Viktor Frankl and Free Will

Viktor Frankl and Free Will Are our lives decided for us the moment we open our eyes for the first time? Can anybody truly force another to do something? These are questions humans have posed for centuries, how free is free will? One of the best and easily available examples in history of this is the holocaust, how the people of Germany and Europe act when there was something adherently wrong going on. No matter how involved a person was from SS officer to a christian living in Berlin most had a choice to go against the orders of Hitler and the Third Reich in order to help a obviously suffering people. Existentialist Victor Frankl captures this in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, where he gives his account of the ins and outs of concentration camp life and goes on analyze it through the eyes of a older man. With the war over we still search the reasons why so many millions were able to take such horrible orders and carry them out just because they were told to. In recent years we have been able to turn the findings of the Milgram Experiment and a experiment done by a group of students at Stanford to try and understand more how people make choices. When you look at Frankl’s book and the two experiments it can be hard to decipher what each really means, if humans do have the power of choice, but when one can look at it closer what it all boils down to is just Frankl argues that all human’s do have free will, it just takes a certain kind of person to exercise it, and make the choice that others around them do not. At the root of the three situations is one overarching question that is being analyzed, how people react to a cruel situation where they have the power and there aren’t any real rules. In the case of Germany and the Nazis the cruelty towards those who were seen as inferior humans went through several very distinct steps, as it started they were just relocated into ghettos of central Europe’s biggest cities and although they had certain rights taken