Happiness (Part 1)

Walking back to happiness, woopah oh yeah yeah
Said goodbye to loneliness, woopah oh yeah yeah
I never knew I’d miss you
Now I know what I must do
Walking back to happiness
I shared with you (yay, yay, yay, yay ba dum be do)

(Walking Back to Happiness- Michael Hawker / John Francis Schroeder)

One question which has plagued humans since, well one must assume, the birth of civilisation brought about by the advent of agriculture and the settling down as communities, is, What is Happiness? This question has tormented some of the greatest minds of all time, many of whom have attempted to answer the question, plus not so great minds who have likewise indulged in speculation.

One reason why this question has never been answered comes from definition. No one has defined a universal notion of what it means to be happy. If one was to ask 100 people to define what makes them happy then, along cultural lines, one would expect to find differences. I use the notion ‘along cultural lines’ to suggest that different cultures have their own notion of what makes one happy. For some it might be the acquisition of wealth and fame, for others it may be seeing one’s child go through the initiation rights of one’s tribe. And yet, despite the cultural differences, there underpins it a single, universal, notion.

Often, notions of success are linked to the concept of achievement, of having accomplished something. For one, becoming famous would suggest that one’s desire to be known has come true and thusly the phrase ‘achieved fame’ is apt. For another, seeing one’s child pass through trials and becoming a fully-fledged member of a community reflects upon the parent/guardian as having achieved the raising of a child to such a recognised level within the community. Thusly, we can say that having achieved the stated goals, the person is happy. However, this happiness is often fleeting. Once the moment has passed and the pride one feels passes, one feels unhappy again. This has given rise to the notion that happiness is like a stranger in the night just passing by. This, I would argue, is because this notion of happiness, e.g. fame and social standing, are not happiness, rather they are just pride, something many theologies see as a sin. Why is this? One can speculate that the need to ‘achieve’ fame or social standing stems from insecurities rather than some deeper search for happiness.

You might be now thinking, if these notions of happiness are not actually happiness, then how would you define happiness? For me, the search for happiness is a contradiction in terms for as with many things, if you seek it, you will not find it as we do not know what we are searching for. Thusly we have a paradox for how can we find that which we do not know? This is beautifully illustrated by A.A. Milne and his protagonist Pooh bear’s search for a Heffalump. A Heffalump is a scary animal which plagues the dreams of Pooh bear and Piglet. And so they dig a trap to catch the Heffalump. However, as they do not know what they are trying to catch, they cannot catch it and if they did catch it, they would not know if they had caught it or not and so is the same with happiness. We do not know what it is ergo we cannot know if we have caught it or not.

If, from this, we can draw the conclusion that happiness cannot be found without, we are forced to consider whether happiness stems from within. Yes, the within can be influenced by the without, however, when push comes to shove, it is the internal forces that drive us.

If we can look at the previous two examples; fame and social standing, and look at the crux of them, maybe we can deduce the basis of why they make people think that they are happy.  It comes from a sense of self, a sense of having self-actualised one’s internal desires. By wanting to feel good about one’s self, the individual has looked without for the source to make them feel good within. By seeing their desires manifest externally they can feel that thy have achieved their internal needs. Yet this happiness would be dependant upon external sources and therefore it can be taken away as quickly as it is given for fame and social standings are illusions like houses on the seashore built upon a foundation of sand. It would then suggest that to be ‘happy’ one must find that happiness from within and so the self-actualisation must stem from an internal source. This, as you can imagine, is a very long and hard destination to arrive at and so many who try to seek happiness find themselves buying into lies and the illusions of happiness. This can take many forms, alcohol, drugs, being promiscuous, and, yes, fame and social standing. As none of these provide a firm foundation, one becomes addicted to them and the desire becomes a need and thusly their lives are spent, not in the search for happiness but rather running away from happiness.

‘till next time and part 2

Happy New Year!

