Living Is Not For The Weak

Where do values come from?

The experience of some suffering or hardship is universally treated as necessary for a well-formed life and good values.

Values help you confront hardship and death by guiding you through life in a way that minimizes physical and spiritual suffering. You use values to relate to yourself and others as harmoniously as possible.

Suffering is where a person’s actual values become separated from their stated or assumed ones. Suffering may be a test of values, or it may be the origin of values. It may affirm existing or forge new ones.

Whether that is through divine agency or through personal formulation, an accidental, undesigned part of life that is nothing to do with God, is a matter for debate. Some people may not even try to attribute their values to any source at all, as we will see in the case of the Arrow.

Who are the three protagonists who have views about values and suffering?

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD — nearly two decades. He had to deal with plague and constant war on the Danube frontier fighting Germanic tribes. His Meditations are a series of exhortations to himself to be the best leader and the best man he could be. He never meant them to be seen by others or published. Meditations is a private journal never intended for publication — unpolished, repetitive, written by a man literally trying to talk himself into being good while running an empire and living in a military camp. There is no audience to entertain.

Mark Manson is a star blogger living in New York who has over two million readers. Subtle Art is a commercial trade book, written for mass appeal, with jokes, profanity, and a deliberately anti-self-help marketing hook. Manson markets his ideas in a way that Marcus Aurelius never had to.

Oliver Queen is the superhero of the Arrow drama series based on the DC Comics character. He is the spoilt son of a billionaire who becomes superhero Arrow after five years away from home. On his return, he and his team wreak revenge on the wealthy criminal class who ruin his home Starling City. His story is a modern fairy-tale based on echoes of the super hero all the way from Odysseus. Like them, he goes through an ordeal, he slays monsters in the form of crime lords in Starling City and undergoes a real test in his homecoming.

Odysseus returns after twenty years to find his household occupied by men consuming his wealth and courting his wife in his absence, Odyssey, Books 21-22. In the same way, Oliver returns from Lian Yu with a list of corrupt men provided by his dead father who have also violated his home, Starling City. Like Odysseus, he reclaims his home through the use of bow and arrows.

What does Marcus Aurelius say about hardship?

Marcus Aurelius shares in the Stoic idea that life is struggle even if he may be half-joking when he says it is a struggle to get out of bed each morning. Struggle is the natural condition, not an aberration. When he wrote this passage, he was probably in a military camp in the Danube province of the empire, fighting Germanic tribes — the Marcomanni and Quadi. From Meditations, Book 5, Section 20:

“Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

The obstacle may change what you do, but it does not change the will to do it.

Struggle, for Aurelius, is a kind of gift — the necessary condition for becoming what you are meant to be. Hardship does not mean that something has gone wrong, rather it probably means that you are doing what needs to be done.

What does Manson say about hardship?

Unlike Marcus Aurelius, Manson challenges the prevailing culture of his society. His self- help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is deliberately written to be the antithesis of feel-good, positive thinking, self-esteem self-help texts and social media.
Manson writes that life is composed of failures, loss, regrets and even death. Some find escape from psychological pain in highs: addiction, blaming other people, outrage and indignation, doom-scrolling on social media, climbing mountains, sky-diving. But it is more fulfilling to confront problems rather than using palliatives or narratives to downplay them. Solving problems as opposed to numbing the pain is what brings satisfaction. Happiness requires struggle.

He says this as an antidote to our current culture of entitlement, victimhood and narcissism; self-esteem to the point where failure is never admitted, nobody can have a different opinion to you and nobody can say no to you.

What does Oliver Queen, the Arrow, say about hardship?

This is how Oliver Queen introduces himself, Arrow Pilot (S1E1):

‘The name of the island they found me on is Lian Yu. It’s Mandarin for “purgatory.” I’ve been stranded here for five years. I’ve dreamt of my rescue every cold black night since then. For five years I’ve had only one thought, one goal - survive. Survive and one day return home. The island held many dangers. To live, I had make myself more than what I was, to forge myself into a weapon. I am returning not the boy who was shipwrecked, but the man who will bring justice to those who have poisoned my city. My name is Oliver Queen.’

As Anatoly Knyazev, the former KGB operative and reluctant crime lord, says in Arrow Crucible (S2E4): ‘Living is not for the weak’.

The hardship burns away weakness and impurity and reveals something stronger and more essential underneath. Oliver is no longer a spoilt, self-indulgent trust fund brat. He is a superhero with a mission to save the city.

