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.
That was my favorite of them all during the first round and it wasn't close. I believe it has true literary value in itself. The time when I read "Dear reader, please imagine" for the third time after it was eschewed at the beginning of part 3 got me like some novels' plot twists.
It got me ordering the Vintrais book. So far I'm more impressed by the story than by the poems themselves (or their pseudo-back-translation into French). They're fine but don't really work as Renaissance pastiches. Of course the impressive thing is that they were written at all.
Great essay. I’m inclined to say “but terrible book review” though I’m not sure I really feel that way. But definitely closer to “essay using book as excuse” than book review.
I wonder if this review was written deliberately in reverse. As far as I can tell, Victor Frankl's only real contribution to the world of meaning was to insist that it is psychotherapeutic to choose an individual meaning of one's own. Previously, the way of living here being described as Orc was the human norm. Certainly the men guarding Frankl in the concentration camp would recognize the concept of meaning as necessary for human life. But for them meaning was in hierarchy, in dedication to a cause greater than one's individual choosing. The cooperation with fate that we see last year in Russia or last century in Germany or last millennium anywhere in the world is one that looks to society for determining the meaning, whether in the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven or the kingdom of God or what have you. Who is to say that Kirill is wrong, and Victor right?
>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.
Kirill's life isn't typical for someone from Moscow. But for a resident of a small town - pretty much so.
He have to be closer to forties or fifties to actually remember the 90s. His mother, on the other hand, does and probably has incorporated the "everything but not the 90" meme.
From what I can gather, the 90s in Russia could be very good if you were young, energetic, and intelligent. A lot of my source is from Inside Russia, a youtube channel.
Wow. I never comment on substack posts(this is my 1st!) but this is clearly one of the best reviews I’ve read.
I read Frankls book more than 15 years ago; maybe it’s time to revisit it.
And unlike some commenters here, I loved the jump between different sections.
When I 1st read the title I was a bit Meh.
While I loved Frankls book when I first read it , it has been commented to the death and I doubted anything could bring anything new. So I was expecting this to be a dull review.
If the author's Russian, as he says, small things could be tonally off, I guess. I thought it was well done. There's a bit of a 'science major learning about the humanities' tone, but given what our humanities majors have been up to lately I don't see that as a bad thing.
Yes, lots of sophomoric affectations ("dear reader" being the main offender) and first-draftisms. Aesthetic unpleasantness detracts from an otherwise interesting piece.
Well, I am a Ukrainian, and I don't say "orcs". "Orcs" implies things were done to them and that is why they do what they do. But they are people; they came to us knowing they were risking death, knowing they would be killing. I deny them orchood.
I think the portrait of Kirill is a depiction that is comforting for some Western readers -- I mean, suggesting that the only reason that Russians go to fight in Ukraine is because their life is so lacking in prospects and they are so apathetic.
What do you mean? (That is, I am not sure I understand you, because I heard something similar in a different situation and it probably meant a different thing. So if you could be more specific, that would help.)
I... honestly meant exactly what I said, but in case you want to get a stronger and clearer statement out of me - I don't think that most of the Russians sent to war by their country's government can be meaningfully said to have chosen or have consented to go. (A more convincing phrasing, I suspect - trivially true for at least the conscripted - is that they had no realistic, meaningful choice not to. All alternatives would have amounted to self-sacrifice, rebellion with no expected payoff, and that's just very hard for people to do in general.)
The hostility to this review is odd. It’s by far the best book review, and best writing, so far. And the other finalists were good to great.
This form of multiple book reviews in one, with the writers perspective tacked on, is actually fairly common historically. When Orwell wrote book reviews, he actually wrote essays which derived from the books he was reviewing. This is common in more literary publications. Rather than being just a review of “Man’s Search for Meaning” but an essay on Frankl’s philosophy on the search for meaning and against apathy, which is why the other two stories matter, and add to the writing.
"Book review" does a lot of lifting these days. It can mean:
'The book is about *blah*. I loved it, but here are *nits*. 4.5 stars.'
Or the book can be a jumping off point for something the review writer wanted to write about.
We may want two words for these, since they are quite different. The first may be more common, since it is shorter and if you want to get paid for it, is easier to write.
I do wonder if there is a language where these have different words. Perhaps English can borrow them?
Even book reviews in publications mostly made up of them (like the London Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement) often seem to be jumping off points for what the review writer wants to write about.
I like the content of the review, but I'm curious why you think it has the best writing. Personally I found the flow and some of the phrasing kind of stilted. Almost as if it was written by someone whose main language is not English. It wasn't bad by any means, I doubt any of the reviews will be, but the other finalists had better style/writing IMO
Certainly this one in my opinion could have done with editing (the "dear reader" stuff could have been largely, if not entirely removed).
One thing I have noticed about these reviews is that many of them use the first or second person in a self conscious way, which may be all right for a blog post style of writing, but at the same time they seem to be aiming at a more formal register, where it is riskier to use the first or second person.
Well that's certainly a reaction to have. What exactly do you mean by this? I'm genuinely interested, especially since there didn't seem to be much sexual content. Forgive me if this is an obvious joke I'm missing.
"Kirill" is a caricature which has only a tenuous relationship with reality. Yes, rural Russia is harsh, but it's not a concentration camp. Propaganda mostly lies, but it contains just enough truth to instill positive motivation, up to and including willingness to kill and die "for the people and the Fatherland", fighting against Nazis who openly call people like them subhuman orcs, in particular. The cult of the Great Patriotic War is basically Russia's true religion, and compared to a drab unpromising future, emulating mythical heroes who saved the world from the worst menace it had ever knew is very appealing to some. Whether this is an extenuating circumstance or the contrary compared to numb apathy is another question.
Yeah, I think rationalists kind of underestimate the value for a lot of people of belonging to a cause, especially old-school ones like nationalism. A lot of grey-tribers are renegade blue-tribers, so they get the social justice thing even if they don't agree with it.
There's also the call to adventure; lots of kids join the US army for similar reasons, just wanting to get out of some dead-end town in the hinterlands. I do think it's one of these natural things for young men; look at the plots of pre-woke fantasy novels, which rationalists might be more familiar with.
Nah, the largest miss is that the person's name is 'Kirill', it's too Russian. Lots of people sent to the frontlines are regional minorities who sure as hell don't care about the Great Patriotic War as much as you seem to imply.
Yes, the word "psychologist" was technically a misnomer, like calling a captain a lieutenant. But his theories could certainly be adopted by psychologists, and probably are.
I now have another book to read. In particular, I draw attention to the author's (deliberate?) unusual spelling "mirky"—which is perhaps better than the commoner "murky" in that it suggests attributes pertaining to Mirkwood.
Man this was really touching and beautiful. It probably doesn't qualify as a book review, but who cares? It's inspiring and for sure it makes you want to read Frankl and du Vintrais.
Not only did the book change my life in my twenties, it takes on new meaning and significance with each new life stage (the bits pertaining to marriage and carrying on generations hit extra hard now - the anecdote of the grieving husband brings me to tears).
A great book, and also a very short book, particularly if you focus mainly on the concentration camp section. I read this book shortly after reading Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling + Either/Or) in my early twenties, a year or two after my father had died of cancer. Both authors have had a huge influence on my life and, at least for me, were incredibly uplifting and freeing. They helped me process my grief and finding meaning in my life again. It's hard not to see Kierkegaard's influence in Frankl, which unfortunately makes Frankl's contributions seem less novel, but his delivery of the ideas is much more digestible.
I read "Man's Search For Meaning" for a graduate psychology class on motivation. The rest of the class had a lot of problems but the assigned readings were enough on their own to make it worth it. Although this isn't a traditional book review, it's of a very non-traditional book and I think Frankl would enjoy the structure of this review. You all should read the whole book, it's short and is sort of written like a blog post already.
It's a pretty good review. The one thing I'd say is I wouldn't call Kirill meaningless, orcish, or subhuman. If he's coming into your town with a gun then yes you should shoot him--pacifism is a fool's philosophy-- but there are plenty of people who have led boring lives that wouldn't sound particularly wonderful by our standards. From his point of view, he defended his country when the time came and died in battle--not so different from Tellus, the supposed happiest man alive according to Solon. Rural Russia sucks, I agree, but Kirill is far from unique in human history. The USA has its own dead-end towns full of poor kids who join the army to get out--are they also subhuman and meaningless because they don't write clever comments on Astral Codex Ten? After all, if he'd survived Kirill might have come back as a war hero, knocked up his girlfriend, and proceeded to become a dad. That would have probably given him at least some source of meaning.
I agree I don't want Kirill knocking on my door with a machine gun. That's war, though. We've all forgotten how awful it is. My conclusion from all this is 'Putin is a khuilo*', not 'Kirill is a p-zombie'. The whole question reminds me of the tendency of intellectuals to believe the masses are inferior. I don't like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I hope they kick them out, but pretending the enemy troops are some sort of Frankl-stein monster is a little much. Wars happen for reasons, and people fight them for reasons, even if they don't make much sense to people like us commenting on ACX.
