Victor Frankl

I came across my notes on Victor Frankl's book: "Man's Search for Meaning" last week, looked for my copy to read it again but found I had sold it. That evening over a meal in a local hotel a friend started to tell me about this chap who was in Auschwitz and survived because he decided his goal, his raison d'etre, was to make a record of human reactions to extreme circumstances. He survived the holocaust and along with his own survival his observations led him to believe that human beings can survive almost anything if they can dscover meaning in it. Of course my friend was talking about Frankl. She was also celebrating the having of goals. Which is something I am questioning at present.

I'm reading 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Rather slowly because after a while it doesn't grip me, but the original premis does. All swans were white in this hemisphere so the fact that a swan was white was a 'given' and swans could be used to epitomise whiteness in literature and poetry until the black Australian swan was discovered in the 19th century, at which point adjustments had to be made in thinking. He uses this as a demonstration of his own observation that most of the really life changing events have come from left field and are entirely unpredictable. Despite this fact the tendency persists in human beings to try to learn from the past, to amass information and statistics so we can gain forewarning of what will happen in the future. It's the need to control and the need for security that chiefly drives us, but there is also the need to appear to have knowledge and to be important.

Taken from N.N.Taleb's homepage: "My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

It was this book and more wrangling about religion/creationism in a chat room that lead me to look up Frankl again. Religions provide the ultimate reason for existance t and it was most often those with faith that survived the horror of the camps.

Two days after my conversation on Frankl a customer came in to ask me to order a couple of books for the prisoner on death row she has befriended. One of them was 'Man's search for Meaning.'

How's that for synchronicity?

Since I started to read 'The Black Swan I have tried to be aware of where and when I am spinning a story for myself. I think I've already stated here somewhere that I can live without religious belief but I need to make my life into a story. There's nothing wrong in that - only that it is another red herring.

Probably.

As a side thought: past events have not served to avoid the catastrophic crashes going on in the financial world. Presumably the wrong conclusions have been drawn, the wrong precautions taken. I don't understand enough about the world of finance to know if there have been unforeseen circumstances but in the aftermath no doubt there will be heads rolling from the necks of those who claimed they DID 'know' what would happen.