God In Search of Humans

Over a period of time, we have looked at how early mythologies gave way to theologies which then gave way to philosophies and sciences. We have looked at how all of these were merely humans attempting to understand that which they/we cannot understand or know. Indeed, the notion that life is not in our control is absolutely terrifying as on some level we know there are forces at work of which we cannot know, or even comprehend. Thusly, we looked to the heavens and created gods and decided that the arbitrary movement and placements of the planets and stars, (although following a set pattern) controlled our destinies (see if you can guess which star sign I am?!). Yet, the advent of the mythical god-like persons in the early mythologies were very human in their flaws, but later with Jesus the Buddha et al., there was a change in the natures of these transcendent figures. (note: I am not going to debate the existence or divinity of any figures in this essay) and suddenly the way that the gods were looked at became different.  

The question then becomes, if humans created early gods to embody the flaws of the, well, us, then why the shift in the nature of the gods, and what does it say about humans and/or real gods?  

What sets the likes of Jesus Christ and the Buddha apart from the early gods is their natures. Whilst the early gods were petty and reflected the times, Athena was the Goddess of Wisdom and War in Greece, the later transcendent figures were peaceful. They spoke of love and compassion. Whilst the early gods smote down those who wronged them, raped the women whom they fancied, and pretty much followed their base instincts, the later transcendent figures forgave the sins against them, and embraced children. The later transcendent figures embodied all that is good in people. 

One might draw the conclusion that this showed a shift in the mentality of cultures to a more passive one. Indeed, some might call it a slave mentality, but this is to misunderstand what these natures show. The desires to harm and to be selfish are base. They are easy to follow and easy to implement. They come from a very simple mindset- all that matters is me. If one looks at the world now, one can see that this mindset is still prevalent in many people, people who still love the scandal of the modern gods, the celebrities, especially when it involves sex or crime. Yet, still these transcendent figures emerged from the same environment which gave us the gods to whom all human life was worthless. Indeed, throughout many mythologies, the acquiring of knowledge for humans to raise themselves up has been seen as a vile sin. Prometheus was chained to a rock and had an eagle come each day to eat his liver (which regrew overnight) for the sin of bringing fire to humans. Eve and Pandora were expelled from Paradise for acquiring knowledge of life.  Yet, along comes Jesus and the Buddha to set out to teach people. This is a massive move away from the existing gods for, to them, knowledge was power and if people acquired knowledge, they would no longer need the gods, if they became self-sufficient (read Nietzsche’s version of the Judeo-Christian Fall myth in Genesis- see below). 

What is interesting here is the nature of the knowledge. Eve and Pandora learnt of suffering, yet Jesus and the Buddha taught of Love and Compassion. Whilst the early people had gods who embodied the worst of human nature, the new transcendent figures embodied the best of human nature. They were humble and kind, although they were strong characters and could get angry, they taught that life only has meaning if we help others, with Jesus becoming the poster-boy for the sacrifice of Love with his Crucifixion.  

Now we can look at this and draw many conclusions but let us look at two. 1) Humans got tired of the hardships of life and decided to look for something better 2) The gods looked down on their creation and realised that something was missing. And that thing that was missing in humans was, humanity. 

Humanity is the benevolence and kindness that one shows to another. It is compassion and love. It is putting others before ourselves and helping when we can. It is about a collective spirit as opposed to selfism. Indeed, it is everything that we are taught is a sign of weakness. 

Here is one of the ironies of society. Society is created by insecure people who shaped it in a way where selfishness and cruelty, putting one over another, is seen as strength. It is better to break someone’s nose or betray a confidence than it is not to fight or to keep another’s confidence. Indeed, the behaviours that we see portrayed as strength are the easiest. Yet, put one of these superhumans alongside one who is kind, one who shows humanity, and soon one will see that it is the big strong society who fears the one with humanity. How can this be? How can a society be so afraid of one person being kind that they shoot him? Because they know that to be kind is the hardest of all things to do and thusly they fear those who can be kind as they know that these people are stronger than them, they are gods on earth. They are the ones whom the gods in heaven are searching for. They are True Humans.

’till next time,

Merry Christmas! 

———————- 

From The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche 

48.

—Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror of science?… No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great danger.—

The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] What does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining…. But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.—So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end—and also many  other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.—“Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”—every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science…. It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shall not know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing  but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think…. Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (—the priests have always had need of war….). War—among other things, a great disturber of science!—Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.—So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become scientific—there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”…

The Evidence of Faith

The essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne once noted that humans are absurd for even though they cannot make a single worm, they make whole pantheons of gods. I’ll give you a moment to stop laughing. The question as to whether or not there is a God is a well-trod path, indeed these pages have covered it before. For new readers, I’ll briefly summaries my position on this sometimes controversial and often tedious question.  

For me, the question ‘Do you believe in God’, is superfluous because to arrive at this question and to answer this question, certain things must be taken for granted, most notably, that one has the tools to answer the said question. What do I mean by that? Well, we humans, and probably many animals as well, live our lives through illusion. We know what things are because we are told their names. We look at a chair and are told ‘chair’. What is interesting is that we do not form an absolute notion of what a chair is, rather we take an abstract notion of the concept of the chair. The Greek philosopher Plato spoke of the ‘World of Ideas’ in which there are the perfect forms of everything. For example, horses have 4 legs, a head and a tail. Although horses look different, the basic concept is the same, ergo, we know what the concept of a horse is. This theory, whilst elegant, does not fully understand the psychology of the human mind. This may be due to later years having more choice as what to use and the designs we can have, for example, as a chair. Yet the concept of ‘something that you can sit on’, still remains and so the notion is transferable. Before me there is a table but if I were to sit on it, would I be sitting on a table or a chair? It very much depends on the concept placed before me. If I see what I would call a table yet am told that it is used as a chair, suddenly, my mind shifts from one concept to the other, the certainty that I have that it is a table as it fits within the concept of ‘the table’ is replaced by a new certainty, that, as it conforms to the concept of a ‘chair’, it now becomes a chair.  

It is through language that the abstract and concrete become real, in Biblical terms, the word becomes flesh. And so, if one was to speak to me of a table or a chair, without describing either, I would have a brief picture in my mind of what the chair and table look like, even if, in reality, they look very different to my mental picture built from my own experiences with chairs and tables.  

However, imagine that I have never encountered a chair, I may have heard the word, but I have no concrete experience to associate with the chair. It may be described- it has four legs and you sit on it- and I may, amusingly, picture something more akin to a cow than a chair, if, indeed, I knew what cows were.  

Form this we can see that personal experience supplemented by language creates concepts. A cow, a table, a chair, a horse- I’ll assume when I mentioned these you could picture them in your mind, even if it was not the same table, chair, cow or horse as I picture abstractly, or am looking at right now (as I am with the table)- can be understood from our prior knowledge of said things. Although Plato would argue that this may stem from a-priori knowledge, from when we were in the World of Ideas, it is clear that if it were not for personal experience, we would not be able to know or understand these concepts. 

This then brings us back to the question ‘Do you believe in God?’. Now, you can see why I say this question is superfluous for how can one answer it? Do we have prior knowledge of what God is? Does the word ‘God’ carry any concrete concept as we could say ‘oh, that is chair and sat on the chair, talking to a cow, is God’? The answer is, of course not. Therefore, we do not have the tools to answer such questions.  

The way that people have around this dilemma, be they ones who believe in a God or not, is to cite the concept of faith. One who believes may say, ‘I do not need evidence, I have my faith and my faith is my belief’. One who does not believe may say, ‘I do not need evidence, I have my faith and my faith is my belief’. You may have noticed that both are using the same device, faith, as, ironically, the evidence they claim not to need. They are saying, in essence, ‘I cannot know but I have faith, ergo, I believe that there is/isn’t a God’, and so the faith they profess to be enough for their ability to know or not know if there is a God, is, in fact, the evidence they build their concept upon.  

‘till next time       

Confirmation Biases

Confirmation Biases is one of those words (yes, I know it is made of two separate words) which people seem to ascribe almost mystical qualities to. Ever since the dawn of science in the modern age (1700s, although ‘science’ has existed in its current form since the Ancient Greeks and the principles long before that) science, or Science, as we should say, has become one of the dominant religions of the world. Indeed, those who sneered at Science in favour of Religion now sneer at Religion with the same distain that they would have sneered at Science were they born a few hundred years earlier.

