A Sufficient Why

We had talked about why the Army simply fails to satisfy, and what was to be done about it. In other words, we had unearthed the fundamental lack of meaning which is at the heart of our, and millions of other peoples' discontent. It was a step in the right direction, but it left something wanting. What good is it, knowing how hungry you are, if you cannot find food?

For this, I turn to Viktor Frankl again, for he says it much more authentically than I can.

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." 

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning.

A Step in the Right Direction

A buddy of mine and I were having a conversation about the lack of meaning we had both experienced in the military life. After I had told him about Viktor Frankl he said, "That is very interesting. So you are saying that everyone is really trying to find meaning in life."

"Yes."

"Now some people would say that simply searching for that meaning is what really matters," he went on. "That whether or not you find that meaning doesn't make a difference as long as you are searching for it. That is reason enough in itself. What would you say about that?"

I thought for a bit. "I don't think that can be right," I answered.

"I don't necessarily agree with these people. I am just pointing out that some people believe that and asking what you think."

"I think that that is partially true. It is a falsehood based on a partial grasp of something that really is going on. They are grasping that they need to search for some meaning in life, but to say that it doesn't matter whether they find it or not is nonsense. The only reason for searching for something is in order to find it. If it is unfindable, or if it simply does not exist, then what on earth is the point of searching for it?

You see, this meaning is not something arbitrary and personal. You cannot simply decide, 'Well, I am just going to say that stamp collecting is the meaning of life,' and be satisfied with that. Meaning is not something we create, it is something we discover, or fail to discover.

The people who hold to that belief are not completely wrong. In fact, they are on the right track, so far as they have gone. They have half the truth. They have grasped the fact that we are missing something, and the awareness of this loss is a step in the right direction..."

At this point we side-tracked to a short discussion of semantics. He submitted that "lack" was a better word than "loss," since "loss" implies possession at some point in the past, whereas it seems pretty clear that the person has never possessed this "objective meaning." I accepted his correction since I realized that I had unconsciously been drifting towards a collective loss, the Original Sin of Catholic theology, which was not really our topic.

"All right then, so they have come to feel this sense of something lacking, which is a step in the right direction. But that is not enough. Being aware of a lack all day long will not bring you one whit closer to filling it. Remember, it isn't an illusion, it is an actual objective lack of something that we really, desperately need.

Think about it like this. Suppose there is someone who is anorexic. For whatever reason she simply does not eat, and she is wasting away. For her to feel hungry is a good thing, even though it may be less comfortable than simply not having an appetite. It means she is becoming aware that she is missing calories. However, no amount of hunger will do anything towards putting actual calories into her stomach. For that she will need to act upon her hunger and find some real food and eat it."

He nodded. "Hmmm. Interesting. Well, you have a good weekend."

"You too," I answered. 

An Insufficient Why, Part II

The funny thing about conversation is that it has a way of bringing to the fore and making articulate ideas that were perhaps there, in your mind somewhere, but which were hidden. Perhaps they were active as motivations of actions, as half understood feelings or prejudices, or just as a gut reaction to something, but when you talk about them with someone else, and answer someone else' question, they have a tendency to take shape in quite surprising ways.

The conversation with P was somewhat like this. I have been pondering Viktor Frankl's book, "Man's Search for Meaning," for several years now, especially his dictum, borrowed from Frederick Nietzche, "A man can endure almost any 'how', so long as he has a sufficient 'why'." It seemed self-evident to me at the time, since I was going through the Special Forces 'Q' course. It was not easy, but I endured it because I had a sufficient 'why.' At least it seemed to me that I had a sufficient 'why.'

Perhaps I was a bit naive, but I more or less thought that the Special Forces motto, "De Opresso Liber" (To Liberate the Oppressed) was a serious job description. I envisioned them as being sent off to other countries to battle evil warlords, topple ruthless dictatorships, and rescue refugees. Perhaps at certain times and in certain places they have done these things. Afghanistan is a good example from recent history. However, after getting to know a number of Special Forces guys as instructors in the course I realized that most of them (not all, but most) regarded it as an opportunity to travel to exotic places, sleep with exotic women, and kill exotic people with no repercussions.

After that my sufficient why was pure cussedness. I decided God had put me there for a reason and I was learning a lot, so I was going to hang in there simply for the sake of hanging in there. I decided God had a plan, and I was just going to hang out and see what it was.

There was something that both P and I saw about the job, once we got here. It is fun. There are a lot of fun things that we do. We get to travel, we get to see strange places. I got to jump off the highest canyon swing platform in the world in Nepal, drink fresh chilled coconut milk out of a coconut on a beach in Thailand, ski for free at Mammoth Ski resort in California, learn to climb rocks at Red Rocks in Colorado. We have fun times. I get to shoot thousands of rounds, workout in world class gyms, and learn medicine for free. I get paid for it all.

