Suffering

We in the developed (notice how I didn’t say civilised) world have an incredible capacity and that capacity is to produce whine. On the tv, in our works, in our daily lives, all we seem to hear is people whining about their levels of suffering. It seems that we are all modern day Jobs, being tortured by a cruel God just to prove a point to the devil- that we can endure and then still present our backs in thanks

 

‘Heard your songs of freedom and man forever stripped

Acting out his folly while his back is being whipped

Like a slave in orbit, he’s beaten ’til he’s tame

All for a moment’s glory and it’s a dirty, rotten shame’

 

-Dylan

 

In his novel, which is actually a thinly disguised memoir of his time in a Siberian prison camp (more on which another week), House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky writes:

 

‘Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him’.

 

Within this context Dusty (Dusty-Toy-Vest-Key) is showing that even those in the least humane conditions (an overcrowded camp in 19^th Century Russia- if you’ve read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich you’ll have a good idea of the conditions or any reports from the Nazi camps) and yet, we, in the developed world (including Asia) constantly whine about our misfortune. This stems from a lack of perspective. We are so self-centred, not out of necessity, but rather out of ignorance, that we cannot see the blessings that we have. To us, our sufferings are worse than Prometheus and Sisyphus combined but if we consider the words of the great Socrates:

 

‘If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.’

 

then maybe we would be able to get that most elusive of all things- perspective.

 

One argument which people have against following the news is that – o- it has nothing to do with me, an opinion which is as disturbing as it is ignorant. If a child starving to death is nothing to do with you then, by golly, can I fairly assume that you are not part of the human race?

 

If one reads the memoirs (such as the book I like to mention here, In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park) then one can see something which should chill them to the bone, and beyond, and that is that the matter-of-fact manner that Yeonmi says things such as ‘we learnt to catch dragonflies so that we wouldn’t starve to death’ (to paraphrase- seriously read her book, I’ll even buy you a copy if it requires that). Observations that I have made from life and from my readings is that those who suffer most, those who genuinely suffer, speak about it least, be they living in fear of genocide or having returned from a war and so on and so forth and so it seems fair to draw the conclusion that, if someone is whining about something then it is fair to assume that they are not really suffering as the Jobs we think we are and rather we are suffering from nothing more than a lack of perspective.

 

‘till next time