*Though, you know, we did push a military alliance to his border.
>Though, you know, we did push a military alliance to his border.
No, we did not. Russia's neighbors or near neighbors are joining, want to join, or joined NATO because they are afraid of Russia attempting to rebuild the empire (see e.g., Finland and Sweden recently), not because NATO wants to "surround" Russia or something
Putin is an unprincipled psycho, but he's a cunning one at that, having a good sense of how to play on Russian hopes and traumas to his benefit. There's a popular notion advanced by the usual suspects that if only he was removed, Russia would then inevitably return to the straight and narrow of being a docile afterthought of the US hegemony. This is naive wishful thinking.
Russians by and large believe (by no means groundlessly) that the West fears and hates them and would always work to undermine any and all Russian aspirations beyond being a "gas station", never mind reclaiming the rightful superpower status. If Putin were to disappear, Russia would eventually produce another one, even given free press and elections and all the rest of it.
The obvious plan B is, of course, forcible balkanization, if there were no nukes it would've been implemented long ago, and it increasingly looks like the proverbial gun on the wall is going to have to fire eventually.
There was a series of pushes for economic revitalization is the last few decades, all of which pretty much failed, mainly through domestic corruption and incompetence, but the West certainly "helped", most notably with the initial disastrous "shock therapy" approach. Now that no other approach to reclaiming superpower status is remotely plausible, it's either back to good old conquest or bust, and neither option leads to a happy ending for anyone, far as I can tell.
I mean Ukraine is pretty nebulously "another country". Russia has about as much claim to it as the US has to the lands we took from Mexico, probably more, from a grand perspective.
Fundamentally they see it as their back yard. Meanwhile we seem to have really strong feelings about our opinions of how 80% of the world should manage its affairs. Its not very hard to see how it would be super grating.
Absolutely if the Ukrainians want to resist, and we want to support them great. But I don't support the idea this is just some totally unjustified unhinged aggression. It is pretty normal great power shit that has been going on for EVER.
Man, this kind of stretches the limits of the term 'book review', but the third section's comparison of Russian conscripts to concentration camp victims is haunting and interesting enough that I don't mind too much. Nonetheless, you kinda feel the need to grade this as an existentialist work on its own merits as much as a book review per se.
I'd *love* to catch back up with this author in about 5-10 years. The prose and subject matter are shooting very, very high, and they mostly get there. They get a lot of credit for ambition alone, not even counting the bonus points for the word "Frankl-stein." To some degree, it feels like they're still 'growing in' to this voice a bit, and there's some visible strain in places. Once they've got a few more million words under their belt, they're gonna be *phenomenal*. And right now, they're already pretty darn good.
At its core, this essay is just a plea for mercy, and in that it succeeds entirely. Well done, and well done.
Mercy for ourselves from ourselves, but superficially mercy to our enemies after the battle.
Maybe we have to hate them, in the moment, to do what we need to do to survive. But does that hate have to live inside us for the rest of our lives? Can we live on as something other than animals, if we once embraced animal rage?
I have a strong objection to an underlying assumption that pervades this whole project: the idea that our understanding of when/how humans have this feeling of meaning and meaningfulness has to itself be the kind of thing we would seem meaningful.
I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic. To the contrary, spelling out the gory scientific details is often anything but. And if we were simply trying to account for some other boring aspect of our mental lives: eg the feeling of nostalgia there would be no pressure to treat it at a level besides the purely scientifically descriptive.
Yet, when it comes to meaning, there seems to be an irresistible temptation to assume that it makes sense to say something gives someone meaning and describe it as if it was a real objective thing rather than trying to operationalize what that means (is it a disposition to have certain kinds of feelings, it's own qualitative feeling what) and then offer an empirical theory about when those occur to be evaluated only with the usual tools of scientific theory.
I think it's very unfortunate and is basically a way to ensure falling into fallacies.
I agree. As I was reading, I thought, "this is interesting, but I don't know if it'll actually hold up under scrutiny". In that sense, the other parts helped me understand what Frankl says, but didn't really show that his ideas actually described humans.
I kind of pushed away this doubt with the feeling that, "well, not everything has been measured, and common sense says that having meaning tends to be good". But for example, do other inmates not have wives or friends and family which they can think about to stay sane?
If having the feeling of "meaning" is important, then surely our understanding of that feeling is also important? Especially when so many people seem to lack it or question its existence.
I don't think we even know what this feeling **is**, enough to analyze it the way you (and I) would like.
But yes, I do think there's a chance it might simply turn out to be plausible-sounding-but-useless mystical gobbledygook. (As opposed to useful mystical gobbledygook, which I take seriously.)
Ofc understanding it is important, but this approach basically rules out explanations of that feeling which don't themselves feel meaningful.
For instance, you might be able to explain away what makes us feel as sense of meaningfulness in ways which would cause us to think "that's not meaningful at all", e.g., if it was all explained by evopsych style behaving in ways likely to help your genes spread or was all about climbing the social status hierarchy in some way. Maybe not those specifically but I expect the sense of meaning not to be a very deep thing.
"I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic."
But we would expect an account of grammar to be grammatical and an account of understandability to be understandable. It's at least plausible that "meaning" is in this group rather than in the "erotic" and "funny" group.
It could turn out that way. But that's no reason to work under the assumption it must. It's a reason to compare all the theories that seem to best predict/unify our observations (x felt meaningful at time Y) and see which theory does best. But works like this totally eschew this framework and don't even consider that the standard by which we are supposed to judge.
I mean a priori it seems plausible that maybe the best scientific theories are the ones that generate the most sense of awe and wonder or are even the most poetic. And sure, give it a whirl. But what you don't do is just start writing poetry about nature and avoid comparing the accuracy of the predictions of some mathyy theory to your poetic one and instead substitute poetic value/sense of awe as the benchmark to evaluate the theories.
If you're in Auschwitz you're only going to bother doing your best to get through it if you have some cognitive REASON to do so.
If you're fat and lazy being fed figs and grapes by your favorite females in the shade while a cool breeze laps your skin you may not require any particular reason to keep from running at electrified barbed wire.
Philosophy, like all nerdish pursuits, arises in dissatisfaction with Life As It Is.
Life can definitely get better thereafter and find you maintaining an interest in philosophy or whatever but fortunate are those who never even understand the question, never mind requiring an answer...
A winner. Break a reader's heart, then lift it up. Hard to beat. Blagodarju! - Thinking about Kirill, I wonder about Andrej. Who lived in a meaningless mess very much like Kirill. Until the "Orcs" came. Because Andrej lives in Ukraine. Let us hope he still does. / My step-son K. lives in the early-occupied part - good he is no medic, else he would be at the front already, seems the Ruzzian overlords do not trust their "liberated brothers" enough to give them weapons. Here are 100 gram going down hoping he will not need to find meaning just before hitting a shell.- I find it all too sad to call a Russian "orc" or even to shout "slava Ukraina". I stick to PTN-PNX or "Could we please scroll forward to the part where you take a gun and put it to your head, Vlad?"
I see the through-line, and agree with the main thrust, but really didn't care for the editorial conceit. I find the "dear reader" stuff cringy at the best of times, and it completely fell apart for me at the 3rd, personal experience section. A strong, deep argument has to be backed up by clarity and confidence in the writing, and I didn't see that at all. Would enjoy reading after 2 or 3 complete rewrites.
A tangent: a good way to answer a child's question "why is the sky blue" is "because air is very slightly blue, and you can see the blue when you look through enough of it. Lots of clear things are like that - the glass in windows is green, and water is blue like the ocean."
I heard in high school that the middle-aged were more likely to survive than the young, because they understood the feeling of surviving bad times. In college, I mentioned this to a psych professor who was a survivor, and he said surviving was all randomness and noise.
One "dear reader" is too many. 14 is embarrassing.
How can a book review that doesn't even really tell me the full point of the book be a finalist? Synthesis is great, awkwardly inserting your hobby horse argument about modern Russian soldiers is not.
I found that affectation annoying too, but as someone else said earlier in the comments, that style of addressing the reader is common to Russian literature, and the English language "dear reader" cliche was probably the best way to approximate it, so I'm willing to give it a pass. And I didn't think the Russian soldier part was that much of a logical disconnect, the point being made seemed to be 1. meaning is a way to get through otherwise unbearable conditions 2. this has a downside in that authoritarian regimes take advantage of this by offering meaning to the destitute in return for their service. All three parts focusing on some form of suffering and injustice in Eastern Europe brought about by authoritarian regimes (the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Ukraine war) seems more like parallelism to me than an awkward or inappropriate insertion.
Well, first off, "style" is an important part of the quality of a work, so I don't think we should let the author off the work for his failure to reproduce English affect. At the very least, certainly not fawn over it and call it objectively great writing as Nolan does.
And sure, I agree about the parallelism between the Holocaust and the Ukraine War. But the author chose to focus on the struggle of the *Russian* soldier, not the massacred Ukrainian civilian. I find that quite irksome, and I think the Grey Tribe would be much less praiseworthy if a book review requested we empathize with the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre.
