When Suffering Illuminates

In his remarkable book Love and Suffering: Break the Emotional Chains That Prevent You from Experiencing Love, Silard develops, step by step and through numerous examples from life, including his own, what he calls the Love Progression Model. It is the book’s central framework for understanding the relationship between love and suffering and the path available to anyone who wants to break the emotional chains created by painful relationships and experience genuine love. The Love Progression Model consists of layer-by-layer practical guidance grounded in philosophical reflection on revenge, acceptance, forgiveness, judgment, gratitude, character qualities, happiness, incarceration and liberation, suffering, and love. If suffering is unavoidable, and the desire to emerge from suffering as a better rather than a worse human being is universal, then this book is a must-read for all of us.

Silard uses the example of a Holocaust survivor to illuminate one of the book’s most powerful insights: “suffering emerges when you love, and love emerges through your suffering.” This resonates deeply with me.

I am a survivor of the Tiananmen massacre. My simple love for freedom and human dignity led me to become part of the Tiananmen democracy movement. That love brought me face-to-face with the government’s machine guns and tanks, nearly cost me my life, and forced me to witness fellow protesters falling in pools of blood. My suffering reached an extreme when I saw about a dozen students crushed by tanks. Yet it was precisely at that moment of extreme pain that my love for human freedom and the dignity of life became deeper and more transcendent. I became convinced that the meaning of my life was to help reduce human suffering and prevent tragedies like the one I had just witnessed. It became a turning point in my life.

Thirteen years later, in the suffering of solitary confinement, I reaffirmed that love.

In 2002, I returned from the United States to China to help the Chinese democracy movement develop strategies of nonviolent resistance. I was arrested and imprisoned and spent nearly fifteen months in solitary confinement. Of course, only afterward did I know it had been fifteen months. While I was there, I had no idea how long I would remain in that environment. I sometimes imagined that I might spend the rest of my life that way.

There was no one to talk to except during interrogations. I received no news from the outside. I had no books to read and no paper or pen with which to write. Hunger, fear, and hopelessness produced seemingly limitless anxiety and regret. What had happened to my family? Had they abandoned me? Had my friends and colleagues already forgotten me? Why had I put myself in this situation?

Yes, why had I?

Because of love. I could not forget why I had gone back to China in the first place. Although love itself may not be simply categorized as right or wrong, I kept asking myself whether what I loved was right. To answer that question, I devised a thought experiment.

I imagined myself carrying a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the streets of China and asking every person I encountered whether he or she wanted the rights contained in that document. I found it impossible to imagine anyone answering no. I reaffirmed my conviction that the thirst for freedom and dignity is fundamental and universal, and therefore that my love for this cause was right.

Because of this love, I felt no bitterness even amid the suffering I was experiencing. My love for my family also deepened through it. In Anthony Silard’s terminology, the Chinese Communist Party authorities had “righted” me by detaining me in solitary confinement: what they intended as punishment ultimately strengthened the very love and conviction they sought to suppress.

And, unexpectedly, my true love for poetry emerged through that suffering.

I had always felt a deep affection for poetry, but it was not until solitary confinement that I became serious about writing poems. To maintain my sanity, I began composing poetry entirely in my mind as a form of mental exercise. During that period, I created more than one hundred poems. Since my release and return to America, I have continued to write poetry as an expression of love. Composing and reading poems have become a spiritual sanctuary for me, giving back bountifully for the time I lost in imprisonment.

“Give for” is another wonderful mentality Silard introduces in the book—one of the ways of thinking that can lead us toward “forgive.” Rather than allowing suffering to remain only a subtraction from our lives, we can discover what life has given us forwhat was taken away. This does not erase the suffering. It transforms our relationship to it.

Another truth revealed by the book that I found especially useful concerns how we judge others. Silard asks us to recognize that every human being contains all human character qualities, although at different levels, and possesses the potential, under certain circumstances, to act upon them.

During my imprisonment after the end of the solitary confinement, I encountered all kinds of people, criminal prisoners as well as prison guards. I was able to regard each of them as an ordinary human being like myself, to accept them, become friends with some of them, and even influence them. I believe this was possible precisely because I already held something close to Silard’s insight: the qualities I observed in them were not qualities belonging to an entirely separate category of human beings called “bad people.” They were human qualities, and therefore possibilities within all of us.

Yet here I believe we encounter a question that must be confronted rather than obscured by our advocacy of acceptance, forgiveness, nonjudgment, gratitude, and love. We may forgive and even love a person who has committed a crime, but this cannot mean that we should forgive, much less love, the criminal act itself.

Silard’s book focuses primarily on the relationship between one individual and another: how a victim can confront suffering and the person who caused it, liberate himself or herself from emotional incarceration, and rediscover genuine love. The book does not substantially address the related question of how we should judge and respond to wrongful actions themselves.

We can almost always discover some good that emerges from another person’s wrongful action or from the suffering it causes, good that otherwise might never have existed. But that does not make the wrongful act good. Earthquakes have led human beings to invent stronger building materials and better methods of construction, but we would hardly conclude that earthquakes are therefore good.

The distinction becomes particularly important when a wrongful act extends beyond a private relationship and has consequences for society. After asking how we can forgive and love the wrongdoer, the next logical question is: How should we understand, judge, and respond to the wrongdoing? That question clearly lies beyond the principal scope of Silard’s book, but I believe it would make a meaningful extension of his work.

I was also surprised to realize how useful Silard’s insight about human character qualities could be for democratic opposition movements.

Too many leaders of such movements place themselves on a moral high ground. They imagine that the character qualities they condemn in dictators do not exist within themselves. They fail to recognize that they, too, possess these qualities at different levels, and that when circumstances permit, reward, or induce certain behaviors, they may act out precisely the characteristics they oppose.

Indeed, some have done so and continue to do so. They become corrupt. They lie. They cannot tolerate criticism. They cannot tolerate opposition. They use the resources under their control to suppress people who disagree with them. In other words, they risk becoming what they oppose.

What would it mean to develop the strategies and internal culture of a democratic movement according to insights derived from the Love Progression Model? How might a movement committed to defeating authoritarianism prevent authoritarian character traits from reproducing themselves within the movement? This, too, could be a fascinating extension of Silard’s work.

There is one more situation that deserves consideration. When we speak about an individual’s suffering, we cannot assume that the suffering was caused by another identifiable individual. Sometimes the perceived perpetrator is a group, an institution, a political system, or even society itself.

What, then, is the best path for the individual victim to achieve liberation?

We can easily find cases in which suffering produces hatred, but the victim cannot identify a particular individual against whom to seek revenge. In extreme cases, people redirect their anger toward society as a whole and retaliate indiscriminately and violently against innocent people. Does the Love Progression Model still work under these circumstances? If so, how should it be adapted when the object of resentment is not a person but a collective, an institution, or society itself?

Anthony Silard’s contribution is remarkable. Love and Suffering offers not merely an explanation of why suffering can imprison us, but a practical and philosophical path toward transforming it. The book also, precisely because of the strength of its central framework, opens the door to further questions about wrongdoing, justice, political movements, collective responsibility, and socially generated suffering. Silard’s work positions him exceptionally well to take on these extensions, which I humbly suggest here. I will look forward to his future work.

I conclude with a small poem:

Suffering may or may not illuminate.

When it does,
we find our true love.

When it does not,
we can only be shrouded
in the darkness of hatred.

Dr. Jianli Yang, a Tiananmen massacre survivor and former political prisoner of China, is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Center for the National Interest and a Columnist for National Review.