Reason Man

The entry for September 7th is Epictetus again, and the claim would be unbearable coming from anyone with an easier life: that you carry nothing more powerful than your own reasoned choice, that it oversees everything else and answers to no one.

The page pairs him with Viktor Frankl. Three years in the camps, family killed, life’s work destroyed, freedom taken, and one thing left uncollected — the ability to decide what the suffering meant. He went further than survival with it. He treated the camp as a place where his theories were still being tested and where he could still be of use to the people around him.

I have started thinking of this as a superhero, because I hold the doctrine better when it is slightly ridiculous. Reason Man. No cape, no origin, one power: he decides what things mean to him. He cannot stop the cancelled flight, or the reorganisation, or the reply that does not come. His power does not reach an inch into the world of events. Which makes him the weakest figure in the canon and the only one who cannot be disarmed. People have tried, at industrial scale.

His villains are easier to name than to beat. The Autopilot, who runs the day while I am not looking and leaves me feeling perfectly free throughout. Duress, who narrows the frame until the only visible option is endure this. Obligation, the sympathetic one, who takes ten genuine musts and quietly files eighty more alongside them.

The same caution as day one. Told carelessly this becomes a way of informing people that their constraints are imaginary. Frankl’s were not. Mine are softer than his by a distance that ought to embarrass me, and I give in to them faster.

So, tonight’s line. Where am I under duress, and what is still mine inside it?