Les Phillips Blog

This morning¹, I woke up thinking about Viktor Frankl’s book. His book, Man’s Search For Meaning², written over 60 years ago, provides insight about the human condition. It’s wisdom is critical to our understanding of today’s events. Then informs now.

Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who was sent to the Nazi concentration camps in World War II. He tells of his experiences and what he learned. As a psychiatrist he had a keen awareness of the human condition. His book is a candid personal account of the brutality of these camps. More importantly, his training gave him two perspectives. One perspective came from his personal experiences. The other perspective came from being a trained doctor with insights into human behavior and feelings. His book explores how people react to brutality and the threat of death. It shows how they manage to find a reason to continue living. Frankl gave me the knowledge to start to compare then and now. I began to see similarities between the inmates experiences then and our experiences today.

I am not suggesting that most of us experience the brutality and hopelessness of a holocaust survivor. Although in our nation and around the world others do. Rather I woke up thinking about how our experiences in today’s world traumatize us. Whether we know it or not, the shadow of those prisoner’s struggle penetrates all of our minds today. No one is immune, prisoner and jailer are both enslaved by their experiences. Both are damaged and sickened by it.

The experiences of our parents come to us, filtered by our experiences with them. It is the same for them and earlier generations. Every generation has the opportunity to stop passing on this sickness and its damaging behaviors, into the future.

For example, as a child my mother was abused by her father. What I know from her is that he was an alcoholic and abusive. I know it was physical. I don’t know if it was sexual. From my own experiences with abusive people, I do know that psychological abuse always accompanies it. This leads results in traumas.

Abuse is an infectious illness. But it can be controlled and ultimately healed. I know this from my own personal experiences. When I was younger, I was selfish and unaware of how I affected others. I ignored the harm that I caused. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized what I’ve done and now feel remorse. I have gained insight into what I feel and how others have similar feelings. I have developed a sense of empathy.

We all have the potential for empathy. We experience it naturally, when we feel embarrassment, guilt or remorse. We know we have harmed someone and caused them pain. We have formed an intimate emotional awareness of ourselves and how others experience us. This is an instance of walking in someone else’s shoes.

If we allow our empathy to grow, our awareness of our world expands. We become conscious of its emotional complexity. This can lead to a better understanding of what we feel and why we do what we do. We also learn to appreciate what others have experienced and why they act as they do. If we chose, we can see others more clearly, with fewer misconceptions and biases. It’s harder to turn someone into a “they” and abuse them. It is also possible to recognize and celebrate someone else’ successes, which encourages them.

We can develop the capacity to see our shared humanity and kinship. That is the healing each of us needs. In turn we help to heal those around us and those who follow.

Quite a lot to wake up too at the start of the day.

I started to ponder this while having my morning coffee. I considered how important my self-awareness has been to my growth as a person. What was needed for me to develop this awareness? It is my personal experiences and my curiosity about how others experience their lives.

For instance, I am fascinated with history, its events and the people involved. Being a Curious George I can’t help but ask questions. I project myself into the moment. What was it like in the Second World War? What did the survivors, military and civilian, think and feel? What were the forces shaping their daily lives, their concerns and challenges? What was considered normal, made them happy, laugh or cry? How had tens of millions of people around the world allow themselves to go to war? I want to know how it affected their futures and our present.

For some time, I’ve been asking the same questions about us. How did we get to where we are now? Viktor Frankl’s book provides his personal experiences and thoughtful analysis that can help us find our answers.

As the New Administration takes power, there are many signs that they are devoted to censoring our access to information. This results in the loss of our common knowledge. They have begun to blatantly censor information within our government. The attacks on scientific data, health, and climate change take away our free will. They also target Diversity-Equity-Inclusion and the privatization of the US Post Office. They are stealing our futures. They force us down paths that most of us, if given the opportunity, would consider cruel and destructive.

The last time Trump was in office he and his appointees campaigned against openness. Specific words like Climate Change were not permitted to be used in government reports and announcements. Giving the message that the issue of our collapsing environment and its causes were not to be discussed openly. In turn the awareness of this genuine threat to our lives was diminished, the urgency of our situation was defused. Without this knowledge we were left ignorant. Ignorance means not being aware of something. And without awareness, we can’t exercise our right to freewill. We can’t consider and act against the life-threatening conditions that menace us now.

Banning our use of words, ideas, and information stifles informed discussion. This denial restricts our free speech and action. It is one step towards the enslavement of our minds. What we don’t know will hurt us.

How can we trust someone who doesn’t trust us?

1. I started this post in November of 2024. Then set it aside because of a persistent writer’s block stemming from my loss of direction. I’d lost my purpose which undermined my self-worth. It was a part of the process of self-evaluation I’d been experiencing since Covid. First, I tore myself down. I challenged my assumptions and beliefs. Who was I? I demolished my self-esteem by recognizing the lies I have been telling myself for much of my life. I admitted I had harmed people while thinking I was doing good. I learned to see myself as others might’ve seen me. At my lowest point, where oddly, is where rebirth begins, I asked myself two primal questions. Who am I? What is the point of this absurd world? These are the questions that we repeatedly answer many times through our lives. Our experiences, feelings and actions pile up over time. And, if we hit a challenging period, we re-calibrate with this questions. Provided we are willing to ask them. If we don’t, the questions get buried and fester. The lies we tell ourselves continue to contaminate our feelings and actions.We continue to spread pain to ourselves and others. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is popular because it deals with this reality. ↩︎
2. I’m using my old copy, Man’s Search For Meaning: Viktor Frankl, Washington Square Publishing, 15th Edition, 1969. There has been a resurgence of interest in Frankl and his ideas. New and used copies are available in local bookstores and on the web. ↩︎