Why Believe In Others

It’s only four minutes and twenty-two seconds long but, Why Believe In Others, in TED's Best of the Web collection is a rare clip from 1972 of Viktor Frankl, famous Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, sharing his powerful message of the human search for meaning and the greatest gift we can give others – which is to believe in them.

This clip immediately caught my eye because, in the middle of my junior year in high school, someone gave me the great gift of Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning and it was like a soothing balm for an aching soul that already felt like life was empty and meaningless. Taking his message to heart helped me shift my trajectory, which created profound change in my life.

In the clip, Frankl opens talking about the European view of Americans is that they just want to make a lot of money – this is their primary goal in life. He then quotes a statistic that sixteen percent of American students indeed say their primary goal is to make a lot of money but he goes on to emphasize that what is most remarkable are the numbers establishing the top category - seventy-eight percent of polled students say that what they are most concerned with is finding meaning and purpose in their lives.

The point is that if we ignore our fellow human’s search for meaning, we are doing then a great disservice by letting them remain as they are but if we presuppose that, even in the most hardened or delinquent people, there is meaning in their lives, we are able to illicit it from them and they will become what they, in principle, are capable of becoming. This is the most important gift we can give others.

He then mentions he’s taken up flying lessons and illustrates on a chalkboard how to course correct for a crosswind. Basically, if you are headed east in a straight line, the crosswind will blow you off track and you will wind up to the south of your destination so in order to make your intended landing, you have to head the plane north and then you will arrive where you intended. Using the same illustration, he says the same is true for man and loosely quotes Goethe – “…that if we leave man as he really is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be."