No, see, American drone operators and bomber pilots (who actually chose to join military instead of being drafted) are fair elves who just want to bring the Light of Freedom to barbaric lands. Resistance is futile.
That review completely lost me at Kirill part. It's a typical Russian-who-moved-abroad view of those who remained. It creates a strawman and proceeds to describe its plight (at least this one is very transparent about it!), moving on to either hand-wringing over cruel fate of Motherland, or blaming the Russian people for being "the wrong kind" (this one seems to be the first type).
It's people like that who make Russian troops (and even civilians on the net) take up the "Orcs" label and own it (well, you can also blame Warhammer 40K which made Orcs cool).
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.
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?
>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.
It’s so true. And good on him for affirming it. A meaning of one’s own is the only way.
Things will happen and circumstances will change and at the end of the day all that matters is what you make of it.. The internal theatre that we direct is all encompassing when it comes to “meaning “. The truth that he forged this conviction under extreme circumstances is telling.
> The truth that he forged this conviction under extreme circumstances is telling.
The review asserts that he did not.
> A meaning of one’s own is the only way.
This is the apparently-profound wisdom of the modern era. I don't really understand it. How can meaning be meaningful if we just... pick it out of a hat? And if we *are* using some other criteria, then doesn't that point to a sense of meaning that transcends our own choices?
I understand your concern. But we don’t pick meaning out of a hat, meaning comes from processing the circumstances of our life in a way that we can live with. If we can’t do that, then there’s no way forward. A lot of things happen in our life and around us that we have no control over. What are we to make of the things we have no control over? We have to make something out of it because they are the circumstances of our life. That’s where meaning comes in. Everything is predicated on that choice.
The phrase was coined by Christian anarchist writer Elbert Hubbard in a 1915 obituary he penned and published for dwarf actor Marshall Pinckney Wilder. The obituary, entitled The King of Jesters, praises Wilder's optimistic attitude and achievements in the face of his disabilities:
"He was a walking refutation of that dogmatic statement, Mens sana in corpore sano. His was a sound mind in an unsound body. He proved the eternal paradox of things. He cashed in on his disabilities. He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand."
I agree with you. "Choosing a meaning of your own" doesn't make coherent sense, it has to be grounded in something otherwise one is suspended in relativism.
Also, psychologically, it can be a trap. It requires more insight in their own motivations than most people have to understand whether they are really following their own paths, or just following their introjects.
People's subjective drives being fulfilled is generally the what people want when they talk of needing meaning. If I informed you of the good news that you have a teleological purpose, but that it was that you were designed to spend your eternal life toiling in slavery on the spice mines of Acturus-9, you probably wouldn't be happy about this state of affairs. And even if you insist you would be in a contrarian fit, I'm extremely confident most people would not. People tend to only care about external meaning insofar as it conveniently lines up with fulfillment of their entirely subjective higher order desires.
I don't agree that that is what people mean when they talk about meaning. "Subjective drives being fulfilled" sounds a lot more like "wanting to be happy" or "wanting pleasure".
Being a slave in a spice mine is a terrible existence, both subjectively and by any objective criteria one might come up with, so it couldn't possibly be anyone's teleological purpose ("telos").
People have drives apart from seeking the personal experience of happiness and/or pleasure and I think the psychological hedonism thesis is as close to dead as you could hope for. But if you expand to desires - mental states that some state of affairs ought to obtain - then yes, that's what people seem to really mean when they talk about wanting meaning in their lives.
Being a slave in a spice mine is a purpose in an objective teleological sense if we define it to be so, and I'm suggesting to you the fact that people recoil at the thought of is because they don't care about teleological purpose in this sense per se. In fact, they tend to only care about it insofar as teleology is carefully defined to be subjectively fulfilling. People will *say* they want teleology because they incorrectly think that makes it more real, but they will only abide it if it conveniently lines up close to subjective fulfillment. Even people who believe in something like my fanciful spice mines example imagine themselves to be the elect.
I think the idea is that you should wrestle with philosophical issues ( or with God, but only until dawn) and stay alert for meaning. The staunchly unphilosophical will never realize that their actions have meaning. Once you've figured out the meaning, it seems like it was always there and is beyond your power.
It's a bit worse than that. Your instinct to question this process is spot-on, but the problem isn't that this kind of existentialism is arbitrary. It's that it's deliberately contrary to earlier forms of meaning-making. Like a salesman prompting you to imagine how it will feel to pull up at the club in the overpriced car you haven't committed to buying yet, it wants you to imagine enjoying this feeling of having meaning without actually selling you on it being possible to have meaning in this way. Perhaps Robin Hanson would say that meaning is a feeling we get when complying with group norms, and this invites you to be part of a distributed group joined by individualism.
It's not that Frankl advocates for meaning to be picked out of a hat; he seems to believe that meaning comes from a mix of the situation and a lot of insight into one's own life, and I tend to agree. I feel like, although meaning in this sense is uniquely individual and therefore apparently arbitrary, it's the fact that it's so personal that makes it meaningful in the first place. Looking for a meaning to fit everyone is, in my opinion, somewhat pointless. How can we expect every life to have the same meaning if they're all unique?
Yes, it hadn't occurred to me before, but it is obviously right that we must create meaning in our lives, rather than search for a universal "meaning", whatever that even means. (Heh.) My main quibble is with this:
> Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
I am highly skeptical of "always only one right answer", unless this is secretly religious. But I suppose I'll need to read the book to find out more.
Is that a quote from the book? It’s rather opaque without context. In the sense of “whatever happens must happen because G_d or quantum theory wills it” I understand.
In the sense of being at the start of a decision tree, I’m not clear about it.
I mean, there isn't much to the thought of Jack Bogle (invest in an index) or Albert Ellis (your thoughts create your feelings), but it's still useful and represented an important advance. (Ellis in particular was inspired by the Stoics.) Academics love to invent complicated theories, but for practical purposes simple is often best.
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.
> In contrast, I dislike the cloying writing style with its flourishes of false affection.
I initially found it peculiar, but later it started to make a bit more sense when the writer turned out to be Russian. There's this historical ... **thing** ... with literate Russians and the French, and I don't really get it, but at least to my limited understanding, it entirely explains this aspect of the review. Or who knows, maybe I made my margarita (heh) a bit strong, and I'm just charmed by it all.
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
Didn't the reviewer mention smoke from chimneys at some of the camps, presumably referring to mass human cremations? Large-scale deaths from neglect, cold, and starvation in Russian labour camps seem to justify use of the term concentration camp for them with its meaning of "death camp", even if the guards weren't actually killing people. So it isn't clear what your beef is.
Also, the first concentration camps, of the "crappy places" category I think, were set up in Cuba during a Spanish uprising there in 1896, which was before the 2nd Boer War (1899 - 1902) when they were first used by the Brits.
