What Is Logotherapy - It Will Change Your Life

LOGOTHERAPY (Spirit Wellness or Soul Health) is the existential or life-style approach for developing a life filled with meaning and significance in well functioning families, faith communities, companies and neighborhoods where we find a lasting sense of belonging among the good people with whom we share faith, hope and love.

Logotherapy is a world class psycho-spiritual system for winning a satisfying life for normal persons who apply pragmatic existential psychology and mystical philosophy in the best approach to living, loving, and leading well yet identified by the human race. It helps heal people suffering from mental illness, neuroticism or psychopathy but is more often useful for normal persons making their way through the high expectations and anxieties and joys and sorrows of everyday existence.

The spiritual values, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices that were to eventually be woven into Logotherapy, first appeared in Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount. These key aspects of Logotherapy offer brilliant solutions to life’s challenges that Mahatma Gandhi called the most meaningful discourse about living with satisfaction and joy ever conceived by any scholar. The very fact that world class scholars are still praising these constructs two thousand years after a wandering rabbi and field preacher first uttered them in a primitive land to simple farmers and shepherds – verifies their world class worth. Logotherapy does indeed strike a resounding cord in contemporary minds and hearts for millions of normal souls. Through the last half century Logotherapy has become the action arm of existential psychology -- although it goes much further in serving thoughtful persons than psychology alone.

Those initial concepts that lead ordinary women and men through increasing knowledge and wisdom with purposefulness and generosity for the health of their souls, were next elaborated on by St. John the Beloved, Paul the Apostle, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Soren Kierkegaard and more recent life-style scholars that included Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Ernest Becker and others. However, it remained for Viktor Frankl, the brilliant successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler as leader of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, to break with tradition to systematize this very powerful approach to fulfillment, Frankl combined life-style (existential) psychological knowledge with philosophical wisdom into a unified psycho-spiritual whole that keeps lives and souls normal.

He learned that after we meet our clamoring physical needs – after a society becomes affluent and comfortable, men and women absolutely must open sources of meaning or become frustrated with their lives. Unfortunately, we humans who developed in a slow paced society that seemed changeless -- have now invented a tumultuous civilization that makes it difficult to find consistent stability and peace. Our fast changing society often forces us to adapt too swiftly for many souls to remain comfortable. We no sooner find stability than life’s demands shift once more and we are forced to find new and often painful ways to get comfortable again. For -- while we humans usually claim to enjoy changes, we resist new relationships and attitudes unless the rewards are obviously and immediately useful to ourselves.

Multitudes of completely normal persons complain of days, weeks and years of boredom at meaningless jobs that are inter-spaced with times of stark terror as society makes U Turns and frustrates them. Masses of unhappy souls report being lost in the mind-numbing routines of life until they want to scream --

Is this all there is to life, to my precious life -- that is passing like sand through an hour glass.

When do I fulfill the high expectations of my brilliant youth? Then too, a great many secular values and attitudes limit our joy and satisfaction because we humans first, last and always have a broad streak of mysticism at the core of our souls. And our metaphysical needs must be satisfied or life remains incomplete. Every civilization that left its footprints on earth arose around a religion or a philosophy that explained the meaning of their existence and offered a modicum of psycho-spiritual security. They always knew that for life to be consistently meaningful it had to include more than eating and drinking, copulating, defecating and boasting.

And when empires became so secular that they eventually faltered as did Rome, Babylon, Persia, Britain and all the rest –- they fell because their vested secular interests brought then down. Most of the crumbling societies created pseudo religions such as Communism, Fascism, and Capitalism with selfish ideologies and greedy practices that were used unsuccessfully to meet the metaphysical needs of humankind. Precisely as occurred in America during the 2007 to 2010 financial disaster caused by secular greed. We humans cannot find lasting satisfaction through possessions, power, prestige and pleasure alone. We must develop an abiding sense of purpose that sustains our positive attitudes and activities or we burn out and turn to self-defeating choices.

Logotherapy became so valuable that some fifteen million copies of Frankl’s paperback book MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING were devoured intellectually by men and women in a few years as it was translated into thirty-four languages. Viktor then wrote thirty more, powerful books about life, love, labor and leadership that taught many more millions of women and men the spirit wellness methods that can keep life meaningful and satisfactory. Finally, Professor Jard DeVille, who cheerfully admits to being the dwarf seated on his mentor’s giant shoulders, can occasionally see further along the path of knowledge than Viktor could. Therefore, in his twenty graduate volumes and courses about Logotherapy, DeVille integrates Frankl’s crucial need for meaning with the humanly essential need to belong that leads to the following equation.

