What Does The Capos In Man's Search For Meaning Mean

In a place where there is only suffering and every day is a fight for survival, even the most decent of humans can become monsters. As the prisoners fought this constant battle of survival, they would resort to the most brutal ways, like stealing and fighting—some would even torture other prisoners for the approval of the guards. These were the Capos, prisoners who acted as trustees to the guards and received special privileges. Most importantly, the Capos are a powerful symbol of the basic needs of survival and the lengths people will go in order to survive in the novel Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. The symbol of the Capos showcases how the prisoners are purely undertaking anything in the hopes to survive, even if that means following the orders of a maniac. The Capos are merely being obedient and not questioning the ethical issues in the commands

As Milgram states in his “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” “these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.” What Milgram is saying is that the unethical cases, like the Holocaust, cannot and would not happen without obedience. Furthermore, if people had not listened to Hitler, concentration camps and gas chambers for the purpose of slaughtering millions of Jews and any other human considered unclean would never have existed. The same concept applies for the Capos. If they had not blindly followed the orders of the SS men and tortured others in the hope of survival, causing what another researcher would call “a full disruption of an evolving, humanistic, ethical sense” (Martin 43), the Capos would not have lost their humanity nor would so many innocent people have lost their lives to monsters overwhelmed with