I skimmed the review, and it seemed OK, although the topics don't interest me much. I didn't care for the author's repeated appeals and asides to the "dear reader", as these sound a bit knowing and twee.
Thanks for your thoughtful and informative response. Given the time proximity, I suspect the Brits picked up on the idea. Andersonville during the Civil War was essentially a concentration camp with death rates approaching extermination levels. My good friend's mother spent some time as a young child in a Turkish Concentration camp. Jewish settlers in Tel Aviv were removed to the Judean hills in WWI in the correct assumption that the English would eventually use the coastal route to invade from Egypt. She was still around, complainting 70 years later, but then she always complained.
When we watch Cadablanca, we are always startled by the use of "Concentration Camp." Hollywood had to tread a fine line, given its Jewish associations, and the movie did its job.
In 2023 using "concentration camp" for the Nazi Final Solution is a profoundly troubling euphemism, especially in a finalist for a Substack review prize.
I cannot understand why you consider "concentration camps" to be euphemism. As I pointed out in an earlier comment technically speaking there were different kinds of camps used by nazis: extermination camps, but also actual concentration camps. Extermination camps were indeed mostly about final solution of Jews (and sometimes also Romani), but there were also concentration and labour camps with far more diverse inmates and their fates. And since the review is about surviving inhuman conditions it cannot be about death camps because in death camp survival was simply not an option (and indeed I think Frankl was an inmate of concentration/labour camps, but not a death camp). Also most of the victims of death camps were not really inmates but were murdered on arrival (there was usually a small contingent of actual inmates used to run the camp, but this was only delay, they were "rotated" rather frequently). For comparison, I believe none was liberated at Treblinka death camp (about 100 people escaped during uprising of prisoners earlier during the war, shortly before the liberation germans murdered remaining labour crew) where over 930000 people were murdered, whereas in Dachau (a concentration camp, where Frankl was an inmate for a time) Americans liberated about 30000 people (and they were even not all former inmates who survived). This is not to say that people were not killed in nazi concentration camps (they were, massively so, dying from sickness, bullets, hard labour and gas chambers), or that the conditions there were somehow good (it was hell on earth), but nazi concentration camps and extermination camps are two different things, both of which existed.
Ok. Perhaps this was not as clear as I wanted. So another attempt: Nazi concentration camps were actually concentration camps since their purpose was (according to wiktionary) to detain a large numbers of people, especially political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees etc., for the purpose of confining them in one place, typically with inadequate or inhumane facilities. The fact that nazi concentration camps had less adequate and more inhumane facilities than other camps of this kind is irrelevant. There were also death camps were prisoners were not kept for extended time but rather murdered on arrival.
I guess that diminishing Auchwicz to a bad place, like so many other bad places of our indifferent times is OK. After all The places where Americans of Japanese ancestry were kept were concentration camps too. And they didn't even get a country for their suffering. Oh wait, they already had one!
I thought that was my point. A concentration camp could be an extermination camp or something like Depression Era work camps. The two are quite different. To call Auschwicz a concentration camp is a euphemisim. That I'm getting posts with a tone like yours is worrisome.
Andersonville Prison had another thing in common with Nazi concentration camps: after the war ended, Henry Wirz, the Confederate officer in charge of Andersonville Prison, was one of the first people in history to be tried for and convicted of war crimes.
Nazis used several types of camps: concentration, death (extermination), and others. The reason why memoirs of former prisoners speak about concentration camps and not death camps is because people who were sent to a death camp did not get the chance to write memoirs. It was literally impossible to survive death camp for more than a few weeks, and vast majority of victims were killed immediately upon arrival anyway. On the other hand, it was at least possible, if difficult, to survive concentration camp. What adds to the confusion is that one of the most famous nazi camps, the one in Auschwitz consisted in reality of several kinds of camps including death and concentration camp
There are different types of camps, but colloquially, in American English, they're all collectively referred to as "concentration camps". It's inaccurate, but that's just the way it is. Maybe it's because of the Brits?
While there’s clearly a large difference between what the Brits did in South Africa and what the Nazis did, the term Concentration Camp is commonly used for both. Wikipedia says “Auschwitz concentration camp ... was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps”. Further, Wikipedia describes Frankl as having “spent three years in four concentration camps”, suggesting this is common usage, even if you consider it inaccurate.
How very kind of you to remind us of this. So what term would you prefer to use? Death camp? Not The Brits Camp?
I don't get the rationale for this kind of nit-picking, and I'm certainly not hanging out any flags for the British Empire during the Boer War. Are you going to "Well ackshully" about if it's the Shoah or the Holocaust as well?
In "Bloodlands"*, Timothy Snyder emphasized the difference between concentration camps and death camps (though, confusingly, Auschwitz contained both), but most people still use the former term to refer to the latter.
It might not be ideal for "concentration camp" to be used for death camps, but a lot of people grew up with that usage, and you'll miss out on a lot of good material if you insist on avoiding anything where concentration camp is used to mean death camp.
On the other hand, that bit about posters not having editors.... I wonder whether you're trolling.
The Nazis themselves called their camps, including the death camps, Konzentrationslager or KZ for short - that abbreviation is still "tainted" in modern German, and both the abbreviation and the long form, unless qualified with context, tend to stand for the Nazi camps and nothing else in German. I'm pretty sure they got the term from the Brits, knowing full well that it would be somewhat euphemistic.
I can imagine that Frankl himself, like everyone else who was in one, used the term KZ or Konzentrationslager, and if the reviewer here is following the terminology in the book they're reviewing rather than using a more modern term, I would give them a pass on this one. Especially if the Russian language has the same connotations for this term as German.
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.
Re homelessness: I grew up in a nice suburb and went to a small private school, so much that I was shocked in college when people were mean to me for the first time. Coming from that background, I have a visceral aversion to hitting people. In Aikido, where it's a structured environment, I won't hurt or even offend the other person, I still can't deliver a forceful punch. And in spite of being maximally nice, in the sense of not wanting to hurt anyone, when I'm confronted by homeless addicts I have no idea what to do that would really help and usually don't do anything and find the whole thing awkward and escape the awkwardness by pretending that the homeless person doesn't exist. In an abstract utilitarian sense hurting someone is the same as not helping, but they feel very different psychologically, and the kind of personality that helps can be very different from the personality that doesn't harm. Sometimes US veterans are very concerned about homelessness, in spite of being willing to kill. The reviewer's point about a lifetime of meaningless suffering making young Russian men willing to kill is probably right, and that's really different psychologically than apathy to the homeless.
There's a book (sorry I didn't make note of the title) which argues that high housing prices are a primary cause of homelessness-- that drug addiction or mental illness or high debt make people homeless, but is the high housing prices that push them over the edge-- there are relatively poor cities where there isn't a lot of homelessness because the housing prices aren't that high.
