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Commonly Misunderstood Concepts: Happiness (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Commonly Misunderstood Concepts: Happiness (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published November 26, 2009
as Part of Issue CCXX of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 24, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CCXX of The Rational Argumentator on November 26, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 24, 2014
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 One of the most grievous errors made by most people in the Western world today can be found in the prevailing view of happiness as constant pleasure or euphoria. This vision of happiness is not only unattainable but destructive of genuine happiness. A much more realistic and satisfying understanding of happiness can be found by combining the insights of Classical Aristotelian and Enlightenment philosophers and applying them to the vast opportunities we have in our time.

The view of happiness as pleasure or euphoria fails in multiple ways. First, it is physiologically unattainable. It is simply impossible for the human body to experience euphoria except in short, fairly infrequent bursts – the body simply cannot produce enough of the pleasure-stimulating chemicals that lead to the desired sensations. Moreover, the body reacts in the same essential manner to pleasure deserved through effort – such as the pride in having completed a creative work or in having transformed an aspect of the world – and to pleasure brought about by the introduction of certain foreign substances, such as drugs, into the body. It is well-known that a drug user needs increasing doses of a drug to experience the same euphoria; the doses that could produce it originally no longer suffice, because the body becomes accustomed to them. However, a lack of the drug altogether results in feelings of active, often severe, displeasure, because the body has come to treat the presence of certain amounts of the drug as its default, neutral state.

The same can be said of any life dominated by pursuit of pleasurable feelings for their own sake – detached from the events and conditions of the external reality. If an individual does manage to experience feelings of heightened pleasure all the time, his body will eventually become desensitized to them – to the point of viewing them as the neutral state. Every pleasurable feeling has a cause – be it internal or external. The individual will therefore come to view the cause of the pleasurable feelings as needing to be present in order to maintain even a neutral state of mind. As it is virtually impossible to maintain the causes of unusual pleasure in operation all the time, this individual will be certain to experience emotional “withdrawal” more often than he experiences pleasure.

Furthermore, a life dominated by the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake becomes a trap for the individual – preventing him from exercising his agency in the external world and instead confining him to replication of biochemical patterns within his own body that are aimed at producing the sought-after feelings. Instead of reshaping the elements of the world outside him into increasingly favorable configurations, he will become a slave to the peculiar construction of his own organism – and he will short-circuit its mechanisms in such a manner as to deprive feelings of pleasure of the utility they would have for a person who is not obsessed with them. The external reality is often quite unaccommodating; the man who focuses on his own feelings instead of observing and responding to the outside world will quickly find the outside world wearing away at his life until there is nothing left.

The sensible function of pleasure is as a reward for objectively beneficial behaviors. If an individual feels good after performing an act that improves his chances of survival, then this gives him an incentive to perform that act in the future. This is why the human capacity to experience pleasure was favored by natural selection for thousands of generations. However, this capacity evolved in a very different environment from our current one – where feelings of pleasure were largely extremely difficult to earn; good food was scarce and only attainable after strenuous hunting and foraging, and even the comfort of a shelter secure from the elements was a rarity. In our era, human beings have become extremely adept at artificially stimulating their pleasure centers without doing anything beforehand to earn such stimulation. The coupling of humans’ new possibilities with their ancient biology can explain such bizarre phenomena as obesity, recreational drug use, promiscuity, and the teenage culture in the contemporary Western world.

Pleasure can still serve its more beneficial function as an incentive for accomplishment, and, by being framed in this manner, it can be limited to a reasonable presence. But it has become much easier to bypass this much more demanding route to pleasure. The solution, of course, is not to reject our life-improving modern conveniences, but rather to alter our thinking about what constitutes a happy life.

To gain a more sophisticated understanding of happiness, it is useful to refer to two sets of historical philosophers. The Classical Greek philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, developed a concept of happiness as being inextricably linked with virtue. The Aristotelian view of happiness, or eudaimonia, did not emphasize pleasure or emotional states. Rather, it saw the truly happy man as the man who has actualized his full potential and has thereby positively influenced the external reality to the entirety of his ability. Virtuous habits – including moderation in the pursuit of pleasure – enable the individual to devote his energies toward self-actualization, which produces a longer-lasting, sustainable happiness. The Enlightenment philosophers contributed to this view by emphasizing the tremendous potential of the human rational faculty in literally reshaping the world and taking humanity out of the muck of poverty, vulgarity, and violence that it had been immersed in for most of its history. Each individual’s use of reason is his means for cultivating his full potential and for attaining true happiness. When the American Founders talked about a natural right to “the pursuit of happiness,” it was this rational, virtue-driven happiness that they had in mind.

