On Dec 2, 9:49 am, pas...@blueyonder.co.ruk (Peter Ashby) wrote:
>
> > How is it self delusion? Was Alexander Solzhenytsyn self deluded? Or
> > Viktor Frankl? Seneca? Epictetus? Or were these men perhaps (surely
> > not :-)
>
> Where does Solzhenytsyn say that the Gulag was safe and relaxing? I read
> the whole lot of The Gulag Archipelago when I was 17 and I don't
> remember any such statement without it being so heavily qualified your
> use of it would be meaningless.
>
That's a good point. I wasn't able to finish reading the Gulag
Archipelago, it was too slow and long for me. I preferred Cancer Ward
that also had the advantage of being funny.

I don't think that Viktor Frankl was deluded, and I certainly don't
think that there is any evidence for his having found life in a
concentration camp relaxing.

Wikipaedia quotes Epictetus as saying 'We are disturbed not by events,
but by the views which we take of them.' which is, perhaps, another
way of saying what I was saying. If you don't describe viewing your
time in prison as relaxing as self-delusion, then it is a little
difficult to think of what you would be able to call self-delusion.

I'm not sure which Seneca is intended, nor what was said that is
relevant to this.