The suffering of man has many faces. The silent genocides of Christians in the Middle East. African tribes murdering each other. North Koreans being tortured by their own government in re-education camps. Emaciated Indians dying from starvation. Prisoners in all countries harboring bitter remorse for their crimes. Even the privileged of this world do not escape suffering. Children, born with a disability. Victims of car accidents, living limbless in a wheelchair. Elders, facing loneliness. Rich or poor, young or old, white or black – everyone suffers, and even those who have never experienced traumatic events will one day be confronted with the loss of loved ones and notice the ravages of time on their bodies. The flower does not realise that it is withering, but the human being does.
Ludwig Van Beethoven, arguably the greatest musical revolutionary of all time, saw the initial tinnitus he struggled with gradually degenerate into absolute deafness and realised that one day, he would no longer hear his own compositions. His frustration made him flirt with suicide. The Post-Impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh dreamed of founding an artistic brotherhood that would transform the art world but died unappreciated, poor and depressed. As her excruciating nerve pain worsened, the paintings of Frieda Kahlo expressed more sadness and grief. Everyone goes through their personal hell.
Hell is not some secret, far-away Kingdom of Darkness where sinners burn in eternal flames. It is right here on Earth, and it is called war, sorrow, agony, disease, wrath, malice, chaos. To the existentialist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre, hell means ‘the others’: “L’enfer, c’est les autres”. Interaction with others is inevitable, but others do not always behave the way we want them to. Their tongues lisp harsh words that linger in our minds for years to come, and they do things that we rather bury in the catacombs of our subconscious. And the more intelligent we are, the more aware we become of the dark side of human nature. It is not a big surprise that geniuses often become misanthropic.
However, labeling others as the sole source of our own suffering insinuates that we ourselves are perfect, which is proof of a great lack of self-reflection. Our words and actions have hurt others as well. Sometimes, we would pay a fortune to turn back the clock, to undo the actions we took, to unspeak the words we spoke. One thing is certain: man suffers and makes his fellow man suffer.
“Homo homini lupus est”, said the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The Romans did not shy away from some cruelty towards their fellowmen. Prisoners of war served as slaves or gladiators who had to fight their family members in collossea. Millenia later, Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, confirmed Plautus’ statement in his book ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’: “Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
Man is not only a wolf with men, but also, and above all, with his fellow earthlings, the animals. We are the greatest cause of their indescribable suffering, a suffering of a magnitude that most people do not understand. We put them in tiny cages, stuff them with hormones, stomp them to the slaughterhouse, brutally slaughter them, and eat them, every single day. 60 billion (!) innocent farm animals per year have a miserable existence from the day of their birth, unaware that the day of their death has already been set. Elephants, sharks, monkeys, bears, crocodiles, and numerous other species are massively massacred for their teeth, flesh, skin, fins, and legs. In the Hell of the animals, we are the Devil. We call our victims ‘beasts’, but the real beasts are us. Man’s suffering does not make him more empathetic towards creatures he considers inferior.
Thus, the greatest source of suffering in the world is man’s conscious cruelty. The cruelty of wild carnivores is unconscious and instinctive, aimed at survival; however, homo sapiens sapiens is the only creature on Earth that makes deadly weapons, dumps toxic filth into rivers, cuts down forests, invents virus-creating food systems, builds expensive spacecrafts to reach Mars while millions of people have no fresh drinking water, and tells lies… because he can, and because he deliberately wants to. The existence of Evil is the price man pays for his free will.
Man suffers, and yet he is cruel – we feel passion but no compassion. As long as we are unable to recognise our own suffering in the suffering of others, be it humans, animals, or the planet, as long as we lack compassion, suffering will be an absolute certainty, a premise of life, an axiom of the human condition. Feeling another’s pain without experiencing it yourself is the prerequisite to reducing our pain. Compassion is the antithesis of egoism and the conditio sine qua non for our spiritual and moral growth. It is the golden key to the door to inner peace. But he who does not find the key cannot open the door.