It is important to emphasize that this view of happiness does not advocate asceticism, either. A certain sustainable amount of pleasure is preferable to complete avoidance of enjoyment – because the latter cannot be maintained indefinitely and is likely to result in an eventual reaction toward the opposite extreme of hedonism. It is also important to recognize that what constitutes self-actualization will differ considerably among individuals, and the sustainable level of pleasure will also vary in accordance with an individual’s material circumstances and psychological inclinations.

Nowhere is the sharp distinction between the conventional, hedonistic view of happiness and the rational, virtue-based view more evident than in human relationships, particularly those of a romantic nature. Those who expect their romantic partners to continually inspire them with feelings of ecstasy or euphoria are sentencing themselves to a lifetime of frustrations, breakups, and serial attempts at happiness – which will all inevitably end in the same way. A genuinely fulfilling romantic relationship is not one that continually stimulates the pleasure centers of each party’s brains, but rather one that exhibits a lasting commitment on both sides and a continual cooperation for the purpose of making life better. Feelings of love and affection should be present, of course, but they are much more sustainable in a gentle, comforting, persistent form than they could be in the form of the rapture that so many people mistakenly imagine love to be. My essay, “A Rational View of Love“, offers a more thorough exposition of this idea.

Finally, it is important to recognize that no life – and particularly no productive life – will be free of negative feelings. Whenever we seek to overcome obstacles, we are likely to encounter difficulties we cannot immediately resolve. This may produce feelings of doubt, fear, anger, disappointment, and frustration, in various mixes and degrees. As the world is severely flawed in most ways, it would be unreasonable for us not to have a substantial amount of negative feelings about it. These feelings should not be banished from our brains; indeed, they can serve as useful indicators of the problems in our lives and can motivate us to resolve them. Many people today make the mistake of abandoning any aspect of life they may occasionally feel negatively about – be it a job, a relationship, an educational pursuit, an independent creative work, or a set of ideas. But a negative feeling should not be the equivalent of a mental off-switch or “Keep Out” sign. Instead, it should be seen as an invitation to explore, resolve, challenge, or resist. Turning away from anything that does not trigger immediate good feelings is the surest recipe for unhappiness.

If it is not through a constant feeling of pleasure, then how can one know if one is happy? I posit that this can be ascertained by asking a single question: “Am I pursuing an overall course in life with whose consequences I expect to be satisfied for as long as I live?” This question ignores the everyday fluctuations in emotional states and arrives at the core issue: how one’s choices and behaviors contribute to the actualization of one’s potential and the establishment of a sustainable, ever-improving life. It shifts the focus of one’s attention from one’s present feelings to the future effects of one’s actions. Incidentally, however, it also has the effect of making one feel better on average, since one’s present emotional state is heavily dependent on whether one has behaved in a life-affirming or a life-undermining manner in the past. The more one does now to benefit one’s future, the better one will feel in the future. But it is a good, flourishing life itself that constitutes happiness, and, as a byproduct, results in mild, sustainable, and profoundly rewarding pleasure.

Read other articles in The Rational Argumentator’s Issue CCXX.

Commonly Misunderstood Concepts: Employment (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Commonly Misunderstood Concepts: Employment (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published November 26, 2009
as Part of Issue CCXX of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 24, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CCXX of The Rational Argumentator on November 26, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 24, 2014
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The mistaken identification of wealth with money, which I refuted in an earlier installment of this series, results in yet another damaging fallacy: the idea that the only legitimate “employment” is work performed for somebody else in exchange for money. This cultural confusion has become so deep-rooted that even people who own their own businesses or function as independent contractors are classified as “self-employed” – which, despite the second component of that term, is somehow seen as distinct from being “employed,” which has become in the minds of many identical to working for a formal organization on a fixed schedule for largely fixed compensation. There is nothing wrong with the latter kind of employment; indeed, I am currently engaged in it, and it pays well. It is a practical and a tremendously useful way to earn a living for many. But the societal stigma against many individuals who choose not to pursue that path needs to end.

