I have to post this even though it is in ultra-rough-draft form… I will never sleep if I don’t get it posted! I have been chiseling at these ideas since I first posted my article on law over a year ago. I recently stumbled across Epicurus and his philosophies and that was what really brought everything into focus for me. The ideas presented here are related to the ideas I presented on law here (latest draft I’ve posted to the forum).
Action and the Soul
This article is not about intangible entities, such as ghosts or deities, whether they exist or what their nature is. Rather, I have in mind the “soul” in its metaphorical sense. To borrow the terminology of Ludwig von Mises, I will be employing methodological dualism throughout this study. My soul is me, it is the “I” in “I want to be happy.” It is whatever is “looking at” the stream of incoming sensory data that comprises my experience of the world.
In examining the soul, I want to address the question: how can I be happy in the deepest and fullest sense of the word? This is a big question. It is the kind of question that has been fielded almost exclusively by religion and theology, not science. However, I believe we can apply the methods of science to begin to answer this question. I think we can do better than shrug our shoulders or appeal to mysticism in attempting to answer this question. Of course, the idea that ethics can be a science is highly contentious. I will adopt the position of Henry Hazlitt in his book The Foundations of Morality:
I will content myself here with pointing out that ethics is not a science in the sense in which that word is applied to the physical sciences—to the determination of matters of objective fact, or to the establishment of scientific laws which enable us to make exact predictions. But ethics is entitled to be called a science if we mean by this a systematic inquiry conducted by rational rules. It is not a mere chaos. It is not just a matter of opinion, in which one person’s opinion is as good as another’s, or in which one statement is as true or as false or as “meaningless” or as unverifiable as another; in which neither rational induction nor deduction nor the principles of investigation or logic play any part. If by science, in short, we mean simply rational inquiry aiming to arrive at a unified and systematized body of deductions and conclusions, then ethics is a science.
(Introduction)
Most of us pursue our own happiness without a great deal of introspection. After all, the pursuit of happiness is completely instinctual. However, if we intend to apply a methodical (scientific) approach to the matter, we must do more than simply rely on gut impulses.
An instinctive, irreflective knowledge of the processes of nature will doubtless always precede the scientific, conscious apprehension, or investigation, of phenomena. The former is the outcome of the relation in which the processes of nature stand to the satisfaction of our wants. The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.
Ernst Mach – Introduction to The Science of Mechanics
I will tentatively begin the discussion with the word “happiness” with the understanding that this word is very imprecise and overloaded. It conveys the general meaning well enough to get things started.
The methodology I will employ in this article is two-fold – I will approach the problem simultaneously from two distinct methodologies belonging to two distinct (yet related) fields of science. The first methodology I will apply comes from the Austrian tradition of economics and is called praxeology. Praxeology works by beginning with a small number of truths about the human condition and human nature that are so obvious they cannot be denied and then deducing useful conclusions from these truths. Praxeology is a deductive method.
The second methodology I will apply comes from the natural sciences, in particular, evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology uses a hybrid of basic truths about the human condition and human nature combined with scientific evidence to derive hypothetical scenarios of human evolution that further illuminate human nature beyond that which could be determined from deduction alone. Evolutionary psychology is an inductive method.
Both praxeology and evolutionary psychology begin with the idea – unpopular nowadays – that humans have a nature. In particular, the idea of human nature is that humans have innate predispositions which they do not choose to have and may not be able to thwart even with conscious effort. If human beings have a nature then they are not übermenschen. They are not capable of reshaping themselves into anything they want to be. There are limits to their capacity to reason, to accurately perceive the world and to alter themselves and the world around them to suit their objectives.
Mises comments on the idea of human nature specifically as it relates to the idea of natural law.
… first, … a nature-given order of things exists to which man must adjust his actions if he wants to succeed. Second: the only means available to man for the cognizance of this order is thinking and reasoning, and no existing social institution is exempt from being examined and appraised by discursive reasoning. Third: there is no standard available for appraising any mode of acting either of individuals or of groups of individuals but that of the effects produced by such action.
