Highlights from Your Comments
responses to some of the comments in the original "Man's Search for Meaning" publication
Hello,
My review of "Man’s Search for Meaning" (read it if you haven’t yet) was originally posted a few months ago, anonymously, as part of the ACX Book Review Contest 2023. It gathered quite a lot of comments, and I couldn’t answer them due to the anonymity requirement. I wrote this review in the hope of raising an audience and choosing a platform to write. We’ll see how the first part fares in the future. But I was quite amazed by the comments and, in fact, chose Substack (as opposed to other platforms or a standalone blog) based partially on this response.
I would like to thank everyone for their unbelievably kind words. That was incredibly encouraging and inspiring. I will try to do justice to the standard I set.
The most common cryticism that the review encountered was the "dear reader" style. I think this particular style fits this particular piece, and the more personal approach works well for the messages I was trying to convey. But I fully understand if somebody doesn’t care for it.
***This is a long post that might be truncated in emails. I highly recommend opening this in your browser (by clicking on the title) to read the whole 4,500-word post without interruption.***
I will get to the comments now. I tried to group them according to the topic, but otherwise the order doesn’t matter. If I missed yours, feel free to repeat it below. Here is the original post:
About this review in general:
Owen T writes:
Sheesh what a bummer. Lol I am kidding that was fascinating to read. May I ask, was it edited/conceptualized even partially with AI? Not that I think that’s a problem if it was.
Nope, no AIs were harmed, exploited, or otherwise employed in the writing of this review. Not that there is anything wrong with it…
Leo Abstract writes:
I wonder if this review was written deliberately in reverse.
No, it was pretty much written “in sequence”, with large chunks rewritten here and there.
Certainly the men guarding Frankl in the concentration camp would recognize the concept of meaning as necessary for human life. But for them meaning was in hierarchy, in dedication to a cause greater than one's individual choosing. The cooperation with fate that we see last year in Russia or last century in Germany or last millennium anywhere in the world is one that looks to society for determining the meaning, whether in the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven or the kingdom of God or what have you. Who is to say that Kirill is wrong, and Victor right?
I don’t think I would try to defend this last argument (even though I wholly believe it). I think the distinction between "right" and "wrong" in this particular case is moral and not mathematical, and so Kirill is wrong and Victor is right because of their actions and not because of their justifications for them.
Yug Gnirob writes:
This is the first of these book reviews that have gotten me to buy a book.
Thanks. These are really important to hear for any reviewer.
glaebhoerl writes:
Author (who I assume is lurking) might enjoy this tweet:
https://twitter.com/meaning_enjoyer/status/1657511104946507781
"best deradicalizer testimony i saw was a former jihadi who admitted it was the best, most meaningful time of his life until he could no longer shake the growing horror of what his actual impact on the world was"
He was, and he did!
About Frankl:
garymar writes:
I read the Frankl book a long time ago. One passage I have never forgotten.
In this passage, the prisoners were transferred to another camp. In their weak, emaciated condition, they were made to stand outside for several hours, clad in thin prisoner clothes, in the freezing winter rain.
And they were crying – for joy.
They were crying for joy because they could plainly see that the camp had no chimneys.
I could never get that image out of my head.
Thank you for sharing.
Alek writes:
It's well-known that Dr Frankl bored holes in the skulls of his Jewish patients, who had taken overdoses of pills in that camp, and injected an amphetamine intracranially.
Timothy Pytell wrote many times about Frankl deeds and lies.
Yes, there is, in fact, controversy around Frankl himself and this book in particular. I don’t think it’s a fully factually justified controversy (so "well-known" here is very untrue), and I deliberately removed a paragraph and a half about it from the review since it is worth judging this book by its own merit.
I think one of the criticisms of this book in particular is that the author deliberately jumbles up the timeline of his incarceration in the camps, so it would seem that he was in Auschwitz for the majority of the time, whereas in reality he was mostly in Dachau and Theresienstadt. Even if it’s true, I don’t think this is crucial for the book’s message.
About Guillaume du Vintrais:
Kuiperdolin writes:
[…] It got me ordering the Vintrais book. So far I'm more impressed by the story than by the poems themselves (or their pseudo-back-translation into French). They're fine but don't really work as Renaissance pastiches. Of course the impressive thing is that they were written at all.
