Everything Is F*cked

A Book About Hope

Mark Manson

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062888471
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Réussite personnelle

New York Times Bestseller

"Just because everything appears to be a mess doesn't mean you have to be one. Mark Manson's book is a call to arms for a better life and better world and could not be more needed right now." —Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy

From the author of the international mega-bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck comes a counterintuitive guide to the problems of hope.

We live in an interesting time. Materially, everything is the best it's ever been—we are freer, healthier and wealthier than any people in human history. Yet, somehow everything seems to be irreparably and horribly f*cked—the planet is warming, governments are failing, economies are collapsing, and everyone is perpetually offended on Twitter. At this moment in history, when we have access to technology, education and communication our ancestors couldn't even dream of, so many of us come back to an overriding feeling of hopelessness.

What's going on? If anyone can put a name to our current malaise and help fix it, it's Mark Manson. In 2016, Manson published The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, a book that brilliantly gave shape to the ever-present, low-level hum of anxiety that permeates modern living. He showed us that technology had made it too easy to care about the wrong things, that our culture had convinced us that the world owed us something when it didn't—and worst of all, that our modern and maddening urge to always find happiness only served to make us unhappier. Instead, the "subtle art" of that title turned out to be a bold challenge: to choose your struggle; to narrow and focus and find the pain you want to sustain. The result was a book that became an international phenomenon, selling millions of copies worldwide while becoming the #1 bestseller in 13 different countries.

In Everthing Is F*cked, Manson turns his gaze from the inevitable flaws within each individual self to the endless calamities taking place in the world around us. Drawing from the pool of psychological research on these topics, as well as the timeless wisdom of philosophers such as Plato, Nietzsche, and Tom Waits, he dissects religion and politics and the uncomfortable ways they have come to resemble one another. He looks at our relationships with money, entertainment and the internet, and how too much of a good thing can psychologically eat us alive. He openly defies our definitions of faith, happiness, freedom—and even of hope itself.

With his usual mix of erudition and where-the-f*ck-did-that-come-from humor, Manson takes us by the collar and challenges us to be more honest with ourselves and connected with the world in ways we probably haven't considered before. It's another counterintuitive romp through the pain in our hearts and the stress of our soul. One of the great modern writers has produced another book that will set the agenda for years to come.

Part I:

Hope

Chapter 1

The Uncomfortable Truth

On a small plot of land in the monotonous countryside of central Europe, amid the warehouses of a former military barracks, a nexus of geographically concentrated evil would arise, denser and darker than anything the world had ever seen. Over the span of four years, more than 1.3 million people would be systematically sorted, enslaved, tortured, and murdered here, and it would all happen in an area slightly larger than Central Park in Manhattan. And no one would do anything to stop it.

Except for one man.

It is the stuff of fairy tales and comic books: a hero marches headlong into the fiery jaws of hell to confront some great manifestation of evil. The odds are impossible. The rationale is laughable. Yet our fantastical hero never hesitates, never flinches. He stands tall and slays the dragon, crushes the demon invaders, saves the planet and maybe even a princess or two.

And for a brief time, there is hope.

But this is not a story of hope. This is a story of everything being completely and utterly fucked. Fucked in proportions and on scales that today, with the comfort of our free Wi-Fi and oversize Snuggie blankets, you and I can hardly imagine.

Witold Pilecki was already a war hero before he decided to sneak into Auschwitz. As a young man, Pilecki had been a decorated officer in the Polish-Soviet War of 1918. He had kicked the Communists in the nuts before most people even knew what a pinko Commie bastard was. After the war, Pilecki moved to the Polish countryside, married a schoolteacher, and had two kids. He enjoyed riding horses and wearing fancy hats and smoking cigars. Life was simple and good.

Then that whole Hitler thing happened, and before Poland could get both its boots on, the Nazis had already Blitzkrieged through half the country. Poland lost its entire territory in a little more than a month. It wasn’t exactly a fair fight: while the Nazis invaded in the west, the Soviets invaded in the east. It was like being stuck between a rock and a hard place—except the rock was a megalomaniacal mass murderer trying to conquer the world and the hard place was rampant, senseless genocide. I’m still not sure which was which.