Theory & History ch. 3.4
Any idea of measuring happiness should be banished immediately – happiness is a subjective state of mind and the conditions for happiness vary from individual to individual or even from time to time for the same individual.
Introspection and the Soul
One of the first tools of analysis is to break up the problem under study into smaller pieces along natural boundaries; for example, we separate left from right when dissecting an animal exhibiting bilateral symmetry or we separate the heavens (astronomy) from the terrestrial (geography) or sea animals from land animals, and so on.
I have chosen to break up the problem of the soul into three pieces. The first piece is perception. The second piece is cognition. The third piece is valuation or appetite.
This separation is based on introspection and is different from that employed in neuroscience, psychology or even the philosophy of cognition because the methodology employed in this article is primarily deductive. It should be understood that this division is no less arbitrary (in an ultimate sense) than those divisions employed in other fields and, therefore, cannot possibly conflict with them.
Perception can be further divided into two pieces, sense perception and memory perception. Sense perception is everything which comprises my awareness of the “now”, that is, the present. Memory perception is everything which comprises my awareness of the past.
Cognition is the “inner voice” that is capable of reasoning through difficult problems, drawing conclusions, constructing hypotheses based on perception, predicting the future and identifying patterns in the historical past, among other things.
Desire or appetite is the hunger pang that motivates action. If the soul was comprised solely of perception and cognition, the human being would be no different than a calculating device that idly waits for instructions and programming.
The soul can also be divided along the dimension of time; past (memory perception), present (sense perception) and future (cognition as it relates to prediction).
In this division, I have not overlooked the will. However, the will is not properly a piece or component of the soul. Rather, when we speak of the “the will” we are employing a hypostatic metaphor, as when we speak of “Time itself.” The will is not a thing. The will is the action or motion of the soul, which is the subject of study.
Starting Point
The soul itself is the ultimate starting point.
The soul as it relates to memory perception is ultimate. It is conceivable that I am misremembering the past and that the world has, as a matter of fact, unfolded differently than I remember it unfolding. However, even if this were the case, I have no means to perceive the mistake. Hence, I have no choice but to proceed as if my memories are, in fact, genuine.
The soul as it relates to sense perception is ultimate. The famous thought experiment of the “brain in a vat” illustrates this problem – what if you are not what you think you are but are, instead, a brain in a vat of warm saline water hooked up to some mad scientist’s supercomputer that is simulating the world around you? This is a conceivable situation. However, even if this were the case, I would have no means to perceive the mistake. Hence, I have no choice but to take my sense perceptions at face value. Descartes’ cogito argument or any other argument cannot imbue me with any greater confidence because I could make such arguments even if I were a brain in a vat.
The soul as it relates to cognition is ultimate. It is conceivable that my brain is unreliable and deduces false conclusions from true premises or fails to perceive the glaring inconsistencies in the axioms with which it operates. However, even if this were the case, I could not perceive the mistake since the sole means I have to diagnose it – my reasoning – is the very thing that is compromised. Every argument by which I am convinced is cognized to be true only insofar as I comprehend it and I believe that its axioms are consistent and its deductions are valid. There is no external cognitive reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the faults in my own cognitive abilities.
Whatever its origin, every belief I may have about theology or neurology or mathematics or cosmology or quantum physics must stand judgment before the throne of my own cognition and my own perceptions. I cannot have certainty through proxy, which is the fallacy of any appeal to authority. Certainty or even confidence is a state of mind not a fact residing within a physical object or within an abstract idea or within the mind of someone else.
Finally, the soul as it relates to valuation is ultimate. This is a sub-species of the brain-in-a-vat problem. It is conceivable that I am the subject of a grand hoax and that my values and desires come from a source external to myself or are really aligned against my own true interests. Nevertheless, I could never perceive the mistake since I only come to know my desires and appetites through their immediate effect on my state of mind. There is no external reference outside of myself to which I can appeal to perceive the mistakes in my valuations.