Does the book sound familiar?
I can believe that there are young, healthy men who take up homelessness for a while as a sort of urban camping, and also college students who try begging as a lark. I don't think either of those are anything like the majority of people begging on the street.
Me, I've never heard of the book, but this has been my default assumption for a few years now, and I have seen very little during that time to argue against it, and much to argue for it. It frankly surprises me a little that anybody *doesn't* think that. Part of this may be that I am old enough to remember a time before the 2000s housing bubble, or the Fed's decision to "fix" the collapse of that bubble by blowing up a much bigger one. Back in those days, before housing of any sort became so jawdroppingly expensive, I clearly remember that it was possible for people to be fairly dysfunctional and still have a place to sleep indoors. You didn't have to work as many hours to do this, which meant that you didn't have to be capable of working that many hours (or getting anyone to hire you for that many hours, or finding a government benefit equal to working that many hours), which meant that you could have some unknown but significant amount more wrong with you, in term of being able to get it together to do economic stuff, before you sank below the "able to pay for a place to sleep that is in a building" level. I knew some of these people, and I am convinced that today they would be homeless.
Of course, then and now, once a person sank below that level, the dysfunction often spiraled, especially if it had to do with addiction.
There's also the drug problem. It's sort of an existential question - would you rather spend money on drugs or rent? The more people become addicted, the more they choose drugs. :-(
Well, see, my point more or less is that when it becomes literally prohibitively expensive to pay rent, the "drugs or rent" question becomes much, much easier for those already inclined to overuse them.
I've seen a breakdown where some are what they call "lifestyle" homeless, and a larger chunk are working poor who lost jobs or otherwise got priced out of housing, but a third large group are suffering from severe mental illness and drug addiction. And one of of the problems is that the first two groups get steadily drawn into the third, from the living conditions as well as what might as well be considered peer pressure.
I volunteered for a few years at a place that feeds homeless people, and this seems to match up. Most of the people who show up are frankly not capable of holding down a job. But then, they do say that the second group, the priced out, are less visible - the first group intentionally stands out, and the third group is what causes most of the problems.
There's also probably an effect where this varies by location. My city is a "destination", where people from a large region gravitate (or are sent via one-way bus tickets). So we may see more of the first and third groups, and less of the second.
So, I think you're right about the distinction; I'd characterize the ability to ignore the homeless as something like "limited sociopathy", whereas what the reviewer is talking about seems more like when that applies to everything in life, when there is literally nothing to care about. And in retrospect, I see that I didn't phrase what I was saying well. What I meant was more along the lines of, if we get this result in a nice part of a nice city, imagine what things are like when the entire environment is full of stuff that it's safer not to care about.
I've done some martial arts too, but not aikido, and I've also noticed that people can sometimes be very unwilling to punch another person, even when they are perfectly capable of punching targets. Like, they can break boards, but they aren't able to do a full force punch in a drill, even though they **know** that their partner will step away and deflect it. It's not even "unwilling", it seems to be something deep down that won't try to seriously hurt another person unless they're angry. Which is generally something that makes me hopeful about people. :-) But less hopeful about AI safety. :-(
When I lived in DC several years ago I was walking through the (mostly gentrified) Columbia Heights area and saw someone passed out by the sidewalk. I kept walking. On my way back there was an ambulance there, so I stopped to talk to the paramedics and ask if I should have called 911. Their response was "you can, but he's just drunk, so there's not really anything we can do". Another time, a friend of mine found a body in the same area that had clearly been there for hours before anyone noticed. The sad fact is that as a passerby it's nearly impossible to tell if an addict is in a life threatening situation.
Two years ago around the corner from The Port Authority Bus Terminal I saved the life of a man who had beaten nearly to death and was laying sprawled out on the sidewalk.
This was 10pm and I had to pass through the young gentlemen who had just beaten him.
I'm tempted to comment on the lack of any response by others who just walked past him but that would be pretty self serving.
I only feel the need to mention it because I (like I imagine many of you) have a "nice guy" bone to pick with society.
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.
Hm. I did a little searching and I ran across this, which puzzled me, because I couldn't figure out what direction the hostility was coming from, until I saw that it was **intra-group** criticism, Tablet being a Jewish publication.
I may not have looked hard enough, but I didn't find anything by Pytell freely available, just some summaries, and some summaries of rebuttals of Pytell. Overall, I think I'm going to need to wait to read more criticism until I actually read the book in question. But so far most of it seems ad hominem. With the exception of a valid warning that he's writing to an audience, using persuasion, rather than simply pouring raw thoughts upon a page.
"Often the suicide was done at the deportation centers, no doubt to disturb the Nazis. Also, “those reflecting on the suicides of relatives or friends often admired the courage it took to end one’s own life.” Under the circumstances it was a dignified act. Cyanide, sleeping pills, or poison were the most common methods of suicide and therefore drugs were in high demand.
Apparently, whenever patients had taken an overdose of pills and then had been given up for dead by other doctors, Frankl felt “justified in trying something.” First, “some injections intravenously … and if this didn’t work I gave them injections into the brain … into the Cisterna Magna. And if that did not work I made a trepanation, opened the skull … inserted drugs into the ventricle and made a drainage so drug went into the Aquaeductus Sylvii. … People whose breathing had stopped suddenly started breathing again.” But he “could only keep them alive for 24 hours no longer.”[66] Frankl administered the stimulants Pervitin and Tetrophan."
According to Alexander Batthyány, Frankl first described his experiments in a lecture in 1947 at the Austrian Society for Neurology. However, he made no mention of his research in his original biographical statement in 1973, although he did mention the “experiments” in his 1981 interview with Tom Corrigan. He did however give a full description of the research in his 1993 interview with Dr. Neugebauer and Dr. Klamper as well as in his 1995 autobiography. Never one to express much self-doubt, Frankl proudly recounted his research efforts. Frankl narrated that although he had no training in brain surgery, and was denied access “to even look on” when Professor Schönbauer performed surgery, he was still able to conduct the surgery. Frankl also remarked that the primary surgeon Reich refused to do the operations (it is not clear why he refused to do surgeries), and therefore Frankl decided to perform the brain surgery techniques after reading about them. He published an article in Ars Medici documenting the experiments in September of 1942 (ironically, just as he was deported to Theresienstadt)."
The earliest source cited is:
66. For a verbal description of these experiments, see Corrigan Interview (GTU). Frankl’s written documentation is Viktor Frankl, “Pervitin Intrazisternal,” Ars Medici no. 1 (1942): 58–60.
Tablet's one of the few right-leaning Jewish publications (they seem to be trying to take over from Commentary) and might be an interesting read for some of the people here trying to puzzle out how to be conservative without being fascist. But they're hardly right about everything.
