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Correlation Between Mental Health and Responsibility and Humbleness

Recently I read a book by a Jewish doctor who survived life through concentration camps. Now this man is very well known and widely respected,(even more so after his death) yet his message seems to fall upon deaf ears here in America. This message speaks to what most people see as an enigma yet when looked at through understanding eyes becomes as clear as the most flawless diamond. I say there are two main things we lack here in America, responsibility and humbleness. These are made evident in everyday life, and through this piece I hope to show the effects that come about by the lack of these two fundamentals to living.

Out of the two it is hard to dictate which is more devastating than the other. Therefore I have come to believe that they are both equally deteriorating to our culture and to our lives. Yet when they are combined together they become exponentially devastating, Causing rampant cases of sadness, depression, loneliness, thoughts of suicide, and maybe even worse. First we will look at the effect of complete pride that does not allow us to be humble in any nature.

Pride begins to tear us down from multiple angles. So many people view pride as something to be longed. If we have pride in ourselves then no one can tear us down, if we believe in who we are we need not to apologize for anything. Yet even this in itself is flawed. Pride is not something to be desired yet a disease which wraps is greasy fingers around our neck and chokes us off from loving people truly for who they are. Pride brings sorrow, pride brings disappointment, and pride can be found on the opposite side of a sharp razor from confidence. Pride brings expectations based on who we are, pride brings fake confidence, fake reality of who we are, and pride is destined to fail, for it’s based on us humans, who are destined to fail. As seen in our culture we live our life believing that we deserve something even without the notion of having to work to get it. And even then there are times where we begin to work for our goals only to give up when it becomes too much work for us to handle any longer, so we give up and become angry and act as if we never received what we deserve.

Paired with the equally disastrous pride, lack of responsibility pushes culture further and further down what should be the hierarchy ladder of evolution. We find ourselves not becoming better, yet becoming more and more like the animals we supposedly have evolved to be better than. Lack of responsibility spurs on many things that originally were intended for moral goodness and perverted it. Welfare is the prime example. Intended for such a great purpose it has been used and abused by individual’s lack of responsibility in their own lives. When paired with pride, do we not only refuse to take responsibility, but we feel we are owed our laziness that allows us to live off of others works. Take a look around our society and you will see a culture of individuals believing they are not getting what they deserve, that they feel they should be given better, without the willingness to work to gain it.

Expectation makes for depression and sadness in our culture. Expectation of something better, something deserved not gained. Yet it is not the expectation itself which causes this. It is us as human beings. Frankl describes briefly in his book how life was torn down more from prisoners own point of view upon their suffering than from the actual suffering itself. Real character, real responsibility, real life was shown by those who even in the most desire circumstance, even when they did deserve better,  were able to come out on top. Coming out on top did not mean escaping a physical death, but escaping the death of their own souls. They proved humanities resilience and true worth in these situations. They would not allow their situations to dictate who they were yet beat the expectation of those around them, were able to offer their very small measly portions of bread to others; to improve others lives, for the sake of truly being human. They were those who knew how to live, even in the time of their suffering and imminent death. Pride was abolished; responsibility was taken and not just taken but grasped by the rains. None of us will fully be able to understand this (unless of course there is someone reading this who survived through this) because I believe that no one in America can go through that kind of hell.

When we stop looking for what we deserve, stop trying to gain, stop living our own lives for the sake of our pride, for the sake of pleasure; would not the mental health in America increase? When we could be fully happy living our lives for the sake of making a difference in someone else’s life instead of our own?

Can we imagine just for one moment, what America would be like if we were able to live our lives like those few men who even in the worst circumstances of life were able to give up everything they had for others around them. I don’t feel the need to go into statics here, for we all know how blessed Americans are and how even the poorest of us have plenty to spare. What would our world look like? What would the entire world’s economy look like? What would life itself look like? How our culture would be affected.

Frankl goes next into exploring the meaning through suffering and how that can affect how we live our lives in such an incredible way as well. I will write of these soon but I would like to explore these ideas further. What would responsibility and humbleness look like in the lives of Americans?