It is conceivable that I am expected or required by a deity or the Universe to act according to the desires and wishes of all mankind or all living things or the Universe or the deity himself, instead of acting according to my own desires. However, no matter how fervently I try to shrug off my appetites and adopt the desires and wishes of something or someone outside myself, I can only do so as a fulfillment of my desire or appetite of acting according to the wishes of that thing outside myself. That is, when I act on behalf of others, I act by virtue of my desire to fulfill the desires of others. Even if I obey God’s command to stop desiring some sinful experience, it is only because I more strongly desire the peace of mind that comes from being in good standing with God than I desire the forbidden pleasures of the sinful experience.
The vast majority of philosophy gives way to fear; fear of being incorrect, fear of having an incomplete understanding of life and the world, fear that we may be inadvertently doing wrong, and so on. Fear is one of the greatest impediments to the soul’s happiness. The burden does not rest on me to persuade you that your soul is its own highest court of appeal. Recognizing the fact that your own mind, your own senses and your own appetites are their own ultimate criterion whose judgments are not contingent upon any higher court of appeal is nothing but the abolition of fear from one’s mind and soul. Facing this fact is a matter of self-improvement not a question of logical debate.
Protagoras famously said, Man is the measure of all things. Slightly re-stated (to capture his meaning in modern language), no proposition can be more certain than that Self is the measure of all things. The truth of any other proposition can only be judged by virtue of the fact that this proposition is true. The compromise of conviction of belief in the truth of this proposition in one’s own mind cripples one’s ability to think about oneself, about one’s peers and about the natural world and is always the result of fear.
Asocial Action
Imagine Robinson Crusoe stranded alone on a deserted island. He has the width and breadth of the island to himself. There are plants and animals on the island which he may eat in order to survive. There is fresh water to drink. Because there are no other humans on the island, the problem of proper social behavior does not arise.
How should Crusoe act? What should he do? How should he spend his time?
Epicurus’s answer is that Crusoe should seek pleasure and avoid pain.
The truth of the position that pleasure is the ultimate good will most readily appear from the following illustration. Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? … Let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away, but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement.
Suppose on the other hand a person crushed beneath the heaviest load of mental and of bodily anguish to which humanity is liable. Grant him no hope of ultimate relief in view also give him no pleasure either present or in prospect. Can one describe or imagine a more pitiable state? If then a life full of pain is the thing most to be avoided, it follows that to live in pain is the highest evil; and this position implies that a life of pleasure is the ultimate good. In fact the mind possesses nothing in itself upon which it can rest as final. Every fear, every sorrow can be traced back to pain; there is no other thing besides pain which is of its own nature capable of causing either anxiety or distress.
Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance, and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure. But that which is not itself a means to anything else, but to which all else is a means, is what the Greeks term the Telos, the highest, ultimate or final Good. It must therefore be admitted that the Chief Good is to live agreeably.
Cicero (quoting the Epicurean Lucius Torquatus) - On Ends, (Section I.XII)
Mises clarifies the formal nature of Epicurean pleasure and pain in praxeology:
The idea that the incentive of human activity is always some uneasiness and its aim always to remove such uneasiness as far as possible, that is, to make the acting men feel happier, is the essence of the teachings of Eudaemonism and Hedonism. Epicurean ataraxia is that state of perfect happiness and contentment at which all human activity aims without ever wholly attaining it. In the face of the grandeur of this cognition it is of little avail only that many representatives of this philosophy failed to recognize the purely formal character of the notions pain and pleasure and gave them a material and carnal meaning.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chapter 1 Section 2)
To begin with, we must understand the ways in which satisfaction can arise. Satisfaction is a state of mind – the mental formalization of the Epicurean ataraxia – and can arise through a variety of means. First of all, it can arise without any perceptible cause. Sometimes, I feel happy for no apparent reason. Second, it can arise as the result of reflection on the past, that is, through memory perceptions. Third, it can arise as the result of sense perceptions, that is, the present experience of pleasurable sensation. Fourth, it can arise as the result of cognitive processes.
