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I've often thought that in a warped, twisted way totalitarianism gives meaning to life for certain people. If it opression is so intense to make life worthless,
by dkural 13y ago
I've often thought that in a warped, twisted way totalitarianism gives meaning to life for certain people. If it opression is so intense to make life worthless, then one has a cause dearer than life itself - to fight this opression. This struggle itself is meaningful. Many 'hero' movies are structured in this way, the 'good guys' have a cause, usually around defeating some kind of evil, that gives them ultimate purpose.
Likewise, I've found friends with far worse actual problems in the developing world to be existentially happier. They derive great pleasure in being able to go to a rock concert, etc. The game dynamics still work for the majority. Lots of intermediary issues to overcome, bosses to beat. Threat of destruction (socially or economically) seems to be wonderfully stimulating. Game dynamics still work.
What I find far worse is the banality of the first world. That seems to evoke and ferment existential concerns. Kind of along the lines of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LeLZ2crZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LeLZ2crZE
In a way, it is the problem one faces once more basic things are taken care of. Hard to focus on existential angst when hungry.
At the end of the day, even though the universe itself may be arbitrary and doomed, I found that the only things that infuse durable meaning into us as humans is our love for each other, our desire to understand this universe, and our appreciation of beauty in all its forms.
- ahomescu1 13y ago> I've often thought that in a warped, twisted way totalitarianism gives meaning to life for certain people. If it opression is so intense to make life worthless, then one has a cause dearer than life itself - to fight this opression. This struggle itself is meaningful. Many 'hero' movies are structured in this way, the 'good guys' have a cause, usually around defeating some kind of evil, that gives them ultimate purpose. An even more disturbing take on this is that totalitarianism also gives some people a more sinister cause: the oppression itself. I think many people in the various surveillance agencies in totalitarian states actually believed in what they were doing, and many even enjoyed it.
- setrofim_ 13y agoEric Fromm's essay "Fear of Feadom" (or "Escape from Freedom" in the US) describes this phenomenon in great detail. Well worth a read.
- penguindev 13y agoMan's Search for Meaning is about totalitarianism to the extreme; having no freedom except that in how you choose to react. The author was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. And about first world banality - the book of Ecclesiastes in the the bible addresses this also: "I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun." I had the existential depressions when I was 19 - 24. I dropped out of college and all my parents knew to do (and did) was put me in a psych ward and 'treat' me with electroshock. That didn't work.
- reinhardt 13y agoWhat worked then?