Crushed; or: The Sweet Illusion

Painting by Eliran Kantor

In the days following the disaster involving Voepass flight 2283 that crashed in Vinhedo, Brazil, killing everyone on board, the Forensic Medical Institute ruled that the deaths occurred due to the impact of the aircraft with the ground, which was strong enough to cause catastrophic injuries in fractions of a second. According to the coroners, the burning of the bodies occurred posthumously. It is never good to receive the news of a tragedy, but knowing that the victims' suffering ended relatively quickly brings some relief, although we know that mental suffering possibly preceded their end during the plane's descent.

As soon as I read this news, I had the misfortune of seeing a comment that I can only classify as part of the sweet illusion that overflows in members of our species. One person said they were absolutely certain that no one on the plane suffered any kind of pain, not even before the impact, since, according to them, God would not allow it. According to them, when the suffering and pain of death are too great, the universe conspires to spiritually anesthetize the victims.

How pathetic. Such a belief would make Ivan Karamazov even more indignant with God and those who believe in him. And rightly so. In one of the most iconic passages of Dostoevsky’s novel, Ivan tells his brother, Alyosha, that he cannot accept any compromise with God, given the abyss of torments that creatures go through. The character mentions some horrific examples. Among them, Ottoman soldiers who, during the suppression of a revolt among the Slavs, threw babies into the air and impaled them with their bayonets in front of their desperate mothers. Ivan says he cannot forgive God for such things, no matter how magnificent the afterlife is for the devout.

Ivan says this to Alyosha, his younger and religious brother, who is not an idiot. Alyosha knows very well that there is deep pain in the world. It is a conversation between two people who, although they have different conclusions about God and existence, admit a common starting point: the reality that the pain in the world is absurd and difficult to measure. That is why they are great characters of literature. But there is a multitude in the real world who do not admit the reality of pain. To make matters worse, a considerable number of those who buy into this pathetic illusion live with brutal horrors in their daily lives. There are poor people who live in areas of urban conflict who, because they are pacified by faith, believe in the sweet illusion.

This reminds me of when I was a child and, for some reason, I would often hear the following stupidity in conversations among adults: people who fall from great heights, whether from a building or an airplane, die instantly of a heart attack. What? What do you mean? People who have heart attacks feel terrible pain, even when they soon lose consciousness. I remember thinking, as a child, “But what about people who skydive? Why don’t they die automatically too?” It made no sense at all. It was just another version of the sweet lie that people tell each other — and themselves — that there are far fewer horrors in the world than there actually are.

In an age of information abundance, denying this is ridiculous. One only needs to look briefly into the most horrifying depths of human experience to find obvious examples that, no, human beings, like other animals, are not numbed and comforted when facing a desperate end. The anthropologist Ernest Becker stated that civilizations are based on the denial of death. I will go further: part of our psyche is based on the denial of extreme pain and suffering. But we only need to take a quick look at what Mexican cartels do, dismembering and skinning their victims alive with exquisite sadism, to understand that, outside of a surgical and humanized environment, there is no anesthesia or comfort.

Now imagine the victims of extermination camps being violently taken to be slaughtered and locked inside gas chambers. Dozens of naked and desperate men, women, children and old people, breathing a poison that took minutes to kill them all, in a painful and excruciating death. There are those who believe that the spiritual world would make those victims feel comforted, anesthetized, and welcomed with open arms in the afterlife. In addition to being pathetic, this sweet illusion manages to disrespect the terminal horror faced by millions of sentient beings since the beginning of time.

Facing the world without illusions requires at least accepting that we came here without our consent to be crushed alive, one way or another, sooner or later. All of us, as sentient and finite beings, will be crushed in one way or another before our end. Of course, pain and death are not all the same. Dying in a bed, sedated and surrounded by family or dedicated medical professionals is not the same as being skinned, dismembered or burned alive. Some are unluckier than others. But we will all be crushed in the end. We are all on a journey towards execution: some in more comfortable seats, yes, but all with one destination. What will change is the manner and time of our deaths.

Pleasures have limits. Pains do not. In ‘Tears and Saints’, Cioran wrote that the limit of all pain is an even greater pain. Our culinary and orgasmic pleasures have limits, even if some manage to extend them further than others. Pains, on the other hand, only end with unconsciousness — which in many cases takes a long time to arrive — or with the nothingness of death. It is only through idiocy that we are able to deny this. It is not even a question of accepting or rejecting certain realities, but rather of recognizing them.

Between the thinker who rejects and the one who affirms existence as it is, full of pain, there is a fundamental division that is based on the affections of each person. However, both recognize the pain inherent in being. The problem is that many do not even recognize this in the first place. This is why many laypeople, when they read philosophy, think that all serious philosophers are pessimists and averse to existence. Laypeople come to this conclusion precisely because even the philosophers who most accept the world and do not question whether we should leave it behind describe the world of becoming as brutal or hostile.

The sweet illusion does not take hold of those who truly think, even if the thinker still worships life. Thinkers who worship life merely develop other mechanisms to absolve existence: they create other illusions, better elaborated, better founded. This is the case of Alyosha, in fact. This is the case of Dostoevsky himself, since the hero of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ is precisely Alyosha, and not Ivan, his nihilistic brother. Although Ivan is the most interesting character, he represents the ideas that Dostoevsky wants to defeat, since he himself was a defender of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

But to wish that people so immersed in the sweet lie have the sensitivity of a Dostoevsky is asking too much, even though Dostoevsky is far from being a nihilist or a pessimist. It is even more disconcerting to want them to see the world of becoming in the same way as a Schopenhauer or a Mainländer.

by Fernando Olszewski