Once there was a gifted young neurologist/psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl who practiced in Vienna in the years before World War II. When the war came, the US knew of his reputation as a brilliant scientist and humanitarian, and so this country offered him a visa to escape to freedom. But he felt he could not abandon his family, so he made the decision to stay in Germany. As a result, he spent six years in four different concentration camps. He lost his young, pregnant wife, his mother, his brother, and his father to the brutality of Dachau, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Theresienstadt.
What he didn’t lose, however, was his faith in a certain aspect of human nature and its power to sustain us. He felt that all humans have the ability – the freedom – to decide how to respond to what happens to us. And that this ability is paramount. You can take everything away from a man until he is nothing but a skeletal shell lying in filth in a concentration camp, but you cannot take away this suffering human being’s inner core of freedom that allows him to self-determine his own responses, his own attitude toward life. If a human being feels there is meaning to that life –that one’s actions can have some kind of meaningful, positive impact on the world, no matter how great or small—then one can be happy even in the direst circumstances.
Frankl felt that this freedom-to-act-meaningfully-in-the-world should be tempered with a strong sense of responsibility-to-others. He was fond of saying that the “Statue of Liberty” on the East Coast should be balanced by a “Statue of Responsibility” on the West Coast.
It is this statement of Frankl’s that intrigues me. It’s been days since I finished reading his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and his “Statue of Responsibility” idea is still haunting me. The balance of liberty and responsibility defines us on so many levels. It is what we teach our children. It is how we live our own lives. Getting the balance of liberty and responsibility right is crucial to a healthy, stable life.
It is also crucial to a healthy, stable nation. Everything depends on balance, doesn’t it? And the philosophies of our two main parties need to balance each other for our nation’s health. We need both philosophies in balance.
If you will allow me to explain, I would like to posit that Liberals tend to value personal liberty, and governmental responsibility. Each individual should have the freedom to self-determine their own lives according to their own ideas. The government, on the other hand, should have the overarching responsibility of making sure basic human needs are met for everyone.
On the other hand, Conservatives tend to value just the reverse: governmental liberty, and personal responsibility. According to this world view, government should small and should operate in a deregulated fashion, as should the free market. Meanwhile, it is up to each individual to have the responsibility to make sure their basic human needs are met.
Hence the Statue of Liberty needing her counterpart: The Statue of Responsibility. I would add that the two main parties of our nation, Liberal and Conservative, need each other just as much. We need that dynamic tension. Without this balance, too many of us lose our sense of meaning. We need to respect each other. And our country needs civil debate and discourse. Can we try to treat each other better? We are all human beings, after all. As Viktor Frankl states: “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense:Since Auschwitz we k now what man is capable of.And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake. “