Sheesh what a bummer. Lol I am kidding that was fascinating to read. May I ask, was it edited/conceptualized even partially with AI? Not that I think that’s a problem if it was.
That was my favorite of them all during the first round and it wasn't close. I believe it has true literary value in itself. The time when I read "Dear reader, please imagine" for the third time after it was eschewed at the beginning of part 3 got me like some novels' plot twists.
It got me ordering the Vintrais book. So far I'm more impressed by the story than by the poems themselves (or their pseudo-back-translation into French). They're fine but don't really work as Renaissance pastiches. Of course the impressive thing is that they were written at all.
Great essay. I’m inclined to say “but terrible book review” though I’m not sure I really feel that way. But definitely closer to “essay using book as excuse” than book review.
I wonder if this review was written deliberately in reverse. As far as I can tell, Victor Frankl's only real contribution to the world of meaning was to insist that it is psychotherapeutic to choose an individual meaning of one's own. Previously, the way of living here being described as Orc was the human norm. Certainly the men guarding Frankl in the concentration camp would recognize the concept of meaning as necessary for human life. But for them meaning was in hierarchy, in dedication to a cause greater than one's individual choosing. The cooperation with fate that we see last year in Russia or last century in Germany or last millennium anywhere in the world is one that looks to society for determining the meaning, whether in the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven or the kingdom of God or what have you. Who is to say that Kirill is wrong, and Victor right?
You write "Does Kirill have a choice, though? At any point of his hypothetical life? Frankl believes that he does."
But Frankl writes, "Naturally only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights." Why should our Kirill be one of them, when he's meant to be an archetype and not a rare exception?
That aside... Overall I like the meaning conveyed by this review, as it is a thought-provoking lens to view things. In contrast, I dislike the cloying writing style with its flourishes of false affection. I don't know you, which probably won't change when your identity is revealed at the contest's end, and you certainly don't know every reader this will reach.
I read the Frankl book a long time ago. One passage I have never forgotten.
In this passage, the prisoners were transferred to another camp. In their weak, emaciated condition, they were made to stand outside for several hours, clad in thin prisoner clothes, in the freezing winter rain.
And they were crying – for joy.
They were crying for joy because they could plainly see that the camp had no chimneys.
>Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
Humor is the last exit from the Freeway to Oblivion. I am most familiar with Jewish and Irish forms of the exit, and they are well marked exits. Oblivion is not being able to make any sense of what is happening to you.Sometimes laughing at it is the best one can do. There’s no tragedy in being crushed like a bug, only pathos.
The best joke I know about this. A man in Brooklyn wins the lottery and gets millions of dollars. He gives a press conference.
A reporter shouts out to him “Abe, what are you going to do with the money“
“Number one“, he says “for my wife Sadie, who has been by my side the last 50 years, there is nothing that she asks, for I will not give her. Anything that she asks if it is in my power to give her it’s hers.
Also I have a nephew. He’s a nice kid and he wants to start a bakery, so I’m going to help him out …just a little.”
“What about you Abe, what about you?” another reporter shouts.
“For me, I will get the permits and finance the building of a solid gold statue of Adolf Hitler in the middle of Central Park .”
There is a stunned silence in the room, and then someone asks, “Abe, why would you do that“
Abe puts his arm up in the air, rolls down his sleeve, and points to his forearm, and the number tattooed on it.
With a big grin on his face, he says, “because if it wasn’t for him, I never would’ve had the numbers!“
Lost me when reviewer used term "Concentration Camp." That term was used by the Brits during the Boer War as a place for keeping Boer farmers and families. Crappy places, but not a Nazi death camp.
How can you write a serious review of a major 20th century work and have nobody edit it? I expect better from Substack
The parenthetical paragraph about what to label Kirill was what made me cry.
I'm not sure that bringing the Ukraine war into closer focus was something I desired, exactly, but it's a good thing nonetheless. Thank you for a very powerful, interesting, and moving piece of writing.
My favorite review so far, both for the book and for the review. I'm not sure what to say about the review, other than that it demonstrates why "the humanities" as an academic subject deserves to derive its name from "human".
> they were simply arrested unproportionally more
It is only at this point that I began to seriously wonder whether English was not the native language of the reviewer; it could also have been an attempt to avoid the political valence that "disproportionally" has lately gained. But there were interesting phrasings throughout, which might be artifacts of another language, or might be deliberate artifice. Since the reviewer later says that they are Russian, I'll assume that this isn't written in their native tongue, so I will congratulate them a second time on a very well written review.
> morally mirky
I'm just going to assume this is an intentional pun on Tolkien, because it makes me smile, and the reviewer seems eminently capable of doing this on purpose. :-)
> Just the other week Kirill saw a comatose drunk man fall down on the street, and didn’t do anything, because his father was never given any help in the same situation. Nobody else did anything too. I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
I live in America, in a major West Coast city. Last month I was talking with a private security guard working on a block on the main street near me. Among the other incidents that day, when he and his two companions showed up in the morning, there was a dead body curled up outside the new Asian grocery store. He'd been dead for a few hours. The people at the grocery store had said that the man was obviously just a homeless addict, and so they had ignored him for several hours. I never learned whether anyone found out whether the man was still alive when the grocery store employees first arrived. But later interactions would demonstrate that there was some wisdom in their course of inaction. One of the security guard's companions was stabbed with a needle by a seemingly passed-out "homeless addict" (which is to say, someone who looked and acted the part, but it's not like anyone could tell). A week later I found out that the stabbed guard got Hepatitis C. The other of the guard's companions had had some form of chemical compound thrown in his face by a mumbling "homeless addict", and a week later I found out that he'd gotten a detached retina. At this point, around 4 pm, the guard I talked to was the only one left from that group of three, and understandably on edge, so I kept him company for an hour or two until his replacement showed up. He clearly needed someone to talk to.
For audience calibration, I will stress that this was a very bad day, not a normal day. But also, this is the beating progressive heart of the city, a high-property-value cool neighborhood, and at a deceptive lower bound only one block from the epicenter of the city's BLM protests in 2020. I'm not referencing all this to condemn America or America's political left, but instead to highlight the apathy involved: the ability to allow human suffering to fester and erupt around oneself and yet to pass by on the other side. Reinforced in a vicious cycle because it truly is safer to pass by on the other side. And I'm relatively new to all this: what kind of people has this produced, in places where it's been going on for decades? And the answer, betraying my American solipsism, is that we should all have seen "The Wire" by now.
> Their unhappy life of suffering and apathy, life without meaning is suddenly instilled with one by someone else, typically someone is a position of power. And very often this “meaning” is to kill and die on a foreign field.
Alas, it doesn't have to be that much power, and it doesn't have to be foreign.
>> To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismark could be applied: “Life is like being at the dentist. You alway think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
It's well-known that Dr Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in that camp, and injected an amphetamine intracranially.
Timothy Pytell wrote many times about Frankl deeds and lies.
Something made me curious. I read the book in a Spanish translation, titled “El hombre en busca de sentido”. There is a subtle difference here: the subject is Man, not the Search as in the English title.