Unlike physical quantities such as space, time, air and so on, satisfaction is not scarce or bound by the rules of scarcity. In this sense, we can see that it is conceivable that satisfaction can be had at will. By contrast, it is not conceivable that a million diamonds can be had at will because diamonds are scarce; there are only so many of them and only by digging them out of the ground or persuading someone else to part with theirs can you have more.
Just as we can enjoy satisfaction for no apparent reason, wants can and often do arise for no apparent reason. However, wants do not solely arise from internal factors outside of one’s control. Wants can, in fact, be increased or decreased. Because of this, the nature and quantity of one’s wants lies at least partly within the realm of human action.
Epicurus argued that a man should seek to decrease his wants in order that it may be as easy as possible to be satisfied (happy):
Independence of outward things [is] a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much, being honestly persuaded that they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it.
Letter to Menoeceus
In respect to what he believed were the primary afflictions that prevented people from being pleasantly situated, Epicurus taught what would later be termed the tetrapharmakos or “The Four-Part Cure”:
Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure
Philodemus, Herculaneum Papyrus
All four maxims are related to the elimination of anxiety about the prospect of future pain: pain inflicted by malevolent gods or Nature, pain suffered in a torturous afterlife, pain suffered by inability to meet one’s bodily needs and pain suffered by long and intense diseases.
The Epicurean view of attaining satisfaction is to reduce one’s wants, particularly by eliminating the anxiety that drives the creation of superfluous wants. To satisfy the gods, you must labor and purchase animals to sacrifice to satiate their wrath. To avoid a torturous afterlife and attain a blissful afterlife, you must forego pleasures and inflict pains upon yourself. To avoid suffering the humiliation of foregoing the luxuries of life, you must labor and purchase those luxuries before you die. And so on.
The first recommendation we can make to Crusoe is that he should seek to minimize his wants to those which he can reliably attain. The means by which he can attain this is a particular form of action, namely, psychological self-training. It is possible to shed a mental habit. For example, the habit of uttering curse words can be shed by repeatedly substituting a preferable word whenever the offending word manifests itself.
Whenever Crusoe thinks about the croissants he was accustomed to having before being stranded on the island, he can repeatedly think of the pleasure of eating the coconuts that are available to him instead until he has suppressed somewhat the memory of croissants which is causing him distress through the unsatisfied want. This subject warrants its own study and is only briefly touched here in cartoon form to illustrate that the means exist by which Crusoe can alter, to a degree, his own schedule of wants.
But in order to be happy, it is clearly not enough to simply want less. If he does not act, Crusoe will soon perish. In order to satisfy the wants which remain – whether as a matter of choice or not – Crusoe must employ means to achieve his ends and so achieve the ultimate end of ataraxia as described by Mises.
Praxeology – as a value-free science – scrupulously avoids recommendations regarding right ends. Mises says:
Praxeology is indifferent to the ultimate goals of action. Its findings are valid for all kinds of action irrespective of the ends aimed at. It is a science of means, not of ends. It applies the term happiness in a purely formal sense. In the praxeological terminology the proposition: man’s unique aim is to attain happiness, is tautological. It does not imply any statement about the state of affairs from which man expects happiness.
Human Action, Chapter 1 Section 2
At this point, we must augment the deductive method with inductive methods in order to give a non-arbitrary answer. We can begin to answer the question of what ends Crusoe should have by noting that we can exclude those ends which will bring him pain at the outset. Next, we ask among those ends which will not cause him pain, what should be their schedule? Here, we are not interested in the technical problem of survival which can be answered by any expert in survivalism, rather, we are interested in how Crusoe should order his schedule of wants so as to maximize his pleasure and satisfaction given that he is already able to survive.
