#339: “To Join the Minority”

“Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the “individual differences” did not “blur” but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. And today you need no longer hesitate to use the word “saints”: think of Father Maximilian Kolbe who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz and who in 1983 was canonized.

“... You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

“So, let us be alert— alert in a twofold sense:

“Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

“And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”*

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*Frankl, Viktor E.. Man's Search for Meaning (pp. 153-154). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition. (Bold emphasis added.)

Viktor Emil Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997)[1] was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor.[2]
He was the founder of logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy which describes a search for a life meaning as the central human motivational force.[3] Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.[4]
Logotherapy was recognized as the third school of Viennese Psychotherapy; the first school was created by Sigmund Freud, and the second by Alfred Adler.
Frankl published 39 books.[5] The autobiographical Man's Search for Meaning, a best-selling book, is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl