What drives men to pursue philanthropy, men like Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Viktor Frankl to expose the world’s travesties, to put human suffering on display and advise us on how to overcome it? Great men such as these were successfully able to utilize their talents and experiences to bring something meaningful into existence, each in their own way. Here we will explore their stories, and the archetypal structure which they all embodied, so we too can learn from great men, and attempt to embody the spirit of leaving humanity in a better place than we found it.

George Orwell, being of lower middle class upbringing, was employed as a young man in the British Police force, serving in colonial India in the 1920s. He saw the injustice caused by foreign dominion over people who didn’t desire their presence. Out of guilt, and repentance for the injustice he saw through becoming part of such a system, he endeavored to pursue a course of correction for the sins of his Being. He voluntarily undertook the challenge of subjugating himself to the lowest working class, emerged himself in their culture, studied their misfortune and the content of their lives. Being himself an intelligent writer, he sought to expose the many problems of the working class, to bring to the light of day their suffering, and their tragedies, the terrible working conditions, the housing crisis, the food and economic poverty. He published The Road to Wigan Pier, not only revealing to the upper classes the plight of the lower class, but offering criticism and advice to the Socialist party in how they should change their ways to better unite to face the difficulties of the suffering of the less fortunate.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian soldier during the beginning of WW2. In a letter to a friend, he criticized Russia’s disorganization at the time of German redaction of a peace agreement between the two countries, and subsequent attack on Russia. Russia’s unpreparedness was obvious, and he spoke to this point in his letter. The apprehension of this letter led to his arrest and imprisonment within the Russian prison camp system, which was unjustly imprisoning and putting to work millions of its own members for any perceived criticism or rebellion against the Russian government, which, at this point was a perverted Marxist system, stimulated with totalitarianism. During his time in the Russian camps, he documented the terrible experience he underwent, and the stories he collected along the way. He wrote to the torture, malnourishment, excessive prolongation, the freezing climate, and the altogether hellish conditions within which some 40-60 million Russians died in. Once the Americans freed him from his final camp, he exposed the camps conditions, and what the government was propagating in his novel The Gulag Archipelago. He published this work first under an alias, as the continued totalitarian nature of the government would have condemned him once again had they uncovered his identity. He exposed the hidden Russian gulag system to western Europe and the rest of the world, for what it truly was, as the rest of the world was wholly ignorant of the details of what had happened there. In addition to such acts of bravery in the face of evil, he remarked as to what enabled himself and the prisoners to strive forward in the face of such calamities, the pursuance of meaning. Individual responsibility and the strength of the human will, he offered, in short, the antidote to chaos and suffering.

Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist in Germany at the start of WW2, and was subsequently imprisoned at a variety of their prison labor camps, one of which was Auschwitz. He too, like Solzhenitsyn, wrote to the tragedy and cruelty of the oppressive governing state, and the affect it had on demoralizing and killing millions within its own borders. During his stay in the prison camps, Victor used his psychological knowledge to alleviate the suffering of his fellow countrymen, to help bring them through some of the worst conditions involuntarily forced upon human beings. After the war, he released Man’s Search for Meaning, a novel exposing the system in its first half, and in the second half, outlining his system of logotherapy, of a truthful pursuance of meaning to counterbalance the malevolence and misfortune found in the world. By providing a psychological system of meaning to alleviate illness, sickness, and misfortune, Viktor Frankl not only gave an anecdotal explanation to the value of such pursuit, but provided the means by which one can implement a similar strategy to one’s own life to alleviate suffering and provide wellbeing.

In all three cases, these great men encountered malevolence, and tragedy, discovered a way to overcome it, and using the powers they contained, brought back something valuable to the people. This was their way of pursuing meaning in the world, and the amount of virtue they displayed in doing so, makes them all heroes in their own right. They went through hell, discovered how to survive, made it back to Earth, and revealed the optimal pathway through the shadow of death.