What were the crucibles they underwent?

Marcus Aurelius went through his crucible in the military camp, Manson at the edge of the cliff at the Cape of Good Hope and Oliver Queen on Lian Yu. Each came out harder and stronger on the other side of their epiphany.

They have an attitude to pain and struggle that is neither pessimism nor cheerfulness, but something more like clear-eyed acceptance with active engagement. Life is hard, it is always going to be hard, and that hardness is precisely what makes a well-lived life possible. For Oliver Queen, hardness allows him to fulfil his mission and clean out Starling City.

What does Marcus Aurelius say about the death?

Marcus Aurelius speaks of the transience of life. From Meditations, Book 4, Section 48:

Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen, tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

The imminent prospect of death keeps pain, struggle and suffering in perspective. Good values help the struggle and make living less onerous.

Marcus Aurelius and Manson use mortality as a clarifying device, but differently. Marcus Aurelius returns to death constantly as a memento mori meant to dissolve vanity and ambition — a near-daily meditation. Manson uses mortality more as his closing argument rather than the structural backbone of the whole work.

Marcus Aurelius might think that it is better to keep death in mind on a daily basis so you can constantly dissolve vanity, keep perspective and identify what is really important. Manson just seems to see it as another tool to be used from time to time in navigating through life. What does Manson say about death?

Manson writes about the death of his teenage friend who drowns in a lake by a condo when they are at a party. He describes it as a seminal event, a turning point in his life. As a reaction to this tragedy, he gets his own life in order.
He ends his book with reflections on sitting on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. One slip or mistake and he would plunge down the cliff to certain death. An onlooker thinks he is contemplating suicide. Confronting mortality obliterates superficial values in life. Death keeps life in perspective. Death encourages us to adopt good values.

What is Oliver Queen’s, the Arrow’s, attitude towards death?

For Oliver, death is not a way to keep life in perspective and remember the importance of good values. For him, how much he takes pleasure in killing is a measure of his self-worth. He admits to Prometheus, one of his arch-enemies, that he kills because he likes it, but he feels so guilty that he can only say it under torture.

After Tommy Merlyn dies, he commits to never killing again except when absolutely necessary. At that moment, he sees killing as something that damages the killer, not just the victim. When he later kills Billy Malone because Prometheus manipulates him, he refuses to accept the manipulation as an extenuating circumstance. He carries the guilt as some form of self-punishment.

Death, as in the death of other people by his agency, triggers a moral struggle between taking pleasure in killing as opposed to the guilt of doing it.

What values does Marcus Aurelius have?

For Marcus Aurelius, virtue is the only true good. Everything else — wealth, health, status, pleasure, long life, even the survival of Rome — falls into the category the Stoics called adiaphora: ‘indifferents’. You can take them or leave them. Meditations is saturated with duty — to fellow citizens, to the empire, to humankind as a rational community (“what’s not good for the hive isn’t good for the bee”). Marcus Aurelius’s self-discipline exists largely in service of his obligations to others. Marcus Aurelius’s values come from the logos — a rational cosmic order that exists independent of him, which he is trying to align with. His values are not his invention; he is discovering them by reasoning correctly about nature.

What values does Manson have?

For Manson, good values are based in reality, socially constructive, immediate and controllable. Bad values are socially destructive and neither immediate nor controllable. Examples of good values are honesty, curiosity, charity, humility and creativity. Bad values are popularity, dominance through manipulation or violence, indiscriminate pleasure.

This is the rule he gives about categorizing them:

When we have poor values – that is the poor standards that we set for ourselves and others – we are essentially giving f*cks about the things that don’t matter, things that in fact make our lives worse.  But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our f*cks to something better – toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects. 

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Chapter 4 – Defining Good and Bad Values

Manson’s values do not come from outside the individual. There is no cosmic rational order to discover. You choose your own values, and the only test is whether you are willing to suffer for them. This is a much more relativistic, modern, existentialist move. Marcus Aurelius would likely see it as dangerously ungrounded.

What values do the Arrow team have?

Oliver, Felicity Smoake, Thea Queen, Diggle and Roy Harper all think about and act on fundamental values such as friendship, loyalty, courage and sacrifice. If one of them is captured by a villain, they do not hesitate to formulate and execute a rescue plan. They are acutely aware of the moral need to help the weak. They go to extraordinary lengths to save Starling City and protect the innocent from crime gangs and earthquakes. They are also aware of the destruction caused by secrets and lies. The Queen family has a large inventory of secrets and lies. Even the villains are intensely moral in that they know they are violating the natural order but make no apology for it.

