I’ve been having conversations around two different ways to live life:
- Find peace and happiness despite suffering
- Reject suffering and strive, even futilely and at the cost of your peace and happiness, for change
I don’t think one or the other is more valid, I just want to explore what I’ve been thinking about and how the conversations have been going.
Find Peace
To find peace is to take a situation that sucks, such as being in a concentration camp, and finding meaning in the suffering, or at least being peaceful about it and accepting your lot. I believe this is the perspective Viktor Frankl argues for in “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He quotes Dostoevsky, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.” This ties to a general life philosophy I have, which is that humans are the most adaptable lifeforms in the universe, and this often gives me strength in tough situations, like when I move to a foreign country: it’s hard, but I’m biologically tuned to adapt no matter how hard it gets.
I say adapt because this approach requires changing little or nothing about the environment. Maybe it’s a more passive philosophy? I don’t care yet to address why the external situations aren’t changed, merely that they aren’t.
This could be bad. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wonders whether prisoners entrusted themselves to fate, rather than try to escape, simply to avoid making a decision. It was never the right time to escape, and nobody wanted to responsibility to make that decision.
Recently I had a really interesting conversation around the possibility of ending death, or at least significantly prolonging life. I thought it was a forgone conclusion that this would be a good option for humanity to have, so long as it was opt-in and especially so long as the ability to kill oneself remained available. The person I was chatting with though said this was a terrible thing, because he didn’t want the responsibility for deciding when to die. I still don’t quite understand the logic, seeing as we take all sorts of measures to push back our death date, such as eating healthy, treating our illnesses, wearing seatbelts, and etc, but these were irrelevant: they wanted to die eventually, they just didn’t want to decide when this is.
I suppose this has something to do with unwillingness to make decisions. There could be something to the Find Peace philosophy that is a result from this: knowing that it’s hard to making a decision to change the situation (such as trying to escape from a concentration camp), one instead leverages the various strategies we all have to make the situation more psychologically comfortable, by, idk, being more mindful, finding meaning in the situation. For Frankl, the suffering and the challenge was an opportunity to test his inner strength.
In a less extreme example, I think this is how much of a population operates. It seems most people just want to be left alone to live comfortably with their families, maybe relax and watch tv in the evening. Even if they have to spend the majority of their waking lives making money for someone else in often tedious or even backbreaking ways, so long as they can have the little slice of comfort that gives them meaning, they won’t revolt.
Maybe that’s because there’s no solution to their degradation, such as was the case with the concentration camp prisoners (or it seems there’s no solution), and therefore simply accepting your fate and trying to make your life as good as possible, as happy as possible, regardless, is a good idea.
In the wildly popular new TV show Severance, this would be the philosophy of Mark, the character played by Adam Scott. The Choose Violence philosophy would be followed by Helly R.
Choose Violence
SPOILERS SEVERANCE. It’s imo one of the best shows ever made and I highly recommend you go watch the whole thing without reading anything about it.
TLDR Severance, they build an inescapable microcosm of capitalism, where one’s whole life is staring at a computer doing purposefully meaningless work. The workers are utterly disconnected from purpose, output, or craft. Their entire lives are spent in the office and the only comforts they have are lunch and the occasional corporate treat, such as a waffle party.
Mark buys in, and tries to be really good at his job, and an inspiration and leader for his coworkers. He is a liberal: he sympathizes with those who suffer, but he strives to prevent any rocking of the boat, arguing instead that they should take what they can get to avoid accidentally causing further harm.
Helly R. finds herself in this situation and immediately and persistently attempts to escape, and, failing that, kill herself in a way that her “real world” self that put her in this hellish situation would be aware of right before perishing.
I call this the “choose violence” philosophy. This is a philosophy that leads to revolution, prison breaks, peasant uprisings, slaves killing their masters, and tax crime. I believe it might also be a less happy life. It’s certainly less peaceful.
There might be a dignity in accepting one’s fate and making it comfortable as possible, but I believe there’s a problem with the peaceful philosophy in that this leaves one open to be exploited and degraded by anyone willing to cause suffering to someone else for personal gain (or just, arbitrarily, such as by the Nazis).