LOGOTHERAPY = f (Personal Meaning x Communal Belonging)

Even psycho-spiritually maturing men and women must find ways to live, love, labor and lead others - by building on the crucial choices that make life meaningful and significant in places blessed by human hearts where we share faith, hope and love.

And any thoughtless approach that draws from time expired assumptions, worn out traditions and self-defeating ideologies leads to the complaint -- Too soon we get old and too late we get smart.

Katherine Hendricks, who became a successful mining company executive, lamented after a FRONTIERS OF FULFILLMENT seminar at the University of Arizona.

We paraphrase --
I seem to be working sixty hour weeks only to pay for the house and the Mercedes while my family falls apart. I sometime feel I’m going mad because I’ve won everything I’ve ever wanted and it isn’t enough to keep me happy. And I cannot even tell my therapist what has gone wrong.

Multitudes of persons feel much as Catherine did but we are pleased to report that she and her husband brought some key Logotherapy constructs into their marriage and family and that effort saved their relationship. Most people admit that they suffer through three or four disappointments for every one period of joy. A great many graduates from Harvard, Southern Methodist and other great schools reported that life and careers have become painfully boring and much less satisfying than they had expected when they graduated twenty years earlier. A great many women and men dread the final twenty years before retirement after life has no new challenges. And multitudes of career workers wither away soon after retiring because they lost the purposes of life that sustained them. About half of all new marriages fail because of sexual or financial dis-satisfactions and many careers are sacrificed in self-defeating searches for success. With eighty percent of American women and men now saying that they feel frustrated because the nation has lost its way and fear they cannot recoup their former significance. Some existential scholars call this widespread existential frustration the mass neurosis of the twenty-first century – while Frankl called it the existential vacuum of modern industrial life. We also call it psycho-spiritual bankruptcy. We all must find avenues of fulfillment as did one elderly nanny who sorrowfully counseled with Frankl because she felt that her life had been wasted.

Anna -- I’m so discouraged because my life is over. I reared another family’s children and grandchildren and had none of my own. And now they are all grown and although the family takes good care of me, no one needs me any longer. I get so discouraged that I could cry.

Frankl – You feel that your life was wasted? That you caused the children to turn out badly?

Anna -- Oh no! They’ve done well. One boy is a professor and another is a sea captain with his own ship. And the girls have dress shops all over France and Italy. They’ve all succeeded.

Frankl -- But they’ve forgotten you? Is that it?

Anna -- Not that either. When they come home at Christmas or on holiday, they always visit with me. We talk about the old days and they give me presents and some money and we go on rides with their children and dine out together. They are always generous and kind to me.

Frankl -- Anna! Anna! You have it all wrong. You should take pride from having cared for those children. You life wasn’t wasted. It was invested! Your love is still being reflected by the new generation for their own children. You taught two generations generosity and love. And as far as being useless… go to your rabbi and ask to help with the babies in the nursery during Sabbath and volunteer to help neighborhood mothers. You are needed in an avocation.

Anna -- (After a long pause) Why, Doctor Frankl, I see that you are right. My life isn’t over rafter all. Children will still care for me. (She thanked him, found places in which to use her skills as a volunteer and never returned with another lament.)

Logotherapy is neither psychotherapy nor the use of psychotropic medication because it opens consistent avenues of fulfillment for normal men and women in a complex and often painful society through spirit wellness or soul health. Logotherapy offers consistent satisfaction and times of great joy to men and women of all ages and conditions in virtually every aspect of life. Logotherapy can teach you how to –

LIVE - CONSISTENTLY ACCORDING TO SOUND PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES,

LOVE - DEEPLY ENOUGH TO MANAGE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WELL,

LABOR - BY SHARING THE REWARDS OF ACHIEVEMENT WITH YOUR HELPERS,

LEAD - WISELY ENOUGH TO CREATE A GREAT COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVERS.

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Coping With Change - Mini-Quiz

Why do we resist change? Most People live with the illusion that humans welcome change but the fact is we do not --unless it is to our immediate and obvious advantage. And even then it is difficult for most people to cope with a major shift although they desperately yearn for something new. Read the article and take the quiz.