The writer, David Mikics, apparently has written about the canon with Harold Bloom and about old-school stuff like sonnets and the (conservative) Jewish writer Saul Bellow, so I suspect he might be a bit of a closet-rightie. His big concern seems to be with using the Holocaust as a basis for therapy, which I get, though I don't agree with: surviving something like a Nazi concentration camp certainly bears at least learning about for those of us trying to survive less difficult things (which is just about everything).
Tablet is becoming unspeakable politically. Sort of the reverse of pre Podhoretz Commentary where it was OK to read, but one should skip the Jewish articles like.
>for some of the people here trying to puzzle out how to be conservative without being fascist.
What is puzzling about it? There were conservatives long before there were fascists. The people who are confused are the people rapidly debasing the word fascist, which I hope you are not one of.
On a historical timescale, definitely. I do think the far-right does appeal to a lot of disenchanted young men (especially white) who are poorly served by the mainstream and the left, though. If you're constantly hearing how bad you are because you're white, why not go to people who tell you being white is good?
Not in the camp, as far as I understand (I rather doubt that inmates of nazi concentration camps had access to painkillers or sleeping pills), but when he was still a director of neurology in Vienna. But yes, he does seem to be a controversial figure. For a measured, but not starry eyed alternative assessment of Frankl and his philosophy one may see e.g., https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl
There are more charitable interpretations of what he did (like desperately trying to save his compatriots while deluding himself about the fate which awaited Jews in nazi Europe), though yours is also a possible interpretation. Remember also that a Jewish director of neurology in a Jewish hospital in 1941 Vienna might not be completely in charge (to put it mildly). Based only on limited (and perhaps biased) sources I would be reluctant to pass too categorical judgement on Frankl. Still you raised important questions about Frankl which should have been addressed by the review, and haven't.
I don't know. People to love to pass judgement on people in difficult situations, but given how many dumb things I've done under much smaller stresses, I can't say I necessarily would have done better than Victor Frankl in *Nazi Austria*. Also remember we don't have the same horror of medical experiments and the same primacy of informed consent, a lot of which grew out of the postwar Nuremberg trials; there was a long history of scientists carrying on dubiously-moral (especially by modern-day standards) experiments with the excuse they were trying to expand scientific knowledge that might help someone someday. And they weren't even wrong in all cases; do you think an IRB would have approved Jenner's vaccine experiments?
which is a (very) critical answer to the previous article I cited above. I am not qualified to judge the historical arguments, but it shows that indeed it was all complicated, and that relying on a single source can lead to gross oversimplification. This is doubly true in. case of people faced with such difficult (and deadly) situations like being a Jew in nazi Austria.
Modern-day doctors often enough attempt to revive would-be suicides, sometimes producing mutilated cripples, and -- in USA in particular -- cripples who wake up bankrupt (perhaps the one torture even Mengele had never perpetrated!)
Was it an atrocity in Frankl's case simply because of what we now know would happen later to the patients? But neither Frankl nor his patients knew precisely what was in store for them. The implied "permission" for the suicides (and condemnation of the attempts at revival) by modern critics is IMHO an entirely unprincipled exception.
Or even in a very simple crude manner, people who are CODE BLUE often get broken ribs/ruptured spleens and punctured lungs while professionals try and resuscitate them. Sometimes (rarely) even getting resuscitated but then dying of their new injuries in their weakened state.
Hm, OK, looking back, I can see how it might have come across as "smug". I'm not sure why it didn't, to me. Instead it came across as deliberately archaic, in a literary sense.
Elves and dwarves seemed to flow out of the "orc" comment, which led directly to the application of the book's philosophical framework to current events. I can't fault it for that at all.
I haven't read much Moldbug, but the main sense I get is of deliberately shaping the narrative to support the desired conclusions, specifically by leaving out anything that might contradict the narrative. But I can't tell what's being left out, or even if the author is doing it consciously.
This feels more like a necessarily-incomplete attempt at embracing the entire world. It's still missing a lot, but, well, I don't know how to put it right now, other than that it just feels different. Sorry if that's not very helpful.
Not nearly enough Carlyle references for it to be Moldbug. On a more serious note, I find the main characteristic of Moldbug/Yarvin's style to be the obliqueness of the nonstop references and allusions, whereas in this piece it seems like the author was trying to make them as straightforward and direct as possible, to the point of being a bit on the nose. So in my reading, it was almost anti-Moldbug in style, in that way.
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.
The 90s have been mythologised by Putin & Co, "at least it's not the 90s" is his main slogan. I am from Latvia, we also lived through the 90s. It was more the Wild West than some kind of hellhole. In Russia, arguably, many things were much better back then.
Not so mythologized, 90s were really bad back in Russia. But the main point I'm trying to make is that Kirill the ork's psychological portrait would be just about right. If it was 90's. It's not anymore, modern Russian youth is really closer to an average European or American than to Kirill.
No, see, American drone operators and bomber pilots (who actually chose to join military instead of being drafted) are fair elves who just want to bring the Light of Freedom to barbaric lands. Resistance is futile.
That review completely lost me at Kirill part. It's a typical Russian-who-moved-abroad view of those who remained. It creates a strawman and proceeds to describe its plight (at least this one is very transparent about it!), moving on to either hand-wringing over cruel fate of Motherland, or blaming the Russian people for being "the wrong kind" (this one seems to be the first type).
It's people like that who make Russian troops (and even civilians on the net) take up the "Orcs" label and own it (well, you can also blame Warhammer 40K which made Orcs cool).
It’s a wonderful book. It made a huge impression on me.
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.
I think I recognize the writing, and I doubt this writer would use AI in their published works.
I've got 50 bucks that says not a single line was written or edited with an AI.
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.
This is just what book reviews look like around here.
Excellent point but this one seems especially so.
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?
>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.
It’s so true. And good on him for affirming it. A meaning of one’s own is the only way.
Things will happen and circumstances will change and at the end of the day all that matters is what you make of it.. The internal theatre that we direct is all encompassing when it comes to “meaning “. The truth that he forged this conviction under extreme circumstances is telling.
Essentially it’s coming to terms with what is in your control and what is not.
> The truth that he forged this conviction under extreme circumstances is telling.
The review asserts that he did not.
> A meaning of one’s own is the only way.
This is the apparently-profound wisdom of the modern era. I don't really understand it. How can meaning be meaningful if we just... pick it out of a hat? And if we *are* using some other criteria, then doesn't that point to a sense of meaning that transcends our own choices?
