I talk a lot about suffering on this blog, and I suppose this raises the question: What exactly do I mean by suffering? Throwing around a term without actually discussing what it means is lazy, and so I suppose some discussion of what is meant by suffering is called for.
According to Oxford’s English Dictionary, to “suffer” can mean “[intransitive] to be badly affected by a disease, pain, sadness, a lack of something, etc.” Except for being affected by “pain” and “a lack of something”, this is not what I mean for the most part. The next definition is more relevant, which is: “[transitive] to experience something unpleasant, such as injury, defeat, or loss.” The key word here is “loss”. This is what I mean most generally.
“Loss” could mean loss of energy, loss of time, loss of money, or loss of anything, really. In order to accomplish something, a loss of some sort is necessary. A sacrifice must be made. Physics tells us that the net amount of energy in the universe is always the same. So, in order for a person to accomplish something, some energy must move from one place to another, as energy cannot be created.
But what if you get other people to expend their energy and resources in order to accomplish your ends, you may ask? Of course this happens all the time. One may only look at the world briefly and realize that it is incredibly common for this to happen. It’s the essence of any economy based on money or barter of goods.
But people who do this still do not exist in a vacuum. They pay a price. The bourgeoisie of a society may own the means of production and hire labor in order to operate it, but the price is to be hated by those beneath them, having to live a life of manipulation and deceit in order to control others, maintaining a vampiric machine of death that sucks their workers dry. Their existence is constantly threatened by those beneath them, and their survival is predicated on how well they deceive those who outnumber them. This is a form of suffering, and perhaps one day the “loss” they incur will be too great for their survival.
The specific form of suffering meant, then, is the loss of energy. Suffering that we’re dealing with on this blog manifests in manifold ways in the world, in the workplace, in education, in daily chores and errands, in aging, in politics, in psychological development, in addiction, in religion, and many other ways. I could have said “work”, but “work” is too narrow of a word for what I’m talking about.
Suffering is a giving, a giving of what one has, into the world, or from one part of one’s self to another. Ideally, one receives exactly in proportion to what one gives, but this is never the case. Entropy is a fact of life, unfortunately.
