I’ve written before about the importance of gratitude in hard times, as a means of survival, and to appreciate what we still have. This year, gratitude is even more important. It’s a means of self-defense.
Tyrants aren’t just satisfied with your compliance. They don’t just want you to fear, obey, and worship them. They want you to sublimate your entire being into them. You can have no thought that isn’t centered around them. No joy can come except from them. No one has dreams that aren’t theirs. No one has an identity except as a part of them. You don’t just love Big Brother. You’re a part of Big Brother. You don’t exist without him.
Unless you defend your sense of self. Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, wrote the following in Man’s Search for Meaning:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
That’s why gratitude becomes a part of self-defense.
When you live from gratitude, you realize there’s a whole source of goodness and generosity that exists outside the tyrant. You have parents who gave you the gift of life. You have the love and support of those who guided you on the way. You’ve experienced multiple small acts of kindness, like a stranger pointing the way when you’re lost, the customers with full carts who let you go ahead of them in line when they saw you had a few items, or a friend giving you an encouraging word when you’re down.
Gratitude reminds you of the value of your individuality. You don’t merely exist to serve a narcissistic, power-mad overlord. Because you have the capacity to receive kindness and to give it to others in return, you have intrinsic worth. You are human. And so is everyone else.
Gratitude will also get us through whatever challenges and hardships we will face. No matter what losses we suffer, there will always be things we’re grateful for—even if it is surviving another day. And when we get through hard times, gratitude can be the foundation to rebuild our lives and the world.
Tyrants don’t rule forever. They eventually fall, often from their own arrogance, corruption, and abject stupidity. What will be left is our legacy, and what we tell our children and grandchildren about how we survived difficult times. We want to be able to tell them we survived by keeping our dignity and values intact. When the tyrant demanded we surrender our identity and morals, we refused to give in. And the way we did it is through gratitude.
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Tremendous post! Great thoughts, well written.