Summary: My name is John Haven, and I am a retired U.S. Army Captain with a vision for a pantheist religious non-profit designed to turn down the volume on suffering. My idea is really simple: I got into an Uber in Park City with a former Afghan translator who told me his life story. He learned English from movies, joined up with U.S. Special Forces and spent a decade fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan. He said a bunch of his friends had killed themselves, and he’d been really messed up when he got here. But then he said he, “listened to the book Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl five times”, and he was alright. As soon as he said it, I knew it was a miracle. My response was: Holy shit, I do the exact same thing whenever I get sad, and it always sorts me out. I want to start a ‘pantheist religious non-profit’ that puts veterans together in a cabin and has them read that book Man’s Search For Meaning five times and talk things out for a few days, and I want to videotape that healing process so others can replicate it. I think we can do a proof of concept for <$50,000 and some volunteer hours. Can you spare $5?
For those of you who don’t know, during World War II there was this psychiatrist in the concentration camps named Viktor Frankl who wrote a book in his head. When he got out of the camps, he said it he wrote it down in a single sitting. It’s about 200 pages, takes 6 hours to listen to on Audible. Frankl went on to found the third Vienesse School of psychotherapy called logotherapy: Freud = Will to sex (because he never got any), Frankl = Will to Meaning. Easy to remember. Frankl said, "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."
The heart of the book is Frankl’s experience in the camps. What my Uber driver and I were doing was we were visualizing it. Imagine it: You’re a 37 year old psychiatrist, your 23 year old pregnant wife and all your family has gone to the gas chamber, and you’re in Dachau getting abused by Nazis because someone stole a piece of bread. You’ve got like a 1 in 70 chance of surviving, you’re freezing and starving to death, and you look around and realize…that in that moment…you and all your fellow prisoners are ecstatic. Total joy. Why? How is this possible? Simple: You’ve just been told you train to the gas chamber has been cancelled. You have a revelation. You think: Someday I’m going to get out of this place, and I’m going to write this down, and it’s going to change…everything. And sure enough: 16+ million copies sold, maybe 40 million people helped including…a former U.S. Army officer, and his damn Afghan Uber driver.
I’m a Silicon Valley startup guy as well as a soldier by training, and regardless we start with the problem statement: Soldiers don’t read, and depressed soldiers definitely don’t read. I get to say that because I’m a soldier. That Afghan guy and I are THE ONLY soldiers I’ve ever met who have admitted to reading a book, let alone a book five times: I’m only kinda kidding.
After the problem statement comes the solution statement: Some bunk beds out in the middle of nowhere, maybe a cabin, some eggs and veggies, a Ranger Sapper (me), a camp fire, and Man’s Search For Meaning on Audible, and maybe 3-days minimum. It’s that simple. To paraphrase the movie Tropic Thunder: Get them away from their mommies, get them in the shit. You shoot the whole thing guerilla style, put it on Youtube. Get them out there in groups of 2 to 3 walking and listening to the book. You have to become Frankl. If you can become Frankl you realize: Holy shit, my life is really not that bad.
Product Concept: “Get them away from their mommies, get them out in the shit”
Now here’s where it gets really crazy: You have them also listen to a 2nd book. 2 books! I’ve definitely never met a soldier who has read two books. The 2nd book is called Determined by Dr. Robert Sapolsky of both Stanfords neuroscience and primatology lab. If you’re really into writing by Doctors like I am, you know that the only other good writer who is a doctor beside Viktor Frankl is Dr. Sapolsky. Dr. Sapolsky’s book Determined is a painstaking argument for why the correct definition of ‘free will’ is: Anything we don’t understand. That ones a mindbender, but the big idea is simple: Like everything else, humans are basically an ongoing electrical and chemical reaction. A choice/decision is: The inevitable output of inputs. The bottom line is: Given the exact same nature and nurture, anyone would do the exact same thing as you…basically by definition. In other words: There is no magic in the machine.
Dr. Sapolsky gives us a really great example: He’s a mentally handicapped guy on death row who likes to wrap his own fecies in tin foil and put it in his hair…for fun, I guess. The homicide prosecutor is arguing that the guy is responsible for his actions because the guy beat him at the game of tic tac toe. The defense counters by bringing in a ‘trained circus chicken’ that also beats the prosecutor at tic tac toe. The point/big idea is that: In a perfect society ‘evil’ would be treated as a disease, like schitzophrenia or bipolar. But instead they executed the tic tac toe murderer…to deter other murderers…presumably.
So the idea with reading Determined as well Man’s Search is to stop blaming yourself and other people. It’s kind of a scientific proof for ancient religious ideas: Buddhism, predestination in Christianity. Predestination: If things go well, god wanted you to go to heaven. If not, sorry, you’re already in hell. So you read Determined to convince yourself to just let it all go. To quote Frank Herbert: Life isn’t a problem to solve, it’s something to be experienced.
Why a religious non-profit? Let me back up a little: I had a sleep disorder and a stress disorder as a child. I got out of U.S. Army winter Ranger School in 2017 and my ‘PTSD symptoms’ (panic attacks) had gotten really bad. So I read Man’s Search For Meaning and gave myself the John’s Hopkins psychedelic therapy treatment. You blindfold yourself. You take psilocybin, the active ingredients in magic mushroom, and you hope to have a kind of ‘spiritual experience’: In my case I sobbed about my relationship with my father (poor guy did a great job, just wants me to take responsibility for my own shit).
I used to live in San Francisco: In San Francisco you can obtain psychedelics under your 1st amendment rights to freedom of religion. You join a temple, you donate, they give you mushroom. I very much identify as a pantheist: I think all religions are ‘truthy’, they describe truths we hold to be self-evident. The psychiatrist Carl Jung actually basically said: We have a moral responsibility to imbue ourselves with a profound sense of religious feeling because it’s useful to do so. So I figure: Let’s cut out the psychiatrists, they’re doing their thing. The only psychiatrist we need is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning.
So my idea is: I can give you all the therapy you need with Man’s Search For Meaning on Audible and doing what U.S. Army Officers do everyday: Keeping everyone alive and not touching each other.
So with that: Please donate to The Frankl Project. Thank you.