Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away,

choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers.

“Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.

And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism. Because today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely.