How Society Splinters when Life is Absurd

Four existential coping strategies, and the relevance of gross social inequalities

Suppose there were something rotten in Denmark. But assume “Denmark” means the whole world, and what’s rotten might be our existential situation.

Assume, for the moment, that if you’re a person who understands at least roughly what’s going on, you’re liable to recognize that the situation is foul. And the more you understand, the fouler it seems.

The situation in question would be that life is unfair in lots of ways. Circumstances set some of us up to succeed, and others up to fail, and both winners and losers die just the same, so the world doesn’t care what we do, which means the life-affirming cultures in which we immerse ourselves are gaslighting us.

Suppose that some such cynical view of life is true. In that case, there would be four main types of people in relation to that situation.

The four ways of coping with life’s absurdity

• First, and most commonly, there would be those who understand things the least. These folks would be the happiest because simple minds are content with simple pleasures. Indeed, they’d be happy in so far as they’re being exploited — by their instincts, their evolutionary drive, and by the predominant forces in society. These workhorses would have little ambition to be masters of their fate. Thankful for their blinders, they’d lack the alienation that comes with idealism: they’d have no suspicion that life generally is absurd and nightmarish because they wouldn’t be caught up with meta perspectives or with visions of how things generally should be.

In contrast to that main, “well-adjusted” group, which would comprise perhaps three quarters of a developed society’s population, you’d have three groups that differ in how they respond to their understanding that our basic condition in life is eerily awry.

• Second, then, you’d have those who respond to their sense that life is unfair by shrugging off social norms and attempting clumsily to get ahead and to take what they want by breaking the law. Their clumsiness, viciousness, or bad luck gets them caught, so they make up the incarcerated, outlaw class.
• Third, you’d have those with the same suspicions and drive to capitalize on the freedom that comes with recognizing life’s absurdity, except that these would be the winners. Their intelligence or more fortunate circumstances enable them to choose dubious, loophole careers in which they thrive, so they dominate society as cynical elites. Technically, they might follow the law but only because their industries have been carved out by fellow amoralists. They’d work on Wall Street, for instance, or in a pseudo-democratic government bureaucracy.
• Fourth, you’d have the dropouts, those whose disgust for life happens not to be paired with shameless ambition or skill in exploiting folk’s low expectations. This fourth class would be too intellectual and idealistic for its good. Some might commit suicide, while others would live on the fringes of society. They’d be the knowing, relatively innocent losers in life, with neither the temerity to commit crimes, nor the cunning to thrive as social predators or parasites. Like Ivan Karamazov, they’d return God his entrance ticket to a harmonious life because the complete, inner loser suffers like Christ, for knowledge of a greater truth, namely that life is a travesty.

I expect that something like that analysis would capture the main social divisions, assuming the existentialist is correct in declaring that life is absurd. The point would be not just that life for people isn’t ideal, but that the mismatch between the basic facts and how we imagine those facts should be is so dire that the very knowledge of this mismatch is toxic.

The evolution of personhood would be like an atomic accident that radiates horror in all directions. Have you contracted the radiation sickness? Are you aware of what being a person is like, fundamentally speaking, in an impersonal universe? Have you coped with that condition by arming yourself with a career in villainy? Or do you just observe life’s absurdities from a distance, stewing in melancholy and in misplaced wisdom?

Is life absurd?

The question, of course, is how we know that none of that analysis applies.

On what grounds can we discount such a worst-case scenario? Do life’s goods outweigh its degradations? Is life meaningful enough, after all, so that the sick abusers in society aren’t suffering nobly and their villainy isn’t vindicated by any foundational injustice? Would the blinders be not on the teeming workhorses, but solely on the criminals, elite sociopaths, and intellectual dreamers?

Without getting lost here in philosophical and religious disputes about whether life is absurd, or about what it could even mean to ask the question of life’s meaning, we might think that the workhorse’s happiness speaks for itself. What expectation could be more realistic than to assume we ought to enjoy our family, work, and hobbies, and to grow old and die, leaving others some fond memories of our character and of our modest achievements?

Here, though, the grotesque social divisions throughout history do us a disservice by proving that it doesn’t call for an outright miracle to want more than working-class folks have ever had. The cadre of royals or plutocrats that live in obscene luxury and power prove that a superhuman lifestyle is possible on earth. That divide between the peasants and the aristocracy is no philosophical dream or religious myth. For thousands of years in all parts of the world, this hierarchy has persisted in historic reality.

We can observe, then, that that hierarchy is itself a sign that life is absurd. The masses can’t even reassure themselves that they have all that they could reasonably hope to have in life, because the elites come along and demonstrate that the masses are, in fact, blindered, cattle-like workhorses compared to the aristocrats. The masses are blind, at least, to the luxuries and privileges which the rulers enjoy every day.

That great wealth of the minority is typically acquired in part by a lack of scruples, and this dismissal of moral concerns amounts to an understanding that the social enterprise is a fraud. Those who succeed in plundering their way to the top break the rules because they have no respect for nature or society. In effect, at least, the aristocrats perpetrate frauds to repay life for having defrauded all of us, which makes them reverse Robbin Hoods.

But regardless of whether the elites are initially justified in their cynicism, their very existence which stands in stark contrast to the workhorse’s mode of being proves that the existential sham is real, that the masses work like brutes and slaves to enrich the monstrous predators who frolic and scheme from the inner sanctums of their palaces or skyscrapers, and that the world carries on as if nothing were amiss.

We tried, just now, to let the average person’s happiness speak for itself, but it can do no such thing. As soon as you posit that lower- or middle-class contentment, you run up against its all-too real juxtaposition with the superhuman lifestyle of the rich and the famous. Perhaps like the lottery, this contrast provides meaning by enabling the little people to dream of one day winning big. But the elite privileges necessarily never arrive for the majority.

Does the mere dream of being a superhuman speak for itself? Is it ennobling to dream of going to Heaven when you die or of acquiring vast fame and fortune in the present life, when in most cases those dreams are preposterous and vain? Isn’t the futility of such wishes itself a sign that something’s fundamentally awry?

If life is fully absurd, it’s likely there are those four basic types of victims. It wouldn’t really matter to which type we belong, but we might try to recognize our existential position just so we could say we came to know ourselves before the curtain fell.