Which is right then? Should we focus on Man in search or Man’s search?
So I checked the Wikipedia and it turns out that none of them are close to the original title, and it makes for an interesting story:
<<The book's original title is Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager ("A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp"). Later German editions prefixed the title with Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen ("Nevertheless Say Yes to Life"), taken from a line in Das Buchenwaldlied, a song written by Friedrich Löhner-Beda while an inmate at Buchenwald.[4] The title of the first English-language translation was From Death-Camp to Existentialism. The book's common full English title is Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, although this subtitle is often not printed on the cover of modern editions.[5]>>
With Kirill you are missing an important detail. If Kirill is in his 30's, he grew up in a literal hell. That's what 90's in Russia were. No money, no stability, hunger, crime, no prospects, danger on all sides. And then came 2000 and so on, and life finally got normal, more or less. And guess who he trusts and believes to be on the right side? And Kirill's life is not typical nowadays, the description here matches the 90's much more.
Wow. I never comment on substack posts(this is my 1st!) but this is clearly one of the best reviews I’ve read.
I read Frankls book more than 15 years ago; maybe it’s time to revisit it.
And unlike some commenters here, I loved the jump between different sections.
When I 1st read the title I was a bit Meh.
While I loved Frankls book when I first read it , it has been commented to the death and I doubted anything could bring anything new. So I was expecting this to be a dull review.
Well, I am a Ukrainian, and I don't say "orcs". "Orcs" implies things were done to them and that is why they do what they do. But they are people; they came to us knowing they were risking death, knowing they would be killing. I deny them orchood.
The hostility to this review is odd. It’s by far the best book review, and best writing, so far. And the other finalists were good to great.
This form of multiple book reviews in one, with the writers perspective tacked on, is actually fairly common historically. When Orwell wrote book reviews, he actually wrote essays which derived from the books he was reviewing. This is common in more literary publications. Rather than being just a review of “Man’s Search for Meaning” but an essay on Frankl’s philosophy on the search for meaning and against apathy, which is why the other two stories matter, and add to the writing.
"Kirill" is a caricature which has only a tenuous relationship with reality. Yes, rural Russia is harsh, but it's not a concentration camp. Propaganda mostly lies, but it contains just enough truth to instill positive motivation, up to and including willingness to kill and die "for the people and the Fatherland", fighting against Nazis who openly call people like them subhuman orcs, in particular. The cult of the Great Patriotic War is basically Russia's true religion, and compared to a drab unpromising future, emulating mythical heroes who saved the world from the worst menace it had ever knew is very appealing to some. Whether this is an extenuating circumstance or the contrary compared to numb apathy is another question.
I now have another book to read. In particular, I draw attention to the author's (deliberate?) unusual spelling "mirky"—which is perhaps better than the commoner "murky" in that it suggests attributes pertaining to Mirkwood.
Man this was really touching and beautiful. It probably doesn't qualify as a book review, but who cares? It's inspiring and for sure it makes you want to read Frankl and du Vintrais.
A great book, and also a very short book, particularly if you focus mainly on the concentration camp section. I read this book shortly after reading Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling + Either/Or) in my early twenties, a year or two after my father had died of cancer. Both authors have had a huge influence on my life and, at least for me, were incredibly uplifting and freeing. They helped me process my grief and finding meaning in my life again. It's hard not to see Kierkegaard's influence in Frankl, which unfortunately makes Frankl's contributions seem less novel, but his delivery of the ideas is much more digestible.
I read "Man's Search For Meaning" for a graduate psychology class on motivation. The rest of the class had a lot of problems but the assigned readings were enough on their own to make it worth it. Although this isn't a traditional book review, it's of a very non-traditional book and I think Frankl would enjoy the structure of this review. You all should read the whole book, it's short and is sort of written like a blog post already.
It's a pretty good review. The one thing I'd say is I wouldn't call Kirill meaningless, orcish, or subhuman. If he's coming into your town with a gun then yes you should shoot him--pacifism is a fool's philosophy-- but there are plenty of people who have led boring lives that wouldn't sound particularly wonderful by our standards. From his point of view, he defended his country when the time came and died in battle--not so different from Tellus, the supposed happiest man alive according to Solon. Rural Russia sucks, I agree, but Kirill is far from unique in human history. The USA has its own dead-end towns full of poor kids who join the army to get out--are they also subhuman and meaningless because they don't write clever comments on Astral Codex Ten? After all, if he'd survived Kirill might have come back as a war hero, knocked up his girlfriend, and proceeded to become a dad. That would have probably given him at least some source of meaning.
I agree I don't want Kirill knocking on my door with a machine gun. That's war, though. We've all forgotten how awful it is. My conclusion from all this is 'Putin is a khuilo*', not 'Kirill is a p-zombie'. The whole question reminds me of the tendency of intellectuals to believe the masses are inferior. I don't like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I hope they kick them out, but pretending the enemy troops are some sort of Frankl-stein monster is a little much. Wars happen for reasons, and people fight them for reasons, even if they don't make much sense to people like us commenting on ACX.
*Though, you know, we did push a military alliance to his border.
Man, this kind of stretches the limits of the term 'book review', but the third section's comparison of Russian conscripts to concentration camp victims is haunting and interesting enough that I don't mind too much. Nonetheless, you kinda feel the need to grade this as an existentialist work on its own merits as much as a book review per se.
I'd *love* to catch back up with this author in about 5-10 years. The prose and subject matter are shooting very, very high, and they mostly get there. They get a lot of credit for ambition alone, not even counting the bonus points for the word "Frankl-stein." To some degree, it feels like they're still 'growing in' to this voice a bit, and there's some visible strain in places. Once they've got a few more million words under their belt, they're gonna be *phenomenal*. And right now, they're already pretty darn good.
At its core, this essay is just a plea for mercy, and in that it succeeds entirely. Well done, and well done.
I have a strong objection to an underlying assumption that pervades this whole project: the idea that our understanding of when/how humans have this feeling of meaning and meaningfulness has to itself be the kind of thing we would seem meaningful.
I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic. To the contrary, spelling out the gory scientific details is often anything but. And if we were simply trying to account for some other boring aspect of our mental lives: eg the feeling of nostalgia there would be no pressure to treat it at a level besides the purely scientifically descriptive.
Yet, when it comes to meaning, there seems to be an irresistible temptation to assume that it makes sense to say something gives someone meaning and describe it as if it was a real objective thing rather than trying to operationalize what that means (is it a disposition to have certain kinds of feelings, it's own qualitative feeling what) and then offer an empirical theory about when those occur to be evaluated only with the usual tools of scientific theory.
I think it's very unfortunate and is basically a way to ensure falling into fallacies.
A winner. Break a reader's heart, then lift it up. Hard to beat. Blagodarju! - Thinking about Kirill, I wonder about Andrej. Who lived in a meaningless mess very much like Kirill. Until the "Orcs" came. Because Andrej lives in Ukraine. Let us hope he still does. / My step-son K. lives in the early-occupied part - good he is no medic, else he would be at the front already, seems the Ruzzian overlords do not trust their "liberated brothers" enough to give them weapons. Here are 100 gram going down hoping he will not need to find meaning just before hitting a shell.- I find it all too sad to call a Russian "orc" or even to shout "slava Ukraina". I stick to PTN-PNX or "Could we please scroll forward to the part where you take a gun and put it to your head, Vlad?"
I see the through-line, and agree with the main thrust, but really didn't care for the editorial conceit. I find the "dear reader" stuff cringy at the best of times, and it completely fell apart for me at the 3rd, personal experience section. A strong, deep argument has to be backed up by clarity and confidence in the writing, and I didn't see that at all. Would enjoy reading after 2 or 3 complete rewrites.
A tangent: a good way to answer a child's question "why is the sky blue" is "because air is very slightly blue, and you can see the blue when you look through enough of it. Lots of clear things are like that - the glass in windows is green, and water is blue like the ocean."
One "dear reader" is too many. 14 is embarrassing.
How can a book review that doesn't even really tell me the full point of the book be a finalist? Synthesis is great, awkwardly inserting your hobby horse argument about modern Russian soldiers is not.
Your arguments are probably correct from a somewhat, detached, analytic lviewpoint.. So I stand corrected, Dachau wasn't a death camp. I suppose the distintion is made on the maps you have studied.
Perhaps also, that a large minority of the deaths at Auscwicz occurred in the forced marches Gestapo inflicted upon the surviving captives meant that "death camp" was extreme. My site's uncle, an MD, in fact worked in the medical facilities until he contracted typhus and died two weeks before liberation. Certainly not a victim of the gas chambers.
Apparently you are content with the idea that the Holocaust is now a subject of precise terms and that Frankl's experience deserved the phrase "concentration camp."
No. I do object to a review that begins with a reference to concentration camps as a catchall term Especially in a review of this book. Not faulting the book, or the reviewer, jes' sayin' the review lost me at that point. Obviously some might think I'm being picky. Maybe studying Orwell got me oversensitive to even a bit of euphemism.
I remember some linguist who was in solitary confinement in some Asian country and stayed sane by counting the words she knew and such. Don't remember any details.
The book review makes one want to listen to Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) again, in particular the song Red-Yellow days (Красно-желтые Дни), made the last time Russia sent tens of thousands of young men to fight in one of its wars. Link to a cover version plus Tsoi himself below. Translated text here, a young soldier about to depart for the war:
My train has long stayed at the depot
I'm leaving again, it's time
The wind was waiting for me on the threshold
On the threshold of autumn, my sister
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Tell me about those who are tired
From the ruthless street dramas
And the church of broken hearts
And of those who go to this church
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by love,
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by dream
And on this perfectly lit star
I woke up and realized
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Here is a fairly recent cover by Тролль Гнет Ель, to illustrate that Tsoi is not forgotten:
This was truly amazing, an essay I think is going to influence my thinking and beliefs for a long time. I look forward to finding out who the author is so I can read more of their works, if there are any.
It seems to me that this review is really split in audience reaction. Personally, I liked it the least of the 4 finalists so far, and I found it meandering and I did not feel like it taught me anything or introduced new ideas to help me "update my mental software", which is the main criteria by which I measure these book reviews. I read this review and expected to come to the comments and have people asking why this was a finalist, only to be entirely blindsided by the effusive praise it's been given. I believe everyone here is being entirely honest with their enjoyment, so my main takeaway is awe at how different people are, and surprise that my opinion is different than what seems to be the majority of others here.
I'm so surprised by the responses to this review. Comments are emphasizing their profound emotional responses and the literary quality of the work, and I got basically nothing from it (and it's not because this wasn't book review-y enough). No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny, I suppose. As with others, I was mildly off put by the "dear reader"s, so maybe this soured my perspective of the more substantive content.
It seems like Frankl's main insight is "we make our own meaning", which is a perspective that is in the water, to say the least (as an aside, though that is how the reviewer glossed it, "we make our own meaning" does not seem to be the point of the central quotation of the review. Right conduct and right action != self-imposed meaning, to say nothing of the idea that each situation has a unique correct answer. I'd be interested in what Frankl was on about here, but that doesn't seem to be the point of the review). The two case studies are competent applications of the theory, and deepened my understanding of Kirill and his ilk somewhat, but don't seem that exciting.
I'm genuinely curious to the people who are really excited about this review: what did I miss? Was it the Ukraine context or the more personal stuff that did it for you?
Objectivist to the rescue! Specifically about "How can you be okay with killing enemy soldiers?" thing.
The answer is simple: Another's tragedy does not impose on us a moral obligation to martyr ourselves. Imagine you are caught in a Zombie Apocalypse, and one is coming straight for you. It does not matter if the zombie was a sweet, caring paragon of virtue prior to infection. It doesn't even matter if this is a truly awful version of the virus which leaves the person unchanged and completely conscious, but unable to control his body. You are not obliged to let yourself be killed because of his misfortune. Period.
So, yes, you may be forbidden from hating the enemy, or dehumanizing him. But you are absolutely allowed - in fact, obliged - to kill. In defense of your life and in defense of all you hold dear.
And this does make all the difference in the world. As long as you understand that you are dealing with another human being with his own drive for meaning, you have a chance of reaching him and changing his mind. I have read so many stories of deradicalized Islamists & neo-Nazis, and so many of them are reached by acknowledging this basic humanity, this basic need. And providing a _better_ source of meaning than senseless, bloody martyrdom.
“It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”
The writing style doesn't do it for me. Is not the same style that college freshman literary reviews in a school mag deploy? Endless direct addresses to the reader, saying what the parts of the essay are, self-conscious deployment of bad rhetorical devices, detours that are not improved by pointing out they are bad. These habits were once mine and like Caliban looking in the mirror, I am repulsed.
Brilliant book. Changed my mom's life when she was in the psych ward as a teen in the 1960s and got her through her suffering. A powerful tale of how to survive the most atrocious struggles, externally and internally.
Nice to know everyone is so understanding of the article. A reviewer of this book in 2023 decides to follow Frankl's German derived, probably from English, term and it's OK. Even though there's at least some agreement that it could, just possibly be thought to be a not particularly pleasant euphemism for what happened.
To me this review, and Frankl's story, as well as Kirill's fictional one, lack a niche but critical observation. One that, frankly, is missing in the world model of many cultures, including all those in Golden Horde Eurasia.
A human can chose to die, on principle. It is rare, but it does happen.
The concentration camp is not the world, you can escape it. Maybe the success rate for this is 0.01%, but people did escape. And you can choose to rebel, maybe it involve poisoning the food you're cooking for your captors, or killing a lowly German soldier, or even just refusing to drive the gas trucks, but you can rebel.
The author points as much by the end:
> Even in Kirill’s 100,000-people town some do gather on the main square and protest, knowing fully well they will be arrested, possibly beaten, possibly sent to prison. Maybe there are hundreds of them, maybe tens. Maybe not enough. More people write something on social media, which is dangerous in its own right. Some people sit quietly and secretly send money to Ukrainian charities.