Early on, the Soviets were actually far crueler than the Nazis. They had done this shit before, you know—the whole “overthrow a government and enslave a population to your faulty ideology” thing. The Nazis were still somewhat imperialist virgins (which, when you look at pictures of Hitler’s mustache, isn’t hard to imagine). In those first months of the war, it’s estimated that the Soviets rounded up over a million Polish citizens and sent them east. Think about that for a second. A million people, in a matter of months, just gone. Some didn’t stop until they hit the gulags in Siberia; others were found in mass graves decades later. Many are still unaccounted for to this day.

Pilecki fought in those battles—against both the Germans and the Soviets. And after their defeat, he and fellow Polish officers started an underground resistance group in Warsaw. They called themselves the Secret Polish Army.

In the spring of 1940, the Secret Polish Army got wind of the fact that the Germans were building a massive prison complex outside some backwater town in the southern part of the country. The Germans named this new prison complex Auschwitz. By the summer of 1940, thousands of military officers and leading Polish nationals were disappearing from western Poland. Fears arose among the resistance that the same mass incarceration that had occurred in the east with the Soviets was now on the menu in the west. Pilecki and his crew suspected that Auschwitz, a prison the size of a small town, was likely involved in the disappearances and that it might already house thousands of former Polish soldiers.

That’s when Pilecki volunteered to sneak into Auschwitz. Initially, it was a rescue mission—he would allow himself to get arrested, and once there, he would organize with other Polish soldiers, coordinate a mutiny, and break out of the prison camp.

It was a mission so suicidal that he might as well have asked his commander permission to drink a bucket of bleach. His superiors thought he was crazy, and told him as much.

But, as the weeks went by, the problem only grew worse: thousands of elite Poles were disappearing, and Auschwitz was still a huge blind spot in the Allied intelligence network. The Allies had no idea what was going on there and little chance of finding out. Eventually, Pilecki’s commanders relented. One evening, at a routine checkpoint in Warsaw, Pilecki let himself be arrested by the SS for violating curfew. And soon, he was on his way to Auschwitz, the only man known ever to have voluntarily entered a Nazi concentration camp.

Once he got there, he saw that the reality of Auschwitz was far worse than anyone had suspected. Prisoners were routinely shot in roll call lineups for transgressions as minor as fidgeting or not standing up straight. The manual labor was grueling and endless. Men were literally worked to death, often performing tasks that were useless or meant nothing. The first month Pilecki was there, a full third of the men in his barracks died of exhaustion or pneumonia or were shot. Regardless, by the end of the 1940, Pilecki, the comic book superhero motherfucker, had still somehow set up an espionage operation.

Oh, Pilecki—you titan, you champion, flying above the abyss—how did you manage to create an intelligence network by embedding messages in laundry baskets? How did you build your own transistor radio out of spare parts and stolen batteries, MacGyver-style, and then successfully transmit plans for an attack on the prison camp to the Secret Polish Army in Warsaw? How did you create smuggling rings to bring in food, medicine, and clothing for prisoners, saving countless lives and delivering hope to the remotest desert of the human heart? What did this world do to deserve you?

Over the course of two years, Pilecki built an entire resistance unit within Auschwitz. There was a chain of command, with ranks and officers; a logistics network; and lines of communication to the outside world. And all this went undiscovered by the SS guards for almost two years. Pilecki’s ultimate aim was to foment a full-scale revolt within the camp. With help and coordination from the outside, he believed he could stoke a prison break, overrun the undermanned SS guards, and release tens of thousands of highly trained Polish guerrilla fighters into the wild. He sent his plans and reports to Warsaw. For months, he waited. For months, he survived.

But then came the Jews. First, in buses. Then, packed in train cars. Soon, they were arriving by the tens of thousands, an undulating current of people floating in an ocean of death and despair. Stripped of all family possessions and dignity, they filed mechanically into the newly renovated “shower” barracks, where they were gassed and their bodies burned.

Pilecki’s reports to the outside became frantic. They’re murdering tens of thousands of people here each day. Mostly Jews. The death toll could potentially be in the millions. He pleaded with the Secret Polish Army to liberate the camp at once. He said if you can’t liberate the camp, then at least bomb it. For God’s sake, at least destroy the gas chambers. At least.

The Secret Polish Army received his messages but figured he was exaggerating. In the farthest reaches of their minds, nothing could be that fucked. Nothing.

