Attitude, the Last of Human Freedoms

I recently mentioned to my wife, Amparo, that the self-quarantine during the pandemic feels like house arrest. Admittedly, it’s not quite that severe, but like many people, we haven’t seen our loved ones – including our children and grandchildren – in person for what seems like years. In our case, it’s been since Christmas. And that hurts.

But I’m reminded that humans have a great capacity for adaptation, if not acceptance. We eventually begin to see the abnormal as normal, hardship as tolerable.

I’ve always believed, and still do, that the Holocaust, that indescribable evil endured by millions in the Nazi death camps, was the most severe hardship imaginable. Yet, even there, people adapted, and in the years that have followed, many lessons were taught, if not learned, from the Holocaust.

Phases

In his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a survivor of several Nazi camps, describes phases through which most prisoners pass.

The first, not surprisingly, is shock. How can this bizarre world of the camp exist – where the lives of millions of fellow humans depended on the mere finger pointing of a Nazi official who met the trainloads of prisoners arriving daily?

Frankl’s psychological reaction: “I struck out my whole former life.”

The second phase is “relative apathy, in which (the prisoner) achieved a kind of emotional death,” a kind of “blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care anymore…which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings.” 

I wrote in the margin of this passage of the book: “And we’re outraged if Amazon gets an order wrong.” Now, I could add, “And we’re upset about not being able to get a haircut.”

Absolutely Relative

But Frankl insists that “…suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. …The ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative.”

You might still say there’s no comparison between the pandemic and the Holocaust, unless, of course, you’ve lost a loved one from COVD-19. The point is that like the Holocaust, arguably the most horrendous man-made catastrophe in history, we can adapt to a bad situation and that lessons can be learned – if we’re open to them. 

Among what Frankl learned was that “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” Prisoners reverted to primitive instincts, such as obsessing about food.

But Frankl learned much that was more profound. Among them, that even in a concentration camp “it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.” He noticed that many prisoners “were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.”

Ultimate and Highest Goal

Clinging to a mental image of his wife, who died in one of the camps, Frankl writes, “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 of so many thinkers – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”

Among those poets and thinkers were the authors of the Old and New Testaments, their views summed up in the words found in both: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

Applying the law of love to our daily lives is so hard that many see it as unrealistic or even idiotic. After all, people are annoying. They have the nerve to disagree with us. They don’t do what we expect. They flout norms we think are critical.

But that brings us to one of the book’s main conclusions, something we can apply in our pandemic lives: “…Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances….”