Gratitude as self-defense

I’ve written before about the importance of gratitude in hard times, as a means of survival, and to appreciate what we still have. This year, gratitude is even more important. It’s a means of self-defense.

Tyrants aren’t just satisfied with your compliance. They don’t just want you to fear, obey, and worship them. They want you to sublimate your entire being into them. You can have no thought that isn’t centered around them. No joy can come except from them. No one has dreams that aren’t theirs. No one has an identity except as a part of them. You don’t just love Big Brother. You’re a part of Big Brother. You don’t exist without him.

Unless you defend your sense of self. Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust, wrote the following in Man’s Search for Meaning:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

That’s why gratitude becomes a part of self-defense.

When you live from gratitude, you realize there’s a whole source of goodness and generosity that exists outside the tyrant. You have parents who gave you the gift of life. You have the love and support of those who guided you on the way. You’ve experienced multiple small acts of kindness, like a stranger pointing the way…