I disagree, being able to empathize with perpetrators and understand what drives them is a question I find burningly important. The author could have chosen to make the analogy be about a Nazi instead of a Russian, but I think they chose not to for several reasons. Still, the point stands -- the people in Germany and their choices were quite likely driven by something similar, by needing meaning after the crushing of their self image in WWI, the point being that meaning is amoral and pursuit of it can bring great darkness...
Your arguments are probably correct from a somewhat, detached, analytic lviewpoint.. So I stand corrected, Dachau wasn't a death camp. I suppose the distintion is made on the maps you have studied.
Perhaps also, that a large minority of the deaths at Auscwicz occurred in the forced marches Gestapo inflicted upon the surviving captives meant that "death camp" was extreme. My site's uncle, an MD, in fact worked in the medical facilities until he contracted typhus and died two weeks before liberation. Certainly not a victim of the gas chambers.
Apparently you are content with the idea that the Holocaust is now a subject of precise terms and that Frankl's experience deserved the phrase "concentration camp."
Nów I understand your point. However, yes, you are too sensitive. A term "concentration camp" is an established one, and literally everyone hearing term "concentration camp" will think only about places where nazis kept people in horrible conditions, and where people died massively from mistreatment, beatings, hunger, illness, bullets and gas chambers. None will think about more benign places existing in prior times (which, incidentally, can often be called more benign only in comparison with nazi ones, because objectively speaking they were horrible places as well: in the Boer case it is estimated that about 40.000 people died there, about half of them black, and most of the white victims were women and children). In fact most people are shocked to learn that there were things called concentration camps prior to wwII. So concentration camp is not a euphemism. It has a very specific, unequivocal connotation referring to nazi crimes.
And, also: yes, morally calling nazi concentration camps "death camps" is quite justified (and sometimes done), as the intended fate for most of the prisoners, perhaps aside from a small number of German political prisoners, was to ultimately die there, and while I was stressing, perhaps overstating my point, that it was at least possible to survive concentration camp (unlike the extermination camp), it was still extremely difficult - majority of even those 30000 liberated from Dachau were sick and malnourished, and they were still dying after the liberation. But please do not object to others using the term "concentration camp": there is no justification to think of it as a euphemism: the term is permanently attached to nazi crimes.
No. I do object to a review that begins with a reference to concentration camps as a catchall term Especially in a review of this book. Not faulting the book, or the reviewer, jes' sayin' the review lost me at that point. Obviously some might think I'm being picky. Maybe studying Orwell got me oversensitive to even a bit of euphemism.
I remember some linguist who was in solitary confinement in some Asian country and stayed sane by counting the words she knew and such. Don't remember any details.
The book review makes one want to listen to Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) again, in particular the song Red-Yellow days (Красно-желтые Дни), made the last time Russia sent tens of thousands of young men to fight in one of its wars. Link to a cover version plus Tsoi himself below. Translated text here, a young soldier about to depart for the war:
My train has long stayed at the depot
I'm leaving again, it's time
The wind was waiting for me on the threshold
On the threshold of autumn, my sister
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Tell me about those who are tired
From the ruthless street dramas
And the church of broken hearts
And of those who go to this church
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by love,
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by dream
And on this perfectly lit star
I woke up and realized
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Here is a fairly recent cover by Тролль Гнет Ель, to illustrate that Tsoi is not forgotten:
This was truly amazing, an essay I think is going to influence my thinking and beliefs for a long time. I look forward to finding out who the author is so I can read more of their works, if there are any.
It seems to me that this review is really split in audience reaction. Personally, I liked it the least of the 4 finalists so far, and I found it meandering and I did not feel like it taught me anything or introduced new ideas to help me "update my mental software", which is the main criteria by which I measure these book reviews. I read this review and expected to come to the comments and have people asking why this was a finalist, only to be entirely blindsided by the effusive praise it's been given. I believe everyone here is being entirely honest with their enjoyment, so my main takeaway is awe at how different people are, and surprise that my opinion is different than what seems to be the majority of others here.
Thank you for posting this. I’m 100% on the same page as you. Mind-boggling to me that this was a finalist, much less one with such positive comments! Almost feel like I’m being gaslit.
As a reply noted further down, the review seems tailor-made for longtime SSC/ACX readers. I suppose that means in some respect it is a successful review, though I would argue a good review shouldn't draw such ire from people like us who are in the periphery of the intended audience.
This feels like another split in audience reaction - I'm a longtime reader and this review bounced off me entirely. I don't see continuity, stylistically or thematically, with much of what ACX or SSC are/were trying to do.
I'm so surprised by the responses to this review. Comments are emphasizing their profound emotional responses and the literary quality of the work, and I got basically nothing from it (and it's not because this wasn't book review-y enough). No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny, I suppose. As with others, I was mildly off put by the "dear reader"s, so maybe this soured my perspective of the more substantive content.
It seems like Frankl's main insight is "we make our own meaning", which is a perspective that is in the water, to say the least (as an aside, though that is how the reviewer glossed it, "we make our own meaning" does not seem to be the point of the central quotation of the review. Right conduct and right action != self-imposed meaning, to say nothing of the idea that each situation has a unique correct answer. I'd be interested in what Frankl was on about here, but that doesn't seem to be the point of the review). The two case studies are competent applications of the theory, and deepened my understanding of Kirill and his ilk somewhat, but don't seem that exciting.
I'm genuinely curious to the people who are really excited about this review: what did I miss? Was it the Ukraine context or the more personal stuff that did it for you?
I'm very curious to hear from commenters reading this review, if they've already read Frankl or not.
I've already read him, so I enjoyed how the review added something new for me. But maybe if I hadn't read him and didn't have access to my memory of how incredibly powerful his book is, the review wouldn't have been enjoyable.
Yeah, it's very possible that this is it, as I have not read the book. Maybe this review stands better as a sort of companion piece. I definitely was not sold on Frankl's ideas as presented here, but maybe I'll still check it out.
Also, could you specify what the review added? This review completely bounced off me, so I'm super curious what it is that about half the comments are experiencing so profoundly
So, my impression is that it isn't "self-imposed meaning", per se, it's that the participant needs to actively participate in the process of generating meaning. And it's very possible to be wrong, as in the reviewer's story about Kirill. Choosing well is important, but I too am skeptical about the "one right answer bit".
For myself, all I can say is that I've been in a bad place for a while, mentally speaking, and this seems like a piece of the way out.
I've got the book now, and I'll read it later this week, and I'll probably loop back and re-read the review, and I'll try to comment here again.
Objectivist to the rescue! Specifically about "How can you be okay with killing enemy soldiers?" thing.
The answer is simple: Another's tragedy does not impose on us a moral obligation to martyr ourselves. Imagine you are caught in a Zombie Apocalypse, and one is coming straight for you. It does not matter if the zombie was a sweet, caring paragon of virtue prior to infection. It doesn't even matter if this is a truly awful version of the virus which leaves the person unchanged and completely conscious, but unable to control his body. You are not obliged to let yourself be killed because of his misfortune. Period.
So, yes, you may be forbidden from hating the enemy, or dehumanizing him. But you are absolutely allowed - in fact, obliged - to kill. In defense of your life and in defense of all you hold dear.
And this does make all the difference in the world. As long as you understand that you are dealing with another human being with his own drive for meaning, you have a chance of reaching him and changing his mind. I have read so many stories of deradicalized Islamists & neo-Nazis, and so many of them are reached by acknowledging this basic humanity, this basic need. And providing a _better_ source of meaning than senseless, bloody martyrdom.
Long before this war, I realized the same thing about the actual historical Nazis. They are depicted as uniformly evil, but most of them were probably just random guys from some village, who didn't think too deeply about what's going on, and just followed their orders. Probably not stupider or worse than your average neighbor. In a different timeline, you might enjoy drinking a beer with them. Nonetheless, if in this timeline they invade your country, you shoot to kill.
Yeah, to me, the truly frightening thing about what Hitler did was getting normal people to go along with it. And it's brushed aside when people want to paint all Germans as uniformly evil. (Putting aside the question of who gets to be properly called a "Nazi".)
“It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”
The writing style doesn't do it for me. Is not the same style that college freshman literary reviews in a school mag deploy? Endless direct addresses to the reader, saying what the parts of the essay are, self-conscious deployment of bad rhetorical devices, detours that are not improved by pointing out they are bad. These habits were once mine and like Caliban looking in the mirror, I am repulsed.
Brilliant book. Changed my mom's life when she was in the psych ward as a teen in the 1960s and got her through her suffering. A powerful tale of how to survive the most atrocious struggles, externally and internally.
Nice to know everyone is so understanding of the article. A reviewer of this book in 2023 decides to follow Frankl's German derived, probably from English, term and it's OK. Even though there's at least some agreement that it could, just possibly be thought to be a not particularly pleasant euphemism for what happened.
The review is in English. Do you not expect it to use the English terms for things? Why would it be an English translation of a German translation of an English word?