This is probably the best compliment one can give a reviewer (given that the review is favorable). Thank you!
gwern writes:
More reading on Guillaume du Vintrais:
Both of these are great reads if you are interested in Soviet history. I wish I would’ve read the first paper ("The ‘Wicked Songs’ of Guilleaume du Vintrais: A Sixteenth-Century French Poet in the Gulag") before writing the review (I used only Russian-language sources), but I don’t think I missed anything crucial.
I am glad that the story of Guillaume du Vintrais lives in English. Please spread this story; I think it is the most important part of this review.
About Kirill:
Lucid Horizon writes:
You write "Does Kirill have a choice, though? At any point of his hypothetical life? Frankl believes that he does."
But Frankl writes, "Naturally only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights." Why should our Kirill be one of them, when he's meant to be an archetype and not a rare exception?
Yes, and this is exactly the choice. There is no guarantee of success; one can only choose to try to reach them or to never try at all. I think that Frankl believes it’s worth the gamble.
yossarian writes:
With Kirill you are missing an important detail. If Kirill is in his 30's, he grew up in a literal hell. That's what 90's in Russia were. No money, no stability, hunger, crime, no prospects, danger on all sides. And then came 2000 and so on, and life finally got normal, more or less. And guess who he trusts and believes to be on the right side? And Kirill's life is not typical nowadays, the description here matches the 90's much more.
I partially agree. The "wicked 90’s" were exceptionally tough on people. And this does partially explain Putin's support nowadays. I don’t agree that Kirill’s life as described matches the 90s more than the 2020s. There are plenty of YouTube vlogs of people in small towns all over Russia. There are also enough statistics to back them up. Life is still pretty bad there.
Xpym writes:
"Kirill" is a caricature which has only a tenuous relationship with reality. Yes, rural Russia is harsh, but it's not a concentration camp. Propaganda mostly lies, but it contains just enough truth to instill positive motivation, up to and including willingness to kill and die "for the people and the Fatherland", fighting against Nazis who openly call people like them subhuman orcs, in particular. The cult of the Great Patriotic War is basically Russia's true religion, and compared to a drab unpromising future, emulating mythical heroes who saved the world from the worst menace it had ever knew is very appealing to some. Whether this is an extenuating circumstance or the contrary compared to numb apathy is another question.
I don’t believe that Kirill is a caricature, and I didn’t write him as such. Every single point of his life’s description is taken either from first-hand accounts, or from news articles. If you consider a line of people that currently live in Russia, from the happiest to the least happy, Kirill, as described here, will likely be in the second half, but closer to the median, than to the extremum.
I do not think and do not claim that modern day Russia or even Soviet day Russia is a concentration camp (although it sure as hell had and has some!). But people’s psychological coping mechanisms are similar, even if their intensity is not the same.
JustAQuestion writes:
Nah, the largest miss is that the person's name is 'Kirill', it's too Russian. Lots of people sent to the frontlines are regional minorities who sure as hell don't care about the Great Patriotic War […].
I agree; this is a large miss on my part.
BlaMario writes:
> I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
If apathy is the opposite of empathy, this has been researched. Just search the Web for "empathetic countries". Russia comes in 11th most apathetic, preceded by most of Eastern Europe including Finland. Based on this, it seems more likely that apathy is more of a cultural or geographic trait than something recently produced in Russia / Soviet Union.
I would assume you mean this list here. I have to say, based on that alone, my position still stands strong: Sweden is ranked #4 in “Most emphathetic”, and Canada is #11, whereas Venezuela, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania, South Africa, and Brazil, all warm to warm-ish countries, are on the very bottom. Geography might play a role here, but not the only one or the decisive one. On the other hand, out of the 10 “Least emphathetic” countries on the list, 8 have been a part of the Warsaw Pact, and one more has been a part of the Russian Empire.
> Kirill gets drafted in September 2022, and is sent to Ukraine after three days of training.
This perfectly matches the Western preconceptions of Russians attacking in human waves / orc hordes to be slaughtered, but it's easily proven false with a minimum of research. Russian troops have been on the defensive in Ukraine since the draft. There have been no costly attacks except in Bakhmut, by the Wagner mercenary group where the draftees didn't go. The regular Russian army had a plenty of time to train their draftees. And this supposedly Russian author should have known this. Then why the Kirill caricature?