When Dorothy Hamill won the gold medal for figure skating during one of the Winter Olympics, it was a magnificent accomplishment for a twenty year old girl. But it's possible Dorothy did not spend one hour planning what she would do should she win her heart's desire. No sooner did she come home than a flock of leeches pounced on her, taking advantage of her innocence to use and abuse her for their own financial benefit. They confused Dorothy and brought such conflict that she went into emotional shock that complicated her life. She eventually skated again in her own ice show, having matured as an entertainer but it took almost ten years to cope with the major changes a gold medal brought to her. Of course, she isn't alone. Not a year goes by that famous young athletes and actors don't ruin their prospects through the use of drugs and the abuse of other people. Too much change that comes too fast is always a problem.

Because humans were so long evolving into what we are today, with our emotions still far more primitive than our intelligence and logic, it seems entirely likely that our fear of and resistance to change is carried in our very genes. Change came very slowly to our ancestors. We suspect that President William Howard Taft from the late 1800s would have felt more at home in ancient Rome or Greece than he would in contemporary America. There have been more changes in society from 1890/1900 when our fathers and grandfathers were born than from 200 B.C. to 1900. And the tempo of change continues to increase. Life seems to be turning upside down and that's very frustrating. Who could have believed at the end of World War II that skinny little Vietnamese riflemen, shivering with malaria in the monsoon, would maul United States Marines severely enough to lose America the Indochina War? Or that a rag-tag bunch of Islamic fundamentalists could hold American diplomats captive for years and then force a president of the United States to wreck our economic future with massive debts and to cripple the American Bill of Rights? We all resist change unless we win some immediate benefit and yet, it keeps sweeping over us despite our crying out -- Stop the world - I want to get off! No sooner do we win a bit of physical and psychological comfort than our key activities and relationships shift into a new and challenging mode and we are forced to rethink our values, attitudes and choices. We all to often fear and resist anything that is different from life when we were learning who we were and how we fit into the scheme of things.

However, simply knowing that change is inevitable and that most people resist adapting does little to move us beyond useless traditions and crippling ideologies from the past. We need to adapt and make responsible choices as did a friend of ours -- Susan Frey who'd been conditioned by her grandparents and parents to think of herself as a broodmare. Susan had married young as women of her generation were expected to do, had three children in quick succession and settled in to be a traditional housewife to a bread-winning husband. She and Harold even attended a week long seminar in which a religious educator taught that the father was the commanding officer who gave the orders, the mother was the company adjutant who stayed home and carried them out and the children were troopers who saluted and did as they were told. Unfortunately, that simplistic approach was disastrous. Sue grew weary of doing all the scut work and Harold became tired of being responsible for everything else. He fled the family, leaving Susan with no money, no job skills and no security, in other words, one of the 20th centuries major problems, an irresponsible husband and father living in a self-defeating patriarchal model of marriage, came crashing through her life. It became worse. When she turned to her family and church for support, both failed her badly.

Her parents - especially her mother - blamed her for Harold's desertion. Had Susan, her mother insisted, been a good wife her husband would have stayed home as Susan's father did when they'd faced problems years earlier. They offered largely criticism as their daughter struggled to survive. Her pastor, who'd brought into the community the military style family seminar leader, took Susan to task even more severely. He preached sermons that one Sunday condemned working mothers who sent their children to day-care centers and the next Sunday blasted lazy welfare women who failed to teach their kids the values inherent in standing on their own two feet. It was a catch twenty-two approach used by a reactionary man who hid behind a pulpit and chose out of context scriptures through which to make fear driven, anti-women attacks.

A social worker finally rescued Susan by helping her find work and child care and to enter a nursing program. Being a single parent and a working mother was the hardest thing Susan ever did, but she continued maturing until she became an outstanding nurse. She joined a religious community that supported her rather than railing at single mothers who didn't live in the traditional manner with a husband - with any man who'd have her, even if he crippled her in a drunken rage or brought herpes or AIDS home. In one of our seminars, Susan said:

Not only do most men refuse a ready made family, I wasn't eager to marry some bozo who'd give me more kids before running off as Harold did. I've had fine relationships - I'm in a loving and supportive one now - with a good guy I love. Perhaps we'll marry and perhaps we won't. Once I learned how to change my world. how to stand on my own feet with a good job, life became satisfying for me and my children.