In order to maximize his pleasure, Crusoe must resort to an inductive method. He must try varying his own schedule of wants in order to discover which ends he prefers to satisfy over others. We already instinctively do this without a second thought and adjust our wants over time without reflection. However, it is precisely this absence of deliberateness that limits the purely naturalistic approach to satisfying ends and which is at least partly responsible for our sometimes miserable failure to achieve ataraxia despite the fact that its attainment is always our ultimate aim.
We can finally make our final recommendation to Crusoe: he should eliminate ends which he can see from the outset will cause him pain and he must try varying his schedule of wants to see which ends to pursue in order to be most pleasantly situated. The goal of his search is to find the ends which bring the highest ratio[1] of satisfaction to dissatisfaction in the means required to attain them. This is a process of self-discovery.
However, there is more information available by which we can improve our recommendations to Crusoe. For example, we know that many types of mushrooms are poisonous and will cause severe suffering or death if Crusoe eats them. This kind of information was discovered through inductive methods – botanical study of plants and medical investigation of the human body and how plant toxins affect it.
We see that science can provide heuristics by which Crusoe can guide his blind search. A heuristic is invaluable in this regard. Just 10 different ends would result in nearly 4 million combinations and the world presents an innumerable set of possible ends. What is important to note is that science as it is used as a heuristic in the choice of ends is merely an elaboration of the process of individualistic self-discovery by the utilization of specialization and division-of-labor. In other words, the choice of ends is merely advised by scientific investigation and cannot be dictated or determined by it.
This is the mistake of Rothbard; he asserts that reason can prove the eating of poisonous mushrooms by Crusoe is immoral:
If Crusoe had eaten the mushrooms without learning of their poisonous effects, then his decision would have been incorrect-a possibly tragic error based on the fact that man is scarcely automatically determined to make correct decisions at all times. Hence, his lack of omniscience and his liability to error. If Crusoe, on the other hand, had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway-perhaps for “kicks” or from a very high time preference-then his decision would have been objectively immoral, an act deliberately set against his life and health. It may well be asked why life should be an objective ultimate value, why man should opt for life (in duration and quality) In reply, we may note that a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom.
Ethics of Liberty (Chapter 6)
If we faithfully follow the Misesean view of the purely formal nature of the Epicurean pleasure-pain dichotomy, then we can only describe pleasure as “good” or “moral” and pain as “bad” or “immoral” in a purely formal sense. These are just different ways to say “If Crusoe wants to stay alive, he should avoid the eating of mushrooms.” It does not mean that if he eats the mushrooms he has violated some kind of “Thou shalt not” dictum uttered by his Creator-Owner.
Either Rothbard really aims to establish ought from is and therefore has in view much more than the formal sense of “immoral” or he is being unclear. Either he means that Crusoe has really violated a law of human nature, a law which contains normative force, or he is equivocating norms with advice.
Human Nature
The task of developing detailed, specific recommendations to Crusoe in his search for happiness can be reduced to the specification of the attributes of human nature. I do not mean that once we have settled on certain facts about human nature that these facts are then determinative of the ends that Crusoe must choose. The fact of variation within humans means that any attribute of human nature in regards to right ends is subject to individual exceptions and outliers.
Crusoe can employ science in his search for the correct or best schedule of ends which will bring him closest to the condition of ataraxia but the deductive method fails because it can only take ends as givens, which are arbitrary. The science of evolutionary psychology is an inductive method which we can use to begin giving specific, detailed answers to the question, “What should Crusoe do?”
In their popular book, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, evolutionary psychologists Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa lay the groundwork for the science of evolutionary psychology on four principles, each in contravention to what they call the Standard Social Science Model:
- People are animals… there is nothing special about humans… Evolutionary psychology recognizes that the same biological laws of evolution apply to humans as they do to all other species.
