Do you think everything bad has from a different standpoint or perspective a good aspect?

[noname223]

The whole thing does not have to be fully good but it should have a good aspect.

There was a edgy David Foster Wallace story in Brief interviews with hideous men. There is the claim there was something positive about the holocaust. Without the holocaust Viktor Frankl could have never writen such good books, helping others. It is speculative whether the author really believed that.

I discussed this topic with the woman I dated and almost was in a relationship with. Her most edgy take was actually a massive genocide of 90% of humankind would have a positive effect on the climate and humanity would sort of profit from it. (She had a very high IQ.) I knew she wanted kids and I just told her that something like antinatalism exists and she called that crazy. Lol. I think though her stances were more nuanced but I won't go into details. I told her I think the rich and powerful have the highest CO2 emission and exactly these people would probably survive such a mass genocide.

I don't fully buy it. There is the theodicy question. Why is there suffering? Because suffering has a meaning? But which meaning has it if a child with 4 dies from cancer in agony? Maybe the pain stopped. but why does an almighty God let that happen. (creating such illnesses)

 

[lost_one]

Short answer: No.

Not everything has a lesson or positive side behind it, some tragedies, some horrors are just that, tragedies and horrors.

Being defeatist would not be very adaptive, same reason we have the Survival instinct, suicide is not "positive" to our species, it is fascinating really, but a little beside the point, "finding the positive" in the worst of situations is a defense mechanism, to keep us going forward, because again we humans, and many other animals have this survival imperative, it's in our DNA. So sometimes it might not make logical sense, but people will make stuff up, so they can keep existing, so that existance can feel bearable. So they can feel better.

I think it is a completely different question, the one of why suffering exists... and to me like 97% of everything that exists, it doesn't. I doesn't have a reason to exist. I belive that nothing has an inherent meaning, things only have the meaning we give to them. That is why only you can give your suffering meaning. (I also don't belive in god).

All that I said obviously is not a fact, that is my opinion, I just wanted to make that distinction clear.

 

[quietwoods]

From Victor Frankl's worldview, you can absolutely find good in horrible situations. Doesn't mean the horrible situation has a good aspect. There is nothing you can objectively say was good about the holocaust. But people, including Frankl, found goodness while trapped inside horror.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I just think it's a way we try to cope with the bad stuff that does and will happen. It can be a way of trying to get over it. I don't think it's good justification that it needs to happen in the first place though- if that is part of the argument.

Maybe that author would still have written wonderful books without the holocaust experience. It's true that some people can turn pain into beauty but, it's not necessarily needed for that.

Really bad events that happen to us can change us for the better certainly. Also the worst though. How many paedophiles would there be if they themselves hadn't been assaulted? That's not to say it always follows suit but, it sometimes does.

I think for some events, there really aren't obvious positives. Just a desperate attempt to pick up the fragments and try to make something good from them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Personally, I'd welcome the extinction of the human race though. Give all the other animals a chance.

 

[Apathy79]

There's an element of you only know how good a normal life really is by comparison to something awful. And the more awful, the better everything else feels by comparison. It's half the reason I visit those gore sites or watch horror movies or kidnapping documentaries. As bad as my life gets, it's never THAT bad. If everything is just perfect all the time by today's standards, perfect becomes normal and anything deviating from that becomes horrific.

So from that angle, yeah there's an upside to all of it. You can't recognise the good without the bad.

Then there's the karmic side. If you believe in karma and its occurrence across multiple lifetimes, then the basic assumption is a mass shooter or a Hitler type, probably has an awful lot of lifetimes to pay off as a child with cancer who dies in agony. Maybe we see it as tragic because we don't know the full timeline and we're starting from this birth, when the fuller picture would reveal that's what was required.