Conditions of human life are such that
suffering is an integral part of existence.
Now it's an important thing to understand.
It's also a viewpoint shared by
the bulk of the great religious systems of the world.
Life is suffering.
Why?
Well, one reason is because of society's arbitrary judgment.
Every single one of us has traits and features
and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are
far from ideal and that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient.
And so you suffer
because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others.
And you can certainly make the claim that fairly frequently that's arbitrary.
And so that's the claim that
society is tyrannical and judgmental and needs to be constantly
reconstituted so that the tyrannical element doesn't
take full control and fair enough,
you have to stay awake so that that doesn't happen.
But the thing is, it doesn't matter
what society it is, although they vary in the degree of their tyranny.
The mere fact that you're grouped together
with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in order
to live together means that many of the things
that characterize you are going to be suboptimal.
And so the price you pay for social being
is that much of you is deemed insufficient.
Now, hopefully there are various ways
that you can be within a society that's sufficiently diverse so that you can find
a place where what's good about you in the eyes
of others, and perhaps in your own eyes can flourish
of its own accord because you don't have to be good at everything.
If you can be good at one thing well enough that might allow you your niche,
and hopefully a healthy society allows for that.
Certainly, societies can become so tyrannical that they don't.
So you can lay one source of human
suffering at the feet of tyrannical social structures.
But the other element of it clearly
is the mere fact of the arbitrariness of the natural world.
You have a lifespan that's going to be
counted in the number of decades that you can count on two hands,
and that has nothing to do technically with the tyranny of the social structure.
Now, you could say
if we got our act together more completely, perhaps you could live longer.
It's fair enough. But the fact of the limits of your
lifespan and the suffering that's necessarily a consequence of that,
the death of your parents and the death of most people that you will know
before you
means that that part of suffering is an integral part of existence itself.
And so that can't be laid at the feet
of an insufficient social structure except insofar as it's tyrannical and blind.
It's a condition of existence.
And then by the same token, you have
your own responsibility for some of your unnecessary suffering,
because there's things you could be doing to make your life better and to make life
better for other people that you know perfectly well that you're not doing.
And so if you stopped doing all
the unnecessary things that make your life bad, then it would improve to some degree
that is not really computable because you don't know how far you could push that.
So there's three reasons why you suffer.
And one is, well, look at you,
and the way you're built. It's inevitable.
There's not very much of you, and there's a lot of everything else.
And so you just don't last that long,
and you're fragile across multiple domains, and then you're harshly treated
by society, and there's no doubt about that.
And then there's a responsibility that can be laid at your own feet.
Well, the existential take on that,
and the thing that all these diverse people that we've been talking about,
including Viktor Frankl, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
And the people that I've already talked to you about is that, the proper
pathway through that is to adopt the mode of authentic being.
And that is something like
refusing to participate in the lie, in deception and in the lie,
to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth.
And to take responsibility
for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people.
And there's something about that that's
meaningful and responsible and noble but also serves to mitigate the very
suffering that produces, say, the nihilism or the of flea...
Or the escape, into the arms of totalitarians to begin with.
You need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability.
And you can adopt a comprehensive description of reality that's formulated
for you by someone else that neatly divides the world into those
who are innocent and perhaps innocent victims, and those who are guilty
and perhaps the perpetrators of the suffering.
But none of that has anything to do with you.
And in addition, it's simply
it's not a reasonable way of assessing the world, that the suffering is built in.
So that's why there's an existentialist insistence upon that.
So for the Freudians,
the psychoanalysts, and even for people like Carl Rogers, to some degree,
if you're in a situation
that's characterized by psychopathology, if there's something wrong with you
mentally, that's a consequence of something gone wrong.
But that's not the existentialist take.
The existentialist take is no, that's just how it is.
That's just how it is.
You don't have to necessarily have done
anything wrong for things to get completely out of control.
It's a terrifying doctrine,
but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward.
There's a pathway forward.
And the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility
so that you can tolerate yourself
and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who's capable
of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering.
And that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned, is by,
well, certainly by the avoidance of deceit, particularly in language,
but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some
attempt on your part to actually rectify them.
And the thing that's so interesting about
that is, well, two, as far as I'm concerned,
and some of this is from clinical experience, you know,
if you take people and I've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things
that they are avoiding and are afraid of that they know they need to overcome
in order to meet their goals, their self defined goals.
If you can teach people to stand up
in the face of the things they're afraid of, they get stronger.
And you don't know what the upper limits
to that are, because you might ask yourself like if for ten years,
if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do
by your own definitions, right within the value structure
that you've created to the degree that you've done that, what would you be like?
Well,
there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time,
and there are people who do find out over decades, long periods what they could be
like if they were who they were, if they said if they spoke their being forward
and they get stronger and stronger and stronger, and we don't know the limits
to that, we do not know the limits to that.
And so you could say, well, in part,
perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet
because you're not everything you could be and you know it.
And, of course, that's a terrible thing to admit.
And it's a terrible thing to consider.
But there's real promise in it, right?
Because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could
look at the world and another way that you could act in the world,
so what it would reflect back to you would
be much better than what it reflects back to you now.
And then, the second part of that is, well,
imagine that many people did that because we've done a lot as human beings.
We've done a lot of remarkable things.
And I've told you already,
I think before that today, for example, about 250,000 people will be lifted out
of abject poverty and about 300,000 people attached to the electrical power grid.
We're lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever
occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin.
And that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000.
The UN had planned to have poverty between
2000 and 2015, and it was accomplished by 2013.
So there is inequality developing in many
places, and you hear lots of political agitation about that.
But overall,
the tide is lifting everyone up, and that's a great thing.
And we have no idea how fast we can
multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it...