LIFE IS HAPPINESS. Life Is Worth It, That’s Why Death Is An Enemy

The simplest truth has not been emphasized enough by thought leaders: for most people, most of the time, LIFE IS GOOD, LIFE IS HAPPINESS. Contrarily to what Socrates said, we don’t need to examine life to make it worth living. (And that makes the philosophical impulse harder to engage!)

Simplicia: Do unhappy people share your opinion?

Tyranosopher: Most of them aren’t so unhappy that they stop eating. So they view life as preferable to non-life. Hence a good thing to have. When old ancient Greeks thought their lives were not worth living, when they were really unhappy, they would lay in bed, and stop eating until they died. If people are still hungry, they are hungry for life in some sense. 

Simplicia: Life is not necessarily an intrinsic good. Having a child can cause suffering: what if the child dies of a horrible disease? That child would have been better off aborted to start with.

Tyranosopher: In the fullness of time, any child will grow enough to die. And that’s horrible. So you may as well argue that those who give birth cause murder. It’s shortsighted, it overlooks all of life.

Simplicia: I am unconvinced that life is an intrinsically good thing.

Tyranosopher: Consider the average person. Does that person want to die? No. Some are suicidal, true, but they are a very small minority. Most people love life, life makes them happy, and that’s demonstrated from the fact that they correctly assess that they don’t want to die. Thus, in first approximation, one can identify life and happiness. Call this sort of observation effective philosophy.

This turns out to have drastic political consequences, especially considering extremely practical policies impacting demography and immigration.

***

Simplicia: I am not sure that I want to listen to an exposition of the later point. It is bound to be extremely politically incorrect, knowing you. Let’s talk of other things. So human life is an absolute good?

Tyranosopher: Yes. We must hold that moral position, it’s not just that it makes life sacred. It is that “morality” comes from “mores” what tradition is. To have morality, then, one needs tradition, thus humanity, hence human life. 

Simplicia: Aristotle celebrated the pursuit of happiness.  Aristotle asked ‘what is the ultimate purpose of human existence’? He claimed it was ‘happiness’. Funny that you agree with him.

Tyranosopher: I sometimes agree with Aristotle, but not here. Without happiness, there would be no existence, we would be too depressed to search for food. So happiness is not so much “purpose to life” but rather a necessary mean to achieve human existence. Aristotle’s definition of happiness was stealthily perverse. Aristotle was a hopelessly compromised member, teacher, exploiter and propagandist of the Macedonian tyranny. That colored all his ethical system. So, naturally, Aristotle had a twisted definition of happiness. Aristotle termed this eudaimonia – “activity expressing virtue”. The virtue of serving the Macedonian tyranny. Aristotle didn’t celebrate the happiness of free humans, he wanted the slaves to accomplish their duty with minimum fuss, by following their “virtue”. Really, go ask Aristotle (as a virtual reality program) how slaves can achieve the purpose of their lives. Aristotle was pro-slavery (because, he analyzed, we don’t have machines; right, but slavery prevented the rise of machines and mechanical advantage, as the Franks demonstrated a millennium later…) 

Simplicia: OK, forget Aristotle. The US Declaration of Independence establishes as a human right the “pursuit of happiness”.

Tyranosopher: Democritus, a proponent of the atomic theory, born two generations before Aristotle (but contemporary to Aristotle, as Democritus lived to 90) held that:  “Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul.”

While in partial agreement with Democritus (partial, because we need possessions such as food and shelter!), I observe something simpler: most humans are happy enough, most of the time, to not want to die. Thus life is happiness. Run across a desert landscape until thirsty, hungry and exhausted. A safe shelter with water, food and a bed will then define overwhelming happiness. Thus travails bring hope, contentment!

Simplicia: Alleviating suffering is happiness?

Tyranosopher: LIFE IS HAPPINESS. That’s why people fear death. And rightly so. It’s very simple, very animal.

Simplicia: Are you just a beast? What kind of philosophy is that? Animal philosophy?

Tyranosopher: Humans are animals. Go watch the movie Avatar The Way of Water, and consider the super intelligent whale there, more clever than humans. All and any philosophy should be advanced enough to be animal-proof. 

Simplicia: Animal-proof? What does that mean?

***

Tyranosopher: Any philosophical system should encompass, as a very minimum, humanity’s animal condition. Because animals are what we are. This is a point Buddhism makes: live in the present, as animals mostly do. Living in the past and the future, as all advanced animals do quite a bit, is the most human skill. Yet, it’s the present which builds the (subjective) past and the (hoped for) future.  

Simplicia: When Western philosophers try to sound philosophical, they say we shouldn’t fear death. Or all that matters in life is death. Or that philosophy is only a preparation for death.

Tyranosopher:  Personal experience, and common sense, show that fatal accidents develop in a few seconds [1]. So much for long drawn preparations for the death event. Now as far as not fearing death… It was useful to kingly plutocrats to have troops which didn’t fear death. Troops which fear death don’t go into battle. So plutocrats encouraged those paid philosophers to pretend that one should not fear death  

Early Islam was highly successful on the battlefield because Muslim soldiers welcomed death in battle. 

***

Simplicia: You seem to fear death.

Tyranosopher: Exactly! I have feared death many times! I was nearly killed more or less accidentally at least half a dozen times. I could give a long list of dramatic events. And I suffered from the deaths of significant others. Death made my life lonely, diminished it. My young uncle, killed by fascists at the tender age of 28, my grandparents, my parents… When my mom died, part of my life also did. 