As others have said in earlier comments, "concentration camp" is not a euphanism. The central example of one, the first thing English speakers will think of when hearing those words, are the places where the Nazis put the Jews.
I assume English isn't your first language. When you translate each word literally, does this become something politically incorrect in another language?
To me this review, and Frankl's story, as well as Kirill's fictional one, lack a niche but critical observation. One that, frankly, is missing in the world model of many cultures, including all those in Golden Horde Eurasia.
A human can chose to die, on principle. It is rare, but it does happen.
The concentration camp is not the world, you can escape it. Maybe the success rate for this is 0.01%, but people did escape. And you can choose to rebel, maybe it involve poisoning the food you're cooking for your captors, or killing a lowly German soldier, or even just refusing to drive the gas trucks, but you can rebel.
The author points as much by the end:
> Even in Kirill’s 100,000-people town some do gather on the main square and protest, knowing fully well they will be arrested, possibly beaten, possibly sent to prison. Maybe there are hundreds of them, maybe tens. Maybe not enough. More people write something on social media, which is dangerous in its own right. Some people sit quietly and secretly send money to Ukrainian charities.
But then, why would we think Frankl's theory ought to apply to turning Kirill into one of those people?
Frankl's, at least from this review, seems, at root, a coward. Maybe a good utilitarian, but a coward regardless. Someone that tries to think his way around hell rather than embracing death.
I'm not saying that embracing death is easy, I count myself a coward, I think all but a few insane people are, I'm not staying on a soap box here preaching virtue since I don't know how to achieve it myself.
But, if one like me could learn virtue, I'd be from one of the daring concentration camp escapees that went on to form Mossad and restore justice, rather than from someone that learned to cope with the lack thereof.
Reductionist lenses can be helpful in cutting through grand, poetic language and finding what’s most viscerally useful. “What’s the meaning of life?” is an oft asked and important seeming question that gets at something nebulous, so it might be fit for such reductionism.
So what is this concept of “meaning”? Could it be “significance” or “instrumental function”? A chair might have significance to somebody, but cannot inherently have this quality of significance, independent of being perceived as such. A chair certainly has instrumental function- to be sat on, to lend someone comfort and stability- as it was designed with this purpose in mind.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of a chair?”, I will mostly get strange looks. But I will also be able to intuit that the meaning of a chair is to be sat on, and perhaps whatever important emotional association it brings up in its perceiver.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of life?” I will probably be accused of being a melancholy, good for nothing brooder. Which is telling! Pining for meaning is perhaps not some grand cosmic quest, not wrestling with God or orcs, but just a signal that one’s life does not have enough satisfaction. The sensation of satisfaction is easier to work with than this nebulous thing of meaning. Satisfaction comes in many flavors, but I think most people have a strong sense of what gives them satisfaction. And if they cannot do more of it, then they simply must frame what they can in ways that are sufficiently challenging as to earn the satisfactory feeling. It’s the flip side to anxiety: anxiety motivates you to act to achieve some uncertain outcome, and satisfaction rewards you for achieving it.
It’s my sense that much of Western existentialism or nihilism is born of toxic disillusionment with one’s satisfaction structure- the simple Christian norms one grows up with. The satisfaction of working teleologically towards Heaven, or oneness with God or the Good, is addictive! And cognitively acknowledging that that structure is not real can throw one’s ability to find satisfaction in engaging in the real world totally out of wack. But the intuitions that created conceptions of the Good, formalized into Christian ethics some two millennia ago, are still baked into us! So do away with the reality distorting beliefs, but be careful not to dismiss the Good-seeking part of you that is as much you as food-seeking, status-seeking, comfort-seeking drives bestowed by nature, and which is even seen as such by some religious traditions!
I liked the review less and less as I read through it.
> I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
If apathy is the opposite of empathy, this has been researched. Just search the Web for "empathetic countries". Russia comes in 11th most apathetic, preceded by most of Eastern Europe including Finland. Based on this, it seems more likely that apathy is more of a cultural or geographic trait than something recently produced in Russia / Soviet Union.
What nudged me to check this was the red flag when I read the fictional Kirill's biography, this sentence in particular:
> Kirill gets drafted in September 2022, and is sent to Ukraine after three days of training.
This perfectly matches the Western preconceptions of Russians attacking in human waves / orc hordes to be slaughtered, but it's easily proven false with a minimum of research. Russian troops have been on the defensive in Ukraine since the draft. There have been no costly attacks except in Bakhmut, by the Wagner mercenary group where the draftees didn't go. The regular Russian army had a plenty of time to train their draftees. And this supposedly Russian author should have known this. Then why the Kirill caricature?
"best deradicalizer testimony i saw was a former jihadi who admitted it was the best, most meaningful time of his life until he could no longer shake the growing horror of what his actual impact on the world was"
I'm reminded of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is a search for meaning in its own way. Written in 1947 in post-war France, amongst a class of intelligentsia grappling with peace-time existentialism, the books emphasis on freedom is almost diametrically opposed to the conditions of a concentration camp. Whereas Frankl asks, "How can we find meaning amongst even the worst of suffering?", Beauvoir is asking, "How can we find meaning given a certain amount of freedom?"
Both are valid questions. If you are lucky enough like myself to be one of the "dear readers" here, then you likely aren't suffering physical hardship. In fact, if you have enough time to scroll the comments here, you may be suffering from too much free time, from a comfortable life without meaning. This would be what Beauvoir terms our "burden of freedom". If we are free, how can we make meaning in our lives, and how can we be sure that the meaning we've chosen for ourselves is a good one.
Frankl's message is a profound one, but it misses the hardest part: creating good meaning. His book and his wife were good reasons to continue on. But what of someone like Kirill?
Let's imagine that Kirill is magically transported to Kansas City, where he is given UBI that lets him live comfortably though not excessively. He is given an apartment, a cell phone, a bus pass, and anything else on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. What does he do? Sure, at first he probably gets good and drunk, maybe goes on a bender, maybe tries to pick up a local woman (sorry wifey). But what then? What happens when he equilibriates to his environment, one in which he doesn't have to work and doesn't have meaning? This is the burden of freedom, and one that I see coming down the pipeline and straight into the face of those humans who become "obsolete" with the advances of AI/AGI.
Beauvoir's solution to the "burden of freedom" is what she calls the Passionate Man: someone who is engaged actively in their life in an authentic way, who sees themself clearly enough to be able to act toward a meaning that is unique to their talents and passions. Frankl hits on this a bit when he talks about "Right Action", an echo of the larger buddhist idea. Interestingly, the Passionate Man is almost the opposite of the apathetic man that Frankl describes.
Anyways, this is becoming a book review in itself, dear reader. These are hard questions that Frankl and SBD are asking, and I agree that within these depths is a mixture of black and white, good and evil. My own opinion is that life is the meaning in itself, and living more consciously of this, and helping others to see and experience this, is the way :)
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.
That was my favorite of them all during the first round and it wasn't close. I believe it has true literary value in itself. The time when I read "Dear reader, please imagine" for the third time after it was eschewed at the beginning of part 3 got me like some novels' plot twists.
It got me ordering the Vintrais book. So far I'm more impressed by the story than by the poems themselves (or their pseudo-back-translation into French). They're fine but don't really work as Renaissance pastiches. Of course the impressive thing is that they were written at all.
Thank you so much for this.
Great essay. I’m inclined to say “but terrible book review” though I’m not sure I really feel that way. But definitely closer to “essay using book as excuse” than book review.
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.)
Well Latvia isn't Russia.
As someone who grew up during 90s in Russia, it's not mythologized unfortunately.
Kirill's life isn't typical for someone from Moscow. But for a resident of a small town - pretty much so.
He have to be closer to forties or fifties to actually remember the 90s. His mother, on the other hand, does and probably has incorporated the "everything but not the 90" meme.
From what I can gather, the 90s in Russia could be very good if you were young, energetic, and intelligent. A lot of my source is from Inside Russia, a youtube channel.
Wow. I never comment on substack posts(this is my 1st!) but this is clearly one of the best reviews I’ve read.
I read Frankls book more than 15 years ago; maybe it’s time to revisit it.
And unlike some commenters here, I loved the jump between different sections.
When I 1st read the title I was a bit Meh.
While I loved Frankls book when I first read it , it has been commented to the death and I doubted anything could bring anything new. So I was expecting this to be a dull review.
I guess that surprised me even more. Well done !
I find this writing style really unpleasant to read. Like if a robot trying to act human was talking to me.
His writing is much better.
Hmm. I feel this is a really human piece.
If the author's Russian, as he says, small things could be tonally off, I guess. I thought it was well done. There's a bit of a 'science major learning about the humanities' tone, but given what our humanities majors have been up to lately I don't see that as a bad thing.
Yes, lots of sophomoric affectations ("dear reader" being the main offender) and first-draftisms. Aesthetic unpleasantness detracts from an otherwise interesting piece.
*Strongly* agree
Well, I am a Ukrainian, and I don't say "orcs". "Orcs" implies things were done to them and that is why they do what they do. But they are people; they came to us knowing they were risking death, knowing they would be killing. I deny them orchood.