- There is nothing special about the human brain… the brain is just another body part, just like the hand or the pancreas. Just as millions of years of evolution have gradually shaped the hand or the pancreas to perform certain functions, so has evolution shaped the human brain to perform its function, which is solving adaptive problems to help humans survive and reproduce successfully… Evolution does not stop at the neck; it goes all the way up.
- Human nature is innate. Just as dogs are born with innate dog nature, and cats are born with innate cat nature, humans are born with innate human nature.
- Human behavior is the product of both innate human nature and the environment… both innate human nature, which the genes program, and the environment in which humans grow up are equally important determinants of behavior.
The primary tool of evolutionary psychology (EP) is the search for culturally-universal behaviors. Human behavior clearly varies from individual to individual and from culture to culture. But those behaviors which humans exhibit in all cultures are likely to have a genetic basis since it is easier to believe that a behavior is the result of a single genetic factor than it is to believe that a behavior arose as an artifact of cultural conditioning, independently, in every culture.
The very fact that the brain and its component circuitry are so complex is part and parcel of the reason we should believe that complex human behavior has a genetic basis. The pioneers of evolutionary psychology – Leda Cosmides and John Tooby – explain why in their article Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer.
Because their genetic basis is universal and species-typical, the heritability of complex adaptations (of the eye, for example) is usually low, not high. Moreover, sexual recombination constrains the design of genetic systems, such that the genetic basis of any complex adaptation (such as a cognitive mechanism) must be universal and species-typical (Tooby and Cosmides, 1990b). This means the genetic basis for the human cognitive architecture is universal, creating what is sometimes called the psychic unity of humankind. The genetic shuffle of meiosis and sexual recombination can cause individuals to differ slightly in quantitative properties that do not disrupt the functioning of complex adaptations. But two individuals do not differ in personality or morphology because one has the genetic basis for a complex adaptation that the other lacks.
This idea is also reinforced by the principle that the human brain is just another organ – just as the variation in human behavior is not down to some people having more or different arms or more or different eyes than everyone else, so the variation in human behavior due to the brain is not the result of the presence or absence of complex brain circuits in some people.
A large part of the wiring in our brains is concerned with social interaction. It goes without saying that the largest source of dissatisfaction facing Crusoe alone on his deserted island is loneliness and isolation. The movie Castaway memorably illustrates the desperate loneliness of the main character who resorts to putting a face on a volleyball, naming it Wilson and speaking to it constantly in an implied dialogue.
To proceed any further in the investigation of how to attain happiness by choosing right ends, we must re-introduce the complicating factor of society.
Social Action
If there are other people on the island with Crusoe, the problem of choosing right ends is altered dramatically. In the case of asocial action, the problem of right and wrong as a matter of normative principle simply cannot arise. Crusoe’s avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure are essentially amoral and the only sense in which pain can be called “immoral” or “evil” and pleasure can be called “moral” or “good” is purely formal. To say otherwise is to assert that there is a higher court of appeal than Crusoe’s own soul in judging the validity of his desires, which is a veiled attempt to impose fear onto Crusoe.
In the case of social action, however, norms enter the picture. It is a mistake to think of norms as arising from contemplation. Theft is not considered immoral because, a long time ago, philosophers sat down and thought about a society where theft is permitted and realized that such a society would break down. They expounded the idea that “theft is wrong” and the people found this persuasive and began to believe and teach their children “theft is wrong” and so it is today. This is a caricature of the ideological theory of morality.
Norms arise instead from interpersonal conflict. It is easy to see why this is the case. Imagine that Crusoe’s island has become a popular tourist attraction and is filled to the brim with people. By chance, it happens that no one ever comes into conflict with anyone else on the island. In this case, there is no difference for each individual than if he were completely alone on the island. That is, the question of right and wrong is merely the question of pleasure or pain. The problem of right and wrong as a matter of normative principles simply never arises.