But then, why would we think Frankl's theory ought to apply to turning Kirill into one of those people?
Frankl's, at least from this review, seems, at root, a coward. Maybe a good utilitarian, but a coward regardless. Someone that tries to think his way around hell rather than embracing death.
I'm not saying that embracing death is easy, I count myself a coward, I think all but a few insane people are, I'm not staying on a soap box here preaching virtue since I don't know how to achieve it myself.
But, if one like me could learn virtue, I'd be from one of the daring concentration camp escapees that went on to form Mossad and restore justice, rather than from someone that learned to cope with the lack thereof.
Reductionist lenses can be helpful in cutting through grand, poetic language and finding what’s most viscerally useful. “What’s the meaning of life?” is an oft asked and important seeming question that gets at something nebulous, so it might be fit for such reductionism.
So what is this concept of “meaning”? Could it be “significance” or “instrumental function”? A chair might have significance to somebody, but cannot inherently have this quality of significance, independent of being perceived as such. A chair certainly has instrumental function- to be sat on, to lend someone comfort and stability- as it was designed with this purpose in mind.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of a chair?”, I will mostly get strange looks. But I will also be able to intuit that the meaning of a chair is to be sat on, and perhaps whatever important emotional association it brings up in its perceiver.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of life?” I will probably be accused of being a melancholy, good for nothing brooder. Which is telling! Pining for meaning is perhaps not some grand cosmic quest, not wrestling with God or orcs, but just a signal that one’s life does not have enough satisfaction. The sensation of satisfaction is easier to work with than this nebulous thing of meaning. Satisfaction comes in many flavors, but I think most people have a strong sense of what gives them satisfaction. And if they cannot do more of it, then they simply must frame what they can in ways that are sufficiently challenging as to earn the satisfactory feeling. It’s the flip side to anxiety: anxiety motivates you to act to achieve some uncertain outcome, and satisfaction rewards you for achieving it.
It’s my sense that much of Western existentialism or nihilism is born of toxic disillusionment with one’s satisfaction structure- the simple Christian norms one grows up with. The satisfaction of working teleologically towards Heaven, or oneness with God or the Good, is addictive! And cognitively acknowledging that that structure is not real can throw one’s ability to find satisfaction in engaging in the real world totally out of wack. But the intuitions that created conceptions of the Good, formalized into Christian ethics some two millennia ago, are still baked into us! So do away with the reality distorting beliefs, but be careful not to dismiss the Good-seeking part of you that is as much you as food-seeking, status-seeking, comfort-seeking drives bestowed by nature, and which is even seen as such by some religious traditions!
I liked the review less and less as I read through it.
> I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
If apathy is the opposite of empathy, this has been researched. Just search the Web for "empathetic countries". Russia comes in 11th most apathetic, preceded by most of Eastern Europe including Finland. Based on this, it seems more likely that apathy is more of a cultural or geographic trait than something recently produced in Russia / Soviet Union.
What nudged me to check this was the red flag when I read the fictional Kirill's biography, this sentence in particular:
> Kirill gets drafted in September 2022, and is sent to Ukraine after three days of training.
This perfectly matches the Western preconceptions of Russians attacking in human waves / orc hordes to be slaughtered, but it's easily proven false with a minimum of research. Russian troops have been on the defensive in Ukraine since the draft. There have been no costly attacks except in Bakhmut, by the Wagner mercenary group where the draftees didn't go. The regular Russian army had a plenty of time to train their draftees. And this supposedly Russian author should have known this. Then why the Kirill caricature?
"best deradicalizer testimony i saw was a former jihadi who admitted it was the best, most meaningful time of his life until he could no longer shake the growing horror of what his actual impact on the world was"
I'm reminded of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is a search for meaning in its own way. Written in 1947 in post-war France, amongst a class of intelligentsia grappling with peace-time existentialism, the books emphasis on freedom is almost diametrically opposed to the conditions of a concentration camp. Whereas Frankl asks, "How can we find meaning amongst even the worst of suffering?", Beauvoir is asking, "How can we find meaning given a certain amount of freedom?"
Both are valid questions. If you are lucky enough like myself to be one of the "dear readers" here, then you likely aren't suffering physical hardship. In fact, if you have enough time to scroll the comments here, you may be suffering from too much free time, from a comfortable life without meaning. This would be what Beauvoir terms our "burden of freedom". If we are free, how can we make meaning in our lives, and how can we be sure that the meaning we've chosen for ourselves is a good one.
Frankl's message is a profound one, but it misses the hardest part: creating good meaning. His book and his wife were good reasons to continue on. But what of someone like Kirill?
Let's imagine that Kirill is magically transported to Kansas City, where he is given UBI that lets him live comfortably though not excessively. He is given an apartment, a cell phone, a bus pass, and anything else on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. What does he do? Sure, at first he probably gets good and drunk, maybe goes on a bender, maybe tries to pick up a local woman (sorry wifey). But what then? What happens when he equilibriates to his environment, one in which he doesn't have to work and doesn't have meaning? This is the burden of freedom, and one that I see coming down the pipeline and straight into the face of those humans who become "obsolete" with the advances of AI/AGI.
Beauvoir's solution to the "burden of freedom" is what she calls the Passionate Man: someone who is engaged actively in their life in an authentic way, who sees themself clearly enough to be able to act toward a meaning that is unique to their talents and passions. Frankl hits on this a bit when he talks about "Right Action", an echo of the larger buddhist idea. Interestingly, the Passionate Man is almost the opposite of the apathetic man that Frankl describes.
Anyways, this is becoming a book review in itself, dear reader. These are hard questions that Frankl and SBD are asking, and I agree that within these depths is a mixture of black and white, good and evil. My own opinion is that life is the meaning in itself, and living more consciously of this, and helping others to see and experience this, is the way :)
Sheesh what a bummer. Lol I am kidding that was fascinating to read. May I ask, was it edited/conceptualized even partially with AI? Not that I think that’s a problem if it was.
That was my favorite of them all during the first round and it wasn't close. I believe it has true literary value in itself. The time when I read "Dear reader, please imagine" for the third time after it was eschewed at the beginning of part 3 got me like some novels' plot twists.
It got me ordering the Vintrais book. So far I'm more impressed by the story than by the poems themselves (or their pseudo-back-translation into French). They're fine but don't really work as Renaissance pastiches. Of course the impressive thing is that they were written at all.
Thank you so much for this.
Great essay. I’m inclined to say “but terrible book review” though I’m not sure I really feel that way. But definitely closer to “essay using book as excuse” than book review.
I wonder if this review was written deliberately in reverse. As far as I can tell, Victor Frankl's only real contribution to the world of meaning was to insist that it is psychotherapeutic to choose an individual meaning of one's own. Previously, the way of living here being described as Orc was the human norm. Certainly the men guarding Frankl in the concentration camp would recognize the concept of meaning as necessary for human life. But for them meaning was in hierarchy, in dedication to a cause greater than one's individual choosing. The cooperation with fate that we see last year in Russia or last century in Germany or last millennium anywhere in the world is one that looks to society for determining the meaning, whether in the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven or the kingdom of God or what have you. Who is to say that Kirill is wrong, and Victor right?
