Ayn Rand and Suffering
I forgot to include the whole reason why I chose to post about McCain's incredible war story yesterday. I've been re-trying to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and I came to one of those places in the book yesterday morning that forced me to put the book down to devote more time to fully understand a thought. Here's the quote that set me a-thinking (retyped via BlackBerry to let it seep in more slowly...like taking in a landscape on foot vs. from a car):
That's where I had to stop, but the quote continues:
Now granted -- that section is about a powerful business executive and her EMOTIONAL reaction to the pain of love. But I believe Rand's thinking can have very broad applications.
For example, is that the line of thinking John McCain pursued, when abused and broken as a POW he refused to divulge any more than his rank and serial number? Is that how he dealt with the pain inflicted on his body? By refusing to believe in suffering thus overcome it?
Is that how
prisoners,
deportees,
guerrillas,
spies,
soldiers,
the terminally ill,
artists,
poets,
doctors,
activists
perceive pain and suffering?
Can one overcome things just by refusing to believe in them? Things like sin? Self-hate? Stupidity?
Is this an extremely empowering approach to life or ridiculously addle headed one void of a reality check? It would be extremely liberating to give suffering a big F-U, but aren't there degrees and shades to it?
How would I interpret this in daily life? How would you? Can you honestly say that's how we deal with pain? Physical and emotional? I wonder how a welfare abuser would read that excerpt.
I don't think society helps us with putting suffering in context. It could be because fear is so commonly encouraged by all the information we consume. Suffering becomes a constant when we have instantaneous news of terrorist bombings, tens of thousands of deaths from natural disasters, hit-and-runs, robberies, lying politicians.
It's a wonder anyone goes outside any more.
As much as I deplored Fareed Zakaria's "post-America is here" article, I think he had a great point in understanding why most people wouldn't think we're living in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. While global organized death it down, every little act is reported in the information age. That hasn't been the case throughout history when we've sometimes had to wait decades to confirm through the opening of secret archives that millions had been slaughtered. We've had trouble putting every death and deplorable act in context as a result.
Another place I think this culture of fear has been extremely detrimental has been in the process of birth. Our non-stop thirst for information and acceptance of fear have produced a dangerous cycle. OBs and "Baby Doctors" who typically have no formal training for normal birth, manipulate fear of suffering (not to mention fear of self-realization, fear of lawsuits, fear of responsibility, and fear of the routine) to escalate normal situations to the crisis kinds for which they're trained.
Working backwards, this has produced a fear of pain. People believe strongly in suffering and they fear it. Since pain is the cause of suffering, you avoid pain at all costs, even when it is beneficial.
To bring this back to the Rand excerpt, how can we apply her "suffering does not exist" mentality to birth? To be sure, the process is often painful, but how a woman interprets that is very important to the process in my opinion. By embracing a sufferer's mentality, the pain becomes a horrible burden to be avoided at all costs, even to the point of demanding to have a child cut out of your womb.
By denying suffering a seat at the table the pain of childbirth could be seen as limitlessly empowering.
(Full disclosure: I will never have to give birth)
So, is suffering real? Should it be denied? Is that empowering or ludicrous?
-dr-
"She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering."
That's where I had to stop, but the quote continues:
"She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count -- it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously -- an immovable certainty within her kept repeating -- pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously.
She fought it. She recovered. Years helped her to reach the day when she could face her memories indifferently, then the day when she felt no necessity to face them. It was finished and of no concern to her any longer."
Now granted -- that section is about a powerful business executive and her EMOTIONAL reaction to the pain of love. But I believe Rand's thinking can have very broad applications.
For example, is that the line of thinking John McCain pursued, when abused and broken as a POW he refused to divulge any more than his rank and serial number? Is that how he dealt with the pain inflicted on his body? By refusing to believe in suffering thus overcome it?
Is that how
prisoners,
deportees,
guerrillas,
spies,
soldiers,
the terminally ill,
artists,
poets,
doctors,
activists
perceive pain and suffering?
Can one overcome things just by refusing to believe in them? Things like sin? Self-hate? Stupidity?
Is this an extremely empowering approach to life or ridiculously addle headed one void of a reality check? It would be extremely liberating to give suffering a big F-U, but aren't there degrees and shades to it?
How would I interpret this in daily life? How would you? Can you honestly say that's how we deal with pain? Physical and emotional? I wonder how a welfare abuser would read that excerpt.
I don't think society helps us with putting suffering in context. It could be because fear is so commonly encouraged by all the information we consume. Suffering becomes a constant when we have instantaneous news of terrorist bombings, tens of thousands of deaths from natural disasters, hit-and-runs, robberies, lying politicians.
It's a wonder anyone goes outside any more.
