"This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life"
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Muggeridge takes a scalpel to modern comfort culture by calling the “horror of pain” a “low instinct” - not because pain is noble in itself, but because reflexive avoidance can shrink a life down to pure self-protection. The line works as provocation: he’s attacking the idea that the highest human aim is to stay unruffled. Coming from a journalist who moved through the ideological furnace of the 20th century - flirtations with communism, disillusionment, war-time reporting, then a late-life Christian moralism - the claim isn’t abstract. It’s an after-action report.
Notice the rhetorical hedge: “rather,” “on the whole,” “such as it is.” Muggeridge isn’t selling a motivational poster version of suffering. He’s granting that pain is ugly, then insisting that the story it forces you to tell about yourself can be clarifying. Pain edits your illusions. It exposes dependencies, vanity, and the thinness of lives built entirely around control. His subtext is anti-sentimental but also quietly pastoral: meaning isn’t something you purchase with ease; it’s something you’re often cornered into.
The claim also smuggles in a moral hierarchy. “Low instinct” suggests animal recoil, while “enrich” implies a higher human capacity: to metabolize experience into insight, empathy, even faith. It’s a worldview that irritates therapeutic language about “harm” and “triggers” because it refuses to treat discomfort as automatic damage. For Muggeridge, pain is less an enemy than an uncompromising editor, cutting life down to what actually matters.
Notice the rhetorical hedge: “rather,” “on the whole,” “such as it is.” Muggeridge isn’t selling a motivational poster version of suffering. He’s granting that pain is ugly, then insisting that the story it forces you to tell about yourself can be clarifying. Pain edits your illusions. It exposes dependencies, vanity, and the thinness of lives built entirely around control. His subtext is anti-sentimental but also quietly pastoral: meaning isn’t something you purchase with ease; it’s something you’re often cornered into.
The claim also smuggles in a moral hierarchy. “Low instinct” suggests animal recoil, while “enrich” implies a higher human capacity: to metabolize experience into insight, empathy, even faith. It’s a worldview that irritates therapeutic language about “harm” and “triggers” because it refuses to treat discomfort as automatic damage. For Muggeridge, pain is less an enemy than an uncompromising editor, cutting life down to what actually matters.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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