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Persistent Happiness

7/13/2019

The Ultimate Quest of Mankind

The general consensus of Philosophers is that the state known as persistent happiness is an unattainable utopia, but for some philosophers, it may be attainable by living in a loosely defined time called the present.

The general consensus of monotheisms is that persistent happiness is attainable only by living in what is known as the grace of the One God be it down here on earth or up there in the afterlife/Heaven/Paradise.

The general consensus of some of the eastern religions is that persistent happiness is attainable only by detachment from normal life, and by living with other detached people in monasteries.

The general consensus of humanity is that what we call happiness are but periods or moments in life sandwiched between other emotional states.

And of course we should not forget the current trend of “persistent happiness in ten easy steps” sort of teachings…

I think persistent happiness is not an impossible utopia, is not contingent on being detached from life, is not in vague terms like grace, a hypothetical Paradise, or in techniques of auto suggestion.
Living in the present won’t help either, because it would mean getting detached from the continuum of our time on earth hence from our life. Our memories will transport us in our past, and our projects and hopes will project us into the future. So living in the present would mean living without memories without projects and without hope. In my personal opinion, this tragic perspective of a life can never lead to persistent happiness.

If we adopt the premise that collectivism is a slower but wiser and incomparably more powerful version of individualism ensuring individual survival/prosperity in situations where greater means of action than that of individuals are required, then we have to question the generally accepted though pathetic outlooks of humanity to “happiness”:
Can a human being be persistently happy in an ocean of human beings (or even animals) in misery? Strange, that’s what he always thinks.
Can a human being consider himself happy simply because he is less miserable than other human beings? Strange, that’s what he always considers.
Can a human being look for the few positive aspects of his existence and consider it a source of happiness? Strange, that’s what he always does.
It is tragic to have such pathetic expectations for happiness.

Humanity suffers not only from the lack of persistent happiness, but is made to live without any perspective of persistent happiness.

In its quest for persistent happiness humanity is even sometimes led to minimize the importance of the first condition to persistent happiness: a state of inalterable material abundance/physical well-being, and to compensate either:
-by exaggerating the scale/importance of his furtive moments of physical/emotional well-being by considering them as its fair share of true bliss, or
-by creating an abundance of fatalistic “wisdom” and/or religious “spirituality” by repeating phrases like “This is the way it should be” and/or “this is God’s will” to dream itself in a state of persistent happiness by making itself imagine knowing an unknown/unknowable/hypothetical purpose for its unenviable state.

Humanity may even be made to go to such lengths as to make itself think that material abundance is detrimental to persistent happiness.
Material abundance can indeed become detrimental for happiness but only in the very precise context of a pathologic obsession for accumulation.
Only the fear of lacking (scarcity) and/or confusing his personal worth with that of his possessions can cause that kind of obsession in a human being.
It should be noted that the accumulation of the needed scarcities themselves rarely creates an obsession. The accumulation of the means to acquire these scarcities is the common creator of obsession/dependence hence unhappiness.

Persistent happiness is only possible under two simultaneous conditions:
When all needs are abundantly met, and the ego is satisfied to the full.

What is “an ego satisfied to the full”?
By probing itself and its environment, the human abstract mind became aware of the existence of the “understandable” (hence controllable/useable) laws controlling the entire universe.
It saw its own stupendous, unique power of understanding and eventually using all of the laws of the universe and tailored the human ego accordingly.
So until proof of the contrary, the human ego knows that man is the only creature aware of the cosmos, furthermore possessing the potential to understand and use its laws.
Under these conditions it is not unreasonable to consider that the human ego considers Man as the self-awareness of the cosmos.
And though scarcity has always taught man and with good reason that “more” is the only way for survival and well-being, it is my certainty that understanding and interacting with all the laws of the cosmos remains the unmitigated purpose of the human ego.