When we reintroduce the possibility of conflict on the island, the question of how conflicts will be resolved arises. Regardless of who is right or wrong, the problem is that one individual’s chosen end involves obstructing one of the chosen ends of another individual. One individual can only be happy by frustrating another. Disputes arise whenever the chosen ends of two individuals come into conflict, that is, whenever the chosen ends of two individuals are mutually exclusive.
The purpose of a norm, then, is to determine who should get to pursue their end unobstructed and who should stand aside and accept the frustration of their chosen end. Once the purpose of a norm is understood, it is easy to see that most discussions of ethics and morality go astray right from the outset. A moral rule or norm doesn’t exist for its own sake. If it did, then we would be correct in suspecting that Crusoe is subject to moral rules even when he is completely alone on the island. A necessary condition for moral problems is the existence of two or more people pursuing mutually exclusive ends.
Note that if the parties to a conflict argue about it verbally, each is essentially asking the other to choose pain and forgo pleasure since the reason each has the end he has is to obtain pleasure and avoid pain. Stated nakedly, this argument is very unpersuasive. In fact, it is the most basic possible form of hypocrisy. “I will enjoy pleasure and escape pain but you must learn to accept pain and forsake pleasure, at least, in this instance.”
If everyone just always accepted pain and forsook pleasure to begin with, it might be imagined that such conflicts would never arise in the first place. Since everyone is always deferring to everyone else, no possibility of conflict can arise. However, if the would-be Utopian is making this argument to the other party in the course of the dispute, it is a transparently self-serving argument since, as we have just seen, this is what every party to a dispute is always arguing in the dispute: “Accept the pain, defer to my pleasure.”
When the dispute is so serious as to require arbitration, it becomes a matter of law which lies outside the scope of this article. But law is a natural extension of social norms – it differs in the magnitude of what is at stake and it differs in the specialization and division-of-labor involved in the settlement of the dispute.
As many disputes are settled between individuals, patterns arise in what sorts of behaviors result in what sorts of outcomes, that is, which party usually defers. However, unlike law – where the threat of potential violence always stands behind the verbal dispute – the threats employed in the process of settling non-legal disputes are less violent. The threats employed are those of public humiliation, snitching, nagging, guilt, family estrangement, hazing, petty vandalism, community shunning or ostracism, and so on. Since everyone but sociopaths finds these outcomes highly unpleasant, such threats can be effective even though they do not rise to the level of violent threats.
Because these retaliatory behaviors are present in every culture, we can safely conclude that the human brain must have circuitry that permits other humans to impose this wide array of negative feelings on the brain without the use of outright violence. The fact that these circuits exist attests to some process of evolution by which they came about.
What is important to note is that the threats are rarely actually carried out. The mere threat of humiliation or estrangement or shunning is usually enough to bring about the desired outcome. In fact, no explicit threat must be made in every case; the mere fact that the threat could be made may be sufficient to settle a dispute.
As individuals act, they are forced to weigh the satisfaction they expect to receive from a given end against the retaliation which may be taken against them by someone else as a result. The attainment of ends which leave an individual vulnerable to retaliation by another individual who has a mutually exclusive end becomes more onerous by virtue of the added risk of retaliation.
For example, suppose our caveman ancestors had brain circuitry that made them experience feelings of shame or humiliation when accused of something considered bad by their peers – such as wresting a rock out of someone else’s hand. Let us further say that Caveman Adam needs a rock to smash open some nuts. He is sitting next to Caveman Bob who already has a rock in his hand. Caveman Adam has two options. He can get up and walk out of the cave and look around for a rock – risking that a predator may pounce on him or he can simply wrest the rock that Caveman Bob is holding and use that.
If the circuitry did not exist in Caveman Adam’s brain that makes him feel ashamed when accused of something recognized to be “bad” by his peers, his obvious choice would be to simply wrest the rock out of Caveman Bob’s hand. To hell with the gossipers. But since Caveman Adam does have this circuitry, he must weigh the onerousness of peer disapproval against the onerousness of stepping out of the cave to find a rock of his own. The mere existence of the possibility that Caveman Bob can retaliate by exposing Caveman Adam’s bad behavior to the group alters Caveman Adam’s behavior.
