One of my more memorable exchanges with a student came in a principles of economics class. Part of the assignment for that week was chapters from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Ridley compared the living standards of an average worker today with those of The Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1700. Some of my more ahistorical students were incredulous at Ridley’s description of the grinding poverty of the average person just a few centuries ago.
The King had an opulent lifestyle compared to others. Louis had an astonishing 498 workers preparing each of his meals. Yet his standard of living was still a fraction of what we experience today.
Ridley outlined the miracles of specialization and exchange in our time — an everyday cornucopia at the supermarket, modern communications and transportation, clothing to suit every taste. If we remove our blinders and see how many individuals provide services to us, Ridley concludes we have “far more than 498 servants at [our] immediate beck and call.”
Then, the memorable exchange occurred. One student shared that he would prefer to live in 1700, if he had more money than others and power over them. My first reaction was amusement; I thought the student was practicing his deadpan humor skills. He wasn’t. For him, having power was an attribute of a meaningful life.
If only my student’s mindset were an aberration.
During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.
Pascal asks us to imagine a king with “all the blessings with which you could be endowed.” A king, Pascal told us, if he has no “diversions” from his thinking, will “ponder and reflect on what he is.” Pascal’s hypothetical king will be miserable because he “is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease.”
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition.” That is why “war and high office are so popular,” Pascal argued.
Pascal argues individuals seek to be “diverted from thinking of what they are.” I would argue a better choice of words is what they have made of themselves.
I’ll let the reader decide how many modern politicians Pascal’s ideas apply to. With Pascal’s insight, we understand why conflict is a feature of politics and not a bug.
Pascal spares no one’s feelings. Some “seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness.” For them, “rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. [They] must get away from it and crave excitement.”
Let that sink in. A person able to exercise coercive power can use their morally undeveloped “wretched” mind to create endless misery for others merely because exercising power distracts them from their failures as human beings.
Many of America’s Founders had a classical education and they understood the dangers of power. John Adams wrote, “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
We can overcome our “sense of wretchedness” and need for “excitement” not through the perverted means of seeking power but by creating meaning in our lives.
Viktor Frankl, the author of the seminal Man’s Search for Meaning, understood the importance of having a meaningful life and how damaging it is when the drive for meaning is thwarted. He observed how easy it is to “despair over the apparent meaninglessness of one’s life.”
No wonder those who are unfulfilled without meaning wish to be diverted from what they have made of their lives. What Frankl observed is consistent with Pascal: “Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power.”
Frankl added, “In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.” Similarly, “The main joy of being a king,” Pascal observed, is to be surrounded by people “continually trying to divert him and procure him every kind of pleasure… and stop him thinking about himself.” Pascal and Frankl would understand why someone would reach for their phone every few minutes. The maladaptive behavior is an attempt to scratch an existential itch.
Frankl also understood why people would become followers of authoritarian leaders. Mass movements attract followers who fail to make meaning in their lives and seek a borrowed meaning from a destructive leader.
Among the ways Frankl believed we could make meaning were thorough purposeful actions, creative endeavors, and loving others. Entrepreneurial activity — the pursuit of new ways of serving consumers’ most urgent needs — is fertile ground for making meaning. While capitalism is a mechanism for meaning making, even the term itself is loathsome to some; and thus, they fail to avail themselves of opportunities.
Insightfully, Frankl saw, “Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.” Frankl wrote,
For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what?
Frankl called meaninglessness an “existential vacuum” and warned it is “increasing and spreading to the extent that, in truth, it may be called a mass neurosis.”
What Frankl observed, we see as a crisis of our time. Many people without meaning believe they are victims, and experts encourage them to think that way. Frankl called this “neurotic fatalism.”
Neurotic fatalism hides a basic fact of human life: People who make meaning in their lives don’t seek “freedom from conditions” they realize they have the “freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”
Pacal’s authoritarian king or many of today’s modern politicians have no meaning in their lives but find a corrupted false sense of meaning by exercising power over others, starting wars, issuing edicts, punishing enemies, etc. Likewise, those engaged in carrying out their orders have no meaning in their lives other than what they are borrowing from those leading them. This unvirtuous cycle threatens freedom. In a virtuous cycle, with meaningful lives, there is no demand for leaders who impose their will on the public.
So where does that leave us? Are we willing to find meaning in our lives by taking a stand toward the conditions and challenges we face?
Frankl’s imperative is to answer the call of what life demands of us. His experiences taught him “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
People will seek power, but they depend on followers. People making meaning in their own lives are immune to that sirens’ call.