Suffering

I typically don’t care when people deny the existence of God; I question it myself even. Though there's this particular argument that irks me; atheists and Christians often wrestle over the concept of why there’s so much suffering in the world, despite the supposed existence of an altruistic higher being.

The atheist is naive for thinking that the existence of suffering disproves the existence of God, because it takes even more faith to believe that the premise of an omniscient and omnipotent God created suffering by accident and is powerless to do anything about it.

The Christian is naive for thinking that God's intention is to deliver us all from a life of suffering, because they believe that the point of the journey is to arrive—that we endure suffering solely so we can be deemed worthy of the eternal reward of heaven.

Both believe fundamentally that suffering is "bad," and there's nothing wrong with this belief; in fact, it shows that you're not a psychopath. But the mistake that both the atheist and the Christian make is coming to the conclusion that because it is "bad", it's something that shouldn't exist.

I want to posit this idea that in the grand scope of the human condition, perhaps suffering is the point. This is not to say that we should be sadists and constantly make a conscious effort to embrace the suffering as it happens, or that we should entertain this absurd notion of introducing more suffering in our world to bring about more meaning. From a metaphysical standpoint, suffering is not "good" or "bad"; it simply just is. It is a fundamental dynamic in our world that is inextricable from the human condition and our desire to be better than we were yesterday.

So that leads us to another question: As humanity, have we gotten better? Namely, at reducing the amount of total evil—the amount unjust suffering inflicted on other humans—as time progresses? Are we able to fairly measure the amount of suffering in the first place? Can we reliably quantify how much good or evil is present in our world currently? There remains this harrowing notion that as human civilization advances, as we become more and more capable of saving and improving human lives, we become equally as capable of causing terror, unjust suffering, and death.

On one hand, advances in agriculture, pasteurization, public safety and health, medical technologies like vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, and blood transfusions all have contributed towards theoretically saving billions of lives. We've been able to spread knowledge, art, culture, and awareness of pressing issues at an unprecedented rate through the internet. We’ve greatly expanded the scope of philanthropy, introduced clean water to innumerable communities, opened countless numbers of schools, hospitals, and other invaluable institutions across the world. The standard of living and income across all strata of social class and all parts of the world has increased drastically.

On the other hand, we've killed hundreds of millions of people just within the last century. We've invented weapons of mass destruction that can wipe everyone off the face of the earth within minutes. We're causing irreparable damage to the Earth through pollution, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Hundreds of thousands of people are murdered every year just from homicide. Millions more die due to hunger, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, and automobile accidents, all precipitated by the outright negligence of the effects of smoking, air and water contamination, obesity, alcohol abuse, and poorly managed car-centric societies. Hundreds of millions of people are subjected to soul-crushing, mind-numbing work, poverty-level wages, and an abhorrent work-life balance because corporations choose to value short-term gain and profits over the welfare of its employees. Mental illness, depression, drug abuse, and suicide rates have reached unprecedented highs across the globe.

The big question is: will there be a breakthrough point where we somehow surmount the final barrier of our human tendency to gravitate towards evil, and have a world where we perpetually gravitate towards less and less unjust suffering? If you solely looked for trends in the past ten thousand years of history, the answer is very clear—no. Over and over again we have proved that we never learn from the mistakes of our past; in fact, it seems to only get worse over time. Through the events of the past century, we make the perpetrators of atrocities of the distant past look like rank amateurs compared to what we’ve done in recent memory. Do we have any reason to believe that humanity will have a sudden change of heart in the future?

With some of the darkest chapters of human history—colonialism, the Holocaust, the two world wars—most of us feel a burning sense of indignation. Even passive events with no apparent cause or reason—someone’s child that suffers an incurable disease, or earthquakes and floods that have taken the lives of millions—drive us to want justice and redemption. Cause and reason aside, perpetrator or no perpetrator regardless, whatever tragedy befalls us fuels something within the human spirit nonetheless.

Perhaps we're trying to answer a futile question. Perhaps there is no breakthrough point, and the pathway towards the center of everything we do and everything we are is lined with suffering. The human condition is fundamentally a balancing act between good and evil. It’s ultimately the medium through which we can even begin to understand the metaphysical, the elusive concepts of meaning and purpose, and the idea that we can have something worth living for.

"It's possible that without the possibility of evil, there cannot be good. Good requires the possibility of evil, and maybe good is so good that the fact that it requires the possibility of evil is acceptable—maybe it's even desirable."

— Jordan Peterson

Given the choice to live in the matrix and indulge in hedonism, it seems that many of us still choose to live with the suffering of reality. And for us, the reason is very clear. Can we even comprehend or make sense of a life without suffering? As humans, we have an innate propensity to create and write stories, to make something of our life, however imperfect and chaotic. Without suffering, our stories cease to be stories. There are no protagonists without antagonists, no heroes without villains, no plot without tension, no resolution without conflict, no good without evil. And without stories to write, we have no reason left to live.