- Unlike an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what
he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told
by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he
must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he
basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do —
which is conformism — or he does what other people wish him to do —
which is totalitarianism.
–Dr. Viktor E. Frankl
“You can’t get there from here,” is an admonition that speaks
not only to frustrated travelers, but to individual lives and to our
national life as well. “In his book, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning”
(1997, Plenum Press), Dr. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and
pioneering psychiatric doctor, describes a mass neurotic triad
afflicting Western society: depression, addiction, and aggression. We
treat them as if they were the disease, expending billions of dollars
annually, little realizing that they are but the symptoms of the road we
as a society have chosen to travel together.
Depression’s footprints often end in suicide. This is particularly
true among young people. Frankl writes,
- … a study conducted at Idaho State University revealed that 51
of 60 students (85%) who had seriously attempted suicide reported as the
reason that “life meant nothing” to them. Of these 51 students, 48 (94%)
were in excellent physical health, were actively engaged socially, were
performing well academically, and were on good terms with their family
groups.
Suicide, which once ranked 22nd as the leading cause of death in
America now ranks ninth, but estimates are that for every person who
succeeds, 15 tried and failed. Recent figures from the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control rank suicide among those aged 15-24 as the third leading
cause of death. There is now a movement afoot called euthanasia —
physician assisted suicide — to help those 15 who tried and failed. The
compassionate society.
Regarding drug addiction, the second leg of our unbalanced national
stool, Dr. Frankl writes,
- Researchers inserted electrodes into the hypothalamuses of rats,
and whenever they closed the electric circuit, the rats to all
appearances experienced either sexual orgasm or the satisfaction of
eating. When the rats then learned to jump on the lever and by so doing
to close the electric circuit themselves, they became addicted to the
business and pressed the lever up to 50,000 times a day. What I regard
as most remarkable is that these animals then neglected the real sexual
partners and the real food that were offered to them.
One thinks of the lesser-forms of addiction: nightly movie
rentals, incessant television viewing, children who prefer video games
to playmates, Internet surfing and chat rooms that replace daily life.
All forms of reality, once removed, are held at a safe distance from our
wounded psyches.
Studies of college students have found an inverse relationship
between drug use and meaning or purpose in life. An epidemiological
study conducted for the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse
found users of marijuana and hallucinogens suffered over the lack of
meaning of life more than had nonusers. This puts them in the same
company with alcoholics, 18 of 20 who in a study Dr. Frankl cites,
“looked upon their existence as meaningless and without purpose.”
Finally there is aggression and violence, an addiction spread by the
Hollywood and television elite who hire the writers and actors and
produce the programs that we see. There is good reason to believe that
televised violence, contrary to providing a way of “acting out” feelings
of aggression and sparing society, actually increases aggression in real
life. Frankl cites a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry in
which,
- “children were shown films portraying aggressive acts,” and it
was found that “increases in aggression occurred consistently over and
above the initial tendency to behave in that way.” John P. Murry of the
National Institute of Mental Health summarizes the results of a number
of studies as follows: “viewing televised violence causes the viewer to
become more aggressive.”
Following that thread, Frankl cites research conducted by W.A.M.
Black and R.A.M. Gregson, which concludes that “criminality and purpose
in life are inversely related.”
Meaninglessness; the tie that binds us together as we travel down the
yellow brick road crafted by our self-appointed elites, their spirit
guides, and the “child” within, whom our children are now taught to
consult. It is just what the Lord Jesus warned us of them: “And he spoke
a parable to them, Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both
fall into the ditch?” (Luke 6:39) Dr. Frankl terms it the existential
vacuum. It is a black hole of despair — for nothing can rise out of it.
Even our healers descend into it, unable to help those who turn to them.
Dr. Frankl cites a letter sent to him, and another to a colleague:
- I have had recurrent depressive states until two days ago a
psychiatrist at Harvard University (where I am a student) told me
bluntly … “your life is meaningless, you have nothing to look forward
to, I am surprised that you haven’t committed suicide.”
A woman suffering from an incurable cancer was comparing the fullness
of her previous life with the senselessness of the ultimate phase.
Thereupon a Freudian psychoanalyst countered that he believed she had
made a gross mistake. “Her life-in-general had been without meaning even
before the onset of her disease. In reality, the two phases were bare of
meaning and sense.”
Those crafting our culture have seen fit to remove any sense of
meaning from life. Vestiges of God have been ripped from the public
square. Men and women are explained away as some cosmic accident;
electrodes slipping into the primordial slime. Our existence is viewed
by those who consider themselves our secular “mother superiors” as a
threat to the morally superior animal species around us and the world we
inhabit. In their cloistered minds they believe that if only man could
be eliminated, then the buses and trains would always run on time and
the world would be perfect. Would to God our self-anointed
thought-guardians had the intellectual honesty to admit that in the face
of the world they have built, depression, drug abuse, and violence are
quite reasonable and human responses!
What choices do we have, as we stare at the mud-encrusted footprints
of man’s answers disappearing down the yellow brick road to eternity? Do
we follow the “isms” that have plodded the path before us, crafted by
the elites governing the peoples and nations they have ruined? Do we
join Stalin’s frozen peasants, loaded into boxcars and left to die on
the Siberian railways in the dead of winter? Do we remake man in the
image of our elites, through the re-education camps of Mao and the
Chinese? Is fascism, Nazism, or some as yet undiscovered “ism” the
roadmap we want to follow? How will we know? Can we indeed “get there
from here?” And does God have anything to say about the myriad yellow
brick roads that individuals and nations travel en route to eternity?
Next week, in Follow The Yellow Brick Road, Part II.