I understand your concern. But we don’t pick meaning out of a hat, meaning comes from processing the circumstances of our life in a way that we can live with. If we can’t do that, then there’s no way forward. A lot of things happen in our life and around us that we have no control over. What are we to make of the things we have no control over? We have to make something out of it because they are the circumstances of our life. That’s where meaning comes in. Everything is predicated on that choice.
>This is the apparently-profound wisdom of the modern era
It’s a wisdom that goes back a long way, not a fad of our times.
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
How old is that and where did it come from?
Heh, well you did ask.
From wikipedia:
The phrase was coined by Christian anarchist writer Elbert Hubbard in a 1915 obituary he penned and published for dwarf actor Marshall Pinckney Wilder. The obituary, entitled The King of Jesters, praises Wilder's optimistic attitude and achievements in the face of his disabilities:
"He was a walking refutation of that dogmatic statement, Mens sana in corpore sano. His was a sound mind in an unsound body. He proved the eternal paradox of things. He cashed in on his disabilities. He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_life_gives_you_lemons,_make_lemonade
Great! Thanks for that.
I think Shakespeare touched on it
“That this poor player here….could so move his soul to his own content..”
I agree with you. "Choosing a meaning of your own" doesn't make coherent sense, it has to be grounded in something otherwise one is suspended in relativism.
Also, psychologically, it can be a trap. It requires more insight in their own motivations than most people have to understand whether they are really following their own paths, or just following their introjects.
People's subjective drives being fulfilled is generally the what people want when they talk of needing meaning. If I informed you of the good news that you have a teleological purpose, but that it was that you were designed to spend your eternal life toiling in slavery on the spice mines of Acturus-9, you probably wouldn't be happy about this state of affairs. And even if you insist you would be in a contrarian fit, I'm extremely confident most people would not. People tend to only care about external meaning insofar as it conveniently lines up with fulfillment of their entirely subjective higher order desires.
I don't agree that that is what people mean when they talk about meaning. "Subjective drives being fulfilled" sounds a lot more like "wanting to be happy" or "wanting pleasure".
Being a slave in a spice mine is a terrible existence, both subjectively and by any objective criteria one might come up with, so it couldn't possibly be anyone's teleological purpose ("telos").
People have drives apart from seeking the personal experience of happiness and/or pleasure and I think the psychological hedonism thesis is as close to dead as you could hope for. But if you expand to desires - mental states that some state of affairs ought to obtain - then yes, that's what people seem to really mean when they talk about wanting meaning in their lives.
Being a slave in a spice mine is a purpose in an objective teleological sense if we define it to be so, and I'm suggesting to you the fact that people recoil at the thought of is because they don't care about teleological purpose in this sense per se. In fact, they tend to only care about it insofar as teleology is carefully defined to be subjectively fulfilling. People will *say* they want teleology because they incorrectly think that makes it more real, but they will only abide it if it conveniently lines up close to subjective fulfillment. Even people who believe in something like my fanciful spice mines example imagine themselves to be the elect.
I think the idea is that you should wrestle with philosophical issues ( or with God, but only until dawn) and stay alert for meaning. The staunchly unphilosophical will never realize that their actions have meaning. Once you've figured out the meaning, it seems like it was always there and is beyond your power.
It's a bit worse than that. Your instinct to question this process is spot-on, but the problem isn't that this kind of existentialism is arbitrary. It's that it's deliberately contrary to earlier forms of meaning-making. Like a salesman prompting you to imagine how it will feel to pull up at the club in the overpriced car you haven't committed to buying yet, it wants you to imagine enjoying this feeling of having meaning without actually selling you on it being possible to have meaning in this way. Perhaps Robin Hanson would say that meaning is a feeling we get when complying with group norms, and this invites you to be part of a distributed group joined by individualism.
>meaning is a feeling we get when complying with group norms
Or meaning is a feeling we get when we connect with our world.
It's not that Frankl advocates for meaning to be picked out of a hat; he seems to believe that meaning comes from a mix of the situation and a lot of insight into one's own life, and I tend to agree. I feel like, although meaning in this sense is uniquely individual and therefore apparently arbitrary, it's the fact that it's so personal that makes it meaningful in the first place. Looking for a meaning to fit everyone is, in my opinion, somewhat pointless. How can we expect every life to have the same meaning if they're all unique?
>uniquely individual and therefore apparently arbitrary,
Does that follow?
No one is going to construct and tell your story except you. Storytelling is power. Step up.
👍
Yes, it hadn't occurred to me before, but it is obviously right that we must create meaning in our lives, rather than search for a universal "meaning", whatever that even means. (Heh.) My main quibble is with this:
> Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
I am highly skeptical of "always only one right answer", unless this is secretly religious. But I suppose I'll need to read the book to find out more.
Is that a quote from the book? It’s rather opaque without context. In the sense of “whatever happens must happen because G_d or quantum theory wills it” I understand.
In the sense of being at the start of a decision tree, I’m not clear about it.
Yes, it's from the book, at least as quoted by the reviewer.
I suspect that, to intelligently disagree, I will first have to read the book to gain enough context. And perhaps then I won't disagree.
It’s been a long time since I read it. It’s definitely worth it.
I mean, there isn't much to the thought of Jack Bogle (invest in an index) or Albert Ellis (your thoughts create your feelings), but it's still useful and represented an important advance. (Ellis in particular was inspired by the Stoics.) Academics love to invent complicated theories, but for practical purposes simple is often best.
That preface is the most centrally-SSC/ACX book review preface it might be possible to write.
Yes. Not the least because it is 100% accurate. :-)
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.
> In contrast, I dislike the cloying writing style with its flourishes of false affection.
I initially found it peculiar, but later it started to make a bit more sense when the writer turned out to be Russian. There's this historical ... **thing** ... with literate Russians and the French, and I don't really get it, but at least to my limited understanding, it entirely explains this aspect of the review. Or who knows, maybe I made my margarita (heh) a bit strong, and I'm just charmed by it all.
You can always choose to swim towards the surface, even if only few people will ever reach it.
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.
Oh yeah..Don’t get that image out of your head, it’s too important to be chased away.
Thank you.
>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.
Heh. I like your comments, in general, B. Keep posting.
Thanks! I will.
That joke was at the end of _The Last Laugh_ a documentary about Jewish humor and the holocaust.
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
Didn't the reviewer mention smoke from chimneys at some of the camps, presumably referring to mass human cremations? Large-scale deaths from neglect, cold, and starvation in Russian labour camps seem to justify use of the term concentration camp for them with its meaning of "death camp", even if the guards weren't actually killing people. So it isn't clear what your beef is.
Also, the first concentration camps, of the "crappy places" category I think, were set up in Cuba during a Spanish uprising there in 1896, which was before the 2nd Boer War (1899 - 1902) when they were first used by the Brits.
I skimmed the review, and it seemed OK, although the topics don't interest me much. I didn't care for the author's repeated appeals and asides to the "dear reader", as these sound a bit knowing and twee.