I am not here seeking to justify individuals who refuse to work out of sloth or rebelliousness – or individuals who choose to subsist off of the welfare system. Indeed, I am not at all seeking to justify individuals who refuse to work at all. Rather, I seek to effectuate a cultural re-identification of employment with doing actual useful work – physical or mental – irrespective of how much, or how little, money that work earns. If wealth is not money but rather useful goods and services, then useful employment is any activity that generates useful goods and services. Some such activities happen to be highly compensated with money, either because there is large market demand for them or because they are subsidized by private institutions or governments. But other such activities arise out of individuals’ volunteer efforts, hobbies and interests, and desires to improve their immediate environment. An individual who devotes himself or herself primarily to the latter sorts of activities can be as worthy of respect and just as productive as an individual who makes a six-figure monetary income.

First, it is essential to recognize that either market value or institutional advantages that result in monetary subsidies are not necessarily a reflection of genuine wealth creation or usefulness. For instance, numerous products of high culture – including philosophy, literature, and classical music – are not in high demand among the masses, who simply do not understand such products. The creators of high culture will not earn as great an income on the market as the creators of light magazines and popular music. However, these same creators will contribute a much longer-lasting value to human knowledge, refinement, and moral standards for generations to come, whereas the creators of more popular works are unlikely to remain in demand for more than two generations. There is nothing wrong with this differential in compensation, per se, as people who do not appreciate high culture are entitled to vote with their dollars however they please. But this state of affairs does invalidate any notion that the amount of money one receives from one’s work is in any manner connected with one’s worth as a human being or one’s contribution to improving one’s own life and the lives of others – both in the short term and in the long term. Many creators of more refined works have even decided that it is unwise to try to make a living from such works and depend on their approval by a mass audience; instead, they have decided to subsidize their own creations and the dissemination of these works by means of a monetary income they earn from another occupation. This allows for works of high culture to be created exactly as the author intended them to be; if the author is talented and has a consistent vision, such works will be much more likely to endure long into the future.

Another important recognition is that some work is either impossible to transfer to the market given present technology or is prohibitively expensive to transfer. For instance, if I wish to go into my kitchen and get myself a beverage, it would be highly impractical for me to hire another individual to do this for me. If I get the beverage myself, I do not either collect or spend any money – provided that I already own the beverage, the glass, and the living space. But it cannot be denied that the act of getting the beverage was desirable to me and improved the quality of my life. Likewise, numerous actions that an individual performs to improve his or her own skills – such as reading books, practicing musical instruments, and doing mathematical problems – cannot be outsourced to other individuals and retain their value for the individual, which arises from the act of learning new skills that the individual himself would be able to use in the future. Indeed, it is true that all of us, if we have even the slightest desire to live well, will perform a wide variety of work every day for which we receive no monetary compensation at all! If we did not perform this work, it is unlikely that we would be in any position to earn any money, either.

A popular source of contempt in contemporary culture is the individual who, instead of leaving the home to work for money, chooses to remain at home and maintain it in good working order. This is, in my judgment, the single most egregious consequence of the fallacy that employment is the same as working for money. Working within the home – especially when supported by the monetary income of another family member – is a tremendously useful and life-affirming occupation; it facilitates a division of labor where various family members can specialize in the tasks they are most skilled at performing, thereby making good use of the principle of comparative advantage. Moreover, it enables a greater degree of care for any children in the household and provides a source of relief for those individuals who simply do not like working outside the home on a fixed schedule.

I note that there is nothing in this implying that any particular gender of individual should choose to stay at home, or that a family cannot function well if all of its members choose to work outside the home. Rather, I argue that a productive family can exist irrespective of which of its members do or do not choose to work for money. Indeed, for a family which has accumulated sufficient money and physical goods, it is possible to maintain productivity and a high standard of living even if none of its members earns a regular monetary income. Even if an individual has never earned any money in his or her life and, say, lives off a vast inheritance, it is still possible for that individual to perform useful and productive work. Indeed, one of the arguments that the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek made for the right of inheritance can be summarized as follows. Even if the vast majority of people who inherit their money will spend it unwisely, it is enough for one out of a thousand inheritors to be a great thinker and innovator. This individual, through his inheritance, will have the time and leisure to bring his vision to fruition, without needing to worry about providing for his day-to-day subsistence. The result could be a tremendous philosophical, technological, or artistic breakthrough that improves the lives of millions for centuries to come – and this result is worth the wasteful spending any other heirs might engage in.