Understanding its environment has been man’s basic survival trait.
The true scale of the human ego is the scale of its need to understand.
The true scale of the human ego is the scale of its environment: the Cosmos.
Substitute trivial purposes created by scarcity like riches and power which only grant access to scarcities can never satisfy our ego definitively, only deceive it that maybe “more” will …
Abundance will be the end of all the scarcity-related trivial purposes.

If our ego, tailored by the most powerful tool in the universe (our abstract mind) is allowed to express its true nature and scale in an unprecedented, inspiring collective endeavor to understand, domesticate and use the laws governing nature and the cosmos to create whatever our collective sees fit thus satisfying our collective ego to the full,
Then be it by the endeavor itself, by the conquest of an extreme lifespan in health and youth, by the creation of free abundance or by the unshakeable peace a trans-generational alliance of all nations of man would create, the thought-to-be-impossible “persistent happiness” will be the persistently inspired “persistent euphoria” of humanity.

The universe containing us holds the double key lock to human euphoria.
Our all-capable abstract mind holds one key, the collective of our nations holds the other.
Both keys should be inserted and turned simultaneously.

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Superiority

7/13/2019

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Oxford definition:

Higher in rank, status or quality.
Having or showing an overly high opinion of oneself; conceited.

No defined limit existing between normal and “overly high”, both can only exist as subjective estimates which need to be determined within each context.
So to stay clear of unmanageable estimates, we need to work with the simplest of relative terms defining superiority: “higher”, which in a context of value would translate into “better”, and in a context of importance into “higher indispensability”. Since those are all relative terms, then they can only make sense and have a purpose in a collective: a clan.

A clan is a group of individuals cooperating for collective survival/prosperity in an environment of scarcity and constant conflict with other clans for the acquisition and the protection of property/scarcities.
In a clan, individuals have the imperative to be “good” to each other to survive and prosper as a clan, and “bad” to rival clans with which they always are in some form of active or passive conflict over scarcities.
Incidentally, Good and bad are but the subjective human designations for some of the behavioral consequences of scarcity, and naturally these designations are inversed in the opposed perspectives of rival clans.

Why be “superior”?
In a clan where individuals have the imperative to be “good” to each other, people need to acquire subtle, non-conflicting/non-violent means to “deserve” more prosperity hence acquire a higher priority of access to scarcities within the clan. “Superiority” does the trick.
So in an environment of scarcity, “superiority” would be a successful strategy of non-violent competition to acquire a higher degree of indulgence from the clan to personal desires including security and prosperity.
If, hypothetically, “superiority” was unsuccessful or had always implied the lowest degree of indulgence hence the lowest degree of security or prosperity in the clan, would it be nurtured through the eons and be transformed into a basic trait of behavior?

The logical evolution of this successful strategy of personal superiority deserving greater prosperity would be to expand and be transformed into a clan superiority to be used as a justification for any conquest which always is about acquisition hence for abundance, in spite of any pretext.

In between clans this auto-proclamation of “superiority” can go to extreme lengths in its quest for prosperity; slavery to create almost-free abundance or genocide to acquire the entire property of their victims.
But if humans can go to such lengths by an auto-proclamation of superiority, then no need to speculate upon the lengths they will consider going if this superiority becomes a divine pretext “revealed” by a certain mystical superior being, even if the “revelation” was repeated to three different groups at three different times and is always about the superiority of each one over the others.

For monotheists “superiority” is the only crucial issue: the superiority of their own doctrine comprised of the auto-presentation of their one God and His “revealed” system of demands and recompense over all the others. It starts with the Genesis making God think and apprehend not only humans but Himself as well in terms of “better than”, “the best”, “the most powerful” or the “only” and naturally this central apprehension of “superiority” becomes the central apprehension of all monotheisms and monotheists consequently creating their way of life and the perfect pretext for expansion, intolerance, and conflict.
In the east, the land of supposed “inferior” religions, when two strangers met, they used to ask in open, respectful acceptance: “To what sublime religion do you belong?”.