That preface is the most centrally-SSC/ACX book review preface it might be possible to write.
This was exceptional. Thank you.
You write "Does Kirill have a choice, though? At any point of his hypothetical life? Frankl believes that he does."
But Frankl writes, "Naturally only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights." Why should our Kirill be one of them, when he's meant to be an archetype and not a rare exception?
That aside... Overall I like the meaning conveyed by this review, as it is a thought-provoking lens to view things. In contrast, I dislike the cloying writing style with its flourishes of false affection. I don't know you, which probably won't change when your identity is revealed at the contest's end, and you certainly don't know every reader this will reach.
I read the Frankl book a long time ago. One passage I have never forgotten.
In this passage, the prisoners were transferred to another camp. In their weak, emaciated condition, they were made to stand outside for several hours, clad in thin prisoner clothes, in the freezing winter rain.
And they were crying – for joy.
They were crying for joy because they could plainly see that the camp had no chimneys.
I could never get that image out of my head.
>Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
Humor is the last exit from the Freeway to Oblivion. I am most familiar with Jewish and Irish forms of the exit, and they are well marked exits. Oblivion is not being able to make any sense of what is happening to you.Sometimes laughing at it is the best one can do. There’s no tragedy in being crushed like a bug, only pathos.
The best joke I know about this. A man in Brooklyn wins the lottery and gets millions of dollars. He gives a press conference.
A reporter shouts out to him “Abe, what are you going to do with the money“
“Number one“, he says “for my wife Sadie, who has been by my side the last 50 years, there is nothing that she asks, for I will not give her. Anything that she asks if it is in my power to give her it’s hers.
Also I have a nephew. He’s a nice kid and he wants to start a bakery, so I’m going to help him out …just a little.”
“What about you Abe, what about you?” another reporter shouts.
“For me, I will get the permits and finance the building of a solid gold statue of Adolf Hitler in the middle of Central Park .”
There is a stunned silence in the room, and then someone asks, “Abe, why would you do that“
Abe puts his arm up in the air, rolls down his sleeve, and points to his forearm, and the number tattooed on it.
With a big grin on his face, he says, “because if it wasn’t for him, I never would’ve had the numbers!“
Talk about taking charge of your own reality.
Lost me when reviewer used term "Concentration Camp." That term was used by the Brits during the Boer War as a place for keeping Boer farmers and families. Crappy places, but not a Nazi death camp.
How can you write a serious review of a major 20th century work and have nobody edit it? I expect better from Substack
The parenthetical paragraph about what to label Kirill was what made me cry.
I'm not sure that bringing the Ukraine war into closer focus was something I desired, exactly, but it's a good thing nonetheless. Thank you for a very powerful, interesting, and moving piece of writing.
My favorite review so far, both for the book and for the review. I'm not sure what to say about the review, other than that it demonstrates why "the humanities" as an academic subject deserves to derive its name from "human".
> they were simply arrested unproportionally more
It is only at this point that I began to seriously wonder whether English was not the native language of the reviewer; it could also have been an attempt to avoid the political valence that "disproportionally" has lately gained. But there were interesting phrasings throughout, which might be artifacts of another language, or might be deliberate artifice. Since the reviewer later says that they are Russian, I'll assume that this isn't written in their native tongue, so I will congratulate them a second time on a very well written review.
> morally mirky
I'm just going to assume this is an intentional pun on Tolkien, because it makes me smile, and the reviewer seems eminently capable of doing this on purpose. :-)
> Just the other week Kirill saw a comatose drunk man fall down on the street, and didn’t do anything, because his father was never given any help in the same situation. Nobody else did anything too. I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
I live in America, in a major West Coast city. Last month I was talking with a private security guard working on a block on the main street near me. Among the other incidents that day, when he and his two companions showed up in the morning, there was a dead body curled up outside the new Asian grocery store. He'd been dead for a few hours. The people at the grocery store had said that the man was obviously just a homeless addict, and so they had ignored him for several hours. I never learned whether anyone found out whether the man was still alive when the grocery store employees first arrived. But later interactions would demonstrate that there was some wisdom in their course of inaction. One of the security guard's companions was stabbed with a needle by a seemingly passed-out "homeless addict" (which is to say, someone who looked and acted the part, but it's not like anyone could tell). A week later I found out that the stabbed guard got Hepatitis C. The other of the guard's companions had had some form of chemical compound thrown in his face by a mumbling "homeless addict", and a week later I found out that he'd gotten a detached retina. At this point, around 4 pm, the guard I talked to was the only one left from that group of three, and understandably on edge, so I kept him company for an hour or two until his replacement showed up. He clearly needed someone to talk to.
For audience calibration, I will stress that this was a very bad day, not a normal day. But also, this is the beating progressive heart of the city, a high-property-value cool neighborhood, and at a deceptive lower bound only one block from the epicenter of the city's BLM protests in 2020. I'm not referencing all this to condemn America or America's political left, but instead to highlight the apathy involved: the ability to allow human suffering to fester and erupt around oneself and yet to pass by on the other side. Reinforced in a vicious cycle because it truly is safer to pass by on the other side. And I'm relatively new to all this: what kind of people has this produced, in places where it's been going on for decades? And the answer, betraying my American solipsism, is that we should all have seen "The Wire" by now.
> Their unhappy life of suffering and apathy, life without meaning is suddenly instilled with one by someone else, typically someone is a position of power. And very often this “meaning” is to kill and die on a foreign field.
Alas, it doesn't have to be that much power, and it doesn't have to be foreign.
>> To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismark could be applied: “Life is like being at the dentist. You alway think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
Fuck. I need to read this book.
It's well-known that Dr Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in that camp, and injected an amphetamine intracranially.
Timothy Pytell wrote many times about Frankl deeds and lies.
This read like a moldbug article.
Something made me curious. I read the book in a Spanish translation, titled “El hombre en busca de sentido”. There is a subtle difference here: the subject is Man, not the Search as in the English title.
Which is right then? Should we focus on Man in search or Man’s search?
So I checked the Wikipedia and it turns out that none of them are close to the original title, and it makes for an interesting story:
<<The book's original title is Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager ("A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp"). Later German editions prefixed the title with Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen ("Nevertheless Say Yes to Life"), taken from a line in Das Buchenwaldlied, a song written by Friedrich Löhner-Beda while an inmate at Buchenwald.[4] The title of the first English-language translation was From Death-Camp to Existentialism. The book's common full English title is Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, although this subtitle is often not printed on the cover of modern editions.[5]>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning
With Kirill you are missing an important detail. If Kirill is in his 30's, he grew up in a literal hell. That's what 90's in Russia were. No money, no stability, hunger, crime, no prospects, danger on all sides. And then came 2000 and so on, and life finally got normal, more or less. And guess who he trusts and believes to be on the right side? And Kirill's life is not typical nowadays, the description here matches the 90's much more.
Wow. I never comment on substack posts(this is my 1st!) but this is clearly one of the best reviews I’ve read.