You know, if you do slightly more than a minimum of research, you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of such documented cases. This particular issue (lack of preparation and training for the conscripts in September 2022) has been widely discussed in Russian-speaking media, even the pro-regime ones.
Mark writes:
Thinking about Kirill, I wonder about Andrej. Who lived in a meaningless mess very much like Kirill. Until the "Orcs" came. Because Andrej lives in Ukraine. Let us hope he still does. / My step-son K. lives in the early-occupied part - good he is no medic, else he would be at the front already, seems the Ruzzian overlords do not trust their "liberated brothers" enough to give them weapons. Here are 100 gram going down hoping he will not need to find meaning just before hitting a shell.- I find it all too sad to call a Russian "orc" or even to shout "slava Ukraina". I stick to PTN-PNX or "Could we please scroll forward to the part where you take a gun and put it to your head, Vlad?"
Thank you, Mark. Best of luck to your family.
Anonymous Dude writes:
The one thing I'd say is I wouldn't call Kirill meaningless, orcish, or subhuman.
I didn’t say “subhuman”. In fact, I tried to argue the opposite. Lacking meaning, searching for it, and, hopefully, finding it, are inescapable parts of the human condition.
Rural Russia sucks, I agree, but Kirill is far from unique in human history. The USA has its own dead-end towns full of poor kids who join the army to get out--are they also subhuman and meaningless because they don't write clever comments on Astral Codex Ten? After all, if he'd survived Kirill might have come back as a war hero, knocked up his girlfriend, and proceeded to become a dad. That would have probably given him at least some source of meaning.
I fully agree. Being a dad is a very strong meaning to have. But I believe, on average, people who find true meaning in being dads are less likely to get drafted and to go kill other people. Unless there is a direct and clear threat to their family, they would look for ways to avoid it, precisely because they already have meaning in their lives.
About the review in general - again!
Moon Moth writes:
> morally mirky
I'm just going to assume this is an intentional pun on Tolkien, because it makes me smile, and the reviewer seems eminently capable of doing this on purpose. :-)
That was not written on purpose originally. Eventually I saw it during the edits and decided to leave it for the eagle-eyed because it gave me a chuckle.
> Just the other week Kirill saw a comatose drunk man fall down on the street, and didn’t do anything, because his father was never given any help in the same situation. Nobody else did anything too. I’ve lived in several countries, but I’ve never seen such levels of apathy, as in Russia, especially outside the big cities.
I live in America, in a major West Coast city. Last month I was talking with a private security guard working on a block on the main street near me. Among the other incidents that day, when he and his two companions showed up in the morning, there was a dead body curled up outside the new Asian grocery store. He'd been dead for a few hours. The people at the grocery store had said that the man was obviously just a homeless addict, and so they had ignored him for several hours. I never learned whether anyone found out whether the man was still alive when the grocery store employees first arrived. But later interactions would demonstrate that there was some wisdom in their course of inaction. One of the security guard's companions was stabbed with a needle by a seemingly passed-out "homeless addict" (which is to say, someone who looked and acted the part, but it's not like anyone could tell). A week later I found out that the stabbed guard got Hepatitis C. The other of the guard's companions had had some form of chemical compound thrown in his face by a mumbling "homeless addict", and a week later I found out that he'd gotten a detached retina. At this point, around 4 pm, the guard I talked to was the only one left from that group of three, and understandably on edge, so I kept him company for an hour or two until his replacement showed up. He clearly needed someone to talk to.
For audience calibration, I will stress that this was a very bad day, not a normal day. But also, this is the beating progressive heart of the city, a high-property-value cool neighborhood, and at a deceptive lower bound only one block from the epicenter of the city's BLM protests in 2020. I'm not referencing all this to condemn America or America's political left, but instead to highlight the apathy involved: the ability to allow human suffering to fester and erupt around oneself and yet to pass by on the other side. Reinforced in a vicious cycle because it truly is safer to pass by on the other side. And I'm relatively new to all this: what kind of people has this produced, in places where it's been going on for decades? And the answer, betraying my American solipsism, is that we should all have seen "The Wire" by now.