Whatever the larger moral or philosophical issues, if someone comes to your homeland with a gun, shoot them.
The philosophy issues only come in if they surrender.
I think the portrait of Kirill is a depiction that is comforting for some Western readers -- I mean, suggesting that the only reason that Russians go to fight in Ukraine is because their life is so lacking in prospects and they are so apathetic.
Few are really all that comfortable with the reality of man.
"they came to us knowing they were risking death, knowing they would be killing"
Knowledge is a rather misleading thing to focus on, especially while eliding the issues of choice and consent.
What do you mean? (That is, I am not sure I understand you, because I heard something similar in a different situation and it probably meant a different thing. So if you could be more specific, that would help.)
I... honestly meant exactly what I said, but in case you want to get a stronger and clearer statement out of me - I don't think that most of the Russians sent to war by their country's government can be meaningfully said to have chosen or have consented to go. (A more convincing phrasing, I suspect - trivially true for at least the conscripted - is that they had no realistic, meaningful choice not to. All alternatives would have amounted to self-sacrifice, rebellion with no expected payoff, and that's just very hard for people to do in general.)
Ah, that. Agree.
The hostility to this review is odd. It’s by far the best book review, and best writing, so far. And the other finalists were good to great.
This form of multiple book reviews in one, with the writers perspective tacked on, is actually fairly common historically. When Orwell wrote book reviews, he actually wrote essays which derived from the books he was reviewing. This is common in more literary publications. Rather than being just a review of “Man’s Search for Meaning” but an essay on Frankl’s philosophy on the search for meaning and against apathy, which is why the other two stories matter, and add to the writing.
I thought I was great anyway. Kudos.
It's a good deal more ambitious than the other ones I've read, which magnifies both the good qualities and the defects.
"Book review" does a lot of lifting these days. It can mean:
'The book is about *blah*. I loved it, but here are *nits*. 4.5 stars.'
Or the book can be a jumping off point for something the review writer wanted to write about.
We may want two words for these, since they are quite different. The first may be more common, since it is shorter and if you want to get paid for it, is easier to write.
I do wonder if there is a language where these have different words. Perhaps English can borrow them?
Even book reviews in publications mostly made up of them (like the London Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement) often seem to be jumping off points for what the review writer wants to write about.
Last year’s winner had a theme-expanding ‘hook’ at the end too. It’s what made it stand out from the crowd.
I like the content of the review, but I'm curious why you think it has the best writing. Personally I found the flow and some of the phrasing kind of stilted. Almost as if it was written by someone whose main language is not English. It wasn't bad by any means, I doubt any of the reviews will be, but the other finalists had better style/writing IMO
He said he was Russian.
Certainly this one in my opinion could have done with editing (the "dear reader" stuff could have been largely, if not entirely removed).
One thing I have noticed about these reviews is that many of them use the first or second person in a self conscious way, which may be all right for a blog post style of writing, but at the same time they seem to be aiming at a more formal register, where it is riskier to use the first or second person.
I think this is the first time I've felt sexually harassed by a book review.
Well that's certainly a reaction to have. What exactly do you mean by this? I'm genuinely interested, especially since there didn't seem to be much sexual content. Forgive me if this is an obvious joke I'm missing.
Could you clarify what you mean? I don't understand the connection at all?
Possibly "dear reader" is an issue.
I wonder if this would apply to the "Terra Ignota" books.
It sounds a bit weird in English, but in Russian literature that phrase is not out of the ordinary.
I haven’t enjoyed a read like this since I was 17. I’m 40 now. Meaning is a very big deal to me. So are morality and empathy Thank you.
"Kirill" is a caricature which has only a tenuous relationship with reality. Yes, rural Russia is harsh, but it's not a concentration camp. Propaganda mostly lies, but it contains just enough truth to instill positive motivation, up to and including willingness to kill and die "for the people and the Fatherland", fighting against Nazis who openly call people like them subhuman orcs, in particular. The cult of the Great Patriotic War is basically Russia's true religion, and compared to a drab unpromising future, emulating mythical heroes who saved the world from the worst menace it had ever knew is very appealing to some. Whether this is an extenuating circumstance or the contrary compared to numb apathy is another question.
Yeah, I think rationalists kind of underestimate the value for a lot of people of belonging to a cause, especially old-school ones like nationalism. A lot of grey-tribers are renegade blue-tribers, so they get the social justice thing even if they don't agree with it.
There's also the call to adventure; lots of kids join the US army for similar reasons, just wanting to get out of some dead-end town in the hinterlands. I do think it's one of these natural things for young men; look at the plots of pre-woke fantasy novels, which rationalists might be more familiar with.
I sort of wondered about the girlfriend who "...thinks Kirill is cool, but wishes he’d go to prison already to get extra street cred".
Nah, the largest miss is that the person's name is 'Kirill', it's too Russian. Lots of people sent to the frontlines are regional minorities who sure as hell don't care about the Great Patriotic War as much as you seem to imply.
Am I getting to wrong conclusions when this essay makes me seriously want to get off of SSRIs?
What are you planning to replace them with?
The author writes: "He is a doctor with a specialty in psychology... It is one of the most famous books written by a psychologist"
Wasn't Frankl a physician, with psychiatry and neurology as his specialities?
Yes, the word "psychologist" was technically a misnomer, like calling a captain a lieutenant. But his theories could certainly be adopted by psychologists, and probably are.
I now have another book to read. In particular, I draw attention to the author's (deliberate?) unusual spelling "mirky"—which is perhaps better than the commoner "murky" in that it suggests attributes pertaining to Mirkwood.
Man this was really touching and beautiful. It probably doesn't qualify as a book review, but who cares? It's inspiring and for sure it makes you want to read Frankl and du Vintrais.
This is the first of these book reviews that have gotten me to buy a book.
Yep. Arriving Monday.
Not only did the book change my life in my twenties, it takes on new meaning and significance with each new life stage (the bits pertaining to marriage and carrying on generations hit extra hard now - the anecdote of the grieving husband brings me to tears).
A great book, and also a very short book, particularly if you focus mainly on the concentration camp section. I read this book shortly after reading Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling + Either/Or) in my early twenties, a year or two after my father had died of cancer. Both authors have had a huge influence on my life and, at least for me, were incredibly uplifting and freeing. They helped me process my grief and finding meaning in my life again. It's hard not to see Kierkegaard's influence in Frankl, which unfortunately makes Frankl's contributions seem less novel, but his delivery of the ideas is much more digestible.
I read "Man's Search For Meaning" for a graduate psychology class on motivation. The rest of the class had a lot of problems but the assigned readings were enough on their own to make it worth it. Although this isn't a traditional book review, it's of a very non-traditional book and I think Frankl would enjoy the structure of this review. You all should read the whole book, it's short and is sort of written like a blog post already.
It's a pretty good review. The one thing I'd say is I wouldn't call Kirill meaningless, orcish, or subhuman. If he's coming into your town with a gun then yes you should shoot him--pacifism is a fool's philosophy-- but there are plenty of people who have led boring lives that wouldn't sound particularly wonderful by our standards. From his point of view, he defended his country when the time came and died in battle--not so different from Tellus, the supposed happiest man alive according to Solon. Rural Russia sucks, I agree, but Kirill is far from unique in human history. The USA has its own dead-end towns full of poor kids who join the army to get out--are they also subhuman and meaningless because they don't write clever comments on Astral Codex Ten? After all, if he'd survived Kirill might have come back as a war hero, knocked up his girlfriend, and proceeded to become a dad. That would have probably given him at least some source of meaning.
I agree I don't want Kirill knocking on my door with a machine gun. That's war, though. We've all forgotten how awful it is. My conclusion from all this is 'Putin is a khuilo*', not 'Kirill is a p-zombie'. The whole question reminds me of the tendency of intellectuals to believe the masses are inferior. I don't like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I hope they kick them out, but pretending the enemy troops are some sort of Frankl-stein monster is a little much. Wars happen for reasons, and people fight them for reasons, even if they don't make much sense to people like us commenting on ACX.
*Though, you know, we did push a military alliance to his border.
> If he's coming into your town with a gun then yes you should shoot him
This isn't a philosophy for fighting monsters, it's a philosophy to keep yourself from turning into a monster afterward.
>Though, you know, we did push a military alliance to his border.
No, we did not. Russia's neighbors or near neighbors are joining, want to join, or joined NATO because they are afraid of Russia attempting to rebuild the empire (see e.g., Finland and Sweden recently), not because NATO wants to "surround" Russia or something
Putin is an unprincipled psycho, but he's a cunning one at that, having a good sense of how to play on Russian hopes and traumas to his benefit. There's a popular notion advanced by the usual suspects that if only he was removed, Russia would then inevitably return to the straight and narrow of being a docile afterthought of the US hegemony. This is naive wishful thinking.
Russians by and large believe (by no means groundlessly) that the West fears and hates them and would always work to undermine any and all Russian aspirations beyond being a "gas station", never mind reclaiming the rightful superpower status. If Putin were to disappear, Russia would eventually produce another one, even given free press and elections and all the rest of it.
