Be yourself!
What is hell? It is not a world you go to after you die; that is a
simplistic religious idea. No… Imagine the worst, and that is hell. Does it include other people? Is it created by people
other than me? Do I contribute to this horror that is hell? Hell is definitely
man-made. People can, I believe, make your life hell (like they can also make
it into something worthwhile). It all depends on how you get on with others,
don’t you think?
Hell is others? But who are the “others” exactly? It sounds like “others”
could be anyone of you in this room! And, if someone else can be hell for me, I
can be hell for him or her, since I am, for him or her “someone else”. In other
words, we can make each other’s lives hell… I am not just a victim; I can be a
torturer too.
I believe in the Nietzschean notion that “what doesn't kill you makes
you stronger”. If people are bad towards you, it can make you into a tougher person. And, if people are trying to mess with you: react! Do you have a victim mentality? I mean, have you become used to considering others as being
the cause of your unhappiness? In a sense, you have chosen to let other people
mess you up. In that case, you can either keep moaning that life isn’t fair or
you can live up to the challenge of dealing with the hell others are trying to
inflict on you; only you, in the end, can deal with the negative aspects of
your life. It’s up to you to tell people to leave you alone! For example, at
school, you can let bullies insult you, humiliate and exclude you, or you can
see your bullies as sad cowardly insecure sheep and hit back. I don’t mean be
like them, but be better than them. If you laugh when they want to make you
cry, you have won. Sartre said: “If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are
in bad company.” What that means is that you should learn to like yourself so
that you will be strong enough not to need others, at least when those others
are not worth knowing. That way, bullies will just seem pathetic to you; their
“slings and arrows” will be like water off a duck’s back! To exist or not, that’s
the problem only you can solve…
Anyway, you need to accept that “it is the nature of men to be base,
unjust and selfish” (Sartre said that too). The state of the world proves my
point. Just look at some of the leaders: a fascist mass-murderer in the
Philippines, a Stalinist ego-maniac in North-Korea, a psychotic billionaire
bully in the USA, Flamby in France (and, soon, a neo-Nazi female)… They are
dangerous, corrupt, and/or incompetent leaders and we elected them or are too scared to get rid of them. That means
the majority of people are weak, frustrated cowards with limited intelligence
who hope their existential problems, their poverty, self-inflicted illnesses or
boredom, will be miraculously solved by electing a megalomaniac!
But, you are better than most people, right? You are strong enough to
make the world better for yourself and for others, aren’t you? It rather
depends on you accepting the fact that you can be strong if you want to be,
that you can always do something with what others try to make you into (“On peut toujours faire quelque chose de ce
qu’on a fait de nous.”) That’s Sartre, again.
No comments:
Post a Comment