These stories are important to record and remember. They should not be generalized; there are scientists to do it for us, but the value of first-hand experience is high. We (or, rather, historians) get a huge amount of information from people’s diaries, and in some countries, they are the only reliable source of information.
I remember the opposite case in Berlin: a homeless-looking man fell down on the street, likely drunk or under the influence of something else. That was in the middle of the city. The police came extremely fast, and then two cops spent 10–15 minutes helping the poor guy up, giving him water, and waiting with him for the ambulance.
Again, one has to be very careful with generalizations here, but I remembered this moment.
Peter Gerdes writes:
I have a strong objection to an underlying assumption that pervades this whole project: the idea that our understanding of when/how humans have this feeling of meaning and meaningfulness has to itself be the kind of thing we would seem meaningful.
I mean, we'd never expect an account of what erotic attraction is to be erotic. To the contrary, spelling out the gory scientific details is often anything but. And if we were simply trying to account for some other boring aspect of our mental lives: eg the feeling of nostalgia there would be no pressure to treat it at a level besides the purely scientifically descriptive.
Yet, when it comes to meaning, there seems to be an irresistible temptation to assume that it makes sense to say something gives someone meaning and describe it as if it was a real objective thing rather than trying to operationalize what that means (is it a disposition to have certain kinds of feelings, it's own qualitative feeling what) and then offer an empirical theory about when those occur to be evaluated only with the usual tools of scientific theory.
I think it's very unfortunate and is basically a way to ensure falling into fallacies.
This is very interesting. Basically, as I understand it, you are proposing a variation of the “dissecting a frog” argument: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies.” I am not sure I agree. Actually, I am not sure I agree with the frog thing, either.
I do think that trying to understand where the “meaningfulness” feeling comes from can help one locate said feeling. But this is very hard to generalize, and probably should not be generalized. When Frankl talks about it in the second half of his book, he is using it quite successfully as a psychological tool to help some of his patients, but I don’t think he draws any general conclusions from it.
There is also a piece from the afterword by William J. Winslade that I remembered that might be relevant to this:
Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” “That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.”
George writes:
To me this review, and Frankl's story, as well as Kirill's fictional one, lack a niche but critical observation. One that, frankly, is missing in the world model of many cultures, including all those in Golden Horde Eurasia.
A human can chose to die, on principle. It is rare, but it does happen.
The concentration camp is not the world, you can escape it. Maybe the success rate for this is 0.01%, but people did escape. And you can choose to rebel, maybe it involve poisoning the food you're cooking for your captors, or killing a lowly German soldier, or even just refusing to drive the gas trucks, but you can rebel.
The author points as much by the end:
> Even in Kirill’s 100,000-people town some do gather on the main square and protest, knowing fully well they will be arrested, possibly beaten, possibly sent to prison. Maybe there are hundreds of them, maybe tens. Maybe not enough. More people write something on social media, which is dangerous in its own right. Some people sit quietly and secretly send money to Ukrainian charities.
But then, why would we think Frankl's theory ought to apply to turning Kirill into one of those people?
Frankl's, at least from this review, seems, at root, a coward. Maybe a good utilitarian, but a coward regardless. Someone that tries to think his way around hell rather than embracing death.
I'm not saying that embracing death is easy, I count myself a coward, I think all but a few insane people are, I'm not staying on a soap box here preaching virtue since I don't know how to achieve it myself.
But, if one like me could learn virtue, I'd be from one of the daring concentration camp escapees that went on to form Mossad and restore justice, rather than from someone that learned to cope with the lack thereof.
“Coward” is maybe a strong (or, rather, anachronistic) word, but I understand what you mean. I agree that this option—ending it all in a blaze of glory—always exists, but it is tabooed in some cultures, for example, the Jewish.
Why would we think Frankl's theory ought to apply to turning Kirill into one of those people?
We don’t. And it probably won’t. It just might explain Kirill’s motivations and internal struggles to us. This information, limited as it is, is still valuable.
Dasloops writes:
I'm reminded of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is a search for meaning in its own way. Written in 1947 in post-war France, amongst a class of intelligentsia grappling with peace-time existentialism, the books emphasis on freedom is almost diametrically opposed to the conditions of a concentration camp. Whereas Frankl asks, "How can we find meaning amongst even the worst of suffering?", Beauvoir is asking, "How can we find meaning given a certain amount of freedom?"
Both are valid questions. If you are lucky enough like myself to be one of the "dear readers" here, then you likely aren't suffering physical hardship. In fact, if you have enough time to scroll the comments here, you may be suffering from too much free time, from a comfortable life without meaning. This would be what Beauvoir terms our "burden of freedom". If we are free, how can we make meaning in our lives, and how can we be sure that the meaning we've chosen for ourselves is a good one.
Frankl's message is a profound one, but it misses the hardest part: creating good meaning. His book and his wife were good reasons to continue on. But what of someone like Kirill?
Let's imagine that Kirill is magically transported to Kansas City, where he is given UBI that lets him live comfortably though not excessively. He is given an apartment, a cell phone, a bus pass, and anything else on the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. What does he do? Sure, at first he probably gets good and drunk, maybe goes on a bender, maybe tries to pick up a local woman (sorry wifey). But what then? What happens when he equilibriates to his environment, one in which he doesn't have to work and doesn't have meaning? This is the burden of freedom, and one that I see coming down the pipeline and straight into the face of those humans who become "obsolete" with the advances of AI/AGI.
Beauvoir's solution to the "burden of freedom" is what she calls the Passionate Man: someone who is engaged actively in their life in an authentic way, who sees themself clearly enough to be able to act toward a meaning that is unique to their talents and passions. Frankl hits on this a bit when he talks about "Right Action", an echo of the larger buddhist idea. Interestingly, the Passionate Man is almost the opposite of the apathetic man that Frankl describes.
Anyways, this is becoming a book review in itself, dear reader. These are hard questions that Frankl and SBD are asking, and I agree that within these depths is a mixture of black and white, good and evil. My own opinion is that life is the meaning in itself, and living more consciously of this, and helping others to see and experience this, is the way :)
That’s beautiful. Thank you.
polscistoic writes:
The book review makes one want to listen to Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) again, in particular the song Red-Yellow days (Красно-желтые Дни), made the last time Russia sent tens of thousands of young men to fight in one of its wars. […] Translated text here, a young soldier about to depart for the war:
My train has long stayed at the depot I'm leaving again, it's time The wind was waiting for me on the threshold On the threshold of autumn, my sister /After red-yellow days Winter begins and ends Woe to you from my mind Don't be sad, look more cheerful And I'll go home With a shield, or maybe on a shield In silver, or perhaps in poverty, But as soon as possible/ Tell me about those who are tired From the ruthless street dramas And the church of broken hearts And of those who go to this church /After red-yellow days Winter begins and ends Woe to you from my mind Don't be sad, look more cheerful And I'll go home With a shield, or maybe on a shield In silver, or perhaps in poverty, But as soon as possible/ And I had a dream that the world is ruled by love, And I had a dream that the world is ruled by dream And on this perfectly lit star I woke up and realized /After red-yellow days Winter begins and ends Woe to you from my mind Don't be sad, look more cheerful And I'll go home With a shield, or maybe on a shield In silver, or perhaps in poverty, But as soon as possible/
…And, just like in many of our drunken parties, in the end we always come back to Viktor Tsoi…
It pained me to see Tsoi recently used in Russian propaganda. I am pretty sure that he himself would hate to see what’s going on there these days. He probably deserves a separate post, maybe with translations of some of his songs to English, if I’m feeling particularly bold.
Ok, thanks for sticking with me until now. The next post will have Karl Marx and Adam Smith, chewed dog toys, sparrows fighting for real estate, and a horse without testicles. Subscribe.
Best,
K.
Why not leave another comment? Generally speaking, every post here is an AMAA post. So go ahead!
> I remember the opposite case in Berlin: a homeless-looking man fell down on the street, likely drunk or under the influence of something else. That was in the middle of the city. The police came extremely fast, and then two cops spent 10–15 minutes helping the poor guy up, giving him water, and waiting with him for the ambulance.
I''m glad to hear that. As you say, it's dangerous to generalize, but it's nice to hear that the "system" can sometimes still work, somewhere.