I read Frankls book more than 15 years ago; maybe it’s time to revisit it.
And unlike some commenters here, I loved the jump between different sections.
When I 1st read the title I was a bit Meh.
While I loved Frankls book when I first read it , it has been commented to the death and I doubted anything could bring anything new. So I was expecting this to be a dull review.
I guess that surprised me even more. Well done !
I find this writing style really unpleasant to read. Like if a robot trying to act human was talking to me.
Well, I am a Ukrainian, and I don't say "orcs". "Orcs" implies things were done to them and that is why they do what they do. But they are people; they came to us knowing they were risking death, knowing they would be killing. I deny them orchood.
The hostility to this review is odd. It’s by far the best book review, and best writing, so far. And the other finalists were good to great.
This form of multiple book reviews in one, with the writers perspective tacked on, is actually fairly common historically. When Orwell wrote book reviews, he actually wrote essays which derived from the books he was reviewing. This is common in more literary publications. Rather than being just a review of “Man’s Search for Meaning” but an essay on Frankl’s philosophy on the search for meaning and against apathy, which is why the other two stories matter, and add to the writing.
I thought I was great anyway. Kudos.
I think this is the first time I've felt sexually harassed by a book review.
I haven’t enjoyed a read like this since I was 17. I’m 40 now. Meaning is a very big deal to me. So are morality and empathy Thank you.
"Kirill" is a caricature which has only a tenuous relationship with reality. Yes, rural Russia is harsh, but it's not a concentration camp. Propaganda mostly lies, but it contains just enough truth to instill positive motivation, up to and including willingness to kill and die "for the people and the Fatherland", fighting against Nazis who openly call people like them subhuman orcs, in particular. The cult of the Great Patriotic War is basically Russia's true religion, and compared to a drab unpromising future, emulating mythical heroes who saved the world from the worst menace it had ever knew is very appealing to some. Whether this is an extenuating circumstance or the contrary compared to numb apathy is another question.
Am I getting to wrong conclusions when this essay makes me seriously want to get off of SSRIs?
The author writes: "He is a doctor with a specialty in psychology... It is one of the most famous books written by a psychologist"
Wasn't Frankl a physician, with psychiatry and neurology as his specialities?
I now have another book to read. In particular, I draw attention to the author's (deliberate?) unusual spelling "mirky"—which is perhaps better than the commoner "murky" in that it suggests attributes pertaining to Mirkwood.
Man this was really touching and beautiful. It probably doesn't qualify as a book review, but who cares? It's inspiring and for sure it makes you want to read Frankl and du Vintrais.
This is the first of these book reviews that have gotten me to buy a book.
A great book, and also a very short book, particularly if you focus mainly on the concentration camp section. I read this book shortly after reading Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling + Either/Or) in my early twenties, a year or two after my father had died of cancer. Both authors have had a huge influence on my life and, at least for me, were incredibly uplifting and freeing. They helped me process my grief and finding meaning in my life again. It's hard not to see Kierkegaard's influence in Frankl, which unfortunately makes Frankl's contributions seem less novel, but his delivery of the ideas is much more digestible.
I read "Man's Search For Meaning" for a graduate psychology class on motivation. The rest of the class had a lot of problems but the assigned readings were enough on their own to make it worth it. Although this isn't a traditional book review, it's of a very non-traditional book and I think Frankl would enjoy the structure of this review. You all should read the whole book, it's short and is sort of written like a blog post already.
It's a pretty good review. The one thing I'd say is I wouldn't call Kirill meaningless, orcish, or subhuman. If he's coming into your town with a gun then yes you should shoot him--pacifism is a fool's philosophy-- but there are plenty of people who have led boring lives that wouldn't sound particularly wonderful by our standards. From his point of view, he defended his country when the time came and died in battle--not so different from Tellus, the supposed happiest man alive according to Solon. Rural Russia sucks, I agree, but Kirill is far from unique in human history. The USA has its own dead-end towns full of poor kids who join the army to get out--are they also subhuman and meaningless because they don't write clever comments on Astral Codex Ten? After all, if he'd survived Kirill might have come back as a war hero, knocked up his girlfriend, and proceeded to become a dad. That would have probably given him at least some source of meaning.
I agree I don't want Kirill knocking on my door with a machine gun. That's war, though. We've all forgotten how awful it is. My conclusion from all this is 'Putin is a khuilo*', not 'Kirill is a p-zombie'. The whole question reminds me of the tendency of intellectuals to believe the masses are inferior. I don't like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I hope they kick them out, but pretending the enemy troops are some sort of Frankl-stein monster is a little much. Wars happen for reasons, and people fight them for reasons, even if they don't make much sense to people like us commenting on ACX.
*Though, you know, we did push a military alliance to his border.
Man, this kind of stretches the limits of the term 'book review', but the third section's comparison of Russian conscripts to concentration camp victims is haunting and interesting enough that I don't mind too much. Nonetheless, you kinda feel the need to grade this as an existentialist work on its own merits as much as a book review per se.
I'd *love* to catch back up with this author in about 5-10 years. The prose and subject matter are shooting very, very high, and they mostly get there. They get a lot of credit for ambition alone, not even counting the bonus points for the word "Frankl-stein." To some degree, it feels like they're still 'growing in' to this voice a bit, and there's some visible strain in places. Once they've got a few more million words under their belt, they're gonna be *phenomenal*. And right now, they're already pretty darn good.
At its core, this essay is just a plea for mercy, and in that it succeeds entirely. Well done, and well done.
We have a winner.
I have a strong objection to an underlying assumption that pervades this whole project: the idea that our understanding of when/how humans have this feeling of meaning and meaningfulness has to itself be the kind of thing we would seem meaningful.
I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic. To the contrary, spelling out the gory scientific details is often anything but. And if we were simply trying to account for some other boring aspect of our mental lives: eg the feeling of nostalgia there would be no pressure to treat it at a level besides the purely scientifically descriptive.
Yet, when it comes to meaning, there seems to be an irresistible temptation to assume that it makes sense to say something gives someone meaning and describe it as if it was a real objective thing rather than trying to operationalize what that means (is it a disposition to have certain kinds of feelings, it's own qualitative feeling what) and then offer an empirical theory about when those occur to be evaluated only with the usual tools of scientific theory.
I think it's very unfortunate and is basically a way to ensure falling into fallacies.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how ...
This is absolutely phenomenal.
A winner. Break a reader's heart, then lift it up. Hard to beat. Blagodarju! - Thinking about Kirill, I wonder about Andrej. Who lived in a meaningless mess very much like Kirill. Until the "Orcs" came. Because Andrej lives in Ukraine. Let us hope he still does. / My step-son K. lives in the early-occupied part - good he is no medic, else he would be at the front already, seems the Ruzzian overlords do not trust their "liberated brothers" enough to give them weapons. Here are 100 gram going down hoping he will not need to find meaning just before hitting a shell.- I find it all too sad to call a Russian "orc" or even to shout "slava Ukraina". I stick to PTN-PNX or "Could we please scroll forward to the part where you take a gun and put it to your head, Vlad?"