Of course, the manner of productive work one does is often constrained by one’s current material situation. Many people will work for money, even if they wish to do something else, because they need the money to maintain the standard of living they wish to have. Increases in monetary income can go a long way toward improving both one’s access to leisure and one’s level of security and comfort. On the other hand, the same goals can also be achieved in part by spending less of the money one already earns and by living within one’s means – never letting one’s expenses exceed one’s income, which is akin to deficit spending for individuals, and not taking out interest-bearing debt, unless there is no other option, and the good the debt would fund could be seen as a necessity – such as a house. Devoting some time to managing one’s spending and establishing less expensive lifestyle choices is just productive as working to earn a salary increase.

If you wish to work to earn money, by all means do so. If you would rather focus on working in the home or doing volunteer work of any sort, this is excellent as well. Provided that one works and has useful outcomes to show for it, there is no need to feel any inferiority in one’s own case or any disrespect for others.

Read other articles in The Rational Argumentator’s Issue CCXX.

Commonly Misunderstood Concepts: Education (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Commonly Misunderstood Concepts: Education (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published October 3, 2009
as Part of Issue CCX of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 24, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CCX of The Rational Argumentator on October 3, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 24, 2014
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There are several terms that are commonly misunderstood in most contemporary societies, with devastating consequences. Among these are “education,” “health care,” “employment,” “wealth,” and “happiness.” In this series, I hope to dispel – one by one – common fallacies surrounding these terms and to replace them with truer, more life-affirming understandings.

Education is the first colossally misunderstood term that I would like to address – as misunderstandings of it create massive societal problems where none need exist, and at the same time blind many people to genuine, but oft-overlooked problems.

Dictionary.com defines “education” in several ways:

1. The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

2. The act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.

3. A degree, level, or kind of schooling.

4. The result produced by instruction, training, or study.

5. The science or art of teaching.

Already the multiple possible meanings impart some ambiguity to the term. Clearly, acquiring general knowledge and developing the powers of reasoning and judgment are not the same as attending a school. Many a person has attended schools – even elite schools – and learned scarcely anything at all. While the dictionary writers at least take care to distinguish the different uses of the term “education,” a more commonplace tendency in today’s world is to package all the meanings together and to consider them inextricable from one another.

It is thus that the obsessive emphasis of contemporary societies on formal schooling operates. Abuses of the term “education” lead to a belief that schooling is both necessary and sufficient for learning, as if sitting in a classroom with thirty other similarly ignorant people is indispensable for attaining knowledge, but will also magically impart this knowledge to everyone involved.

I will preface further discussion by emphasizing that I have probably gotten the most out of formal schooling that an individual could hope to get. I was valedictorian of my class in high school and salutatorian in college, where I pursued three majors. And yet, in retrospect, I find that my best learning had always been self-initiated and self-motivated – and that I could not have succeeded in school without the effort I put in to acquire knowledge on my own.

Equating education with formal schooling is not a harmless idiosyncrasy; it is both expensive and costly. The equation of education with formal institutions leads to the demand to spend vast amounts of money on such formal institutions – as if dollars spent could purchase motivation, curiosity, and initiative. Conventional institutionalized schooling also makes substandard use of the most formative time in an individual’s life – the time when that person’s mind forms the habits and connections that shape both learning and character for decades into the future. Literally hundreds of millions of young people spend the vast majority of their time sitting behind desks, walking in lines, and being confined to “restricted areas” within school buildings, when they could much more readily utilize their talents elsewhere.

One problem with the model of Western public schools is that it creates a one-size-fits-all standard to which every student is expected to conform. The teacher can typically only do one thing in the classroom at a time. Teachers generally have no choice but to gauge the average level of knowledge and skill in the class and to teach primarily to that level. The students who know the material already or who grasp it more quickly have their time wasted; the students who do not follow as quickly as their “average” peers are often left behind. And the “average” students – to be quite blunt – generally do not learn particularly much, certainly not enough to justify forgoing twelve to sixteen years of their lives.