The problem is that there is a corollary to Frankl's statement. It is true that you can endure any circumstances, no matter how awful, if you have a sufficient reason. I have found that it is also true that if you do not have such a sufficient reason, the circumstances, no matter how fun, simply do not matter. This is why the richest people in the world, with the most leisure and recreation opportunities, cannot enjoy them. They do not have a reason.

There is an insufficient why in this job. No matter how cool some of the things I get to do are, they do not matter unless there is a reason for them. The older I get the more my priorities shift, and the more my priorities shift the more the army, the government, the whole question of politics and economy, nationalism, (dare I say it) Americanism, etc. all begin to seem too small. They feel claustrophobic, as it were. It isn't that they are bad things. They are not, and the world is a better place for those who give themselves unselfishly to any of these goals, and the ends for which they rightfully exist (except, perhaps, nationalism.)

I, on the other hand, have seen that there is more in life. There is something worthier of time and effort and sacrifice. You see, America, the government, the nations of the world, programs, conflicts, all of these things are temporary. All of them are no more than dust in the wind. With the shifting of political and economic climates all of them will simply vanish and no more trace of them will be left.

Sometimes we get sidetracked by the fact that they are more visible than we are. We can see them stretching out for centuries, so there is a sense of history and heritage in them, but from the point of view of eternity that a thousand years are a blink of the eye.

The older I get, the more I figure, "Why bother?" There must be something more.

An Insufficient Why

A few weeks ago I was at work, packing my bags to leave for the day. Another guy named "P" came down into the locker room, also packing to leave. The difference was that he was packing to leave for good. He just came back from a combat deployment, his time in the army is over after one enlistment, and he is done.

P has kind of an interesting life story. He speaks Chinese fluently, having studied it in college. He traveled and worked in China for a year or so. He is a bar registered lawyer who practiced with a law firm for several years. He also spent two years in Africa working for the peace corps teaching at a school, where he taught himself French, which he also speaks fluently. To top it all off, in his thirties he decided to join the Army and go Special Forces.

One time, a little over a year ago, he asked me, "Does your faith give you meaning in your life?"

I answered that, yes, it does, but that is not necessarily why I believed it. I believe because I have come to see that the Faith is True. It is that truth that gives meaning.

He nodded thoughtfully, and said, "I ask because I joined the Army hoping that it would provide me with a sense of meaning, and I was disappointed to find that it really didn't."

With this background, and knowing that I also plan to get out  of the Army about this time next year, it was not surprising that he should ask while he was packing, "So, what are you going to do after you get out of the army?"

I answered, "Try to do something meaningful with my life." It was a rather non-specific answer, since I actually do have a fairly detailed plan (for me). But he wasn't really asking what job I was going to do, or what college I was planning on attending.

"Something meaningful. Well, there is the big question, isn't it? What really is meaningful in life?"

"That is the question, isn't it?" I replied. "That really is the biggest reason why I am getting out. Do you know who Victor Frankl was?"

He shook his head.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychoanalyst in the early 1930's. Since he was Jewish he was deported by the Nazis some time after their takeover of Austria. He survived throughout the war, and out of his experiences he wrote, "Man's Search for Meaning," a book examining the psychological phenomena he encountered in what was arguably one of the most abnormal experiences for a human being to endure. In fact, it was Frankl who coined the phrase, "An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is normal behavior."

The burden of his book was the role of purpose in Auschwitz and other such places. He observed that those people who survived were the ones who had some purpose, some meaning, something worth enduring for. Those who did not have this transcendent sense of purpose either simply gave up and died, or they survived by doing incalculable damage to their own psyches. Only those who believed in something made it through with anything like their mental health intact.

Not all such purposeful people survived, of course, for no amount of  purpose will stop a bullet or make you immune to poison gas. Indeed, some with the deepest sense of faith and purpose did not live. At one point in the book he makes a point of separating himself from the martyrs by saying, "We who have come back, we know- the best of us did not return.” There were those who had such a deep and powerful purpose that it gave them the peace and strength to die well. 

Since I read that book, some three or four years ago, I have been pondering it very deeply. There is something haunting, almost accusing, in the strong, patient insistence on meaning. He coined a phrase by Neitzche of all people, "A man can endure almost any 'how', so long as he has a sufficient 'why'." It is this that P was searching for in his varied and rather remarkable like thus far. He is trying to find a sufficient why.