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What we've lost (4): Resilience

What We've Lost: Compared to all of history, and much of the modern world, our lives in Canada are relatively easy. Yet you'd never know that

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The last 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers consider What We’ve Lost. 

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In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argued that our primary motivation in life is to seek meaning. This is done, he said, through our attitude towards existence.

What we've lost (4): Resilience Back to video

“Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal,” Frankl wrote.

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“Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”

Westerners are now living in a culture that encourages the opposite of what Frankl observed could, in certain cases, make the difference between prisoners who survived the Holocaust and those who didn’t — namely, one’s mental resilience and ability to discover meaning in the course of suffering.

“Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate,” wrote Frankl.

Today, our culture venerates victimhood. It does not encourage us to search for the meaning inherent in bearing our various crosses, but instead tells us to define and feel new modes of suffering. “Good people,” in today’s world, are victims. Our society sees “discrimination” lurking in every shadow, and praises others not for their strength but for the way they outwardly display their mental or physical brokenness.

READ THE ENTIRE WHAT WE’VE LOST SERIES

It’s not considered brave to overcome. Today, what’s considered brave is to simply expose our soft underbellies and publicly announce each of our weaknesses. Look no further than to the social media biographies that typical woke “progressives” display as an encapsulation of their very selfhood: a list of diagnosed mental or physical illnesses, membership in oppressed communities or claims of having been traumatized by life’s predictable tribulations.

This is why we have a country full of human rights tribunals that regularly award obscene financial payments to people who’ve complained of hurt feelings. Thirty-thousand dollars for the waitress who was “misgendered” here, and $10,000 for the transgender person whose landlord offended them there.

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Our society’s “praiseworthy” people no longer need to overcome adversity or succeed despite it, they merely need to stew in it — and share their misery with the world. These are not my heroes, but this behaviour is paradoxically considered brave and virtuous. Feebleness is rewarded. Our attitude towards existence is all wrong.

Another example: my school-aged sons have erroneously been taught, by public school teachers, that “bullying” is an endemic threat with poorly defined borders. I’ve been left to explain that, no, disagreements among friends does not constitute “bullying” and does not immediately warrant adult intervention. Getting along with others by tolerating and navigating dissent, even arguments, is a normal part of growing up. These are learning opportunities, not “woe is me” opportunities. Unfortunately, many adults have forgotten this basic lesson.

Compared to all of history, and much of the modern world, our lives in Canada are relatively easy. Yet you wouldn’t know that if you had to sit down with a woke person and hear his or her list of grievances. And should someone not have any grievances, well, then, it must mean that she is not a good person. Because there are only two types of people in our woke culture: the goodly oppressed and their vile oppressors. That is the philosophy of critical theory, which underpins wokeism.

We have lost our resiliency. With it, we have lost the dignity that Frankl witnessed within those concentration camp prisoners who stood, emaciated and stripped of both clothing and of every facet of their previous identities, but not of their inner strength.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” wrote Frankl.

Next up in What we’ve lost: Service

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