Viktor Frankl

This post piggy backs my last post about what I've been noticing about humans and the impact of our attitudes. You can read that post here.

The name in the title of the post is the name of a man that who had just about as tragic of a life as you can imagine. He and his family were imprisoned during the holocaust in Nazi Germany. I read about him while reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I don't really see a point in re-summarizing the story, so here's a quote from the book written by Stephen Covey himself:

Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can’t do much about it.

Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them.

His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be among the “saved” who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms” – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.

In the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the classroom, in his mind’s eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.

Through a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.

In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Franki used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

I'm not sure if I have too much to add to that story, I just thought it was pretty cool that I read that story a day after I wrote the post I did yesterday. Total different scopes too. I mean if this guy can have that kind of willpower and control of himself and his situation in that situation, how can any of us feel justified in not being able to control ourselves and make the best out of such petty situations that get us upset everyday.

The point I'm trying to make isn't the same old "other people have it a lot worse, suck it up" story either. This isn't a "don't be a shitty person" post, it's a "look how much less shitty you could be and how easy it is" post. Viktor understood how much better exercising his innate human endowments could make even the worst of life's problems. We have self-awareness, which a lot of people choose to not utilize, we have imagination, which a lot of people suppress for infantile reasons, we have conscience, which a lot of people will do anything to ignore, and we have independent will, which a lot of people never take advantage of because they let themselves get so firmly entrenched in natural conditioning and expected response.

Long story short, find a reason to be happy, find something that gives you a chance to stand out, and never let a bad or ignorant attitude ruin something that could be great.