By maturing steadily, by coping with change rather than freezing in the past, Susan developed the knowledge and wisdom needed to reject the naive advice given by her parents and pastor. Sue eventually became a fully functional person rather than clinging as a subordinate, second class wife to an immature man. She matured through persistence and hard work and is now the resident nurse in a fine manufacturing firm. So must we all mature when we set out to change our world - when we seek a better, more meaningful life.

Remember - while we are asking what the meaning of life is - life is consistently asking us what meaning we are creating for ourselves by managing change wisely. Life demands that we make our attitudes, activities and relationships personality purposeful within our families, companies and communities, in the schools, hospitals and governmental agencies in which we serve humankind. Life challenges us to mature spiritually, to focus all our powers along lines of excellence, to become fully human rather than remaining unhouse-broken barbarians who use and abuse other persons. Successful lives must be connected physically, psychologically and philosophically to individuals and organizations that are actively searching for fulfillment along avenues of achievement rather than simply accepting some decaying status quo.


SELF-FOCUS

WHY DO INDIVIDUALS AND ESPECIALLY ORGANIZATIONS CONSISTENTLY RESIST CHANGE EVEN WHEN MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO IS HARMFUL?

WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN OCCURRING WHEN PEOPLE ARE UNPREPARED FOR CHANGE BECAUSE THEY'D ASSUMED LIFE WOULD REMAIN STATIC?

HOW FAR SHOULD SOMEONE LIKE SUSAN GO IN REJECTING THE ADVICE OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO REAL STAKE IN HER GAME?

Jard DeVille; Psychology Dept. Chair at Westminster College; Director of the Learning And Learning Disabilities Clinic with the University of Wisconsin, also taught in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona. He's published many psychology books, seminars and test instruments. He's considered by many to be one of America's foremost leadership scholars. Permission to use if attributed to author with his website address.

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Self-Serving Myths Of The Past

Many people see our problems and feel that society is slipping out of control, that the ability to cooperate for the good of our communities has been lost, and our willingness to abide by our long-standing social contracts is compromised. It's true that an entire generation of young barbarians has grown up for whom the way to deal with others is to grab whatever you want. But it seldom occurs to us that our nihilistic system supports ruthless abusers, from back-street hoodlums to Wall Street arbitrageurs and Enron executives. Many naive women and men long for some idealized good old days, while ideologues try to bring them back. Both types ignore one important fact.

The much glorified and mythological American past that many reactionary politicians and religious leaders seek to recreate, as Henry Hyde and Jerry Falwell do, was almost exclusively for the benefit of affluent white males. It excluded Negroes, Indians, poor whites, Mexicans, and most women from any possibility of finding consistent satisfaction.

We know; we were there at the time!

Don’t misunderstand us when we criticize evil choices and call for a rebirth of spirituality. We love our American homeland deeply but we detest and want to expose the ruthless abusers who claim to be the only true Americans as they measure patriotism, success and justice almost exclusively in financial terms. If we didn’t love our people, we’d run with the wolves attacking them. Few persons understand that virtually all wars are financial conflicts orchestrated by ruthless power freaks in high places and fought to the death by poor boys who get few benefits for their sacrifices. Even as, the George W. Bush administration increased fees charging American veterans four and five hundred percent annually in the Veteran’s Affairs hospitals and excluding more and more veterans. The Bush administration prepared to destroy the Veteran’s medical program along with Social Security by privatization. Especially, when we need them desperately with the failings of our financial systems.

Understand this well.

Calling the American past, during the thirties, forties and fifties, our golden era of spirituality and morality, as so many primitive politicians and reactionary religious ideologues do, is a scheme to destroy civil and gender rights and eliminate the wages of the worker from production. It is a form of narcissistic self-deception that leads to private benefits for a few at the expense of everyone else. Here is how it really was for millions of Americans during the so called golden age of morality and decency.