The obvious plan B is, of course, forcible balkanization, if there were no nukes it would've been implemented long ago, and it increasingly looks like the proverbial gun on the wall is going to have to fire eventually.
> would always work to undermine any and all Russian aspirations beyond being a "gas station"
Could that be because the aspirations are mostly about conquering other countries?
Russia needs to find a new hobby.
There was a series of pushes for economic revitalization is the last few decades, all of which pretty much failed, mainly through domestic corruption and incompetence, but the West certainly "helped", most notably with the initial disastrous "shock therapy" approach. Now that no other approach to reclaiming superpower status is remotely plausible, it's either back to good old conquest or bust, and neither option leads to a happy ending for anyone, far as I can tell.
I mean Ukraine is pretty nebulously "another country". Russia has about as much claim to it as the US has to the lands we took from Mexico, probably more, from a grand perspective.
Fundamentally they see it as their back yard. Meanwhile we seem to have really strong feelings about our opinions of how 80% of the world should manage its affairs. Its not very hard to see how it would be super grating.
Absolutely if the Ukrainians want to resist, and we want to support them great. But I don't support the idea this is just some totally unjustified unhinged aggression. It is pretty normal great power shit that has been going on for EVER.
> It is pretty normal great power shit that has been going on for EVER.
I think most countries stopped doing this after WW1, which was more than a hundred years ago. I don't see USA recently trying to annex Canada.
Now but it was recently involved in wars against several countries literally on the opposite side of the world.
Of course. But there is a difference between war and annexation.
Man, this kind of stretches the limits of the term 'book review', but the third section's comparison of Russian conscripts to concentration camp victims is haunting and interesting enough that I don't mind too much. Nonetheless, you kinda feel the need to grade this as an existentialist work on its own merits as much as a book review per se.
I'd *love* to catch back up with this author in about 5-10 years. The prose and subject matter are shooting very, very high, and they mostly get there. They get a lot of credit for ambition alone, not even counting the bonus points for the word "Frankl-stein." To some degree, it feels like they're still 'growing in' to this voice a bit, and there's some visible strain in places. Once they've got a few more million words under their belt, they're gonna be *phenomenal*. And right now, they're already pretty darn good.
At its core, this essay is just a plea for mercy, and in that it succeeds entirely. Well done, and well done.
How is it a plea for mercy? Mercy for what and from whom?
Mercy for ourselves from ourselves, but superficially mercy to our enemies after the battle.
Maybe we have to hate them, in the moment, to do what we need to do to survive. But does that hate have to live inside us for the rest of our lives? Can we live on as something other than animals, if we once embraced animal rage?
Yes, complete agreement.
We have a winner.
I have a strong objection to an underlying assumption that pervades this whole project: the idea that our understanding of when/how humans have this feeling of meaning and meaningfulness has to itself be the kind of thing we would seem meaningful.
I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic. To the contrary, spelling out the gory scientific details is often anything but. And if we were simply trying to account for some other boring aspect of our mental lives: eg the feeling of nostalgia there would be no pressure to treat it at a level besides the purely scientifically descriptive.
Yet, when it comes to meaning, there seems to be an irresistible temptation to assume that it makes sense to say something gives someone meaning and describe it as if it was a real objective thing rather than trying to operationalize what that means (is it a disposition to have certain kinds of feelings, it's own qualitative feeling what) and then offer an empirical theory about when those occur to be evaluated only with the usual tools of scientific theory.
I think it's very unfortunate and is basically a way to ensure falling into fallacies.
I agree. As I was reading, I thought, "this is interesting, but I don't know if it'll actually hold up under scrutiny". In that sense, the other parts helped me understand what Frankl says, but didn't really show that his ideas actually described humans.
I kind of pushed away this doubt with the feeling that, "well, not everything has been measured, and common sense says that having meaning tends to be good". But for example, do other inmates not have wives or friends and family which they can think about to stay sane?
Totally agree with this.
If having the feeling of "meaning" is important, then surely our understanding of that feeling is also important? Especially when so many people seem to lack it or question its existence.
I don't think we even know what this feeling **is**, enough to analyze it the way you (and I) would like.
But yes, I do think there's a chance it might simply turn out to be plausible-sounding-but-useless mystical gobbledygook. (As opposed to useful mystical gobbledygook, which I take seriously.)
Ofc understanding it is important, but this approach basically rules out explanations of that feeling which don't themselves feel meaningful.
For instance, you might be able to explain away what makes us feel as sense of meaningfulness in ways which would cause us to think "that's not meaningful at all", e.g., if it was all explained by evopsych style behaving in ways likely to help your genes spread or was all about climbing the social status hierarchy in some way. Maybe not those specifically but I expect the sense of meaning not to be a very deep thing.
"I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic."
But we would expect an account of grammar to be grammatical and an account of understandability to be understandable. It's at least plausible that "meaning" is in this group rather than in the "erotic" and "funny" group.
It could turn out that way. But that's no reason to work under the assumption it must. It's a reason to compare all the theories that seem to best predict/unify our observations (x felt meaningful at time Y) and see which theory does best. But works like this totally eschew this framework and don't even consider that the standard by which we are supposed to judge.
I mean a priori it seems plausible that maybe the best scientific theories are the ones that generate the most sense of awe and wonder or are even the most poetic. And sure, give it a whirl. But what you don't do is just start writing poetry about nature and avoid comparing the accuracy of the predictions of some mathyy theory to your poetic one and instead substitute poetic value/sense of awe as the benchmark to evaluate the theories.
If you're in Auschwitz you're only going to bother doing your best to get through it if you have some cognitive REASON to do so.
If you're fat and lazy being fed figs and grapes by your favorite females in the shade while a cool breeze laps your skin you may not require any particular reason to keep from running at electrified barbed wire.
Philosophy, like all nerdish pursuits, arises in dissatisfaction with Life As It Is.
Life can definitely get better thereafter and find you maintaining an interest in philosophy or whatever but fortunate are those who never even understand the question, never mind requiring an answer...
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how ...
This is absolutely phenomenal.
Agreed.
A winner. Break a reader's heart, then lift it up. Hard to beat. Blagodarju! - Thinking about Kirill, I wonder about Andrej. Who lived in a meaningless mess very much like Kirill. Until the "Orcs" came. Because Andrej lives in Ukraine. Let us hope he still does. / My step-son K. lives in the early-occupied part - good he is no medic, else he would be at the front already, seems the Ruzzian overlords do not trust their "liberated brothers" enough to give them weapons. Here are 100 gram going down hoping he will not need to find meaning just before hitting a shell.- I find it all too sad to call a Russian "orc" or even to shout "slava Ukraina". I stick to PTN-PNX or "Could we please scroll forward to the part where you take a gun and put it to your head, Vlad?"
Dear Author, amazing piece of writing. :)
If there is a better essay than this coming in the Book Review contest it will have to be out of this world.
This was one fine piece of writing. My sincere thank to the author.
I see the through-line, and agree with the main thrust, but really didn't care for the editorial conceit. I find the "dear reader" stuff cringy at the best of times, and it completely fell apart for me at the 3rd, personal experience section. A strong, deep argument has to be backed up by clarity and confidence in the writing, and I didn't see that at all. Would enjoy reading after 2 or 3 complete rewrites.
Really thought provoking, thanks for this.
A tangent: a good way to answer a child's question "why is the sky blue" is "because air is very slightly blue, and you can see the blue when you look through enough of it. Lots of clear things are like that - the glass in windows is green, and water is blue like the ocean."
"my comments here would not pierce the membrane of banality"
This is my favorite piece of wordcrafting from any of the many book reviews I've read on ACX. I'm stealing it.
I'd like to see some data on which class of people were most likely to survive the camps.
I heard in high school that the middle-aged were more likely to survive than the young, because they understood the feeling of surviving bad times. In college, I mentioned this to a psych professor who was a survivor, and he said surviving was all randomness and noise.
One "dear reader" is too many. 14 is embarrassing.
How can a book review that doesn't even really tell me the full point of the book be a finalist? Synthesis is great, awkwardly inserting your hobby horse argument about modern Russian soldiers is not.
I found that affectation annoying too, but as someone else said earlier in the comments, that style of addressing the reader is common to Russian literature, and the English language "dear reader" cliche was probably the best way to approximate it, so I'm willing to give it a pass. And I didn't think the Russian soldier part was that much of a logical disconnect, the point being made seemed to be 1. meaning is a way to get through otherwise unbearable conditions 2. this has a downside in that authoritarian regimes take advantage of this by offering meaning to the destitute in return for their service. All three parts focusing on some form of suffering and injustice in Eastern Europe brought about by authoritarian regimes (the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Ukraine war) seems more like parallelism to me than an awkward or inappropriate insertion.
Same with the US and it’s many wars.
Well, first off, "style" is an important part of the quality of a work, so I don't think we should let the author off the work for his failure to reproduce English affect. At the very least, certainly not fawn over it and call it objectively great writing as Nolan does.
