“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” This dubious bit of wisdom, described on YourStory, India’s entrepreneurial website, as a “powerful statement of profound wisdom,” originated with Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a confirmed cynic. He didn’t mean for us to take the phrase literally. His Twilight of the Idols (1888), subtitled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, begins with a section called “Axioms and Arrows,” in which Axiom 8 reads, “From the military school of life – That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche deplored the military school of life, which thrives, he said, on deceit, bravado, and absurd mottos repeated until they become articles of faith. Ten years earlier, in Human, All Too Human, he had looked forward to the day “when people distinguished by wars and victories and the highest achievement of military order and intelligence…exclaim of their own free will, ‘We break the sword!’” That hadn’t happen (it still hasn’t), and so he wrote Twilight of the Idols, his hammer blow against received ideas. It is deeply ironic that his own words have become one of those received ideas.
Admittedly, the idea has literary roots. Ten years of hardship did make Odysseus strong enough to defeat all twelve of Penelope’s suiters when he finally made it home. The Red Cross Knight, the Christ-like hero of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, undergoes immeasurable pain and suffering before achieving near sainthood. Epic heroes go through trials and tribulations so often that the trope is the first archetype in Joseph Campbell’s analysis of literary structure, The Hero’s Journey. But times change.
Now biology, psychology, and more modern works of literature tell us that what almost kills us does not strengthen us. A heart that recovers from cardiac arrest is not a stronger heart, and a shattered psyche does not make a person stronger. My father suffered a massive heart attack when he was forty-five, lived another thirty years with a steady decline of his faculties, and died at seventy-six of congestive heart failure. He was like Iris’s father in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin, who returns from the First World War having been wounded three times, and takes to drinking and serial infidelity, lets the family business slide, and ignores his children and wife. “He was a shattered wreck,” recalls Iris, “as witness the shouts in the dark, the nightmares, the sudden fits of range, the bowl or glass thrown against the wall or floor….He was broken, and needed mending…” But there was no mending. As with my father, that which almost killed him actually did, in the end, kill him.
Psychologist Noam Shpancer, writing in Psychology Today, confirms that “we are not stronger in the broken places. What doesn’t kill us makes us weaker.” He points out that “developmental research has shown convincingly that traumatized children are more, not less, likely to be traumatized again,” and cites a study conducted by Barbara Ganzel, which found that New Yorkers who lived a mile and a half from the World Trade Centre on 9/11 had significantly higher amygdala activity when shown photographs of fearful faces – meaning they reacted more agitatedly to the images – than people who lived 200 miles from it. “We have known for a long time that trauma exposure can lead to subsequent vulnerability to mental health disorders years after the trauma,” said Ganzel.
The poet Joseph Brodsky understood that. In his portrait of Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, Brodsky wrote that Nadezhda suffered for the honesty with which she wrote her memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Because her husband’s poems were banned, she memorized them, all of them, as well as all those by her friend Anna Akhmatova. She kept them alive and they kept her alive. Though persecuted by the Kremlin, shunned by the Soviet literati, “she became what she became,” writes Brodsky, “not because of what took place in Russia this century, but rather in spite of it…. It is an abominable fallacy,” he adds, “that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills.”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a handy motto for those who want others to do nothing about injustice. During the pandemic, many people lobbied the government to enact a policy of herd immunity. They thought by letting the virus run rampant through the general population, those most vulnerable to infection – the elderly and people with weakened immune systems – might succumb to the disease, but everyone else would get Covid, recover from it, and be immune from further infection. The coronavirus would disappear and their lives would go on uninterrupted.
Let us contemplate the cynicism of that belief. The majority of the population become stronger by letting the weak die. The young can continue partying and going to football games while their grandparents die in ICUs and long-term-care facilities. As I wrote in Pandexicon, that isn’t immunizing the herd, it’s culling it. I referred to a remark made by Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who until recently was in the ring to become the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency. On May 4, 2020, urging the lifting of pandemic protocols, he said: “Certainly we all want to save as many lives as possible, but we have to ask ourselves, to what end?”
The belief that suffering strengthens and ennobles us simply provides an excuse for doing nothing in the presence of outrage. If we think we have no power to make a difference, all we have to do is put up with four years of authoritarian rule and we’ll come out stronger at the other end. Recent history tells a different story. “It’s reliably depressing,” writes New York Times colonist Pamela Paul, “to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the presidency.” It did, and it seems poised to do it again -- which means, of course, that the left is no stronger now than it was in 2016.
Nadezhda Mandelstam didn’t become strong by enduring adversity; her strength came from defying the Kremlin and exposing the abominable fallacy that by keeping their heads down, her fellow writers would survive tyranny. With poetry and bravery, Brodsky writes, “she was capable of slowing down, if not averting in the long run, the cultural disintegration of a whole nation.”
It’s like the relationship of anxiety to creativity. A little bit of anxiety propels us to solve the mystery by doing something creative but too much anxiety kills the energy to be creative.
Agreed . I think Stranger not stronger . Just one vowel. And stranger rhymes with danger. And anger . Time to send in the comedy troupes. I wish George Carlin was alive . He’d speak . I know nothing . But agree . Loved this .