In Paris, had the peasants been too zen about their situation, there’d have been no French Revolution. Same for the colonists in early North America.
Our society seems to laud these revolutionaries at least as much we do the silently suffering Viktor Frankls of the world, which makes me think we’re all just a bit schizophrenic. Except, not actually: we seem to love historical revolutions and revolutionaries, but society seems to hate modern revolutionaries. Take examples like the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, general reviled as an uppity extra-legal movement of rioters asking for too much too quickly. See the Stonewall Riots, or the anti-Vietnam-war movement, or the Black Lives Matter protests.
In fact, disrupt the peace of the Marks of the world too much, and you may find the Find Peace folks suddenly on the other side of the picket line, angry with you either for disrupting their peace or even for just not accepting your lot and making a mess of the whole thing. Sadly that means the enemy of a revolutionary is not just a counter-philosophy (such as fascism or racism), it’s also just… everyone that just wants a happy, normal, calm life.
Is there a Middle Ground?
I don’t mean centrism, which is just another form of conservatism. Is there a way to find peace, while maintaining a clear line of degradation that, if crossed, causes you to pick up a pitchfork?
I think for the average person, there isn’t. Frankl wondered about the mental state of the prisoners, and pointed out all sorts of fallacious arguments they made to themselves to prevent themselves from taking action: some would always think reprieve was “just around the corner,” and to thus act out of turn would simply get themselves killed for no reason. He thought this was perhaps denial or shock.
We could observe this during COVID. Most countries were hesitant to call the pandemic what it was, and jump to lockdowns, mask mandates, and etc. Milquetoast measures drew out the pandemic, such as ill-wrought half-baked lockdowns that merely extended both the duration of lockdowns as well as the duration of the presence of the virus. To do what was necessary, such as total shift to remote work wherever possible, would require an immediate acceptance of the reality of the situation by many.
This might not quite be it though. Even if every person about to be trotted off to a concentration camp in Nazi Germany was fully aware of their fate and the degradation they’d face, they might have decided resistance was futile and treated it as Frankl did. I’m not sure. It seems some were realistic about the fact that they would die in the camp, but didn’t kill themselves because it seemed pointless when they’d die soon anyway, according to Frankl.
So, I don’t think most people have such a line defined, be they zen or otherwise. Take a modern example, climate change. When do we decide to start blowing up pipelines? When Florida is underwater? When do we decide that the genocide against trans people in the USA has gone far enough? The removal of civil rights? When do the middle and lower class in the USA decide they’ve had enough of paying health insurance premiums at gunpoint with no benefit?
I think there’s no limit. I think most people will deny to their watery graves.
Effective Violence
If it’s true that the limits of degradation of most people are undefined, then the only way to improve society beyond depredations is through the actions of the angry and unpeaceful. But, the angry and unpeaceful, or revolutionaries, as I wrote earlier, tend to make enemies of everyone, even those they’re trying to help. How can they effect change in a way that makes only the fascists their enemy?
I don’t know for certain, but lately it seems it will involve effecting change in a way that maintains at least some of the comforts of modern society. At minimum, the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Peter Kropotkin seems to argue for similar in “The Conquest of Bread,” noting the tendency of early communist revolutions in Europe to degrade to the point of high minded political debate while the people in Paris starve, leaving room for reactionaries to move in and terminate a revolution, or worse, co-opt it.
This is a perspective I’ve been exploring quite a bit and find a lot of traction in. A “quite revolution,” where we simply opt out of capitalism through mutual aid and leveraging modern technology to provide ourselves great comfort for little labor, extracting livelihoods out of parcels of land capitalists don’t care enough to kill over. A fantastic exploration of this concept is “Walkaway” by Cory Doctorow, a novel in which large swathes of society manage to detach themselves from capitalist degradation through the combined power of FOSS, copy-left sharing of hardware designs, very good 3d printers, very good solar panels, and very good batteries.
If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them. My email is caleb@ this website’s domain.