The second problem with Western public schools is that they segregate individuals by age groups, separating young people from those who are most qualified to give them an education – their elders – people whose experience exceeds that of the young people by anywhere from a few years to a few generations. Within public schools, and to a degree within universities as well, most young people are barely aware of anything beyond the immediate, pressing concerns of their own age group; few learn to expect the major transitions that are about to come in virtually all of their lives, and few absorb the skills needed to handle such transitions successfully. Within a peer group for which there exist no serious role models who have actually accomplished something, the lowest common denominator tends to prevail. This is, in part, why reckless, self-destructive, and delinquent behaviors among young people are so common in the West today.

The third problem with Western public schools is the manner in which uniform curricula tend to stifle the development of individual agendas of learning and curiosity in general. The teacher is paid to lecture on a certain predetermined subject material; if a student asks an interesting but tangential question, the teacher – even if he favors curiosity – must often suppress the inquiry for fear of lacking the time to do the job for which he was paid. At the same time, other students may not be interested in the same tangential questions, but might have other questions of their own; it is simply not possible to address all the questions and actualize all of the vast potential of every individual within the standardized structure of a classroom.

The fourth and most disturbing problem of public schools arises from the fact that the best children and teenagers are herded together with the worst: the bullies who mercilessly inflict every kind of petty and not-so-petty abuse imaginable on those who are better than they – for the very fact that their victims are better. Bullying creates an atmosphere of fear, stifled ambition, and anti-intellectualism – even among many students who would never engage in bullying themselves. Bullying – both of the physical sort and of the “softer” verbal sort that happens so often via the cliques and popularity contests that emerge in the schools – is the enforcement mechanism for conformity to the lowest common denominator. Its product is the unthinking acceptance by millions of young people of the latest fads, the most careless risks, and a complete unawareness of their future potential.

It is true that formal schooling could work in some cases – where every student is already reasonably knowledgeable, motivated, and respectful of others. A university course where each student desires to delve deeply and earnestly into the subject matter is a good example of this. But even universities today have become populated with students who neither need nor deserve to be there – all a result of government subsidies fueled by a mistaken perception that college and university educations are needed for even the most routine clerical jobs. As a result, the universities are rapidly succumbing to the same kinds of intellectual apathy, lowest-common-denominator teaching, and reckless behavior that have long plagued the public schools. The term “student” no longer carries a connotation of great honor and respectability, as it did even a century ago. Instead, everyone appears to have a Bachelor’s Degree these days, and to have trouble finding work at a fast-food restaurant with one. In an effort to remedy this, the best and brightest are often pigeonholed by public opinion into attending graduate school, even though many of them have little interest in subsequently becoming academicians. By the time they leave graduate school, they are already in their late twenties, almost certainly poor, and likely in severe debt. Misguided overvaluation of formal schooling has prevented aspiring lawyers and doctors from simply taking the bar and medical exams whenever they wished and receiving their licenses if they passed the rigorous exams. Instead, protectionist professional associations – the white-collar equivalent of labor unions – have collaborated with academia to make the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars on formal schooling a requirement prior to even being allowed to take these exams. The ideal of a meritocracy or natural aristocracy of talent has been replaced by the ideal of the pecking order of seniority and pull, where one must grovel and pay in hopes of someday – probably only when one’s health begins to fail – receiving the groveling and payments of others.

At the same time, societal attitudes make formal schooling a virtual requirement for self-esteem. Many bright, talented individuals who could accomplish tremendous feats if they entered a trade in their early teens are pressured to feel inferior and incompetent until they have served their time. In truth, they have nothing to feel substandard about. Formal schooling is not a requirement for knowledge, skill, or good character; it is not a substitute for entrepreneurial insight, creativity, or determination. It cannot make a person a success or prevent failure. It cannot teach a person anything he could not teach himself. It is not needed as a proof of a person’s competency, nor as a requirement to get a job. Most of what a person does for a living is learned through the experience of doing it – and schooling requirements simply serve as arbitrary barriers to deny some the opportunity of getting this experience.

Formal schooling, to be sure, has its uses – especially for training the academicians and other intellectuals of the next generation. But it would only be strengthened in this role if educational institutions did not have to deal with the people who do not need to attend them and whose education can be achieved spectacularly without them.

Read other articles in The Rational Argumentator’s Issue CCX.