I’ve been rereading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It is an excellent book. After I had been reading it for a while, I was also watching Dr David Wood’s YouTube video on George Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kompf.  What I found interesting was in last section where Orwell said, “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However, they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”

When I put these two things together it became clear why a few years ago the left was protesting and rioting. (That is not to say all of them, but a significant minority was acting out.) While the right is more or less reacting. As a rule of thumb, the left is secular and atheistic, while the right is God fearing and religious. This is not a hard and fast rule, you will find devout people on the left and Godless individuals on the right, but it fits in general since the left is Marxist and Marxism is atheistic.

In his book, Frankl gives three ways people find meaning: one from doing great deeds and works, two from experiencing someone or something, ie love, and three finding dignity from unavoidable suffering. All three have one thing in common, they transcend the human self. Orwell points out that totalitarian regimes find ways to tap into the human need for transcendence. Marxist philosophy at its heart is totalitarian. The devout, on the other hand, have God, and His call for good works for transcendence. Moreover, the right has, through God, the understanding that theirs’ is not an environmental struggle – be it social, political, or climatological – it’s a struggle of the soul. As such, it is a struggle within and not without. The left, being without God, is forced to take an environmental struggle to achieve transcendence, and woe to those who do not partake in that struggle.

This also explains the almost cult of personality that surrounds Jordan Peterson. His Twelve Rules for Life is in effect Frankl’s logotherapy in a more down-to-earth activity for the masses. Particularly, those adrift in postmodern nihilism.

With this in mind, when fighting the left and its Marxist policies, do not hate or deride them personally, you should instead pity them. For their struggle has been tried for hundreds of years, and all it has brought is nihilism that leads to atrocity.

#Orwell, #Frankl, #Peterson, #MeinKompf