Everything You Know Is Wrong, Part I

[It seems like a good time to examine some utterly wrong statements that many people take for granted.  Number 1 in a series.]

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."  --Friedrich Nietzsche

Everyone's heard this one, or something very close.  And from what I can tell the vast majority of us take it as gospel.  

And admittedly it makes a lot of surface sense.  It expresses some ideal of human nature . . . the idea that a human (and by extension, humanity) is made better and stronger by struggle and misfortune and pain, emerging stronger on the other side (or dead, in which case presumably it doesn't matter).

Reality, however, simply does not bear this out.  We're surrounded by examples of cases where people were not killed, but did not emerge stronger.  They are broken, or bitter, or loon-ass crazy.  They end up mean, or criminal, or narcissistic, or fearful to the point of paralysis.  Some of these people are hidden away in our jails and mental institutions; most are not.  They are in our lives, often, and all around us.  Sometimes we're acutely aware of their damage, sometimes not.  Sometimes our own damage prevents us from seeing the extent of the damage around us.

The really insidious inaccuracy of "that which does not kill us makes us stronger" lies not in the failures, however, but rather in the apparent successes.  We can all see and understand, to varying degrees, the sad or neurotic or fearful broken person, trampled down by the harsh randomness of life and the unique hell that other people can be.  But the other end of the spectrum, the ones made so much stronger, apparently, are harder to see for what they represent, and create so much more misery in the world.  The most annoying and depressing "Debbie Downer" among us creates a tiny fraction of the negativity and damage that the sadistic boss, the bully, the unapologetic corporate scumbag, the Type A crazy person, create.  And yet we celebrate those people and ridicule those who are too timid to step over others to get what they want.

We have confused survival with strength.  The "strength" we admire is not heroic; it is the sad residue of a spirit that takes to the crushing other spirits in order to preserve itself.  A few, a very few people, rise above the randomness and pain of life and emerge truly stronger and better.  Real strength lies in seeing what has happened, processing it, and letting it go.  Emerging at the conclusion of that process is a truly strong person -- tough without being brittle, powerful without being a bully, focused without being blind to the world outside.

That which does not kill us . . . does not kill us.  It can make us stronger, if we were strong enough to see the possibility of emerging stronger to begin with.  It's not much of an exaggeration to say that recognizing the truth of that is crucial to humanity's future.