Resolved: Suffering makes you legitimate

Writing November 2007

I’ll start this by reading a passage from the Aeschylus play, Agamemnon--
"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

Real anguish isn’t BS like your parents not buying you a car. Real anguish fucks with a person’s belief in the goodness of life. People who suffered have the potential to better understand human nature. Through pain, they’ve been exposed to their own breaking points and limitations. That’s what pain brings—unbiased self-knowledge, where your façade has been torn away, and you must stare at your real self.

Look at the people of Liberia, they just suffered two civil wars in about 10 years. There, it is said that every family had a son that was part of a militia, and a daughter that had been raped by a militiaman. This was suffering at its most extreme. Child soldiers, cannibalism, 200,000 dead. When these people suffered, they acted in horrific ways, which highlighted their most basic desires and instincts.

If you have not suffered, you have not had the chance to mature. The suffering know how vulnerable their lives are, and what they themselves are capable of. They understand the world to be a potential sham. Therefore, rather than living in spiritual muck, some of them attempt to find a meaning to life. Those who succeed in this have the potential to affect the world more than any one else could because they have a full understanding of the world.

Look at people like current Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a former political prisoner who is now attempting to reform the country.

Abraham Lincoln, who dealt with depression his entire life, and yet saved the USA.

Malcolm X, the son of a minister killed by white supremacists,
Malcolm X who spent a considerable amount of the early portion of his life in detention centers and prison, and later became one of the last, great American heroes.

Finally, look at Cervantes,
who fought in a war,
crippled his left hand,
lived as a slave in Algiers,
then later, once freed from slavery,
became bankrupt,
went to prison because of money problems,
and had much trouble in living as a writer
until he wrote the legendary first novel, Don Quixote.

And in the prologue of this work, he acknowledged that his life of suffering shaped the story itself. This novel would go on to shape all of literature, and certainly influenced the style of our tongue-in-cheek literary group, the Philolexian Society.

Thank you all for listening.