And sure, I agree about the parallelism between the Holocaust and the Ukraine War. But the author chose to focus on the struggle of the *Russian* soldier, not the massacred Ukrainian civilian. I find that quite irksome, and I think the Grey Tribe would be much less praiseworthy if a book review requested we empathize with the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre.
I disagree, being able to empathize with perpetrators and understand what drives them is a question I find burningly important. The author could have chosen to make the analogy be about a Nazi instead of a Russian, but I think they chose not to for several reasons. Still, the point stands -- the people in Germany and their choices were quite likely driven by something similar, by needing meaning after the crushing of their self image in WWI, the point being that meaning is amoral and pursuit of it can bring great darkness...
It doesn't matter what caused Kirill to arrive armed & unwelcome in Ukraine, only that the world is better without him in it.
It matters very much what caused Kirill to arrive, so as to prevent additional Kirills in additional Ukraines. The one dead Kirill solves nothing.
That's very much a question for *after* there are no more Kirills still alive in actual Ukraine.
Your arguments are probably correct from a somewhat, detached, analytic lviewpoint.. So I stand corrected, Dachau wasn't a death camp. I suppose the distintion is made on the maps you have studied.
Perhaps also, that a large minority of the deaths at Auscwicz occurred in the forced marches Gestapo inflicted upon the surviving captives meant that "death camp" was extreme. My site's uncle, an MD, in fact worked in the medical facilities until he contracted typhus and died two weeks before liberation. Certainly not a victim of the gas chambers.
Apparently you are content with the idea that the Holocaust is now a subject of precise terms and that Frankl's experience deserved the phrase "concentration camp."
I guess I'm just too sensitive. My Bad.
Nów I understand your point. However, yes, you are too sensitive. A term "concentration camp" is an established one, and literally everyone hearing term "concentration camp" will think only about places where nazis kept people in horrible conditions, and where people died massively from mistreatment, beatings, hunger, illness, bullets and gas chambers. None will think about more benign places existing in prior times (which, incidentally, can often be called more benign only in comparison with nazi ones, because objectively speaking they were horrible places as well: in the Boer case it is estimated that about 40.000 people died there, about half of them black, and most of the white victims were women and children). In fact most people are shocked to learn that there were things called concentration camps prior to wwII. So concentration camp is not a euphemism. It has a very specific, unequivocal connotation referring to nazi crimes.
And, also: yes, morally calling nazi concentration camps "death camps" is quite justified (and sometimes done), as the intended fate for most of the prisoners, perhaps aside from a small number of German political prisoners, was to ultimately die there, and while I was stressing, perhaps overstating my point, that it was at least possible to survive concentration camp (unlike the extermination camp), it was still extremely difficult - majority of even those 30000 liberated from Dachau were sick and malnourished, and they were still dying after the liberation. But please do not object to others using the term "concentration camp": there is no justification to think of it as a euphemism: the term is permanently attached to nazi crimes.
More reading on Guillaume du Vintrais: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/poetry/2012-platonov.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/history/1993-makinen.pdf
No. I do object to a review that begins with a reference to concentration camps as a catchall term Especially in a review of this book. Not faulting the book, or the reviewer, jes' sayin' the review lost me at that point. Obviously some might think I'm being picky. Maybe studying Orwell got me oversensitive to even a bit of euphemism.
I remember some linguist who was in solitary confinement in some Asian country and stayed sane by counting the words she knew and such. Don't remember any details.
Nah, that would be "willing to compromise a lot of your moral principles and communicate well with both cops and criminals" mostly.
The book review makes one want to listen to Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) again, in particular the song Red-Yellow days (Красно-желтые Дни), made the last time Russia sent tens of thousands of young men to fight in one of its wars. Link to a cover version plus Tsoi himself below. Translated text here, a young soldier about to depart for the war:
My train has long stayed at the depot
I'm leaving again, it's time
The wind was waiting for me on the threshold
On the threshold of autumn, my sister
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Tell me about those who are tired
From the ruthless street dramas
And the church of broken hearts
And of those who go to this church
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by love,
And I had a dream that the world is ruled by dream
And on this perfectly lit star
I woke up and realized
/After red-yellow days
Winter begins and ends
Woe to you from my mind
Don't be sad, look more cheerful
And I'll go home
With a shield, or maybe on a shield
In silver, or perhaps in poverty,
But as soon as possible/
Here is a fairly recent cover by Тролль Гнет Ель, to illustrate that Tsoi is not forgotten:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B_oWYuHRc0&list=RD8B_oWYuHRc0&start_radio=1&rv=8B_oWYuHRc0&t=72
...and Tsoi himself, back in the days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltTEzwR3Mpw
This was truly amazing, an essay I think is going to influence my thinking and beliefs for a long time. I look forward to finding out who the author is so I can read more of their works, if there are any.
Honestly, I think this was the best book review I’ve ever read or will ever read.
I enjoyed this very much except for the repeated use of "dear reader", an affectation I found jarring. Was there a specific intention behind its use?
It seems to me that this review is really split in audience reaction. Personally, I liked it the least of the 4 finalists so far, and I found it meandering and I did not feel like it taught me anything or introduced new ideas to help me "update my mental software", which is the main criteria by which I measure these book reviews. I read this review and expected to come to the comments and have people asking why this was a finalist, only to be entirely blindsided by the effusive praise it's been given. I believe everyone here is being entirely honest with their enjoyment, so my main takeaway is awe at how different people are, and surprise that my opinion is different than what seems to be the majority of others here.
Thank you for posting this. I’m 100% on the same page as you. Mind-boggling to me that this was a finalist, much less one with such positive comments! Almost feel like I’m being gaslit.
As a reply noted further down, the review seems tailor-made for longtime SSC/ACX readers. I suppose that means in some respect it is a successful review, though I would argue a good review shouldn't draw such ire from people like us who are in the periphery of the intended audience.
What makes you think I’m in the periphery of longtime SSC/ACX readers?
This feels like another split in audience reaction - I'm a longtime reader and this review bounced off me entirely. I don't see continuity, stylistically or thematically, with much of what ACX or SSC are/were trying to do.
I'm so surprised by the responses to this review. Comments are emphasizing their profound emotional responses and the literary quality of the work, and I got basically nothing from it (and it's not because this wasn't book review-y enough). No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny, I suppose. As with others, I was mildly off put by the "dear reader"s, so maybe this soured my perspective of the more substantive content.
It seems like Frankl's main insight is "we make our own meaning", which is a perspective that is in the water, to say the least (as an aside, though that is how the reviewer glossed it, "we make our own meaning" does not seem to be the point of the central quotation of the review. Right conduct and right action != self-imposed meaning, to say nothing of the idea that each situation has a unique correct answer. I'd be interested in what Frankl was on about here, but that doesn't seem to be the point of the review). The two case studies are competent applications of the theory, and deepened my understanding of Kirill and his ilk somewhat, but don't seem that exciting.
I'm genuinely curious to the people who are really excited about this review: what did I miss? Was it the Ukraine context or the more personal stuff that did it for you?
I'm very curious to hear from commenters reading this review, if they've already read Frankl or not.
I've already read him, so I enjoyed how the review added something new for me. But maybe if I hadn't read him and didn't have access to my memory of how incredibly powerful his book is, the review wouldn't have been enjoyable.
I haven't read him, and I enjoyed the review a lot.
Yeah, it's very possible that this is it, as I have not read the book. Maybe this review stands better as a sort of companion piece. I definitely was not sold on Frankl's ideas as presented here, but maybe I'll still check it out.
Also, could you specify what the review added? This review completely bounced off me, so I'm super curious what it is that about half the comments are experiencing so profoundly
I haven't read him yet, but I will this week, and I'll try to remember to circle back.
So, my impression is that it isn't "self-imposed meaning", per se, it's that the participant needs to actively participate in the process of generating meaning. And it's very possible to be wrong, as in the reviewer's story about Kirill. Choosing well is important, but I too am skeptical about the "one right answer bit".
For myself, all I can say is that I've been in a bad place for a while, mentally speaking, and this seems like a piece of the way out.
I've got the book now, and I'll read it later this week, and I'll probably loop back and re-read the review, and I'll try to comment here again.
Objectivist to the rescue! Specifically about "How can you be okay with killing enemy soldiers?" thing.
The answer is simple: Another's tragedy does not impose on us a moral obligation to martyr ourselves. Imagine you are caught in a Zombie Apocalypse, and one is coming straight for you. It does not matter if the zombie was a sweet, caring paragon of virtue prior to infection. It doesn't even matter if this is a truly awful version of the virus which leaves the person unchanged and completely conscious, but unable to control his body. You are not obliged to let yourself be killed because of his misfortune. Period.
So, yes, you may be forbidden from hating the enemy, or dehumanizing him. But you are absolutely allowed - in fact, obliged - to kill. In defense of your life and in defense of all you hold dear.
