You’re free to choose. No matter who you are, whatever your ethnicity or “culture,” you alone can make decisions about you and your life. That also means that you will be responsible for the results of your choices.
Sigmund Freud believed that if everyone were hungry “all individual differences would blur.” Being desperately hungry, we would do anything to appease our hunger. Victor Frankl, “tested” this principle in a Nazi concentration camp where Jews like him had to work like cattle and were exterminated like rats. Frankl witnessed how, despite the unbelievable hunger and endless physical suffering, some of his fellow prisoners still acted honorably and decently.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to the powers which threatened to rob you of your self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”
If persons in hellish and brutal conditions can still choose to do good and to be good, then surely we can do the same.
Sigmund Freud believed that if everyone were hungry “all individual differences would blur.” Being desperately hungry, we would do anything to appease our hunger. Victor Frankl, “tested” this principle in a Nazi concentration camp where Jews like him had to work like cattle and were exterminated like rats. Frankl witnessed how, despite the unbelievable hunger and endless physical suffering, some of his fellow prisoners still acted honorably and decently.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to the powers which threatened to rob you of your self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”
If persons in hellish and brutal conditions can still choose to do good and to be good, then surely we can do the same.
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