Those that carry the biggest burden, who take the most responsibility, are the ones we still talk about, are the ones which have provided mankind with the greatest boon. As Jesus Christ carried the biggest responsibility (archetypally / metaphorically), that of suffering for the sins of all mankind, we thus still revel in his virtue, and his story is known by all. Regardless of the supernatural claims, the archetypal nature of his story is that which inspires the great men of history, and whether they know it or not, his story lives on in the actions of the philanthropist, in the words of the philosopher, in the lives of the great men of history. It is to him who takes the most responsibility, who carries his cross for the sake of repaying the debt he owes to the world, and by doing so, saves others, who finds the highest purpose, and to him we owe a debt of gratitude for the current state of the world we find ourselves in. We think the world we find ourselves in is free, and it is free, to a degree, more so now than it ever has been, but it was forged to be so at a high cost, the cost of error, of miscalculation, of injustice, of evil, of malevolence and inhumanity, and the rebellion against such forces, through the suffering, the deaths, the struggle and the perseverance of millions before our time. The cost was paid in effort, time, suffering, poverty, war and blood far before our time. It is the result of thousands of years of sacrifice, and to call this freedom free is to be naive to those people over millions who have laid down their lives in pursuit of a greater future. Sacrifice is a bargain with the future, it is the payment of the present, for a result in the future. This negotiation was carried out by our forefathers and generations past who fought for rights, for knowledge, for truth, for peace, for freedom, and their fight costed millions their lives, many their physical and psychological wellbeing, many endured great sufferings in the negation of injustice, so that now, we can see the fruits of their bargain.

We yield the fruit of that future, and bear the burden of honoring those sacrifices by pursuing what is meaningful in our lives. We hold the responsibility of providing a better future for our children and generations to come, we owe it to them, as we are in debt to those who come before us, to leave the world a better place than we found it. We ought to make a similar sacrifice, a similar negotiation with existence, so that we can provide the ground for a better future for those who come after us, just as we were afforded the luxury of the world we find ourselves in today (in comparison to how things were for those who came before us). It is great men like Orwell who provided the brave counter narrative that spurred the legislative aid that brought millions out of poverty. Orwell went to the slums of Wigan, and Sheffield, went to the coal mines and was able to expose the conditions of millions who lived in an altogether horrendous lower class, in an altogether different world than that of the bourgeois and upper class. It was through his elicit stories that an awareness of the profound suffering was detailed, and provisions could be made for their alleviation. It was his voluntary sacrifice of time and wellbeing, to dive to the depths of humanity, that led to him to be able to bring to civilization the stories of the underworld, so collectively, we could solve the problems which we didn’t know existed. Since the problems of the poverty of the lower class were brought into the spotlight in the early thirties, much effort has been done to alleviate the conditions of the poor and working classes, so now, their baseline, the average member of the lower class, is a king in comparison to those who lived just 70 years before. The change, the improvement, didn’t come for free, it came at the sacrifice of many people, in the face of adversity, it took courage and it took people navigating their lives towards a cause that superseded their existence, it took sacrifice of the present for the gain of the future.

It is in the pursuit of meaning, of doing something that has implications beyond ourselves, that we prove to be worthy of the lives we should be grateful for having, and it is in this pursuit that united men such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Frankl. They all saw the potential they contained to do more than they had to, to do something good, and right, and it was never easy. It is in this adoption of responsibility and in the creation of something valuable that we repay the debt with which we are charged. We all have different abilities, different potential, different manifestations of the divine, yet the objective potential for pursuing a higher value, is something inherent in all of us. As Jesus is the archetypal son, God is the father, the Holy Spirit is in each of us, the potential to align ourselves with the greater good, a higher ideal, lies within every man and woman’s very Being. Jesus was the greatest articulation of what the manifestation of God himself should embody at the time, and in being the greatest manifestation of the highest good he was charged the highest responsibility, and the highest suffering, that of taking up his cross, taking the suffering of the world upon his shoulders, and paying the ultimate price for the sin of mankind. As God is the highest representational symbol of “the highest ideal”, Jesus the highest manifestation of that ideal, and us, being intricately interwoven with the potential of alignment with that ideal through the holy spirit, we too hold the potentiality of manifesting it, each in a different form, in a way conducive to our situation and competencies.