How sweet life can be

Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content
I don't have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I'm gone
You always said people don't do what they believe in, they just do what's most convenient, then they repent
And I always said, "Hang on to me, baby, and let's hope the roof stays on."

— "Brownsville Girl", Bob Dylan, Knocked Out Loaded

Some time ago, I was thinking about C.S. Lewis' famous quote about tyranny. I think it's spot on — if people truly believe that they are righteous in their ways, even if it means terror, they will never back down. Ever. But that's only one perspective of the quote.

Something that's implicit in Lewis is that if you have the approval of your own conscience, you are not in torment. I am not sure if that's the case, but it sure is impossible to be in peace if the vector of your actions isn't aligned with the that of your conscience.

As soon as we realize that people will never back down, we may lose hope. Albert Camus was painfully aware of the horrors of humanity, yet in a letter to Jean Grenier he argues that a "certain continuity in despair can lead to happiness" and that even though in the entire Old World of Europe we see, in the human scale, nothing but destruction and decadence, optimism and love can still go hand by hand, as happiness is linked to love. "I know of times and places where happiness can seem so bitter that we prefer the promise of it," he writes, but this is only because we do not have enough heart to love, "to persevere in love". We have to take part in what he called the "celebration of beauty and the earth".

The same man who wrote, in The Plague, that "on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences" has hope. Yes, life is a struggle, but that would never mean that it is pointless. If anything, the opposite — you have something to do.

Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus specifically to deal with the issue of suicide, which he calls "the only serious philosophical problem". Suicide is precisely what Soren Kierkegaard believes is the end point of the merely aesthetic life. Think of it in terms of sensations and boredom: how awful would it be to merely go after pleasures indefinitely, being a slave to your own senses?

Like Nietzsche and Marquis de Sade, Kierkegaard believed that humans are naturally aesthetic people. It takes work to go from this life to the ethical life, the second stage. Kierkegaard might have died in pain because of a disease, but he practiced exactly what he preached. Sade and Nietzsche, however, died in agony, the first one pleading to Napoleon for his life and the second one going crazy for writing about impossible human standards while being a decrepit man. Even in the agony of breaking up his engagement, Kierkegaard chose it himself. Whose conscience was lighter on their deathbed?

You might think it's still tragic, but here is Kierkegaard, talking about precisely this problem. In Either/Or a famous passage says:

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.

You can't avoid being uncomfortable. It is still going to be painful whatever way you choose. And that's where the knight of infinite resignation comes in.

After the aesthetic stage, you get a little bit of consciousness. You do what is right regardless of what you feel about it, because it's the right thing to do. Obviously this is a higher stage than the merely aesthetic one where only your own sensations matter, but it might come at a huge cost — your own happiness. In Fear and Trembling he talks about a knight and a princess whom he can't ever have even if they have a history. "Does he want to forget the whole thing? (...) No! for the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole of one's life's content and still be the same." He can't have the princess, yet he can't forget her. "The knight does not cancel his resignation, he keeps [his love] just as young as in the first instance, he never lets it go."

The knight of resignation sees the beauty in life, lives for his ideals even if that means his life is going to be rough. He is, in Kierkegaard's words, a tragic hero. There is a beauty in being this true to yourself, something that not many are, yet it is unquestionably painful. "Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain", Bob Dylan would sing in the late 90s.

In late 2019, legendary youtuber PewDiePie made video on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, using as a context (and bait for an audience of gamers) the last Avengers movie. In it, he concludes that for you to become a knight, either of faith or infinite resignation, you must practice. And we can only practice if we understand what we love. In the Swedish youtuber's words, "by understanding what we love, we open ourselves up to becoming more vulnerable, but the knight of infinite resignation understands that (...) the world doesn't always fall into the right place and you will not always win." By understanding what we love and not "cancelling our resignation", we keep our loved object "just as young as in the first place".

A great example of infinite resignation comes in Norm Macdonald's book Based on a True Story. Reflecting back at his whole life, his rise to the top of the comedy world and the oblivion he was thrown into after Saturday Night Live, Macdonald says "Sometimes I get big laughs and think I'm the best stand-up in the whole world, and other times I bomb, and I think I'm not even in the top five," he jokes.

However, he still considers himself lucky to even have had such opportunity: "I never expected to be any more than a common laborer," he writes, "and I would have considered myself lucky to have achieved just that. But I was blessed with so much more."

This is the knight of resignation. In fact, throughout the book he is also an aesthetic man, escaping the horrors of life through Dilaudid, morphine and gambling (the only one he actually did in real life).

If the knight of infinite resignation is a perfectly ethical man, regardless of his happiness, the knight of faith not only is an ethical man but is an ethical man who believes. He believes that whatever was resigned can be won back through God's grace. He understands the logical impossibility, yet he believes — he's like Abraham! Kierkegaard argues that

(...) the knight of faith is just as clear: all that can save him is the absurd; and this he grasps by faith. Accordingly he admits the impossibility and at the same time believes the absurd; for were he to suppose that he had faith without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and all his heart, he would be deceiving himself, and (...) he would not even have come as far as infinite resignation.

I've talked about hope and optimism in the face of uncertainty in the context of personal lives, but surely, the external world doesn't have place for hope, right?

One of my favorite books ever is The White Pill by Michael Malice. After describing for 200 pages the horrors of the Soviet bloc, going on and on about systematic and bureaucratic torture, how evil people can be and have been in the past, he starts telling the tale of how it all came to a crash. However bad things are now, they're better than whatever we had previously. This is not merry-go-lucky Enlightenment optimism, this is terrifying optimism. The last paragraphs of Malice's book are powerful:

The foes of liberty are many and they are powerful—but they are not particularly impressive. They will do everything within their ability to convince others that their might is eternal, that battle against them is pointless and doomed to fail. This is just another one of their many lies. It is said that they will never give up. Yet does wanting power over others mean that they will necessarily get it, and get it easily? Does the fact that they supposedly will never give up somehow imply that their opponents should—or does it imply the opposite? Evil people surrender all the time. At a certain point the costs—in every sense of the term—simply become too high. They are not all-knowing—far from it. They are often not even particularly bright. They are not all-powerful. They are men and women, far closer to snakes than they are to gods. They can, will, and have been defeated many, many times.

It is possible that those of us who fight for the dignity of mankind will lose our fight. It is not possible that we must lose our fight.

That is the white pill.

In spite of everything, believe.

Norm Macdonald eventually seemed to have gone to the final Kierkegaardian stage and become a man of faith. In one of my all time favorite tweets, he says:

At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how could life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.

Arthur Herman in The Idea of Decline in Western History also makes this point at the end, after showing how end of cycle ideas of decadence have never got it right. He cites Tocqueville:

Yes, I sometimes despair of mankind. Who doesn’t…. I have always said that it is more difficult to stabilize and maintain liberty in our new democratic societies than in certain aristocratic societies in the past. But I shall never dare to think it impossible. And I pray to God lest He inspire me with the idea that one might as well give up trying.

I started writing this with the song "Brownsville Girl" in my mind, but I have to come back to another Dylan gem. One of the answers to Macdonald's tweet (which isn't mine) mentions exactly these lines:

It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be
But she ain't a-gonna make a move, I guess it must be up to me

— "Up to Me", Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series Volume 14: More Blood, More Tracks