How to live under rising authoritarianism, according to a philosopher who did it bravely
The morning after Donald Trump won the presidential election this week, I stumbled out of bed and searched my bookshelf for a slim volume I hadn’t looked at in years: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Frankl knew a thing or two about living through a time of rising authoritarianism. A Viennese Jew born in the early 20th century, he was a budding psychiatrist and philosopher when he was sent to the Nazi concentration camps just months after he got married. His wife and other family members died in the camps — but he survived.
We are not, thank goodness, facing a situation even remotely as grave as Frankl’s. But Trump has given us every reason to fear that he plans to hollow out American democracy and aspires to authoritarian rule. A big part of what makes that scary is the sense that our agency will be severely constrained — that, for example, even more of us will become unfree to make decisions about our own bodies. And that can lead to despair.
This is exactly where Frankl can help us: He argued that human beings always have agency, even when we’re facing a horrible reality that it’s too late to undo. “When we are no longer able to change a situation,” he wrote, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”
We do that, Frankl said, by choosing how we make meaning out of the situation. His own experience in the camps helped him crystalize his philosophy and the branch of psychotherapy he pioneered: logotherapy (which literally translates to “meaning-therapy”). He practiced it in the camps, ministering to fellow inmates hungry for a way to make meaning of their suffering. After the Holocaust was over, he advocated for it to be used with all sorts of people, since the human search for meaning is universal.
This was where Frankl broke with his intellectual forebear, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis who believed that people are driven by the “pleasure principle” — an instinct to seek immediate gratification. “It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life,” Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning.
Frankl was inspired by proto-existentialist philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, who fought against nihilism, or despair at the meaninglessness of life, and replaced it with a firm conviction: Life may not come with any built-in meaning — but that just means we have to create meaning ourselves.
Frankl’s core idea — that life is potentially meaningful under any condition, because human beings always retain the freedom to express our values in how we respond to life’s tragedy — can offer a philosophical tonic for the many people feeling despair right now. If you’re one of them, read on.
Frankl’s advice is to ask yourself, “What does life expect of me?”
In times of despair, many of us feel like all our actions are futile, so there’s no point in even trying. We ask ourselves: What’s the meaning of it all, anyway?
In his book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Frankl turns the question upside down:
At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?
The question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life.
In other words, we’re accustomed to thinking that life owes us answers, but Frankl says it’s just the opposite: Life itself is constantly asking us a question — how will you face up to this situation? And this one? And this one? — and it’s our responsibility to answer. The answers we must give are different in every moment, because every moment demands something new of us: When a new president takes power, for instance, we each have to consider afresh how best to use our particular talents and resources to meet the demands of the new political reality:
The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.
We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?
That means that the task of making meaning out of life is never complete — it’s something we have to show up for over and over again. And Frankl argued that we do that by looking not inward, but outward at the world.
Under normal conditions, we might make meaning by creating or doing something that feels valuable, like writing a novel. Or we might revel in experiencing the beauty of nature or love for another human being. But when the elements of a good and stable life are being taken away, there is still a way to make meaning: We can come face to face with suffering and express our values in how we respond to it. That is a capacity that nobody can take away from us.
How to live out Frankl’s “tragic optimism” by recommitting to your values
At the end of Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl stakes out a position he calls “tragic optimism.”
The philosopher did not believe that human nature is all good or all bad. In fact, he saw both naive optimism and pure pessimism as forms of nihilism: Both views imagine the human being as having a nature that is perfectly settled in advance, so both views rob the human being of agency. Instead, Frankl preferred to see people as beings who are constantly choosing, who have the freedom to make their own meaning even amid the most tragic circumstances.
Frankl himself embodied that in the camps, where he knew the odds of surviving were very slim. And he recounts a moment that I find incredibly moving:
It did not even seem possible, let alone probable, that the manuscript of my first book, which I had hidden in my coat when I arrived at Auschwitz, would ever be rescued. Thus, I had to undergo and to overcome the loss of my mental child. And now it seemed as if nothing and no one would survive me; neither a physical nor a mental child of my own! So I found myself confronted with the question whether under such circumstances my life was ultimately void of any meaning.
Not yet did I notice that an answer to this question with which I was wrestling so passionately was already in store for me, and that soon thereafter this answer would be given to me. This was the case when I had to surrender my clothes and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript, I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. How should I have interpreted such a “coincidence” other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?
Frankl interpreted the page as a sign that the man had “entered those gas chambers upright” — that he’d chosen to stick to his faith even as he faced death, and that, in fact, he’d become a walking embodiment of his faith, with no more need for a page describing it.
He found many ways to “live his thoughts” in the camps. Frankl describes, for instance, how he chose to respond with dignity to a Nazi officer who beat him as he did hard labor in the freezing cold. And how he chose to treat typhus patients in one of the camps. “I decided to volunteer,” he wrote, because “if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor.”
What we’re facing in the US today is not comparable to what Frankl faced during World War II. But his philosophy and the way he personally embodied it offers us a helpful reminder: Now is the time to live our thoughts. To ask ourselves what our values are — and then get to work enacting them.
There are lots of things to be concerned about as America enters a second term under Trump. What will happen to pregnant people? What will happen to low-income people? What will happen to undocumented people?
As you consider what worries you, think about the very real actions you can take now to “live your thoughts.” For example, if you’re concerned about undocumented people, you can consider donating to an effective nonprofit like the International Refugee Assistance Project or sponsoring a refugee family to resettle in your community.
Will your actions change everything? Probably not. But they may change some things for some individuals. And even if they do not — as Frankl reminds us, sometimes it’s beyond your control to change a painful situation — you will know that you are living out your responsibility to the world and helping build a foundation for the future you want to see.
“With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future,” Frankl writes. “Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.”
Or, to put it another way: Life does not owe you answers, but you still owe answers to life.