Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

In light of the wholesale madness that afflicted too much of the “civilized” world during the great war that had just passed, Frankl felt the younger generation of his day no longer had the kind of role models that would give them a sense of enthusiastic idealism, the energy that drives progress. The young people who had witnessed the war, he felt, had seen too much cruelty, pointless suffering, and devastating loss to harbor a positive outlook, let alone enthusiasm. The years leading up to and including the war, he noted, had “utterly discredited” all principles, leaving the nihilistic perception that the world itself lacked any substance. Frankl asked how it might be possible to resurrect and sustain concepts like a noble meaning in life, which had been so wantonly demolished by a torrent of lies. In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality. That very eagerness for consumption has become today a dominant worldview, one devoid of any greater meaning or inner purpose. Add to that the degradation of human dignity created by an economic system that had, in the last few decades before Frankl gave his talks, relegated working men and women into “mere means,” degrading them into “tools” of making money for someone else. Frankl saw this as an insult to human dignity, argu...