Thanks for your thoughtful and informative response. Given the time proximity, I suspect the Brits picked up on the idea. Andersonville during the Civil War was essentially a concentration camp with death rates approaching extermination levels. My good friend's mother spent some time as a young child in a Turkish Concentration camp. Jewish settlers in Tel Aviv were removed to the Judean hills in WWI in the correct assumption that the English would eventually use the coastal route to invade from Egypt. She was still around, complainting 70 years later, but then she always complained.
When we watch Cadablanca, we are always startled by the use of "Concentration Camp." Hollywood had to tread a fine line, given its Jewish associations, and the movie did its job.
In 2023 using "concentration camp" for the Nazi Final Solution is a profoundly troubling euphemism, especially in a finalist for a Substack review prize.
I cannot understand why you consider "concentration camps" to be euphemism. As I pointed out in an earlier comment technically speaking there were different kinds of camps used by nazis: extermination camps, but also actual concentration camps. Extermination camps were indeed mostly about final solution of Jews (and sometimes also Romani), but there were also concentration and labour camps with far more diverse inmates and their fates. And since the review is about surviving inhuman conditions it cannot be about death camps because in death camp survival was simply not an option (and indeed I think Frankl was an inmate of concentration/labour camps, but not a death camp). Also most of the victims of death camps were not really inmates but were murdered on arrival (there was usually a small contingent of actual inmates used to run the camp, but this was only delay, they were "rotated" rather frequently). For comparison, I believe none was liberated at Treblinka death camp (about 100 people escaped during uprising of prisoners earlier during the war, shortly before the liberation germans murdered remaining labour crew) where over 930000 people were murdered, whereas in Dachau (a concentration camp, where Frankl was an inmate for a time) Americans liberated about 30000 people (and they were even not all former inmates who survived). This is not to say that people were not killed in nazi concentration camps (they were, massively so, dying from sickness, bullets, hard labour and gas chambers), or that the conditions there were somehow good (it was hell on earth), but nazi concentration camps and extermination camps are two different things, both of which existed.
Ok. Perhaps this was not as clear as I wanted. So another attempt: Nazi concentration camps were actually concentration camps since their purpose was (according to wiktionary) to detain a large numbers of people, especially political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees etc., for the purpose of confining them in one place, typically with inadequate or inhumane facilities. The fact that nazi concentration camps had less adequate and more inhumane facilities than other camps of this kind is irrelevant. There were also death camps were prisoners were not kept for extended time but rather murdered on arrival.
I guess that diminishing Auchwicz to a bad place, like so many other bad places of our indifferent times is OK. After all The places where Americans of Japanese ancestry were kept were concentration camps too. And they didn't even get a country for their suffering. Oh wait, they already had one!
I'm afraid you are going to have to, at some point, come to grips with the fact that words mean things.
I thought that was my point. A concentration camp could be an extermination camp or something like Depression Era work camps. The two are quite different. To call Auschwicz a concentration camp is a euphemisim. That I'm getting posts with a tone like yours is worrisome.
Andersonville Prison had another thing in common with Nazi concentration camps: after the war ended, Henry Wirz, the Confederate officer in charge of Andersonville Prison, was one of the first people in history to be tried for and convicted of war crimes.
Please check the facts before you criticize the others:
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-camps/
Nazis used several types of camps: concentration, death (extermination), and others. The reason why memoirs of former prisoners speak about concentration camps and not death camps is because people who were sent to a death camp did not get the chance to write memoirs. It was literally impossible to survive death camp for more than a few weeks, and vast majority of victims were killed immediately upon arrival anyway. On the other hand, it was at least possible, if difficult, to survive concentration camp. What adds to the confusion is that one of the most famous nazi camps, the one in Auschwitz consisted in reality of several kinds of camps including death and concentration camp
There are different types of camps, but colloquially, in American English, they're all collectively referred to as "concentration camps". It's inaccurate, but that's just the way it is. Maybe it's because of the Brits?
While there’s clearly a large difference between what the Brits did in South Africa and what the Nazis did, the term Concentration Camp is commonly used for both. Wikipedia says “Auschwitz concentration camp ... was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps”. Further, Wikipedia describes Frankl as having “spent three years in four concentration camps”, suggesting this is common usage, even if you consider it inaccurate.
Really? Does the phrase "concentration camp" really primarily refer to the camps of the Boer War for you?
Do Substack writers typically have editors?
The very epitome of a high temperature low effort comment.
A concentration camp can also be a death camp.
Surely this will help you find it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpBu_aXjrEk
How very kind of you to remind us of this. So what term would you prefer to use? Death camp? Not The Brits Camp?
I don't get the rationale for this kind of nit-picking, and I'm certainly not hanging out any flags for the British Empire during the Boer War. Are you going to "Well ackshully" about if it's the Shoah or the Holocaust as well?
In "Bloodlands"*, Timothy Snyder emphasized the difference between concentration camps and death camps (though, confusingly, Auschwitz contained both), but most people still use the former term to refer to the latter.
*Which I reviewed here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2023/03/11/bloodlands/
It might not be ideal for "concentration camp" to be used for death camps, but a lot of people grew up with that usage, and you'll miss out on a lot of good material if you insist on avoiding anything where concentration camp is used to mean death camp.
On the other hand, that bit about posters not having editors.... I wonder whether you're trolling.
The Nazis themselves called their camps, including the death camps, Konzentrationslager or KZ for short - that abbreviation is still "tainted" in modern German, and both the abbreviation and the long form, unless qualified with context, tend to stand for the Nazi camps and nothing else in German. I'm pretty sure they got the term from the Brits, knowing full well that it would be somewhat euphemistic.
I can imagine that Frankl himself, like everyone else who was in one, used the term KZ or Konzentrationslager, and if the reviewer here is following the terminology in the book they're reviewing rather than using a more modern term, I would give them a pass on this one. Especially if the Russian language has the same connotations for this term as German.
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.
This is a nice reply ♡
Re homelessness: I grew up in a nice suburb and went to a small private school, so much that I was shocked in college when people were mean to me for the first time. Coming from that background, I have a visceral aversion to hitting people. In Aikido, where it's a structured environment, I won't hurt or even offend the other person, I still can't deliver a forceful punch. And in spite of being maximally nice, in the sense of not wanting to hurt anyone, when I'm confronted by homeless addicts I have no idea what to do that would really help and usually don't do anything and find the whole thing awkward and escape the awkwardness by pretending that the homeless person doesn't exist. In an abstract utilitarian sense hurting someone is the same as not helping, but they feel very different psychologically, and the kind of personality that helps can be very different from the personality that doesn't harm. Sometimes US veterans are very concerned about homelessness, in spite of being willing to kill. The reviewer's point about a lifetime of meaningless suffering making young Russian men willing to kill is probably right, and that's really different psychologically than apathy to the homeless.