However, the Arrow team never explicitly discuss what their values are. There is an unspoken consensus among them as to what is right. How to achieve it is a different matter.

The only member of the team who chooses their values to some extent is Oliver himself. He went through transformation on Lian Yu to become armored, to acquire purpose and pursue justice, but he also went through transformation to find freedom from expectation, Arrow Muse of Fire [S1.E7]:

Helena: I know it must have been hell for you. Alone on that island, for five years. But, um… Oliver: But, what? Helena: But was there ever a day when you were just… happy to be away from everything? No pressure from your family, no need to be the person that everyone else expect you to be. Was there ever a day when… Oliver: When I didn’t feel lost, I felt free? More than one. And those are the days that I miss.

He came to see freedom as a good value.

The Arrow team all agree on their values even if they sometimes disagree on how to interpret and apply them. They do not explicitly acknowledge the divine as the source of their morality. They are acutely aware of pain and suffering, and danger and death, but this is not what informs their morality either. The source of their values seems to be unexamined.

What is the ultimate authority for Marcus Aurelius and Manson?

All these views on values may be reasonable but it is important to acknowledge whether they are externally justified, as in the case of Marcus Aurelius or internally constructed, as in the case of Manson. In the case of Oliver Queen, his suffering forges him and his continued struggle validates what he has become without saying whether it is cosmic, chosen or just part of the story.

Marcus Aurelius is almost entirely interior. He is a man wrestling with his own mind. Manson, despite the breezy exterior, is also fundamentally about inner values and inner choices. Both would agree that human beings tend to ego, appetite and reaction, and that they need some kind of pressure to turn towards something larger and more stable.

The disagreement is about what that larger thing is: God, or self-constructed meaning. Marcus Aurelius says it is given — it exists whether you acknowledge it or not. Manson says the larger thing is chosen — and that is what makes him distinctly modern, almost existentialist, in a way that ancient sources are not.

Do the Arrow team appeal to an ultimate authority for their values?

This larger thing is not discussed in the Arrow but it is implied and pervasive in the quasi-religious experience it offers. There is no mention of God in the Arrow series but it is an intensely moral drama. We escape from the banality of our everyday existence by living with billionaires who have superhuman powers in a fantasy universe. They are engaged in a life and death crusade for good against evil and the Arrow is the savior.

God is implied in the Arrow by the power of the values they live by but is not openly spoken of. It leaves us to infer a worldview from plot, dialog and characterization rather than presenting an argued position. Pop culture does not need to justify its metaphysics in the way that philosophy or self-help books do.

Can you adhere to your values without an ultimate authority?

If your values are grounded in something you consider separate and greater than you, as in the case of Marcus Aurelius, then when you are suffering and you want to give up, you can appeal to something outside you and greater and stronger than you, and that gives you strength.

If your values are self-authored, as with Manson, the only backing you have is your prior commitment. When willpower and mood are failing, you are appealing to a past version of yourself who settled on your values, but your self-authored values are only as strong as your ongoing willingness to keep on reaffirming them.

If your values are unexamined as in the Arrow drama, you cannot articulate why you stuck to your values or why you gave them up. You cannot learn until the crisis is over whether what kept you going was durable because it comes from a higher authority or just habit.

You cannot tell the difference between ‘this is true’, ‘this is what I chose’ or ‘this is what I happen to have been given’. If you can tell the difference, you can defend them when under pressure.

How does genre affect the presentation of values?

Marcus Aurelius writes philosophically and Manson is a self-help genre author. They are making claims about how somebody should live and therefore explicitly justify their positions.

Arrow is telling a story about how its team members live. It is fiction. It is simply depicting their moral world and does not have to defend one as a proposition. Different genres have different obligations.

Can you be serious about morality without acknowledging God?

Manson and the Arrow team show that moral seriousness can exist without explicit divine authority. We can speculate that Marcus Aurelius would have respected their discipline, their willingness to suffer for their values and their serious introspection. However, he might have said that virtue has to be discovered in a rational cosmic order, not chosen. Sincerity is not the same as truth. Self-authored values, however sincere, have no foundation. He might have admired them but not have called them virtuous.