RACIAL HATRED -- Only radicals with a hidden agenda or profoundly ignorant persons can say with a straight face that life in America was spiritual, was more moral when racial and sexist violence was the law of the land, was ruthlessly enforced by state-sanctioned terror. The psychopathic Mississippi or Alabama Ku Klux Klan sheriffs who beat poor people sadistically and organized forty-five hundred murders of black men, women and children during the 20th century were all too real. Louisiana politicians like Huey Long harnessed race hatred for their own benefit and used brutal tactics to block Negroes from first class citizenship. Jard saw this close-up because his father personally saved Long from assassination by two gunmen in the 1930s. Men and women of African, Mexican or Indian heritage, for that reason alone, were not permitted to vote, to serve on juries, eat in restaurants, sleep in clean hotels, use public toilets, go to schools and colleges for which they were paying taxes or hold decent jobs. For generations college educated Negroes were given only filthy, back breaking jobs in steel mills across Pennsylvania and Indiana. Black U.S. Navy gunners, risking their lives battling German U-Boat wolf packs on the frigid North Atlantic crossing during World War II, were beaten savagely by American military police for trying to get hot coffee in government canteens. When one young Black fighter ace from the famed Tuskegee Group returned home from years in combat protecting white bomber crews in Italy, the only job he could get was as a janitor in the local bank. Indian children were locked in concentration camps and beaten when they spoke the only language they knew. Japanese American parents remain locked in concentration camps while their sons were dying while fighting German Nazis as members of the famed 442 Regimental Combat team. The Go For Broke boys won more medals than any unit their size in World War II but when they came home they were denied service by everyone from doctors to barbers and renters because of their ancestry. When minorities tried to succeed professionally, to become first class citizens by enrolling their children in good schools and building their careers, hundreds of armed white men, usually led by police chiefs and blessed by racist pastors, would beat or murder them. There was a lynching of a black man about once a week for a hundred years across the south.


GENDER HATRED -- Even during the profitable postwar economic boom, women remained second class citizens. They were refused admission in universities and graduate school programs only because they were female. Georgia Tech officials denied seven highly qualified young women acceptance in its engineering programs in the middle fifties. The dean defended his decision in court, saying,

We cannot enroll them -- they would have to pass through the male gym on their way to the engineering lab.

Indecent to expose the sweet innocents to sweaty male bodies, cannot cut another door into the lab! Women still cannot serve as pastors in the two largest American denominations. Because they have no testosterone glands, Roberta quips. After all, radical men know that God created women to tend men's sexual needs and see their food is cooked! It was not until 1965 that laws were abolished that prohibited even married women from using contraceptives in order to control the size of their families. Scores of social workers were sentenced to prison by male judges for teaching poor women to use birth control methods. Corporations hired women only as secretaries, food servers and cleaning women, even if they had to earn the family living because irresponsible men fathered children and then ran away from their responsibilities. Teaching and nursing were the only professions generally open to women and they both paid badly. Many, probably most business, political, educational and religious leaders of the era wanted women barefoot and pregnant, subservient to their male lords and masters.

Entire companies still behave toward this way toward women. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently had to press criminal charges against the Mitsubishi Automobile Company in Tennessee to end years of sexual harassment of it’s women employees. Company executives refused to block the frequent humiliation of women and then fired those who complained about their criminally abusive supervisors and managers. The corporate executives, trained in Japan where women are little more than convenient sexual servants to men, ordered their American managers to hire nude dancers and prostitutes to entertain home office vice presidents visiting the factory. Even when they were caught, rather than correcting the abuse, the executives mounted an expensive publicity campaign to escape justice. We are happy to report it didn’t work.

Many sexist men of the lunatic fringe -- with the brainwashed daughters, spouses and girlfriends they manipulate, hate women who are succeeding beyond their abilities -- especially successful women who accept as lovers and mates only sophisticated and supportive men. Bright and competent woman understand that neurotic men are on a one way ride to nowhere, at least emotionally and culturally if not always financially, and choose not to go along with them. Talented women despise their primitive attitudes and assumptions about relationships, and that is more than most existentially alienated men of the right wing can tolerate. The haters are usually supported by fundamental preachers and reactionary politicians in an attempt to return uppity women to subservient citizenship. If that doesn't work, if self-directing women still refuse to waste their potential as menial servants and brood mares, especially if they refuse them as sexual partners, a great many angry men become violent. This was the theme of the motion picture Thelma And Louise a few years ago, in which two abused women broke away from their existentially alienated and brutal men. The macho motto of such men could well be the old New England advice that thousands of fathers gave to their sons before marriage;

A woman, a dog and a walnut tree -- the more you beat them the better they be.

