and this desperation, I’m convinced, gives off a repelling hormone, the Desperation Hormone, which I now surmise made that college girl so repulsed by my existence.

 

My hero Viktor Frankl would scoff at my self-analysis. He would argue that I am not a victim of cynicism and despair, that I have the power to free myself of my mental afflictions, that I possess free will. As Frankl observes, “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

 

I want to believe Viktor Frankl. I really do. But I keep returning to an interview I read with one of my heroes, the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who said you can’t really change who you are. “You never really change. You’re born a certain way and that’s it.” When I first read this interview in my early twenties, I remember immediately agreeing with Dangerfield. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So what’s it matter if we embrace Tragic Optimism or not? Why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?

 

Another hero of mine, George Carlin, had a similarly pessimistic view. He famously said, “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” Carlin is telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our inevitable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them.

 

So what is it then? Are we free to change ourselves, as Frankl argues, or are we stuck in our predicament? Who am I to believe? Saint Frankl? Or my comedic heroes Dangerfield and Carlin? Do I have to take a side? I love Frankl whose courageous life gives me inspiration for the possibility of a better, nobler existence. But I love my cynical comedic heroes whose nihilistic diatribes have also brought me a sort of cathartic joy. Yes, it’s true. Nihilism when packaged by a master like Dangerfield or Carlin has a pleasure all of its own. Sometimes I’m in a solemn Frankl mood but other times I’m in a more scabrous, comedian mood. I’ve got the Frankl Factor inside me, but I also have the Dangerfield Factor. Do I have to pick one over the other?

 

I’m in my middle age, and I haven’t yet been able to answer that question, so who am I teach Man’s Search for Meaning?

 

 

 

Related articles

Rodney Dangerfield website goes live for his 92nd birthday

The Rodney Dangerfield of Conditions

Rodney Dangerfield: Late Comedian's Sweat in Fridge

Rappin' Rodney by Rodney Dangerfield

Still Grappling Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning After a Decade in the Classroom

I Am Unworthy of Teaching Viktor Frankl's Masterpiece

I Am Unworthy of Teaching Viktor Frankl's Masterpiece

Manderlin's Search for Meaning Chapter One

 

I Am Unworthy of Teaching Viktor Frankl’s Masterpiece

 

When you teach Viktor Frankl’s beloved masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning, as I do, at the college level and you have been doing so for over a decade, you have certain responsibilities. I presume you don’t have to be an all-out saint like Viktor Frankl, risking your life to help others the way he did in the concentration camps, but you should be moving in the right direction on the scale of positive attitude and meaning, flourishing in your work, your maturity, and your service to others.

 

And there lies the problem. Having taught Man’s Search for Meaning for over ten years, I should have absorbed some of the book’s powerful wisdom and its essential goodness, but I feel like the same desperate soul that I was before I taught it, which is disturbing for many reasons not the least of which I feel like a fraud and a hypocrite.

 

I have fallen short of being “worthy of suffering,” of being a free agent, someone who is more than a “plaything of circumstance.” And knowing this brings me shame.

 

Often I imagine Frankl perched in heaven tsktsking me as he watches me bloviate his book’s principles to my students, for he would see me as a confident, capable speaker but someone whose life violates his moral imperative: We make an “inner decision” to choose under any circumstances our attitude toward life and we must choose to grasp our highest moral behavior and as a result make ourselves worthy of our suffering. But my attitude is horrendous, toxic, cynical, fearful, desperate, and at times even nihilistic.

 

If I may illustrate, I was at this college party back when I was in my early twenties and an attractive girl who knew me from Introduction to Art class walked up to me, not because she liked me, but because she needed to get something off her chest. She said, “I need to tell you something. You’re not the kind of person people gravitate to. You have this face that makes people feel stupid and you look like you’re always inhaling foul odors.”

 

Then keeping her head turned toward me, she walked backwards across the room and put her arm around this evenly tanned guy who was conspicuously free of my sour expression and she curled her lips  as if to say, “See you later, loser.” And to add to the insult, she made this scrunched-up face at me as if being in my presence had afflicted her with a dark cloud of stench and now she was leaving my stench-infested world and entering a more fragrant universe where everyone smiled at each other because everyone smelled like fresh lilac.

 

I was stunned by the raw disdain she expressed toward me and I was equally stunned by the truth that I didn’t want to hear: I do have a way of looking at people like I’m judging them severely and that I’m smelling foul odors from them as if I disapprove of their entire existence. And sometimes I really do feel that way, but the expression more often than not has little to do with judging others but more with a sense of general desperation that consumes me. I am desperate for answers about the problems of death and existence that always seem in short supply. I am desperate for courage and confidence and identity, but these things also remain scarce. My face therefore isn’t of a man disapproving of others but of a man who disapproves of life itself.

 

And this disapproving, grumpy face of mine evidences a man who does not embrace the robust attitude toward life that Frankl says we must assert as we brave our way through life’s challenges.

 

I teach Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece, but I am the embodiment of the book’s antithesis. The irony of it all is not funny. It is killing me.