A person who did find this key is Mr. Eddie Jakubowicz, who shared his touching biography with the world on his 100th birthday and won the “Happiest Man on Earth” award for it. Eddie knows what suffering means. As a German of Jewish descent, he always felt “German first, German second, and Jewish at home”. In 1938, Eddie, his parents, and his little sister were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Months later they were put on a train to Auschwitz, the largest extermination camp of occupied Europe. During this ride, they managed to escape through the train floor. They fled to Belgium, where they lived in hiding in a cellar. In 1943 they were arrested again and taken back to Auschwitz. His entire family was gassed in what he calls his “Hell on Earth,” but Eddie survived.
Every day of the two subsequent years, Eddie witnessed the ultimate embodiment of Evil. Every moment, he saw and feared death. What the nazis did to the prisoners was so atrocious that some still don’t believe him when he describes it. In 1945, in anticipation of the advancing Allies, the camp guards staged a death march to clear the camp and destroy evidence. During this march, Eddie miraculously managed to escape into the wilderness.
After the end of the war, he struggled with intense grief, despair, and anger. One day, however, he made the heroic decision not to wallow in misery, but to be the kindest man he could possibly be, with every person he encountered. Then he met Flore, the love of his life, and proposed. Today they have been married for more than 70 years. When he talks about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with his disarming smile, I see gratitude in his eyes. And that gratitude is a choice that makes him happy.
Today, Eddie calls himself the happiest man on Earth. He did what Aleksander Solszenycin and Elie Wiesel talked about: everything can be taken from us, except for one thing: the freedom to choose our attitude in any situation, to choose our response to any event. Do not let the evil of others corrupt your soul. Only then are you a victim! Eddie has turned the tables: his love for the world has conquered the hatred of the nazis.
The world is not divided into those who oppress and those who are oppressed. This simplistic view, imposed by cultural Marxist academics, might be politically correct but is not correct, as it de-emphasises the infathomable complexity of the human psyche. We are all aggressors and victims of each other, we all have a nazi and a camp inmate in us. Victor Frankl, a psychologist who also survived Auschwitz, wrote in his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ that he could discern evil in some prisoners – some capos displayed more sadism than the nazis themselves – and goodness in some guards.
Yes, others hurt us, but to accuse ‘les autres’ as the sole cause of our malheur is to ignore the nazi in ourselves! According to clinical psychologist and intellectual giant Jordan B. Peterson, there is only one lesson the Holocaust should have taught us: The nazi is you. If you had lived at that time as a German under Hitler, you would have been an active participant in the horror, or at least a silent spectator, because everyone was. That you would have been a hero risking his life to save Jews is statistically highly unlikely. A statement that makes you rather uncomfortable – you know he is right, but you hate to admit that you probably would have been as cowardly as the rest, and you wouldn’t have done anything. Inaction is also a sin, and millions of Europeans were collectively guilty of it, less than a century ago.
Carl Jung, student of Sigmund Freud, called the dark side in each of us our “shadow,” and Adolf Hitler the embodiment of the shadow of the German people. The Shoah is then the symbol of the collective shadow of humanity, of the demons that hide in everyone. “I’m not a devil!”, many would cry out – but the dead animal on their plate thought otherwise.
A shadow is something that is cast behind you and that you are not aware of. But it is there, and it follows you everywhere. The awareness of the existence of our shadow is the catalyst of the moral and spiritual metamorphosis that our soul desires and can only be brought about through profound introspection. Don’t waste time trying to change others. Find your own darkness, acknowledge it, and then change yourself: thát is the real purpose of existence. It is the most arduous challenge in the world, but if you succeed, your surroundings will be blinded by your brilliant light and cannot do otherwise than evolve with you.
Do not chase happiness but instead, strive to transform and improve the self. The pursuit of happiness is senseless. Happiness is not the goal of life, but a by-product of the search for meaning and virtue and goodness. Because only a life that signified something, to us and to others, was worth living.
I end my reflection on suffering and happiness with a quote from a letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers some time before his death: “It is my wish that your life will be better and more carefree than the one I have had. Recommend virtue to your children, only that brings happiness, not money, I speak from experience. It was virtue that kept me going in misery, besides my art I owe it that I did not end my life with suicide. Farewell, and love each other”.