There’s a passage from Viktor Frankl that keeps returning to me these days, insistent as a knock on the door: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
I’ve been sitting with this thought—and with Frankl’s two slender books, Man’s Search for Meaning and Yes to Life, both of which emerged from the hell of Nazi concentration camps—in a time when the very idea of truth seems negotiable. When propaganda isn’t just a tool of authoritarian regimes abroad but a diagnosis we level at one another across dinner tables. When algorithms know what will outrage us before we do, and feed it to us in an endless scroll.
Frankl wrote from Auschwitz and Dachau. I write from a country where we argue about which news is real, where we’re told that what we see with our own eyes might be lies, where competing narratives about basic reality multiply like fractals. The scales are incomparable, of course. But the mechanism Frankl identified—the one Hitler understood so well—is the same: if you can convince people to stop thinking for themselves, if you can make them believe anything repeated often enough, if you can strip them of their inner freedom, then the external chains become almost unnecessary.
The Propaganda of Certainty
“Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming evidence was suppressed,” Frankl observed. Not could believe—would believe. The inevitability in that phrase haunts me.
We live in an age of competing certainties, each side convinced the other has been brainwashed, each wielding their own statistics and experts like weapons. Social media companies have learned what authoritarian regimes always knew: humans will choose comfortable lies over uncomfortable truths, will gravitate toward information that confirms what they already believe, will mistake repetition for validity.
But here’s where Frankl offers something radical, something I keep turning over in my mind like a stone worn smooth by water: the problem isn’t just that we’re being manipulated. It’s that we’re surrendering the one freedom no one can actually take from us—the freedom to pause, to question, to choose our response.
Every spiritual tradition I’ve encountered teaches some version of this truth. The Buddhist concept of the space between stimulus and response, where freedom lives. The Stoic distinction between what is up to us and what is not. The Christian mystics who found liberty even in prisons. The Islamic teaching that while we cannot control our circumstances, we can control our intentions. Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who lost everything including his pregnant wife to the camps, arrived at the same essential insight: meaning is not something we find, but something we make through the stance we take toward what we cannot change.
The Questions Life Asks
There’s a revolution in one of Frankl’s insights that we often miss because it’s packaged so gently: “The question can no longer be ‘What can I expect from life?’ but can now only be ‘What does life expect from me?'”
This is the Copernican shift at the heart of his philosophy. We keep asking what life owes us—happiness, success, pleasure, security—and we feel betrayed when it delivers suffering instead. We consume content that promises us techniques for getting what we want: ten steps to happiness, five ways to manifest abundance, the secret to positive thinking. Even our spirituality becomes transactional, another form of control.
But life, Frankl insists, is asking us the questions. Every situation we face is life posing a problem that demands our response. And here’s the difficult part: we don’t get to choose which questions we’re asked. We only get to choose how we answer.
In our current moment, when democracy itself feels under threat, when institutions we trusted reveal themselves as more fragile than we imagined, when neighbors eye each other with suspicion across ideological divides—life is asking questions. Not easy ones. Not the kind with clear answers or convenient solutions.
Life asks: How will you respond when others embrace comforting lies? Will you choose your own comfortable delusions, or will you sit with uncertainty?
Life asks: When propaganda surrounds you like air, will you do the hard work of thinking for yourself, of questioning your own assumptions as rigorously as you question others’?
Life asks: When the political becomes a substitute for the spiritual, when ideology offers simple answers to complex questions, will you choose the harder path of genuine seeking?
The Suffering That Means
“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering,” Frankl wrote. This isn’t masochism or resignation. It’s something more subtle, more difficult to grasp in a culture that treats suffering as a problem to be solved or an injustice to be protested.
There are three paths to meaning in Frankl’s view: through creating something, through loving someone, and through the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. We focus on the first two because they feel active, productive, under our control. But it’s the third path that tests whether we’ve understood anything at all.
When we watch democracy strain at its seams, when we see truth itself become weaponized, when we feel powerless against forces that seem intent on rewriting reality—this is unavoidable suffering. Not suffering we choose, not suffering we can eliminate through the right techniques or the right vote or the right protest. It’s the suffering of living in a time between worlds, when what was no longer works and what will be hasn’t yet been born.
The question isn’t whether this suffering is fair or deserved. The question is what we’ll make of it. Will it embitter us or deepen us? Will it make us smaller or larger? Will we use it as an excuse to surrender our inner freedom, to say “they made me this way, they left me no choice,” or will we recognize that even here, especially here, we can choose our response?
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it,” Frankl notes. There’s a Taoist principle here, an idea echoed in mindfulness practice: when we can see our suffering clearly, when we can name it without drowning in it, something shifts. The suffering doesn’t disappear, but our relationship to it transforms.