Pilecki was the first person ever to alert the world to the Holocaust. His intelligence was forwarded through the various resistance groups around Poland, then on to the Polish government-in-exile in the United Kingdom, who then passed his reports to the Allied Command in London. The information eventually even made its way to Eisenhower and Churchill.

They, too, figured Pilecki had to be exaggerating.

In 1943, Pilecki realized that his plans of a mutiny and prison break were never going to happen: The Secret Polish Army wasn’t coming. The Americans and British weren’t coming. And in all likelihood, it was the Soviets who were coming—and they would be worse. Pilecki decided that remaining inside the camp was too risky. It was time to escape.

He made it look easy, of course. First, he faked illness and got himself admitted to the camp’s hospital. From there, he lied to the doctors about what work group he was supposed to return to, saying he had the night shift at the bakery, which was on the edge of camp, near the river. When the doctors discharged him, he headed to the bakery, where he proceeded to “work” until 2:00 a.m., when the last batch of bread finished baking. From there, it was just a matter of cutting the telephone wire, silently prying open the back door, changing into stolen civilian clothes without the SS guards noticing, sprinting to the river a mile away while being shot at, and then navigating his way back to civilization via the stars.

Today, much in our world appears to be fucked. Not Nazi Holocaust–level fucked (not even close), but still, pretty fucked nonetheless.

Stories such as Pilecki’s inspire us. They give us hope. They make us say, “Well, damn, things were way worse then, and that guy transcended it all. What have I done lately?”—which, in this couch-potato-pundit era of tweetstorms and outrage porn is probably what we should be asking ourselves. When we zoom out and get perspective, we realize that while heroes like Pilecki save the world, we swat at gnats and complain that the AC isn’t high enough.

Pilecki’s story is the single most heroic thing I’ve ever come across in my life. Because heroism isn’t just bravery or guts or shrewd maneuvering. These things are common and are often used in unheroic ways. No, being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a better world we didn’t know could exist. To take a situation where everything seems to be absolutely fucked and still somehow make it good.

Bravery is common. Resilience is common. But heroism has a philosophical component to it. There’s some great “Why?” that heroes bring to the table—some incredible cause or belief that goes unshaken, no matter what. And this is why, as a culture, we are so desperate for a hero today: not because things are necessarily so bad, but because we’ve lost the clear “Why?” that drove previous generations.

We are a culture in need not of peace or prosperity or new hood ornaments for our electric cars. We have all that. We are a culture in need of something far more precarious. We are a culture and a people in need of hope.

After witnessing years of war, torture, death, and genocide, Pilecki never lost hope. Despite losing his country, his family, his friends, and nearly his own life, he never lost hope. Even after the war, while enduring Soviet domination, he never lost the hope of a free and independent Poland. He never lost the hope of a quiet and happy life for his children. He never lost the hope of being able to save a few more lives, of helping a few more people.

After the war, Pilecki returned to Warsaw and continued spying, this time on the Communist Party, which had just come to power there. Again, he would be the first person to notify the West of an ongoing evil, in this case that the Soviets had infiltrated the Polish government and rigged its elections. He would also be the first to document the Soviet atrocities committed in the east during the war.

This time, though, he was discovered. He was warned that he was about to be arrested, and he had a chance to flee to Italy. Yet, Pilecki declined—he would rather stay and die Polish than run and live as something he didn’t recognize. A free and independent Poland, by then, was his only source of hope. Without it, he was nothing.

And thus, his hope would also be his undoing. The Communists captured Pilecki in 1947, and they didn’t go easy on him. He was tortured for almost a year, so harshly and consistently that he told his wife that “Auschwitz was just a trifle” by comparison.

Still, he never cooperated with his interrogators.

Eventually, realizing they could get no information from him, the Communists decided to make an example of him. In 1948, they held a show trial and charged Pilecki with everything from falsifying documents and violating curfew to engaging in espionage and treason. A month later, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. On the final day of the trial, Pilecki was allowed to speak. He stated that his allegiance had always been to Poland and its people, that he had never harmed or betrayed any Polish citizen, and that he regretted nothing. He concluded his statement with “I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”

And if that’s not the most hardcore thing you’ve ever heard, then I want some of what you’re having.

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