"Hell is Other People('s Opinions)"
by Joel Bowman
“Hell is other people.”
~ From the play "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre (1944)
“Some things are in our control and others not.”
~ "Discourses" by Epictetus (circa 108 AD)
“You can please some of the people all of the time,
you can please all of the people some of the time,
but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
~ John Lydgate of Bury (later adapted by President Abraham Lincoln)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "The US Navy blockades the Strait of Hormuz after peace talks collapse… Anthropic’s most powerful A.I model ever, Mythos, “breaks containment”… and four human beings, spirited by the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, return from the dark side of the moon…Never a dull moment, dear reader.
Down here at the End of the World, meanwhile, the sun rose in the east this morning and, unless doomsday prophets are about to break an uninterrupted losing streak as old as time itself, it will retire in peace over the western horizon this evening, same as it always does. Life on our pale blue dot – with all its warring and worrying… its anti-social media threads and two minutes of hate… its glorious triumphs and heartbreaking disasters, both natural and man made – goes on. And so, on this lazy Sunday afternoon, we stray somewhat from our usual beat, that of world politics and the gallery of rogues running the whole sordid show.
In a digital world where the lines between private and public are increasingly blurred, where authentic selves compete with artificial intelligence, where we endure a deluge of information and a conspicuous lack of wisdom, we delve into a realm at least as fraught and otherworldly as the cold, lunar darkness… the minds (and opinions) of other people.
"Hell is Other People(‘s Opinions)"
by Joel Bowman
"Upon hearing the importunate call of the telephone or plea of the doorbell, the perennially quotable Dorothy Parker was often heard to remark...“What fresh hell is this?” Charming, no?
The “fresh hell” on other side of the door or the other end of the line was, presumably, anyone who dared interrupt the wry Miss Parker from her habitual wit-making, martini-quaffing or general bon-mot-slinging. You might say, for the sardonic queen of the one-liner, hell really was “other people.”
Not so for Jean-Paul Sartre, whose often misquoted line (taken from his play, "No Exit") is conscripted into a mordant kind of Parkeresque misanthropy. While “Hell is other people” is one, and indeed the most common, translation, a more accurate rendering of the original French might be something like, “Hell is the Other.”
The play itself opens with a trio of characters who have been, to their initially muted chagrin, condemned to purgatory. Garcin, an egotistical journalist who at first claims to have fled the war on account of his pacifism, comes to suspect his real motivation might have been that of cowardice. He appeals to Estelle, but is soon vexed to find her opinion worthless, as she yearns constantly for a man’s approval and would likely say anything to gain it. A third denizen of the underworld (itself a drawing room furnished, hilariously enough, in gaudy Second Empire style) is Inez. Jealous and sadistic by nature, she at first mistakes Garcin for a torturer (“one of the staff”) and then comes to realize that, by depriving him of his desired validation as hero, it is her fate to occupy that space for him.
Devoid of the iconic tortures and characters often associated with the igneous domain of the damned (the “racks and red-hot pincers and all the other paraphernalia”), the three come gradually to realize the roles they will play as one and other’s persecutors.
Inez: "I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others." (pg. 17)
And so, in a triangle animated by such extrinsic forces, in which each individual is condemned to see themself through the cracked lens of their respective tormentor, the Hell of which Sartre writes soon becomes real enough to deserve the designation.
Garcin: "Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough." (pg. 41)
The Road to Hell: The author himself addressed the common misreading of his famous line in a speech preceding a recording of the play, issued in 1965: “Hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.
If my relations are bad, I am situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell. And there are a vast number of people in the world who are in hell because they are too dependent on the judgment of other people. But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.”
It is not other people per se, as much as it is our tendency to value ourselves based purely on their opinion, that really matters. More than four score since it was first performed, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, we dwellers on the digital threshold wake to find that, while we occupy rather a larger room, one without physical walls at all, many are those who anguish in the Hell of the Other. Social media has become our panopticon, our every movement invigilated by the omniscient Other of so-called public opinion.
Two-ish decades into this grand antisocial media experiment, we have only recently begun to assess its deleterious effects on our collective consciousness. Preliminary studies on the impact of the tacky web of social media platforms, particularly on the malleable teen mind, have yielded horrifying results, to put it mildly. Trends in suicide, addiction, depression, self-harm and psychological aberrations of myriad descriptions are off the charts, having all hockey-sticked around the mid-2010s. (See professor Jonathan Haidt’s excellent Substack – "
After Babel" – for more work in this field.)
And yet, far from reversing or even self-correcting, we see only the increasing velocity of social fragmentation. How, then, to escape a room devoid not only of exits, but without bars, walls or razor wire of any kind... a cell that exists entirely in our own mind? From "No Exit":
Estelle: "I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window, but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent!" (pg. 19)
For the majority of Sartre’s play, the primary characters assume they are locked in their eclectically-appointed Hades. (The title in the original is Huis clos, or “closed door,” the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, Latin for “in a chamber.”) Toward the end of the play, the door opens, but by then the characters have realized it is not the physical walls that imprison them, but the opinions of their fellow inmates. What to do?
Happily for us, when it comes to such “modern” problems, the ancients were on the case long ago… It was the slave-philosopher, Epictetus, who addressed the scourge of other people’s opinions by placing them firmly in the category of “things we do not control... but all-too-often control us.” "The Enchiridion," a useful handbook compiled by his student Arrian from the much longer Discourses, begins by underscoring just such a distinction.
“Of things that exist, some are in our power and some are not in our power. Those that are in our power are conception, choice, desire, aversion, and in a word, those things that are our own doing. Those that are not under our control are the body, property or possessions, reputation, positions of authority, and in a word, such things that are not our own doing.”
- Epictetus, "Enchiridion"
"It’s quite enough to live up to your own expectations;
let other people’s opinions be damned."
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Freely download "Enchiridion", by Epictetus, here:
Freely download "No Exit", by Jean-Paul Sartre, here:
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