The Freedom No One Can Touch
I keep coming back to those highlighted passages, those sentences that feel like hand-holds on a cliff face. “Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is.” One person, Frankl insists. That’s all it takes to preserve meaning. To refuse the lie. To choose response over reaction.
This is both encouraging and terrifying. Encouraging because it means we’re never powerless, never truly victims of circumstances beyond our control. Terrifying because it means we can’t hide behind those circumstances, can’t blame our choices on forces outside ourselves.
In our current political landscape, where binary thinking rules and nuance is treated as weakness, where you’re either with us or against us, this is a radical stance. Frankl’s freedom is the freedom to refuse those binaries, to insist on the complexity of truth even when simplicity would be easier. It’s the freedom to say “I don’t know” in an age of certainty. To question our tribe’s dogmas as readily as we question the other tribe’s. To recognize propaganda in all its forms, including the forms we want to believe.
“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it,” Frankl warned. Success, happiness, power—these are the lures that propaganda uses. Vote for us and we’ll restore what you’ve lost. Believe us and you’ll finally understand what’s really happening. Follow us and you’ll be on the right side of history.
But if meaning comes not from what we achieve but from how we respond to what life asks of us, then these promises are beside the point. The question isn’t whether our side wins, but whether we’ve maintained our integrity in the struggle. Whether we’ve told the truth even when lies were easier. Whether we’ve chosen love when hate was more satisfying. Whether we’ve preserved our inner freedom when everyone around us was surrendering theirs.
The Duty That Is Joy
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.” This old proverb that Frankl quotes captures something essential. We resist responsibility, resist the idea that life is making demands of us rather than owing us something. We want the joy without the duty, the pleasure without the struggle.
But what if the deepest joy comes precisely from answering life’s questions with our whole being? What if meaning isn’t found in transcending our circumstances but in fully inhabiting them?
There’s a Hasidic story about a rabbi who, when asked where God could be found, replied, “Wherever you let Him in.” Frankl’s philosophy echoes this: meaning exists wherever we choose to respond authentically to what life asks of us. The concentration camp can become a place of meaning—not because suffering is good, but because even there, the freedom to choose one’s attitude remains.
In our democracy under strain, in our culture of competing truths, in our moment of institutional breakdown—meaning waits. Not in some future when things are better, not in some past when things were simpler, but here, now, in how we choose to respond to exactly this moment.
Living the Questions
I’m writing this, and I don’t have answers. I don’t know how to fix democracy or heal polarization or make truth matter again. I don’t know which prophecies of doom are accurate and which are fear-mongering. I don’t know if we’re witnessing a necessary death that will birth something new or just death.
But I know—and Frankl knew—that these uncertainties themselves are life asking questions. The temptation is to grab for certainty, to embrace whichever narrative makes us feel most secure, most righteous, most in control. To become propagandists ourselves, repeating what we want to be true until we believe it.
The harder path is to live the questions. To maintain the inner freedom to change our minds when evidence changes. To hold our beliefs lightly enough that we can examine them, but firmly enough that we stand for something. To recognize that propaganda works by making us stop thinking, and therefore the most radical response is to keep thinking—critically, honestly, courageously.
“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual,” Frankl wrote. Not the easy answer. Not the popular answer. Not the answer that makes us feel superior to others. The right answer, which can only be found through honest engagement with reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.
In this moment of democratic fragility, when would-be authoritarians use the techniques Hitler perfected—the repeated lies, the suppression of disconfirming evidence, the us-versus-them tribalism—the most important thing we can do is guard that inner freedom. The freedom to think. To question. To choose our response rather than react from fear or rage or tribal loyalty.
This is the freedom no one can take from us, though many will try. This is the meaning available even in—especially in—times that seem meaningless. This is life’s question to each of us: Will you be propaganda’s tool, or will you be a human being who thinks?
The answer matters more than we know. As Frankl reminds us, everything depends on the individual, even if that individual is alone in their clarity. Maybe especially then.
So I sit with these two books, these testimonies from hell that somehow emerged as affirmations of life. I sit with the questions they ask, the freedom they insist cannot be taken, the meaning that waits in every moment for our response. I sit with my own uncertainty about how to live rightly in this time, and I try to remember that uncertainty honestly held might be closer to truth than certainty falsely claimed.
And I wonder what life is asking of me. Of you. Of all of us. Not what we want from life, but what life wants from us.
Maybe the answer begins with refusing to let anyone else think for us. With reclaiming the freedom that exists between stimulus and response, between what happens to us and how we choose to be with what happens. With finding meaning not in victory but in integrity, not in outcomes but in the quality of our response to whatever questions life poses.
This is Viktor Frankl’s gift: the reminder that we are never without choice, never without freedom, never without the possibility of meaning. Even here. Even now. Even in this.