THE MAKING OF MEANING ■ 233school, clerked for a famous justice, became a judge himself, and at the
zenith of his career spent years in the cabinet helping the president
develop stronger civil rights policies and legislation to help the disadvan
taged. Until the end of his life his thoughts, actions, and feelings were
unified by the theme he had chosen as a teenager. Whatever he did to
the end of his days was part of one great game, held together by goals
and rules he had agreed to abide by. He felt his life had meaning, and
enjoyed confronting the challenges that came his way.
E.’s example illustrates several common characteristics of how
people forge discovered life themes. In the first place, the theme is in
many cases a reaction to a great personal hurt suffered in early life—to being
orphaned, abandoned, or treated unjustly. But what matters is not the
trauma per se; the external event never determines what the theme will
be. What matters is the interpretation that one places on the suffering.
If a father is a violent alcoholic, his children have several options for
explaining what is wrong: they can tell themselves that the father is a
bastard who deserves to die; that he is a man, and all men are weak and
violent; that poverty is the cause of the father’s affliction, and the only
way to avoid his fate is to become rich; that a large part of his behavior
is due to helplessness and lack of education. Only the last of these
equally likely explanations leads in the direction of a life theme such as
E. was able to develop.
So the next question is, What kinds of explanations for one’s
suffering lead to negentropic life themes? If a child abused by a violent
father concluded that the problem was inherent in human nature, that
all men were weak and violent, there would not be much he or she could
do about it. How could a child change human nature? To find purpose
in suffering one must interpret it as a possible challenge. In this case, by
formulating his problem as being due to the helplessness of disenfran
chised minorities, and not to his father’s faults, E. was able to develop
appropriate skills—his legal training—to confront the challenges he saw
at the root of what had been wrong in his personal life. What transforms
the consequences of a traumatic event into a challenge that gives mean
ing to life is what in the previous chapter was called a dissipative structure,
or the ability to draw order from disorder.
Finally, a complex, negentropic life theme is rarely formulated as
the response to just a personal problem. Instead, the challenge becomes
generalized to other people, or to mankind as a whole. For example, in E.’s
case, he attributed the problem of helplessness not only to himself or
to his own family but to all poor immigrants in the same situation as
his parents had been. Thus whatever solution he found to his own