How to fight the cruelty of life?

Faith, art, love, friendship and mental attitudes are among the ways of minimizing and overcoming the cruelty of the world.

The human being is given over to the cruelty of the world. Hence, the necessity of a compromise, obtained through the mobilization of the myth to find supernatural comforts, through the mobilization of the imaginary to shelter the soul and through the mobilization of aesthetics and poetry to live reality plainly.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Religious faith, as the faith in an idea, is a profound strength that helps to support and fight the cruelty of the world.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Those who live in accord with the course of Nature and are contented and at ease when the occasion comes, cannot be affected by sorrow or joy. This is what the ancients called release from bondage.
Tchuang-Tsu, Taoist Chinese philosopher, II or III Century b.C., Book of Tchuang-Tzu

Perturbations are a consequence of opinions and unwise judgements.
Cicero, 106-43 a. C., Roman philosopher and statesman, De Finibus bonorum et malorum

He who does not consume himself with the injuries, futilities and enthusiasms, who does not enervate with fear, and does not boil with desires and envy, is a sage; with serenity and firmly he is serene and in harmony with himself.
Cicero, 106-43 a. C., Roman philosopher and statesman, Tusculan disputation

NATURE IS CRUEL

We can’t escape from evil and the world’s cruelty. So proclaim many reflexions about life. Cruelty is in nature and also in man, who embodies the cruelty of life and the natural law of kill or be killed.

Reality is cruel to the human being, strewn on the Earth, ignoring his destiny, submitting to death, unable to escape from fatal mourning, from the vicissitudes of luck, from suffering, from servitude and malice.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

The cruelty between men, individuals, groups, religions and races is terrifying. The human being has in him a sound of monsters which he releases on all favourable occasions.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, My Demons

Life fights cruelly against the cruelty of the world and resists with cruelty to the cruelty of life. All living beings kill and eat living beings.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

LIFE IS SUFFERING; LIFE IS CRUEL; MEANING AND PHILOSOPHY OF PAIN AND EVIL IN LIFE.

Right: Hindu Painting
Goddess Mahakali, connected to the cruelty and suffering of life

Oriental philosophy emphasizes the cruel element of life. To Taoists, Buddhists and for Hindu Jainism, life is suffering. In much the same way, the Bible and some Christian traditions also point out the pain present in life.

Life is suffering.
Pali Tripitaka, Buddhist collection of sacred texts, Vinaya

The Noble Truth of Suffering is this: Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrows and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering, dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering – in short, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.
Pali Tripitaka, Buddhist collection of sacred texts, Sutta-Nipata

And I too, when born, inhaled the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth; wiling, I uttered that first sound common to all.
Bible, Wisdom Book

Mother that obliges the family of animal beings to tremble and to cry from birth; nature, ignoble monster, always breeding and feeding to kill, tell me: if the premature death of a mortal is an evil, why do you inflict it on innocents?
G. Leopardi, 1798-1837, Italian writer, Poésis, Le Coucher de la Lune

Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired, and openly wish – a lie – for death.
Seneca, Roman philosopher and politician, Letters to Lucilius

At one place you will part from a companion, at another bury one, and be afraid of one another. These are the kind of things you will come up against all along this rugged journey.
Seneca, Roman philosopher and politician, Letters to Lucilius

What's the significance of life? Who are we?

Is human life just a dream, from which we never really awake, as some great thinkers claim? Are we submerged by our feelings, by our loves and hates, by our ideas of good, bad, beautiful, awful? Are we incapable of knowing beyond those ideas and feelings?

Listen to Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Folger Shakespeare Library)

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Penguin Classics)

Is the reality we know a reality imposed to us by nature? Is the reality and the meaning of life a creation of men, such as music, or love or colors (science tells us that there isn't such things as music, harmony or colors in the physic world. Just traveling molecules: «There is not, external to us, hot or cold, but only different velocities of molecules; there aren’t sounds, callings, harmonies, but just variations in the pressure of the air; there aren’t colours, or light, just electro-magnetic waves», said H. Von Foerster.).

Are we - and all living beings - just «survival machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes», as Richard Dawkins states? Are we incapable of knowing beyond the frames imposed to us by nature?

Is there any significance for life in a Universe of billions of stars that ignore us? Is there any significance for life in an Universe whose dimensions and nature overcome our understanding?

Listen to the words of Pascal, in the seventeenth century:

«When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity that lies before and after it, when I consider the little space I fill and I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I rest frightened, and astonished, for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there. Why now rather than then? Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time have been ascribed to me?»
Pensees (Penguin Classics)