As we find with Religious bigots and extremist everywhere, one cannot question Science. Science is the all-knowing God who guides our lives and gives us meaning. Indeed, the Dogmas of Religion have been replaced by the Dogmas of Science. If you think I am being absurd (there is a fair chance of that) then look at history of the hostility to those who have created new Sciences (psychology for one), or corrected old Sciences (think how Galileo was threatened with death if he did not recant his correction of Aristotle’s theory of the motion of the solar system) and ask yourself are there any theories now which you believe in which don’t have any ‘evidence’ for other than popular opinion? For example, the theory that the universe began with a Big Bang still lacks any real evidence and what ‘evidence’ the theory is based on (note: it is still referred to as a ‘theory’) is circumstantial.

As we have spoken about ad nauseum in these pages (my apologises) the majority, if not all, of our existence is subjective. We view the world through the prisms of ourselves. This is what leads to echo chambers. Echo chambers is a theory that people generally will only speak/listen to those whom they agree with. This, of course, is dangerous. The great Danish (pun intended) philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that people fight so hard for their freedom of speech to compensate for the freedom they neglect to use, the freedom to think for their selves. And so, if a child is brought up in an environment where one is told that black is white then unless the child leans to think for their self, they will also swear that black is white, often violently, and will seek an echo chamber of people who swill tell them that black is white just so they shout ‘yeah, this person is so right! They think just like me!’, that annoying trait which people often have to praise another in order to praise their own self.

The irony of this is that instead of a pure science, that of thought, investigation and drawing independent conclusions, one enters into the experiment with a hypothesis which is not a true hypothesis in that it is not a question of ‘I think this will happen’, rather it is a case of ‘I know this will happen and the data will prove my hypothesis’ which is the antithesis of Science.

We humans think that we are very smart and wise, and thusly can predict the future. This we give the name of intuition. Sometimes it is right, other times it is wrong. Let me give you two examples, one real and one fictional.

When I was a pre-teen (under 13 years old) I had the opportunity to go on a school field trip to a Jewish Museum. At the end of the tour there was a lady, a survivor of the Holocaust (an event that took place in the late 1930s-mid 40s where Jews, Gypsies, the disabled et al. were murdered by the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler, and Italians led by Mussolini etc.). My question to the lady was (not sure if these are the exact words) ‘did you hate Hitler from the beginning?’. And the reply was, basically, ‘Yes’, as in she could see what was happening and could tell, even as a small child, that Hitler was a very dangerous man stirring up Anti-Semitic feelings that were/are always on the surface of most cultures. From this the lady could tell intuitively that things were going to get bad, and that Hitler was a man to be justifiably hated. Thankfully others felt this way and managed to flee preventing the almost complete genocide of a Race.

My fictional example is more frivolous. Jenny wants to go for a picnic, but she thinks it will rain. She looks out of the window and sees dark clouds. She sees the clouds and decides that her intuition is right and that it will rain. Jenny does not go for her picnic. 30 minutes later the clouds lift and there is glorious sunshine for the rest of the day.

Here we have two examples of confirmation biases. One expects bad things to happen, and the evidence suggests that they will, and they most certainly do. Another expects bad things to happen, and the evidence suggests that they will, and they do not. Both theories are built upon observation, yet one is correct and the other is not. How can this happen? The evidence all pointed towards the expected outcome, yet one was fulfilled and the other not. And here, boys and girls, is the irony. Confirmation biases are, in fact, only confirmations of themselves, they are the same as formulating a hypothesis and then ignoring the empirical and experiential evidence and stating the hypothesis as a conclusion arrived at after careful research when indeed it was arrived at pre-research.

So, what is confirmation bias? Indeed, there are times when it can be useful, and even save lives, but mostly confirmation biases are just used as an excuse by people not to do as Kierkegaard said and think, objectively, for their selves.

‘till next time       

      Remember I can be reached any time at thegreaterfoolblog@hotmail.com