I have only sketched this subject – the field of evolutionary psychology has filled in our understanding of how many of the specific norms which humans actually exhibit have arisen over the course of our evolutionary history. The point is that we are born into a pre-existing fabric of social norms and laws that alter the costs of acting to attain our ends vis-à-vis the costs that would obtain in the situation of asocial action and this fabric cannot be re-woven at will, even by political, social and academic leaders.
For the purposes of answering the question of how to be happy in the deepest and fullest sense, I will take the fabric of social norms to be an unalterable given.
Obstructions to Ataraxia
A stunted self-discovery process is the most dangerous obstruction to progressing toward ataraxia. The process of self-discovery is continual and if it is halted, not only is no further progress toward ataraxia possible but a process of regression sets in. All the other obstructions to ataraxia must be continually removed or else they begin to settle in.
The need for validation is an obstruction because it is mental fear. If you are seeking the meaning of the Universe or the purpose of your life, you are already in an unhealthy state of fear. Your life does not require validation and the Universe means whatever it means to you. If your soul is healthy and confident you will see that this is the case. If you do not see that this is the case then you need to develop courage and overcome the fears you have fallen prey to.
Guilt and regret are obstructions to ataraxia for the same reason: fear. Much of the guilt and fear that people experience has its source in myths. The cure to these fears is the study of nature which shows that the natural causes of natural phenomena are sufficient to explain them. This dispels mysticism and erroneous myths.
Isolation is an obstruction to ataraxia because humans are social creatures. As the science of evolutionary psychology shows, a large part of our brain is wired for social interaction. When we do not receive social interaction, we become stunted and withdrawn. Furthermore, family and friends form a natural social safety net which operates without the conditions of bureaucratic red tape and the impersonal indifference of public policy.
Servility and acquiescence to aggression are obstruct progress towards ataraxia because the suffering of preventable victimization at the hands of others is not only the material wealth which is lost but the mental anguish of being victimized.
Summary
The deliberative process of self-discovery is the most important part of finding happiness. It is the scientific method applied to one’s own schedule of wants. The right ends for engendering happiness within oneself can only be discovered through a process of trial and error. We can copy the success of others and change their ideas to suit our own needs but the ultimate test is whether a particular strategy does, in fact, make us happy.
It can be objected that the morals and friendships which are formed on the basis of such a process are insincere because they are only ever a means to an end, the end of increasing one’s own pleasure. That is, it is naked selfishness. However, this objection is insubstantial because any analysis of the question of how to be happy must, by construction, lay out the means by which happiness can be had. The only way to avoid this is to avoid analyzing the problem of how to be happy, that is, to halt the process of self-discovery or, at least, not attempt to refine it.
Part of the process of self-discovery is intuitive and part of it benefits from refinement. But it can also be retarded and there are people who benefit from retarding the self-discovery process of others. The motives of the person who is seeking to improve his or her life could not be more natural. It is the motives of those who implicitly advocate that others should live an unanalyzed life, by making them feel ashamed for thinking about how to be happy in life, which should be questioned.
In closing, it costs you nothing to share the scientific process of self-discovery with others so even the tiny benefits that will accrue to you in your life as society is improved over time are a net gain and lead to ataraxia – for yourself*.* You also reap the rewards of the empathic experience of seeing your friends and others improve their own lives. As you eradicate fear from your soul, you will more clearly see the benefits of cultivating a healthy respect for yourself, other people, all life and even the Universe itself and you will feel more motivated to share what you have learned with others.
[1] Note that “ratio” is not used in its quantitative or numerical sense but in a metaphorical sense by which an individual is able to mentally “trade off” between the onerousness of a given course of action and the expected utility of the end to be achieved by that course of action.