There's a book (sorry I didn't make note of the title) which argues that high housing prices are a primary cause of homelessness-- that drug addiction or mental illness or high debt make people homeless, but is the high housing prices that push them over the edge-- there are relatively poor cities where there isn't a lot of homelessness because the housing prices aren't that high.
Does the book sound familiar?
I can believe that there are young, healthy men who take up homelessness for a while as a sort of urban camping, and also college students who try begging as a lark. I don't think either of those are anything like the majority of people begging on the street.
Me, I've never heard of the book, but this has been my default assumption for a few years now, and I have seen very little during that time to argue against it, and much to argue for it. It frankly surprises me a little that anybody *doesn't* think that. Part of this may be that I am old enough to remember a time before the 2000s housing bubble, or the Fed's decision to "fix" the collapse of that bubble by blowing up a much bigger one. Back in those days, before housing of any sort became so jawdroppingly expensive, I clearly remember that it was possible for people to be fairly dysfunctional and still have a place to sleep indoors. You didn't have to work as many hours to do this, which meant that you didn't have to be capable of working that many hours (or getting anyone to hire you for that many hours, or finding a government benefit equal to working that many hours), which meant that you could have some unknown but significant amount more wrong with you, in term of being able to get it together to do economic stuff, before you sank below the "able to pay for a place to sleep that is in a building" level. I knew some of these people, and I am convinced that today they would be homeless.
Of course, then and now, once a person sank below that level, the dysfunction often spiraled, especially if it had to do with addiction.
There's also the drug problem. It's sort of an existential question - would you rather spend money on drugs or rent? The more people become addicted, the more they choose drugs. :-(
Well, see, my point more or less is that when it becomes literally prohibitively expensive to pay rent, the "drugs or rent" question becomes much, much easier for those already inclined to overuse them.
I've seen a breakdown where some are what they call "lifestyle" homeless, and a larger chunk are working poor who lost jobs or otherwise got priced out of housing, but a third large group are suffering from severe mental illness and drug addiction. And one of of the problems is that the first two groups get steadily drawn into the third, from the living conditions as well as what might as well be considered peer pressure.
I volunteered for a few years at a place that feeds homeless people, and this seems to match up. Most of the people who show up are frankly not capable of holding down a job. But then, they do say that the second group, the priced out, are less visible - the first group intentionally stands out, and the third group is what causes most of the problems.
There's also probably an effect where this varies by location. My city is a "destination", where people from a large region gravitate (or are sent via one-way bus tickets). So we may see more of the first and third groups, and less of the second.
So, I think you're right about the distinction; I'd characterize the ability to ignore the homeless as something like "limited sociopathy", whereas what the reviewer is talking about seems more like when that applies to everything in life, when there is literally nothing to care about. And in retrospect, I see that I didn't phrase what I was saying well. What I meant was more along the lines of, if we get this result in a nice part of a nice city, imagine what things are like when the entire environment is full of stuff that it's safer not to care about.
I've done some martial arts too, but not aikido, and I've also noticed that people can sometimes be very unwilling to punch another person, even when they are perfectly capable of punching targets. Like, they can break boards, but they aren't able to do a full force punch in a drill, even though they **know** that their partner will step away and deflect it. It's not even "unwilling", it seems to be something deep down that won't try to seriously hurt another person unless they're angry. Which is generally something that makes me hopeful about people. :-) But less hopeful about AI safety. :-(
When I lived in DC several years ago I was walking through the (mostly gentrified) Columbia Heights area and saw someone passed out by the sidewalk. I kept walking. On my way back there was an ambulance there, so I stopped to talk to the paramedics and ask if I should have called 911. Their response was "you can, but he's just drunk, so there's not really anything we can do". Another time, a friend of mine found a body in the same area that had clearly been there for hours before anyone noticed. The sad fact is that as a passerby it's nearly impossible to tell if an addict is in a life threatening situation.
Two years ago around the corner from The Port Authority Bus Terminal I saved the life of a man who had beaten nearly to death and was laying sprawled out on the sidewalk.
This was 10pm and I had to pass through the young gentlemen who had just beaten him.
I'm tempted to comment on the lack of any response by others who just walked past him but that would be pretty self serving.
I only feel the need to mention it because I (like I imagine many of you) have a "nice guy" bone to pick with society.
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.
Hm. I did a little searching and I ran across this, which puzzled me, because I couldn't figure out what direction the hostility was coming from, until I saw that it was **intra-group** criticism, Tablet being a Jewish publication.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl
And then there was this, which takes a different tack:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/authoritarian-therapy/201604/the-case-against-viktor-frankl
I may not have looked hard enough, but I didn't find anything by Pytell freely available, just some summaries, and some summaries of rebuttals of Pytell. Overall, I think I'm going to need to wait to read more criticism until I actually read the book in question. But so far most of it seems ad hominem. With the exception of a valid warning that he's writing to an audience, using persuasion, rather than simply pouring raw thoughts upon a page.
Let me cite https://www.amazon.com/Viktor-Frankls-Search-Meaning-20th-Century/dp/1782388303 ebook I have:
"Often the suicide was done at the deportation centers, no doubt to disturb the Nazis. Also, “those reflecting on the suicides of relatives or friends often admired the courage it took to end one’s own life.” Under the circumstances it was a dignified act. Cyanide, sleeping pills, or poison were the most common methods of suicide and therefore drugs were in high demand.
Apparently, whenever patients had taken an overdose of pills and then had been given up for dead by other doctors, Frankl felt “justified in trying something.” First, “some injections intravenously … and if this didn’t work I gave them injections into the brain … into the Cisterna Magna. And if that did not work I made a trepanation, opened the skull … inserted drugs into the ventricle and made a drainage so drug went into the Aquaeductus Sylvii. … People whose breathing had stopped suddenly started breathing again.” But he “could only keep them alive for 24 hours no longer.”[66] Frankl administered the stimulants Pervitin and Tetrophan."
According to Alexander Batthyány, Frankl first described his experiments in a lecture in 1947 at the Austrian Society for Neurology. However, he made no mention of his research in his original biographical statement in 1973, although he did mention the “experiments” in his 1981 interview with Tom Corrigan. He did however give a full description of the research in his 1993 interview with Dr. Neugebauer and Dr. Klamper as well as in his 1995 autobiography. Never one to express much self-doubt, Frankl proudly recounted his research efforts. Frankl narrated that although he had no training in brain surgery, and was denied access “to even look on” when Professor Schönbauer performed surgery, he was still able to conduct the surgery. Frankl also remarked that the primary surgeon Reich refused to do the operations (it is not clear why he refused to do surgeries), and therefore Frankl decided to perform the brain surgery techniques after reading about them. He published an article in Ars Medici documenting the experiments in September of 1942 (ironically, just as he was deported to Theresienstadt)."
