In my last article, I discussed many different sub-meanings of happy as manifested in different synonyms. But yesterday, in a meeting of the Chicago Ethical Humanist Circle, people were grappling with what was, in their opinion, the most central and important meaning of the word. The conclusion was that the most fundamental meaning of happiness was simply being happy to feel fully and vibrantly alive. I agree with this observation. These people were talking about how grateful they were to feel alive. The very notion of being fully conscious of oneself and of the external world and moving through the world and doing things that give one further existential validation – these are all basic motives for happiness.
However, for many people throughout history, they were simply too uncomfortable in their skins to feel happy to be alive. Some of these people did commit suicide, but many simply performed high-risk activities of one sort or another that put them in danger. Sort of like an indirect form of suicide. Again, the nature of these activities was quite different as to whether a person was living in a traditional natural society or whether he was living in a modern technological society.
Those people who were uncomfortable with their lives in a more traditional natural society, were people who had difficulty absorbing all the organic stimuli in their living environment and who felt as if they were exploding apart from the stimuli. Rather than let that happen, the stimulation misfits got into situations where they were drawn into conflicts with some of the other overstimulated humans. Conflicts and, in particular, physical conflicts allowed these people to focus these explosive stimuli and to effectively expel them outside of themselves. Unfortunately, in the process of participating in the conflict, many people got badly hurt and/or died.
On the other hand, as was discussed in my last article, there is the fact that many mainstream people in traditional natural societies spent a lot of their hours in hard laborious work. Happiness for them consisted in completing their work and being able to rest afterwards. The primary experience of hard laborious work was another way for people in traditional natural societies to focus their attentions on expelling explosive organic energies from their body and feeling contented, a passive low-key kind of happiness. So physical work had two kinds of purposes in traditional natural societies. Getting tasks done in the external world and expelling the stimuli that threatened to explode them apart and make them a bundle of undifferentiated emotions. And the whole journey of the intense work and the peace and rest at the end was of such a nature that one grappled with the world and then rested, and the reflection on the grappling and the whole process resulted in a person feeling vibrantly alive and vibrantly happy though not necessarily ecstatically happy.
In modern technological society, work takes on a more frictionless mediated flavor and this, in turn, affects the nature of being happy. Work today is so frictionless and mediated because it revolves around computers and other modern devices. Rather than make people happy, the process of work in modern technological society makes people numb, and that frequently leads to depression. People who become unhappy with themselves as a result of work that immerses them in an experiential vacuum find one way to get rid of this discomfort is to literally work themselves to death. Sometimes their job requires them to be on call anyway 24/7. But working themselves to death is one way for people to deal with an unhappiness that settles over them, envelops them. It’s another situation where people try to make themselves feel happy by doing things that in other contexts would be viewed as making them feel very unhappy. They try to generate friction through processes of work that are intrinsically frictionless. A friction that they hope will pull them into a greater level of consciousness. Any friction that hopefully will pull them out of a tar pit of emptiness.
Another kind of activity today that people use to pull out of modern experiential vacuums is conflict, physical conflict. But this is not the kind of conflict found in traditional natural societies, where people use conflict as a means to channel a lot of internalized organic stimuli, in such a way that it is expelled from them before they explode apart and undifferentiate or melt away. In today’s world, people don’t use primary experience to tamp down their excessive organic stimulation, but rather to generate some organic stimulation, enough to make an attempt to pull out of their numbness and have a more vibrant life. A lot of the conflict today has sado-masochistic elements to shock people out of their numbness. A good demonstration of this can be found in the novel and film A Clockwork Orange. It shows life in a grizzly future. A future that has already appeared. The numbness of the characters in this novel and film is a far cry from the happiness generated by a vibrant life that the people in the Ethical Humanist Circle were talking about.
Artículos Relacionados: