False Hope

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"
-- Inferno, Canto III, Line 91

For me, the most powerful takeaway from Victor Frankl’s Man's Search For Meaning is the concept of hope, and how it can twist and manipulate a person, and even destroy them if allowed.

The passage I am recalling is the one where Frankl discusses different men’s approaches to survival. Nearly all men in Nazi concentration camps drank alcohol (when available) and smoked cigarettes (more common) as emotional salves. But in the absence of chemical relief, men for the most part had to find the means to cope within themselves: they built inner worlds to relieve their minds of the horror of their complete helplessness to the outside world.

And within the fortification of their inner worlds, the most pernicious, violent, and destructive outside influence became false hope, specifically news from the front of potential Allied liberation forces.

Many men chose to hold onto hope until an arbitrary date, like Christmas, Easter, an anniversary or birthday, and committed suicide or simply gave up on living and died shortly after their chosen expiration date. Others would hear rumors and become excited with the belief that liberation was days or weeks away, and when it never came, they too expired.

For Frankl, having accepted the horror of his external reality, it was this notion of False Hope that was most dangerous, for if allowed, it could destroy his inner world, which was the only thing keeping him alive.

And I too find this to be true. Confronted with my reality, false hope, or the hope of a savior, rescuer, or any of that nonsense is the most dangerous external ameliorate, like opening the gates and bringing in the Greek Horse. The discipline is in accepting that there may never be relief, that perhaps there is no escape, blocking out entirely or being deeply skeptical of any claims that reality will ever shift, and finding reasons to continue on anyway.

We will never know how long Frankl could have survived given his strategies2 since, eventually, Allied forces did arrive and liberate his camp. But I am confident that the sort of delusional detachment from external reality necessary to survive those conditions is not sustainable, even if I am amazed, like all of you, by how long a person can survive the horrors of totalitarian dystopia.3

Footnotes

  1. Inscribed on the gates of hell, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" tends to be interpreted ominously, which makes sense for a soul sentenced to eternal damnation. But interestingly, when confronted with hell on Earth, this same advice is fundamental to survival. Siddhartha said "rely on nothing until you want nothing." Confronted, overwhelmed, and subjugated by the tyranny of evil men, one must also learn detachment from hope itself. ↩

  2. Frankl spent three years in four of the most notorious concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Türkheim. ↩

  3. I also think that Frankl underplays how important it was that the prisoners had one another and that they were able to rely on their memories of loved ones for succor. Surviving such horrors alone - and truly alone, without the ability to believe you were ever truly loved by another person, whether it be a partner, your family, anyone - is much more horrifically difficult than most people can probably imagine. ↩