Humans will lower themselves to unfathomable depths of inhumanity in the name of an undefined yet considered as divine “righteousness” to destroy an undefined yet considered as anti-divine “unrighteousness”, both direct reflections of Good and bad, themselves simultaneous consequences programmed in human nature by eons of collective survival as clans in scarcity.
Scarcity is the only cause of every aspect of the consequence called “human nature”, including every behavior and sentiment.

Even if the intertwined hypothesis of superiority having its origin in a clan as a successful non-violent strategy for superior abundance needs layers of analysis and clarification due to its generalization to almost all domains of human organization (hierarchy), the clear cut “Theory of Clans in scarcity” is the one theory that simply and clearly explains all and every human behavior.
Everything would have been so simple to understand and consequently life would have been easier if the presented one God was not presented as an entity with such modest logical capacities as to confuse cause and consequence.

So the main, simple, primitive strategy of “better than”, “the best” and/or “the only” allowing easier access to scarcities within the clan could have developed through the eons to not only become the leitmotif of aggression/conquest, not only the divine design of creation, not only the apprehension of the monotheism presented one God of his supposed creation, not only the outlook of every monotheist to any other religion including other monotheisms, but to become the auto-apprehension of the one God Himself.
So before the infantile confusion between cause and consequence, the current monotheistic divine cause of everything (Good) including the reason of its own existence was simply the consequence of human clans evolving in scarcity.

Not knowing better, we still think and behave in terms of “better than” or “the best” and seek power or recognition, not realizing that these in fact divulge an instinctive, deep insecurity and a clear incapacity to evolve outside the realm of our fear or lacking, even while living in obscene abundance.
These make ALL of us the victims of our instinctive yet very logical fear of lacking.
We always were and still are the children of scarcity.
Will we be able to change our environment of scarcity and in doing so, eventually change ourselves as well?

But if men still think that mankind will always have an irrational side which will aggressively oppose even the most pertinent logic and basic rationality if it involves discarding their instinctive, intuitive fears and behaviors, then the following should be considered:
- Under the current conditions of existence man can definitively be seen as both rational and irrational, logical and instinctive but taking a few moments to think about any domain of his irrationality or instinct we realize that there was a long lost time when all of these behaviors currently apprehended as irrational/instinctive/intuitive were a must for survival and prosperity. If there was no need for them, they would never have existed. This makes these fears and behaviors extremely logical, the ultimate rationality for that time which lasted for a few hundred thousand years.
- Also, if these behaviors were elaborated/programmed in his nature for so long, then it is also the ultimate rationality not to let them go easily, even if we realize that they no more serve a purpose.

Mankind was, is, and always will be exclusively rational.
There is not a shred of irrationality in the thinking algorithms of men.
The thing is to have the real INFORMATION to which to apply his rational mental algorithms.
Man is the ultimate rational creature who craves understanding, even if sometimes in the absence of factual knowledge, he takes shortcuts to knowledge either by extrapolating the law of cause and effect into superstition by creating spirits to “understand” natural phenomenon, or by considering childish, extravagant stories as the “revelation” of the knowledge he craves.

There is no doubt in my mind that when mankind is communicated the real information about its new conditions of existence, as always it will behave rationally and very slowly but surely will do the logical thing even while enduring the soul-draining pain of gradually letting its “gut-felt” certitudes (and fears) go, if not “properly” frightened by “global” players for whom any change means losing their archaic strategy of domination to own everything existing.

In the game of Monopoly, someone owns everything at the end after forcing family and friends into bankruptcy.
What happens next?
In the game “The bank” is not allowed to play, very unlike our current planetary game of Monopoly where a consortium of the biggest banks is the only one playing and using representative democracy to force us to play along.

As hard as it is to imagine, in total, everlasting abundance any form of individual or clan superiority will be slowly but definitively replaced by a form of acceptance/respect, since superiority can no more serve a positive purpose but only irritate partners and endanger their vital support for a life of abundance and euphoria.

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