SOCIAL HATRED -- Freedom of speech was limited during the Joe McCarthy madness of the fifties. Many persons had to take loyalty oaths and the attorney general of the United States kept lists of traitors who protested that the Cold War was harming America. Anyone who blamed the National Guard for shooting down students at Kent State University was called a Soviet sympathizer. Millions of naive men and women were persuaded by well orchestrated propaganda campaigns that shooting the students served the protesters right. Of course, years later former Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, admitted all this in his autobiography. We especially loved the scene in the movie Nixon where President Nixon slipped out of the White House to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to some students protesting the decade long Vietnam War. He asked;

Why do you hate me so much for defending our country against the evil communist menace?

He lectured the kids about the dangers of socialism, until one of the girls cried out with a burst of insight.

Why -- you are so beholding to those making money from the conflict that you can't stop the war either!

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the F.B.I. For example, kept a secret dirty tricks file with which to blackmail virtually every American political, business and educational leader. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both hated Hoover and wanted to fire him as head of the Bureau but feared that Hoover would reveal their illicit sexual and financial affairs -- Kennedy’s lust for women and Johnson’s manipulation of defense contracts to amass a personal fortune. Hoover’s greatest vindictiveness was reserved for anyone trying to end the slaughter of sixty thousand American white farm and black ghetto kids being sent to kill Vietnamese farm boys. Along with quarter million more maimed and several million ripped away from their homes. Plus the slaughter of almost three million Vietnamese civilians. He went ballistic when Martin Luther King came out in opposition of the war -- screaming around his office that he was going to get him if it was the last thing he ever did. During the civil rights struggle across the south, Hoover sent only southern F.B.I. Agents south to investigate the murder of voter registration workers. He reasoned they would be less likely to find any exculpatory evidence and he was pretty well right. Only a very few agents were successful investigators. Hoover didn’t work in a vacuum, however. A large number of reactionary politicians later named one Washington building The Hoover Building. He was their kind of guy and he had indeed served them well! Hoover was so vehemently against civil rights that Jard still wonders whether the murderous Hoover didn’t secretly orchestrate both John Kennedy’s and Martin King’s assassination. It was possible because it was later revealed that he had several assassination teams under his personal control.

Signing a petition or going to an anti-war rally was dangerous for anyone who opposed Washington's power freaks. Army officers who protested the Vietnam disaster were cashiered by the thousands. Civilians that our government branded 'Doves' usually lost their jobs and some went to prison. As we said earlier, we do indeed love America and want it to prosper but we see the United States as the people and the farms, the lakes, communities and businesses rather than as the financial, political and religious aristocracy who lust to gain all the wealth and power and prestige. You cannot convince us that reactionary sexist and racist legislators care one iota about the people of this nation! The back room conspiracies, vicious electioneering attacks and outright felonies committed by those who yearn to dominate America have destroyed much trust in and respect for government. That is why the people of Minnesota in a previous election voted into the governor’s office a popular professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, who beat both political parties in one fell swoop.

SELF-FOCUS
How can so many persons assume that an era of coercion and brutality was more spiritual than this period when more persons have laws to protect them from ruthless and reactionary abusers?

Do the fearful ever talk about anything except reducing taxes and controlling the lives of the women and men who don’t agree with them?

DANGEROUS CONCEPTS - NIHILISM THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEANINGLESSNESS

NIHILISM

Nihilism, the pragmatic operating philosophy of virtually every government, corporation and research university is a belief in disbelief, is a philosophy of meaninglessness, including the too self-defeating assumption that might makes right.

Like many disasters, Nihilism began with the finest of intentions. European scientists between 1880 and 1920 were seriously examining the earth and the universe for clues about matter and life. They peered outward toward the stars and galaxies with better telescopes and inward with microscopes, to learn many cosmic truths. Researchers like Planck, Mach, Koch, the Curies, Freud, Bohr, Darwin and Einstein used a new way of looking for knowledge. They called it the scientific method that stressed facts rather than faith. They were right of course. I don’t want to cross the Pacific Ocean in an aircraft designed according to the undisputed brilliance of Thomas Jefferson.

