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It’s time for the afternoon update with Jack Heald, The Dad You Wish You Had.
Today I want to talk about a book that made a tremendous difference in my life. And I plan to do this fairly regularly, talking about books that have made a difference for me. If you want to make for yourself than the world you currently have, one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that the things you’re putting into your head are rich and good, are beautiful and true.
Now, that doesn’t mean we fill our head with sweet pablum, like the mental or spiritual equivalent of cotton candy. That means that we fill our minds with things that our forebears passed down to us, that came through the filter of everything our forebears were able to evaluate, and send on to us, and said, “this is good.”
This whole idea of “curation” seems to be the hot new topic in this new media landscape that we live in. Allegedly, there are taste makers and people who will curate content for us and say, “oh this is good, you need to watch this.” “This is good, you need read that.”
Works of art and literature, so that we don’t have to read through, watch through, dig through everything. We can go back to what has been passed on. What is it that generations of men and women who faced the same kinds of existential struggles that we face – what are the things that they said, “this is good, this is true, this is beautiful”?
The book I want to talk about today is Victor Frankel‘s Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl was an Austrian who happened to have the bad luck to be living in Austria when Adolf Hitler decided that he was going to annex the entire country. The Nazi troops marched in, and he also happened to have the double bad luck to be Jewish.
So, Frankel spent the war years in a Nazi prison camp where he watched brilliant minds, beautiful people be destroyed by the cruelty and the ignorance of the Nazi war machine.
If you haven’t read anything about Nazi concentration camps or Soviet gulags, that’s Assignment Number One, my children. Learn about Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps. They specialized in dehumanizing the inmates.
Frankel was one of those who was dehumanized by things are happening today. Frankel was liberated when the Allies defeated the Nazis and opened the concentration camps. But I need you to realize that he experienced the absolute worst that a human being can experience.
Did you have bad parents? Too bad. Did you have some sort of traumatic event or two or three occur in your childhood? I’m sorry. Were people mean to you on the Internet? That’s terrible. Did somebody say bad words that hurt you feelings? Wow, that’s rough.
Viktor Frankl was put in a Nazi prison camp for the crime of being Jewish in Austria in the 1930s. He had his property, his family, his heritage, and even his name stripped away from him. He was referred to by a number.
He was treated like a piece of meat – and not a very valuable one at that. He watched everything he loved, everything he valued, be destroyed. And he came out of the Nazi prison camp and he wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning.
You will not find one ounce of bitterness. You will not find a scintilla of anger. You will not find a gram of revenge inside that book. What you will find is the soaring achievement of a man who suffered the absolute worst that a human being can suffer, and said, “No! You can take everything from me except how I choose to interact with the world.”
Read the book.
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