Dear Author, amazing piece of writing. :)
If there is a better essay than this coming in the Book Review contest it will have to be out of this world.
This was one fine piece of writing. My sincere thank to the author.
I see the through-line, and agree with the main thrust, but really didn't care for the editorial conceit. I find the "dear reader" stuff cringy at the best of times, and it completely fell apart for me at the 3rd, personal experience section. A strong, deep argument has to be backed up by clarity and confidence in the writing, and I didn't see that at all. Would enjoy reading after 2 or 3 complete rewrites.
Really thought provoking, thanks for this.
A tangent: a good way to answer a child's question "why is the sky blue" is "because air is very slightly blue, and you can see the blue when you look through enough of it. Lots of clear things are like that - the glass in windows is green, and water is blue like the ocean."
"my comments here would not pierce the membrane of banality"
This is my favorite piece of wordcrafting from any of the many book reviews I've read on ACX. I'm stealing it.
I'd like to see some data on which class of people were most likely to survive the camps.
One "dear reader" is too many. 14 is embarrassing.
How can a book review that doesn't even really tell me the full point of the book be a finalist? Synthesis is great, awkwardly inserting your hobby horse argument about modern Russian soldiers is not.
Your arguments are probably correct from a somewhat, detached, analytic lviewpoint.. So I stand corrected, Dachau wasn't a death camp. I suppose the distintion is made on the maps you have studied.
Perhaps also, that a large minority of the deaths at Auscwicz occurred in the forced marches Gestapo inflicted upon the surviving captives meant that "death camp" was extreme. My site's uncle, an MD, in fact worked in the medical facilities until he contracted typhus and died two weeks before liberation. Certainly not a victim of the gas chambers.
Apparently you are content with the idea that the Holocaust is now a subject of precise terms and that Frankl's experience deserved the phrase "concentration camp."
I guess I'm just too sensitive. My Bad.
More reading on Guillaume du Vintrais: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/poetry/2012-platonov.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/history/1993-makinen.pdf
No. I do object to a review that begins with a reference to concentration camps as a catchall term Especially in a review of this book. Not faulting the book, or the reviewer, jes' sayin' the review lost me at that point. Obviously some might think I'm being picky. Maybe studying Orwell got me oversensitive to even a bit of euphemism.
I remember some linguist who was in solitary confinement in some Asian country and stayed sane by counting the words she knew and such. Don't remember any details.
Nah, that would be "willing to compromise a lot of your moral principles and communicate well with both cops and criminals" mostly.
The book review makes one want to listen to Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) again, in particular the song Red-Yellow days (Красно-желтые Дни), made the last time Russia sent tens of thousands of young men to fight in one of its wars. Link to a cover version plus Tsoi himself below. Translated text here, a young soldier about to depart for the war:
My train has long stayed at the depot
I'm leaving again, it's time
The wind was waiting for me on the threshold
On the threshold of autumn, my sister
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Tell me about those who are tired
From the ruthless street dramas
And the church of broken hearts
And of those who go to this church
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by love,
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by dream
And on this perfectly lit star
I woke up and realized
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Here is a fairly recent cover by Тролль Гнет Ель, to illustrate that Tsoi is not forgotten:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B_oWYuHRc0&list=RD8B_oWYuHRc0&start_radio=1&rv=8B_oWYuHRc0&t=72
...and Tsoi himself, back in the days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltTEzwR3Mpw
This was truly amazing, an essay I think is going to influence my thinking and beliefs for a long time. I look forward to finding out who the author is so I can read more of their works, if there are any.
Honestly, I think this was the best book review I’ve ever read or will ever read.
I enjoyed this very much except for the repeated use of "dear reader", an affectation I found jarring. Was there a specific intention behind its use?
It seems to me that this review is really split in audience reaction. Personally, I liked it the least of the 4 finalists so far, and I found it meandering and I did not feel like it taught me anything or introduced new ideas to help me "update my mental software", which is the main criteria by which I measure these book reviews. I read this review and expected to come to the comments and have people asking why this was a finalist, only to be entirely blindsided by the effusive praise it's been given. I believe everyone here is being entirely honest with their enjoyment, so my main takeaway is awe at how different people are, and surprise that my opinion is different than what seems to be the majority of others here.
I'm so surprised by the responses to this review. Comments are emphasizing their profound emotional responses and the literary quality of the work, and I got basically nothing from it (and it's not because this wasn't book review-y enough). No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny, I suppose. As with others, I was mildly off put by the "dear reader"s, so maybe this soured my perspective of the more substantive content.
It seems like Frankl's main insight is "we make our own meaning", which is a perspective that is in the water, to say the least (as an aside, though that is how the reviewer glossed it, "we make our own meaning" does not seem to be the point of the central quotation of the review. Right conduct and right action != self-imposed meaning, to say nothing of the idea that each situation has a unique correct answer. I'd be interested in what Frankl was on about here, but that doesn't seem to be the point of the review). The two case studies are competent applications of the theory, and deepened my understanding of Kirill and his ilk somewhat, but don't seem that exciting.
I'm genuinely curious to the people who are really excited about this review: what did I miss? Was it the Ukraine context or the more personal stuff that did it for you?
Objectivist to the rescue! Specifically about "How can you be okay with killing enemy soldiers?" thing.
The answer is simple: Another's tragedy does not impose on us a moral obligation to martyr ourselves. Imagine you are caught in a Zombie Apocalypse, and one is coming straight for you. It does not matter if the zombie was a sweet, caring paragon of virtue prior to infection. It doesn't even matter if this is a truly awful version of the virus which leaves the person unchanged and completely conscious, but unable to control his body. You are not obliged to let yourself be killed because of his misfortune. Period.
So, yes, you may be forbidden from hating the enemy, or dehumanizing him. But you are absolutely allowed - in fact, obliged - to kill. In defense of your life and in defense of all you hold dear.
And this does make all the difference in the world. As long as you understand that you are dealing with another human being with his own drive for meaning, you have a chance of reaching him and changing his mind. I have read so many stories of deradicalized Islamists & neo-Nazis, and so many of them are reached by acknowledging this basic humanity, this basic need. And providing a _better_ source of meaning than senseless, bloody martyrdom.
“It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”
Wow. Last Weeks book review was great, but this blew me away.
The writing style doesn't do it for me. Is not the same style that college freshman literary reviews in a school mag deploy? Endless direct addresses to the reader, saying what the parts of the essay are, self-conscious deployment of bad rhetorical devices, detours that are not improved by pointing out they are bad. These habits were once mine and like Caliban looking in the mirror, I am repulsed.
Brilliant book. Changed my mom's life when she was in the psych ward as a teen in the 1960s and got her through her suffering. A powerful tale of how to survive the most atrocious struggles, externally and internally.
The Razor-Sharp Truth (A Quirky Advice Column)
https://therazorsharptruth.substack.com/
Nice to know everyone is so understanding of the article. A reviewer of this book in 2023 decides to follow Frankl's German derived, probably from English, term and it's OK. Even though there's at least some agreement that it could, just possibly be thought to be a not particularly pleasant euphemism for what happened.