As much as I deplored Fareed Zakaria's "post-America is here" article, I think he had a great point in understanding why most people wouldn't think we're living in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. While global organized death it down, every little act is reported in the information age. That hasn't been the case throughout history when we've sometimes had to wait decades to confirm through the opening of secret archives that millions had been slaughtered. We've had trouble putting every death and deplorable act in context as a result.
Another place I think this culture of fear has been extremely detrimental has been in the process of birth. Our non-stop thirst for information and acceptance of fear have produced a dangerous cycle. OBs and "Baby Doctors" who typically have no formal training for normal birth, manipulate fear of suffering (not to mention fear of self-realization, fear of lawsuits, fear of responsibility, and fear of the routine) to escalate normal situations to the crisis kinds for which they're trained.
Working backwards, this has produced a fear of pain. People believe strongly in suffering and they fear it. Since pain is the cause of suffering, you avoid pain at all costs, even when it is beneficial.
To bring this back to the Rand excerpt, how can we apply her "suffering does not exist" mentality to birth? To be sure, the process is often painful, but how a woman interprets that is very important to the process in my opinion. By embracing a sufferer's mentality, the pain becomes a horrible burden to be avoided at all costs, even to the point of demanding to have a child cut out of your womb.
By denying suffering a seat at the table the pain of childbirth could be seen as limitlessly empowering.
(Full disclosure: I will never have to give birth)
So, is suffering real? Should it be denied? Is that empowering or ludicrous?
-dr-
Labels: ayn rand, birth, fareed zakaria, fear, john mccain, suffering
posted by mrdarius at
Thursday, May 08, 2008
5 Comments:
Wow.
I can relate to that.
Big time.
The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (and I'm paraphrasing here) basically says that suffering is meaningless, it's the meaning that we ascribe to it that defines how we suffer, or survive suffering, as it were.
But again, wow, that quote hit me like a speeding truck.
Might have to re-try reading Rand as well.
i'm rereading the fountainhead at the moment. soon--atlas shrugged.
I must finally get around to reading them, so off to Amazon I go...
Out of interest Aras, I've always known you as a fan of Ayn Rand, how does one reconcile such objectivist philosophies with the Catholic faith? Or any faith for that matter? Because faith is hardly objective.
I'm not being cynical, just curious.
It's not a problem at all, Rachel, for an intelligent person. Surely you're not suggesting that I would ever argue on the basis of Because The Bible Says So?
Religious doctrine tends to prove true, so it's really very simple, even if you don't have faith. E.g. I work in a college with a health faculty, so I have many colleagues in social work that I've talked to about abortion. There were very many women in Soviet times that had multiple abortions. At the time, it was simply considered a method of birth control. Now most of those women have tremendous psychological problems that emerged only years or decades after the event.
Objectively, therefore, abortion should not be legal, if the role of the government is to protect us from developing tremendous psychological problems. (I don't think it is, but liberals do, which is why I don't understand their pro-choice position.)
If someone had predicted these problems at the rime of roe vs. wade, you probably would have called him hysterical. We haven't tied everything out yet, but the things we try that are in conflict with the bible tend to backfire on us. If I were an objectivist betting man, I would bet on the rest backfiring too.
And just about faith in general, Rachel: if you feel faith, closeness to God or Jesus or Mary, or Krishna, or Odin, or Whomever, then it would be objectivist of you to believe that closeness means something. When you read Atlas Shrugged you will learn that everything means something. If you feel nothing, then of course it would be un-objectivist of you to pretend you do.
@ aras: I wasn't going to, but I just had to respond to this after reading the following articles:
Study Fails to Find Link On Abortion, Mental Health, WSJ
And subsequently, this one:
Abortion not linked to depression, The Onion
Also, you suggested that you would never, "argue on the basis of Because The Bible Says So?"
Yet, the very next line of your comment:
"Religious doctrine tends to prove true, so it's really very simple, even if you don't have faith."
I think you have things backwards here, Arai. It's not that religious doctrine often proves true, but rather that religious doctrine is often based on truth/reality. The challenge then becomes one of finding out what truth and reality are, rather than letting them be defined or indexed for you in an ancient tome.
Your view seems to presuppose the moral veracity of the Bible, whereas I think an objectivist viewpoint would see it only as an ancillary work recording narrowly select lessons from reality, often missing the whole story.
This is a very dangerous mistake in my opinion. The Bible has often been misinterpreted and wrongly applied to wreak quite a bit of havoc. Wouldn't it be more prudent to look at the Bible in combination with scientific study, government statements (not really), and personal viewpoints defined by culture, heritage, parenting, and the Interwebs? In the end, I believe that any one of those sources of information could be fallible, and that it would be a mistake to rely on any one in particular.
I think you also misinterpreted liberals' view of the government's responsibility. I agree that one of the responsibilities they perceive is minimizing severe psychological trauma, which we have now seen is not linked to abortion. But on the question of abortion, don't liberals consider the government's role to be one of securing individual rights, and possibly managing crime rates?
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