Secular nihilism developed out of Prussian brutality and became deeply embedded in fiercely secular German universities. It was a major tragedy as Herman Hesse had his character Heller say in his great existential novel STEPPENWULF, the brutal beast that walks upright (man). Hesse was a member of the lost generation that came of age in the bloody trenches of World War I - the generation that lost faith in European institutions for deceiving the people so badly. Heller lamented -- There come times when entire generations are trapped between eras --not knowing what to believe -- whom to trust in their search for life.

In other words, be careful what you choose to believe because the following nihilistic, scientist, pragmatic, opportunistic assumptions are crippling to human health.


SELF FOCUS - Rank the following in order of their destructive potential in your life.

1. Humans collectively form a resource to be shaped as needed by government and business, rather than being persons to be cherished because of their intrinsic worth.

2. Human spirituality is an ancient superstition rather than a normal aspect of existence that Frankl called the spiritual unconscious.

3. In seeking human progress, the successful completion of important projects justifies any and all methods used to reach society's goals.

4. The earth is a resource to be developed whenever and wherever desired rather than the home of life as we know it.

5. Each nation's rulers in government, commerce and science should be trusted to do what is right because they have better knowledge than the people they command and control.

6. Because life is the result of a great cosmic accident, individual lives and families are basically meaningless unless they serve the state or some profitable purpose.

7. Persons who do not fit into the pragmatic views of an industrial society are worthless and expendable as North American Indians were when they could not be enslaved.

8. When enough persons and organizations become opportunistic in their philosophy of operations, doing what they can get away with, taking everything they are strong enough to keep, a secular miracle occurs in which the entire society finds greater satisfaction.



BEYOND SECULAR NIHILISTIC PRAGMATISM

In the early days of World War II, when Japan's politicians were developing political ties with the Nazi's of Germany, Lithuanian police teams were enthusiastically rounding up Jewish families for shipment in cattle cars to the death camps that spread like terrible tumors across Europe. The Japanese Baltic counsul was Sempo Sugihara, an unpretentious little Foggy Bottom type civil servant who never dreamed of challenging the powerful movers and shakers who were leading his country toward disaster in a war they could not win. When this perfect office clerk, who even ate his lunch at his desk, discovered what the cruel anti-Semitic Balts were doing, he exploded in indignation and resolved to do better than his government who'd ordered him to assist the Nazis every way he could.

Sugihara established a secret escape route across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express Railway to Shanghai and to Hong Kong. He forged passports and visas, lied to Lithuanian and German officials with his bland Asiatic smile, used money from his office accounts and sent thousands of Jewish families to safety despite the increasingly shrill protests from the Tokyo office. When he was finally dragged home in disgrace, wearing chains, he declined disemboweling himself in a ritual suicide for disobeying orders. It was not until years after his heroism that I discovered that Sempo Sugihara came out of the community of Nagasaki that deliberately stressed ethical values and responsible choices. Just to keep the record straight -- that was the community the U.S. Army Air Forces, in which Jard served, vaporized at ground zero with the second nuclear bomb.


SELF FOCUS - Rank the following in their order of importance to you.

1. Develop and widely use throughout your life and its activities a sound philosophy of service that creates first class citizenship for all who help you succeed, through an equitable sharing of the physical, psychological and philosophical rewards of commitment.

2. Strive for a sense of belonging in supportive communal groups by gathering women and men into small, intimate teams such as business growth centers, clubs or training classes, through which they find consistent satisfaction by accomplishing meaningful tasks or sharing satisfying activities with people who are important to themselves personally.

3. Draw all the people into the decision making processes of the group, for then the decisions become their own choices rather than something imposed by outsiders who don't really understand what is going on in the trenches where the real work is being accomplished.

4. Establish ways of dealing with stress and conflict before the organization becomes dysfunctional and suicidal because the vested interest groups prefer personal possessions, power and prestige far more than group purpose, performance, productivity and profits.

5. Empower persons to mature by sharing responsibilities and rewards. Avoid open-ended assignments that burn out men and women in a few years, by rewarding self-development and creativity, and by sharing the emotional results of being a true member in a good team.

6. Master the principle of human motivation -- it's a fact that people seek the relationships and continue the activities that reward them personally, while rejecting attitudes, activities and relationships that cause pain or fail to benefit themselves consistently.

7. Keep communications open by refusing to let a few fearful or greedy persons in some chain of command block the flow of vital information up or down for their own reasons, since collectively, the members of a group have total knowledge of what must be done to consistently succeed.

