Cutting the puppet strings

On Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism and the economy of suffering

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I'm Your Puppet Painting by Cathi Doherty

There’s a particular scene in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1965 cinematic masterpiece, The Sound of Music, that has captivated me since childhood. For the cinephiles amongst us, the scene in question features a marionette show performed by the children of the von Trapp family and their governess Maria (played by a youthful Julie Andrews) for Captain von Trapp. The performance is accompanied by the brilliant show tune, "The Lonely Goatherd". The song tells the whimsical and charming story of a goatherd whose yodelling is heard from far off and by passers-by, until he falls in love with a girl who wears a pale-pink coat. It features a simple and wholesome plot replete with a head-bobbing musical number. I remember being enthralled, as an eight year old, by the vivid colours and convivial atmosphere, expertly evoked by the larger-than-life personalities of the marionettes and their synchronised dance routines.

There was however an underlying issue that bugged my mind, perhaps a feature of my voracious and indiscriminate curiosity.

The puppets were completely subservient to the control of their puppet masters, wearing a perpetual smile on their faces responding to every hand movement with unfettered immediacy. Without the skilful manipulation of the wires and strings by the marionettist, those puppets would have been lifeless, devoid of their meticulously crafted identities. Their entire subjectivity was predicated on an invisible power-dynamic thrust upon them without question. Granted, these were largely dramatised interpretations but they signified, to me at least, a more fundamental state of being.

Whilst I was too young at the time to dissect the significance of that scene or my accompanying thoughts, the fragments of memory from that short performance provided me, years later, with a more intuitive self-awareness of how we are all, to varying extents, puppets in our own marionette show that we call life.

“The Lonely Goatherd”, has emerged as my personalised metaphor for how we are, in current internet and social media saturated times, entrapped by the whims and fancies of the algorithm and the relentless forces of global corporatism. We are made to dance to various tunes, sometimes even without conscious knowledge. Our lives and livelihoods become sites of ‘performance’ where we are obliged to communicate and act in specific ways to achieve goals that we think we desire as part of our ongoing search for fulfilment amidst endless materiality.

This essay isn’t meant to serve as a dystopic account of reality or at least that wasn’t the plan.

I wanted to explore what detachment from life’s puppet strings would feel like especially for those of us who’ve become naturally accustomed to accepting the templates of living that have been placed on our laps through culture and society - a job, a family, our material possessions - all the elemental trappings of the first-world corporeal dimension.

Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and unmistakably, a Stoic philosopher, through his reflective aphorisms, provides a fleeting glimpse of the fantasy behind true liberation - a life without puppet strings. The heart of his work lies on a simple premise: in order to make oneself free, we must train ourselves to become indifferent to externals. The externals are those elements in life of which we have no or little control: our ethnicity, sex appeal, intelligence, lifespan, the opinions of others, etc. We must also become acutely aware of the one thing which we do have control over: our perceptions.

Marcus Aurelius Distributing Bread to the People 1765

Through harsh self analysis, training of the reason and self discipline, he concludes that we can learn to take over the reigns of controlling our perceptions as the mind’s ultimate charioteer, and in this way become impervious to misfortune and suffering. Aurelius states that one is then able to permanently severe the burdensome and soul-sucking obligations involved in pleasing others, seeking fame, and procuring material goods, ending our subordination to perceptions, ideas and ideals.

But unfortunately, in what is a rather ironic twist, the world has learnt to build an economy of suffering or a culture of competitive trauma - “tell me your story of suffering and I’ll top that with mine”. Without delegitimising any of these painful narratives that have made appearances in countless books, podcasts, online pages and self-help videos, it is worthy to note that publicised trauma comes in various forms: from an individuals relentless battle against alcoholism and addiction to surviving the horrors of childhood abuse. These are truly sobering narratives that remind us our just how delicately poised life is across the margins of both pleasure and pain.

However, the touching human longing for sympathy, that impulse to have our suffering recognised and validated, has grown distorted by a troubling compulsion for broadcast-suffering and comparative validity. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life (the cards we’ve been dealt with) have become the currency of attention and identification. The more you suffer, the more commodifiable you become as a brand and personality. It is part of an unspoken recipe for navigating out of irrelevance and obscurity into the seemingly warm embrace of public acknowledgement and acceptance.

In metaphorical terms, we’ve not cut our puppet strings. We’ve simply decided to make it a profitable feature of living - a cherished attraction in its own right, a battle-scar we can use to feed the ego and perhaps embellish our street-cred. Am I being grossly unfair in my sceptical assessment of these possibly well-intentioned media narratives of human suffering? Probably. Perhaps the self-help gurus of contemporary culture are all imbued with a wholesome intention to inspire and motivate. Who could say.

But the underlying problem of course is clear to see. However moving or compelling someone else’s story is, we are still consuming it as we would any other commodity. We’re still clicking on those ads, buying the books, downloading the podcasts. We’re still trapped. We are just choosing to vicariously live through another’s supposed journey of redemption instead of forging ours.

As Aurelius poignantly states, life can only be lived through us. In other words, we still hold the key towards freeing ourselves from the manacles of worldly expectation and desire and all its accompanying anxieties and stresses.

We need to start re-writing the narrative of suffering as part of a broader lifelong project of learning to see clearly. Clarity of perception is the greatest self-defence against mental anguish. Suffering and discomfort, are ultimately opportunities for us to lift the veil of illusion and finally see reality. It is a deeply personal experience.

Because not all stories need to be told and perhaps the stories of our lives are best aired to the most captive and meaningful of audiences - ourselves.

The marionettes have spoken.

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