This is substack.
If gold should rust, what would iron do?
Murky*
To me this review, and Frankl's story, as well as Kirill's fictional one, lack a niche but critical observation. One that, frankly, is missing in the world model of many cultures, including all those in Golden Horde Eurasia.
A human can chose to die, on principle. It is rare, but it does happen.
The concentration camp is not the world, you can escape it. Maybe the success rate for this is 0.01%, but people did escape. And you can choose to rebel, maybe it involve poisoning the food you're cooking for your captors, or killing a lowly German soldier, or even just refusing to drive the gas trucks, but you can rebel.
The author points as much by the end:
> Even in Kirill’s 100,000-people town some do gather on the main square and protest, knowing fully well they will be arrested, possibly beaten, possibly sent to prison. Maybe there are hundreds of them, maybe tens. Maybe not enough. More people write something on social media, which is dangerous in its own right. Some people sit quietly and secretly send money to Ukrainian charities.
But then, why would we think Frankl's theory ought to apply to turning Kirill into one of those people?
Frankl's, at least from this review, seems, at root, a coward. Maybe a good utilitarian, but a coward regardless. Someone that tries to think his way around hell rather than embracing death.
I'm not saying that embracing death is easy, I count myself a coward, I think all but a few insane people are, I'm not staying on a soap box here preaching virtue since I don't know how to achieve it myself.
But, if one like me could learn virtue, I'd be from one of the daring concentration camp escapees that went on to form Mossad and restore justice, rather than from someone that learned to cope with the lack thereof.
Reductionist lenses can be helpful in cutting through grand, poetic language and finding what’s most viscerally useful. “What’s the meaning of life?” is an oft asked and important seeming question that gets at something nebulous, so it might be fit for such reductionism.
So what is this concept of “meaning”? Could it be “significance” or “instrumental function”? A chair might have significance to somebody, but cannot inherently have this quality of significance, independent of being perceived as such. A chair certainly has instrumental function- to be sat on, to lend someone comfort and stability- as it was designed with this purpose in mind.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of a chair?”, I will mostly get strange looks. But I will also be able to intuit that the meaning of a chair is to be sat on, and perhaps whatever important emotional association it brings up in its perceiver.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of life?” I will probably be accused of being a melancholy, good for nothing brooder. Which is telling! Pining for meaning is perhaps not some grand cosmic quest, not wrestling with God or orcs, but just a signal that one’s life does not have enough satisfaction. The sensation of satisfaction is easier to work with than this nebulous thing of meaning. Satisfaction comes in many flavors, but I think most people have a strong sense of what gives them satisfaction. And if they cannot do more of it, then they simply must frame what they can in ways that are sufficiently challenging as to earn the satisfactory feeling. It’s the flip side to anxiety: anxiety motivates you to act to achieve some uncertain outcome, and satisfaction rewards you for achieving it.
It’s my sense that much of Western existentialism or nihilism is born of toxic disillusionment with one’s satisfaction structure- the simple Christian norms one grows up with. The satisfaction of working teleologically towards Heaven, or oneness with God or the Good, is addictive! And cognitively acknowledging that that structure is not real can throw one’s ability to find satisfaction in engaging in the real world totally out of wack. But the intuitions that created conceptions of the Good, formalized into Christian ethics some two millennia ago, are still baked into us! So do away with the reality distorting beliefs, but be careful not to dismiss the Good-seeking part of you that is as much you as food-seeking, status-seeking, comfort-seeking drives bestowed by nature, and which is even seen as such by some religious traditions!
I liked the review less and less as I read through it.
> I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
If apathy is the opposite of empathy, this has been researched. Just search the Web for "empathetic countries". Russia comes in 11th most apathetic, preceded by most of Eastern Europe including Finland. Based on this, it seems more likely that apathy is more of a cultural or geographic trait than something recently produced in Russia / Soviet Union.
What nudged me to check this was the red flag when I read the fictional Kirill's biography, this sentence in particular:
> Kirill gets drafted in September 2022, and is sent to Ukraine after three days of training.
This perfectly matches the Western preconceptions of Russians attacking in human waves / orc hordes to be slaughtered, but it's easily proven false with a minimum of research. Russian troops have been on the defensive in Ukraine since the draft. There have been no costly attacks except in Bakhmut, by the Wagner mercenary group where the draftees didn't go. The regular Russian army had a plenty of time to train their draftees. And this supposedly Russian author should have known this. Then why the Kirill caricature?
Author (who I assume is lurking) might enjoy this tweet: https://twitter.com/meaning_enjoyer/status/1657511104946507781
"best deradicalizer testimony i saw was a former jihadi who admitted it was the best, most meaningful time of his life until he could no longer shake the growing horror of what his actual impact on the world was"
I really enjoyed this review. A few thoughts:
I'm reminded of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is a search for meaning in its own way. Written in 1947 in post-war France, amongst a class of intelligentsia grappling with peace-time existentialism, the books emphasis on freedom is almost diametrically opposed to the conditions of a concentration camp. Whereas Frankl asks, "How can we find meaning amongst even the worst of suffering?", Beauvoir is asking, "How can we find meaning given a certain amount of freedom?"
Both are valid questions. If you are lucky enough like myself to be one of the "dear readers" here, then you likely aren't suffering physical hardship. In fact, if you have enough time to scroll the comments here, you may be suffering from too much free time, from a comfortable life without meaning. This would be what Beauvoir terms our "burden of freedom". If we are free, how can we make meaning in our lives, and how can we be sure that the meaning we've chosen for ourselves is a good one.
Frankl's message is a profound one, but it misses the hardest part: creating good meaning. His book and his wife were good reasons to continue on. But what of someone like Kirill?
Let's imagine that Kirill is magically transported to Kansas City, where he is given UBI that lets him live comfortably though not excessively. He is given an apartment, a cell phone, a bus pass, and anything else on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. What does he do? Sure, at first he probably gets good and drunk, maybe goes on a bender, maybe tries to pick up a local woman (sorry wifey). But what then? What happens when he equilibriates to his environment, one in which he doesn't have to work and doesn't have meaning? This is the burden of freedom, and one that I see coming down the pipeline and straight into the face of those humans who become "obsolete" with the advances of AI/AGI.
Beauvoir's solution to the "burden of freedom" is what she calls the Passionate Man: someone who is engaged actively in their life in an authentic way, who sees themself clearly enough to be able to act toward a meaning that is unique to their talents and passions. Frankl hits on this a bit when he talks about "Right Action", an echo of the larger buddhist idea. Interestingly, the Passionate Man is almost the opposite of the apathetic man that Frankl describes.
Anyways, this is becoming a book review in itself, dear reader. These are hard questions that Frankl and SBD are asking, and I agree that within these depths is a mixture of black and white, good and evil. My own opinion is that life is the meaning in itself, and living more consciously of this, and helping others to see and experience this, is the way :)
Interesting that the climate turns Kirill into an orc while no such thing happens to Norwegians or Finns.