And this does make all the difference in the world. As long as you understand that you are dealing with another human being with his own drive for meaning, you have a chance of reaching him and changing his mind. I have read so many stories of deradicalized Islamists & neo-Nazis, and so many of them are reached by acknowledging this basic humanity, this basic need. And providing a _better_ source of meaning than senseless, bloody martyrdom.
Long before this war, I realized the same thing about the actual historical Nazis. They are depicted as uniformly evil, but most of them were probably just random guys from some village, who didn't think too deeply about what's going on, and just followed their orders. Probably not stupider or worse than your average neighbor. In a different timeline, you might enjoy drinking a beer with them. Nonetheless, if in this timeline they invade your country, you shoot to kill.
Indeed.
Yeah, to me, the truly frightening thing about what Hitler did was getting normal people to go along with it. And it's brushed aside when people want to paint all Germans as uniformly evil. (Putting aside the question of who gets to be properly called a "Nazi".)
“It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”
Wow. Last Weeks book review was great, but this blew me away.
The writing style doesn't do it for me. Is not the same style that college freshman literary reviews in a school mag deploy? Endless direct addresses to the reader, saying what the parts of the essay are, self-conscious deployment of bad rhetorical devices, detours that are not improved by pointing out they are bad. These habits were once mine and like Caliban looking in the mirror, I am repulsed.
Brilliant book. Changed my mom's life when she was in the psych ward as a teen in the 1960s and got her through her suffering. A powerful tale of how to survive the most atrocious struggles, externally and internally.
The Razor-Sharp Truth (A Quirky Advice Column)
https://therazorsharptruth.substack.com/
Nice to know everyone is so understanding of the article. A reviewer of this book in 2023 decides to follow Frankl's German derived, probably from English, term and it's OK. Even though there's at least some agreement that it could, just possibly be thought to be a not particularly pleasant euphemism for what happened.
This is substack.
If gold should rust, what would iron do?
The review is in English. Do you not expect it to use the English terms for things? Why would it be an English translation of a German translation of an English word?
As others have said in earlier comments, "concentration camp" is not a euphanism. The central example of one, the first thing English speakers will think of when hearing those words, are the places where the Nazis put the Jews.
I assume English isn't your first language. When you translate each word literally, does this become something politically incorrect in another language?
Murky*
To me this review, and Frankl's story, as well as Kirill's fictional one, lack a niche but critical observation. One that, frankly, is missing in the world model of many cultures, including all those in Golden Horde Eurasia.
A human can chose to die, on principle. It is rare, but it does happen.
The concentration camp is not the world, you can escape it. Maybe the success rate for this is 0.01%, but people did escape. And you can choose to rebel, maybe it involve poisoning the food you're cooking for your captors, or killing a lowly German soldier, or even just refusing to drive the gas trucks, but you can rebel.
The author points as much by the end:
> Even in Kirill’s 100,000-people town some do gather on the main square and protest, knowing fully well they will be arrested, possibly beaten, possibly sent to prison. Maybe there are hundreds of them, maybe tens. Maybe not enough. More people write something on social media, which is dangerous in its own right. Some people sit quietly and secretly send money to Ukrainian charities.
But then, why would we think Frankl's theory ought to apply to turning Kirill into one of those people?
Frankl's, at least from this review, seems, at root, a coward. Maybe a good utilitarian, but a coward regardless. Someone that tries to think his way around hell rather than embracing death.
I'm not saying that embracing death is easy, I count myself a coward, I think all but a few insane people are, I'm not staying on a soap box here preaching virtue since I don't know how to achieve it myself.
But, if one like me could learn virtue, I'd be from one of the daring concentration camp escapees that went on to form Mossad and restore justice, rather than from someone that learned to cope with the lack thereof.
Reductionist lenses can be helpful in cutting through grand, poetic language and finding what’s most viscerally useful. “What’s the meaning of life?” is an oft asked and important seeming question that gets at something nebulous, so it might be fit for such reductionism.
So what is this concept of “meaning”? Could it be “significance” or “instrumental function”? A chair might have significance to somebody, but cannot inherently have this quality of significance, independent of being perceived as such. A chair certainly has instrumental function- to be sat on, to lend someone comfort and stability- as it was designed with this purpose in mind.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of a chair?”, I will mostly get strange looks. But I will also be able to intuit that the meaning of a chair is to be sat on, and perhaps whatever important emotional association it brings up in its perceiver.
If I ask “what’s the meaning of life?” I will probably be accused of being a melancholy, good for nothing brooder. Which is telling! Pining for meaning is perhaps not some grand cosmic quest, not wrestling with God or orcs, but just a signal that one’s life does not have enough satisfaction. The sensation of satisfaction is easier to work with than this nebulous thing of meaning. Satisfaction comes in many flavors, but I think most people have a strong sense of what gives them satisfaction. And if they cannot do more of it, then they simply must frame what they can in ways that are sufficiently challenging as to earn the satisfactory feeling. It’s the flip side to anxiety: anxiety motivates you to act to achieve some uncertain outcome, and satisfaction rewards you for achieving it.
It’s my sense that much of Western existentialism or nihilism is born of toxic disillusionment with one’s satisfaction structure- the simple Christian norms one grows up with. The satisfaction of working teleologically towards Heaven, or oneness with God or the Good, is addictive! And cognitively acknowledging that that structure is not real can throw one’s ability to find satisfaction in engaging in the real world totally out of wack. But the intuitions that created conceptions of the Good, formalized into Christian ethics some two millennia ago, are still baked into us! So do away with the reality distorting beliefs, but be careful not to dismiss the Good-seeking part of you that is as much you as food-seeking, status-seeking, comfort-seeking drives bestowed by nature, and which is even seen as such by some religious traditions!
I liked the review less and less as I read through it.
> I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
If apathy is the opposite of empathy, this has been researched. Just search the Web for "empathetic countries". Russia comes in 11th most apathetic, preceded by most of Eastern Europe including Finland. Based on this, it seems more likely that apathy is more of a cultural or geographic trait than something recently produced in Russia / Soviet Union.
What nudged me to check this was the red flag when I read the fictional Kirill's biography, this sentence in particular:
> Kirill gets drafted in September 2022, and is sent to Ukraine after three days of training.
This perfectly matches the Western preconceptions of Russians attacking in human waves / orc hordes to be slaughtered, but it's easily proven false with a minimum of research. Russian troops have been on the defensive in Ukraine since the draft. There have been no costly attacks except in Bakhmut, by the Wagner mercenary group where the draftees didn't go. The regular Russian army had a plenty of time to train their draftees. And this supposedly Russian author should have known this. Then why the Kirill caricature?
Author (who I assume is lurking) might enjoy this tweet: https://twitter.com/meaning_enjoyer/status/1657511104946507781
"best deradicalizer testimony i saw was a former jihadi who admitted it was the best, most meaningful time of his life until he could no longer shake the growing horror of what his actual impact on the world was"
I really enjoyed this review. A few thoughts:
I'm reminded of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is a search for meaning in its own way. Written in 1947 in post-war France, amongst a class of intelligentsia grappling with peace-time existentialism, the books emphasis on freedom is almost diametrically opposed to the conditions of a concentration camp. Whereas Frankl asks, "How can we find meaning amongst even the worst of suffering?", Beauvoir is asking, "How can we find meaning given a certain amount of freedom?"
Both are valid questions. If you are lucky enough like myself to be one of the "dear readers" here, then you likely aren't suffering physical hardship. In fact, if you have enough time to scroll the comments here, you may be suffering from too much free time, from a comfortable life without meaning. This would be what Beauvoir terms our "burden of freedom". If we are free, how can we make meaning in our lives, and how can we be sure that the meaning we've chosen for ourselves is a good one.
Frankl's message is a profound one, but it misses the hardest part: creating good meaning. His book and his wife were good reasons to continue on. But what of someone like Kirill?
Let's imagine that Kirill is magically transported to Kansas City, where he is given UBI that lets him live comfortably though not excessively. He is given an apartment, a cell phone, a bus pass, and anything else on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. What does he do? Sure, at first he probably gets good and drunk, maybe goes on a bender, maybe tries to pick up a local woman (sorry wifey). But what then? What happens when he equilibriates to his environment, one in which he doesn't have to work and doesn't have meaning? This is the burden of freedom, and one that I see coming down the pipeline and straight into the face of those humans who become "obsolete" with the advances of AI/AGI.
Beauvoir's solution to the "burden of freedom" is what she calls the Passionate Man: someone who is engaged actively in their life in an authentic way, who sees themself clearly enough to be able to act toward a meaning that is unique to their talents and passions. Frankl hits on this a bit when he talks about "Right Action", an echo of the larger buddhist idea. Interestingly, the Passionate Man is almost the opposite of the apathetic man that Frankl describes.
Anyways, this is becoming a book review in itself, dear reader. These are hard questions that Frankl and SBD are asking, and I agree that within these depths is a mixture of black and white, good and evil. My own opinion is that life is the meaning in itself, and living more consciously of this, and helping others to see and experience this, is the way :)
Interesting that the climate turns Kirill into an orc while no such thing happens to Norwegians or Finns.