Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I don't like this article. Of course the gulag makes seeking happiness absurd, but it destroys all belief systems. The gulag destroys a faith in human goodness too, or a faith in social justice, or in individual will. It destroys religious faith as easily as faith in political atheism. Using that to say a life based on maximizing happiness has issues really isn't helpful.

And to be honest, no, suffering does not making your life meaningful. That's one of the most absurd things there is. Even Jesus prayed the cup be taken from him, and wept tears of blood. The author confuses having to survive with suffering as giving meaning beyond simple self-interest, but a lot of suffering is just meaningless. the camp cruelties are meaningless, people torment others for pointless reasons.

Finally, I always am wary of "meaningful." A lot of times you can make meaning in dangerous things that harm others. Happiness...well, at least you end up limiting the damage you do to others; the revolutionary who focuses on transcendent causes may have a meaningful life, but birth a system that gives us the gulag.

Classics have a way to taking things to extreme to illustrate various points. The Gulag example highlights that when a person had a choice to take the road to the left (selfish) or the right (selfless), they took the right road and gave up their self/happiness but ended up achieving meaning. Frankl's book on search for meaning also talks about meaning being more desirable than happiness.

The point is not that suffering makes ones life meaningful but the struggle or striving or the road seems to be preferred by the wise than an end state like happiness.

I agree with you, that was the aim of such camps (I'm also thinking of the Nazis here), and for most of the people, that probably was the result. It broke so many people who physically survived, too. And I think it's important to not focus so much on the "silver linings" of this "cloud", to avoid the sheer horror of it. But all that being said, "L'Espèce humaine" by Robert Antelme is a book worth reading. I only have the German translation:

> Die SS, die uns miteinander verwechselt, vermag uns nicht so weit zu bringen, daß wir uns verwechseln. Sie können uns nicht daran hindern, unsere Wahl zu treffen. Im Gegenteil, hier ist die Notwendigkeit, seine Wahl zu treffen, maßlos gesteigert und konstant. Je mehr wir uns verändern, je mehr wir uns von zu Hause entfernen, je mehr die SS glaubt, uns zu einer unterschiedslosen und verantwortungslosen Masse zu machen, was wir dem Anschein nach auch unbestreitbar sind, um so schärfer werden diese Unterschiede.

> The SS, which mistakes us for one another, cannot bring us so far as to make us mistake ourselves. They cannot hinder us to make our choice. To the contrary, here the necessity to make one's choice is limitlessly increased and constant. The more we change, the further away we get from home, the more the SS believes to have made us into an undifferentiated and irresponsible mass, which we undeniably are on the surface, the sharper these differences become.

I can't speak for any of this, either way. As I said, I'm mainly with you, and I certainly don't want to glamorize concentration camps. But for what it's worth, I recommend this book.

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