8. Set the stage for people at all levels of organizational responsibility and reward to find consistent satisfaction by connecting personal fulfillment to organizational greatness.

9. If you haven't the knowledge and wisdom to achieve through serving society in some area, have the decency to get out of the way and stop harming a group of good people who deserve better of life.

EXISTENTIAL FRUSTRATION

Disaster in the form of existential or life-style caused frustration overwhelmed an old rural parish some years ago as a traditional way of life collapsed and a community fell apart due to twentieth/twenty-first century social and technological stresses. The farming community had been hard hit by drought, a serious decline in land values and a slump in commodity prices. Some church members were losing their sense of identity while others were living on the edge of financial disaster. Many kids were leaving and few in college were interested in returning home to farm. A brisk drug trade developed when some people tried to cope with their stresses chemically and two or three committed suicide when the stresses grew too great. Major changes had been frustrating the rural community for some time, even before the bland old pastor died and his assistant retired. The community’s spiritual, economic and social anchors were dragging and many people were frightened. When two new new priests arrived, they tried to adjust to reality by shifting with the times but unfortunately, that antagonized those fearful members who yearned to return to the past.

The young priests and nuns not only taught traditional religion, meaning to some of the people only what occurred within the walls of the sanctuary during worship, but also the virtue of demonstrating faith and love in the outside society. They wanted the people to understand the dozen debilitating American wars since World War II in spiritual terms, to ask their politicians why they were committing financial suicide in the name of faith and patriotism. The priests and nuns wanted their people committed to civil, legal and financial rights for minority people and to be generous when feeding, clothing and educating the poor migrant children who'd come north to labor in their fields. The leaders were trying to keep the church alive and attractive to the next generation by asking the people to openly discuss values that had always been irrelevant to faith as practiced in the long static community. As the farm economy faltered still more and farmers and merchants fell into trouble, some of the more frustrated and aggressive members of the parish started a campaign to get rid of the trouble-makers who challenged them. Thus, they assumed, they could return to the good old days. They didn’t understand that old traditions and ideologies succeed only in the times and situations which they evolved. One elderly member told me:

I don't even recognize my church anymore and I hate it! These priests are changing everything I know and love. Did not the holy fathers in Rome assure us for fifty years that fighting Commies was God's will and that we would be blessed for our loyalty to America and the church? Why is God punishing us now?

The fearful leaders didn't understand the law of unintended consequences. One paranoid group felt there had to be an evil plot of some kind causing their pain and some men formed a local militia to drive off the villains. Quarrels and fist fights broke out at the altar during communion and in the chancel after services. The priests were harassed at all hours of the day and night with obscene phone calls. Several cars were sabotaged and a church bus was burned and the nun principal of the parish school was forced off the road by a group of cursing militia-men in pickup trucks waving shotguns.

Both priests eventually resigned and Bishop Roy Blocker refused to send out replacements.

He said, no one trying to serve God should have to undergo the harsh judgments and treatments their priests and nuns did. The parish was no longer a community in Christ.

The church had always been a sanctuary for the several hundred farm and village families who worshipped together but it couldn't keep the world at bay in changing times. The anxious and alienated members of the parish crippled the congregation rather than adapt, when the only way they could survive was through accepting change and dealing with new circumstances. After he reopened the church, Bishop Blocker explained;

For centuries we brought our people up in a static and unchanging church atmosphere. We prided ourselves that as God’s church nothing ever changed. We were eternal. We still believe in the unchanging revelation that God made in Christ. But while God hasn’t changed, everything else has. Unfortunately, there will always be some persons who neurotically need more certitude than we can legitimately offer, a certitude that Jesus himself didn’t have in Jerusalem’s garden of olives when he questioned God’s mission for his life.

Thist is true spiritual bankruptcy suffered by many that is caused by the existence we choose or have forced on us by society. Lest you think that too strong an example of alienation, during the week this anecdote was first written, Jeff Rolvag, our handsome and charming next door neighbor hanged himself from a basement rafter not thirty feet from Jard’s desk. He had hidden his existential alienation very well but he certainly isn’t alone in his frustration and the aggression or apathy that follows.

SELF FOCUS -- Have you seen situations in families, schools, companies or communities when life style created frustration causes conflicts?