The earliest source cited is:
66. For a verbal description of these experiments, see Corrigan Interview (GTU). Frankl’s written documentation is Viktor Frankl, “Pervitin Intrazisternal,” Ars Medici no. 1 (1942): 58–60.
Tablet's one of the few right-leaning Jewish publications (they seem to be trying to take over from Commentary) and might be an interesting read for some of the people here trying to puzzle out how to be conservative without being fascist. But they're hardly right about everything.
The writer, David Mikics, apparently has written about the canon with Harold Bloom and about old-school stuff like sonnets and the (conservative) Jewish writer Saul Bellow, so I suspect he might be a bit of a closet-rightie. His big concern seems to be with using the Holocaust as a basis for therapy, which I get, though I don't agree with: surviving something like a Nazi concentration camp certainly bears at least learning about for those of us trying to survive less difficult things (which is just about everything).
Tablet is becoming unspeakable politically. Sort of the reverse of pre Podhoretz Commentary where it was OK to read, but one should skip the Jewish articles like.
>for some of the people here trying to puzzle out how to be conservative without being fascist.
What is puzzling about it? There were conservatives long before there were fascists. The people who are confused are the people rapidly debasing the word fascist, which I hope you are not one of.
On a historical timescale, definitely. I do think the far-right does appeal to a lot of disenchanted young men (especially white) who are poorly served by the mainstream and the left, though. If you're constantly hearing how bad you are because you're white, why not go to people who tell you being white is good?
Not in the camp, as far as I understand (I rather doubt that inmates of nazi concentration camps had access to painkillers or sleeping pills), but when he was still a director of neurology in Vienna. But yes, he does seem to be a controversial figure. For a measured, but not starry eyed alternative assessment of Frankl and his philosophy one may see e.g., https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl
I stand corrected, thank you.
It's easier for Herr Direktor to lobotomize his patients...
There are more charitable interpretations of what he did (like desperately trying to save his compatriots while deluding himself about the fate which awaited Jews in nazi Europe), though yours is also a possible interpretation. Remember also that a Jewish director of neurology in a Jewish hospital in 1941 Vienna might not be completely in charge (to put it mildly). Based only on limited (and perhaps biased) sources I would be reluctant to pass too categorical judgement on Frankl. Still you raised important questions about Frankl which should have been addressed by the review, and haven't.
I don't know. People to love to pass judgement on people in difficult situations, but given how many dumb things I've done under much smaller stresses, I can't say I necessarily would have done better than Victor Frankl in *Nazi Austria*. Also remember we don't have the same horror of medical experiments and the same primacy of informed consent, a lot of which grew out of the postwar Nuremberg trials; there was a long history of scientists carrying on dubiously-moral (especially by modern-day standards) experiments with the excuse they were trying to expand scientific knowledge that might help someone someday. And they weren't even wrong in all cases; do you think an IRB would have approved Jenner's vaccine experiments?
I found another article in tablet about Frankl:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl-geifman-mikics-exchange
which is a (very) critical answer to the previous article I cited above. I am not qualified to judge the historical arguments, but it shows that indeed it was all complicated, and that relying on a single source can lead to gross oversimplification. This is doubly true in. case of people faced with such difficult (and deadly) situations like being a Jew in nazi Austria.
Thank you, that response, and the response to it, are important context.
Modern-day doctors often enough attempt to revive would-be suicides, sometimes producing mutilated cripples, and -- in USA in particular -- cripples who wake up bankrupt (perhaps the one torture even Mengele had never perpetrated!)
Was it an atrocity in Frankl's case simply because of what we now know would happen later to the patients? But neither Frankl nor his patients knew precisely what was in store for them. The implied "permission" for the suicides (and condemnation of the attempts at revival) by modern critics is IMHO an entirely unprincipled exception.
Or even in a very simple crude manner, people who are CODE BLUE often get broken ribs/ruptured spleens and punctured lungs while professionals try and resuscitate them. Sometimes (rarely) even getting resuscitated but then dying of their new injuries in their weakened state.
This read like a moldbug article.
In what ways?
The slightly smug tone, controverted analogies about elves and dwarves, the use of the phrase 'dear reader.'
Hm, OK, looking back, I can see how it might have come across as "smug". I'm not sure why it didn't, to me. Instead it came across as deliberately archaic, in a literary sense.
Elves and dwarves seemed to flow out of the "orc" comment, which led directly to the application of the book's philosophical framework to current events. I can't fault it for that at all.
I haven't read much Moldbug, but the main sense I get is of deliberately shaping the narrative to support the desired conclusions, specifically by leaving out anything that might contradict the narrative. But I can't tell what's being left out, or even if the author is doing it consciously.
This feels more like a necessarily-incomplete attempt at embracing the entire world. It's still missing a lot, but, well, I don't know how to put it right now, other than that it just feels different. Sorry if that's not very helpful.
Just to be clear, I liked the article, as I sometimes like Moldbug's pieces.
It's long, philosophical, and does in-depth examinations of history.
I don't see the author advocating for monarchy or slightly-less-racist fascism, though, so there's that.
I'm just comparing the writing styles--I enjoyed this a lot more than Moldbug's pieces.
I'd say it was much easier reading than moldbug.
Not nearly enough Carlyle references for it to be Moldbug. On a more serious note, I find the main characteristic of Moldbug/Yarvin's style to be the obliqueness of the nonstop references and allusions, whereas in this piece it seems like the author was trying to make them as straightforward and direct as possible, to the point of being a bit on the nose. So in my reading, it was almost anti-Moldbug in style, in that way.
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.
The 90s have been mythologised by Putin & Co, "at least it's not the 90s" is his main slogan. I am from Latvia, we also lived through the 90s. It was more the Wild West than some kind of hellhole. In Russia, arguably, many things were much better back then.
The GDP per capita statistics show a huge collapse in the 90s, dropping by 60% and then about 500% increase by 2008.
This is all measured in dollars, so a lot of it the strength of the rouble but it indicates a lot of stability once Putin came to power.
In terms of GDP per capita, sure, things are better now. What about in terms of personal freedom and opportunity?
In terms of opportunity probably better. Personal freedom - not sure.
Most people would trade quite a bit of freedom for some more bread.
Not so mythologized, 90s were really bad back in Russia. But the main point I'm trying to make is that Kirill the ork's psychological portrait would be just about right. If it was 90's. It's not anymore, modern Russian youth is really closer to an average European or American than to Kirill.
The review states he is in his twenties. (Even if he was in his thirties, he would just have been a child in the nineties.)