Simplicia: It seems that your love of life brings you to like dangerous activities, though!

Tyranosopher: Exactly! Life is made to be dangerous, it’s a fatal condition! Can’t escape it, so we may as well embrace this happiness! Including the fear of death, which incarnates our love of life! We fear death because we love life, so the more we fear, the more we love!  Last time I feared death acutely was doing some solo climbing last summer with a raging torrent below the gigantic rock face. 

I like to fear death from a distance. Like I am climbing something in the wilderness and a mighty gloomy black storm is gathering a few peaks away. It is very motivating, one feels more alive! From all those neurohormones, and life having much more sense, namely the sense away from the storm!

Simplicia: What’s so cool about playing life and death?

Tyranosopher: It’s life in miniature. Moreover… When solo climbing, the infinite power of the human mind is fully concentrated, coolly concentrated, on the next move. The ancestral monkey is doing what it is made to do best. 

Anyway, my point was that we all fear death because we love life so much, and love is happiness. So we are like Monsieur Jourdain, who made prose his entire life, without even knowing it. We are all happy, we are not just pursuing happiness, and that happiness is called life.

Simplicia: Beggars are happy?

Tyranosopher: To a point. US homeless people, when full of drugs, are obviously happier when forgetting about their condition, and this is definitively a societal failure. But, generally all those who cling to life are happy enough to do so.

***

Simplicia: Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure as the only intrinsic good Epicurus added that virtue (living according to higher values) and pleasure are interdependent. Christians and Muslims believe that human happiness is imperfect, only Heaven and Allah promise eternal happiness. Sade explained that the ultimate happiness of European leaders are cruel power plays. Utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham, observed that maximum surplus of pleasure over pain as the cardinal goal of human striving. Utilitarians believe that morals and legislation should be based on whatever will achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Does your metaphysics of happiness bring some effective morality and practical directives?

Tyranosopher: Absolutely! The practical consequences of happiness as life, are enormous for achieving the optimal evolution of civilization. In particular, happiness simply defined as life shows how erroneous recent Western policies have been. Because enforcing fake happiness as financial profits for the few brought a loss of life… Thus an implosion of real happiness. 

Patrice Ayme

If life is happiness, living more will bring more happiness. Dostoyevsky, and many others, agreed:

[1] When the crew of the Titanic saw it was heading towards the iceberg, it had to either try to turn as much as possible, or head straight on, braking as much as possible. It did both, and that was the wrong decision, as it made the attempted turn ineffectual, while exposing the flank of the ship. Wrong decision, because there were  a few seconds to take it, not a deliberation of half a minute. Long studies and practice had not prepared the crew for that emergency. Believing one can hone a philosophical system to handle death well is silly  

OUTRAGE, The Way Of Intelligence

Avatar The Way Of Water is not just a splendid movie, but a strident warning. The basic theme of oligarchs and their febrile hateful servants destroying whatever that stands in their way, even on another planet, to augment their profits, is an exact depiction of what is happening on this planet now, with corrupt or demented (Putin) politicians doing whatever it takes to make insanity the rule of law.

Some will sneer: Putin has nothing to do with us, democratic leaders. Except Obama, the supposedly great democratic leader, was caught on a hot mike conspiring with the insane Medvedev, then president of Russia, and the evil Putin… And except that the Russian oligarchic system is part and parcel of the world oligarchy…. which is partial to making giant stocks of nuclear weapons… So the theory is false, and Putin has everything to do with the present world political system (even though the Nevsky-Kremlin demonicity obviously also played a role).

***

The Navi from Pandora are pacific, however, they need to survive, and that means the capacity to be outraged (or rebellious, as Albert Camus had it [1]).

The OUTRAGE Of INTELLIGENCE: Intelligence is outraged, or is not.

In Avatar, the “Sky People” are Earthlings keen to invade a pristine planet (actually an Earth-sized Moon orbiting a super-Jupiter gaz giant planet, a very plausible scenario). They have already ravaged Earth. The “Sky People” can invade, because they have superior technology. It’s the reverse scenario from  Liu Cixin‘s “The Dark Forest“: there the “Trisolarians” from the closest star system to Earth, the Centaurus system attack Earth… But they attack Earth because the morality of the “Dark Forest” (the galaxy, no less) is that once one has been detected in the “Dark Forest” one must kill, or be killed.

***

INTELLIGENCE EVOLVED TO ACHIEVE DOMINANCE. Dominance Over Events, Primordially:

“Dominance” comes from “Dominus”, from domus, the house, from PIE root *dem- “house, household”. In other words being master of one’s own home. The pseudo-left views this sort of terms, and the concepts attached to them, as ugly, horrendous, impermissible, and to be censored absolutely. This is because the pseudo-left is actually a client of its patron, the international oligarchy, which makes it so, for example, that there is no decent health care system in the USA (although the US health care system is the most expensive in the world, by far, in terms of percentage of GDP…). So the pseudo-left refutes the existence of its patron, the oligarchy, by denying that even the concept of dominance should exist.

Intelligence evolved to enable bacteria to go up nutrient gradient, etc. Intelligence finds out how elements of the world work, and use them to improve its lot. Intelligence defines advanced life forms. It’s everywhere, even in trees as the Avatar world has it, on a much grander scale than Earth. But if all advanced animal life disappeared, maybe advanced intelligence from plants would evolve.

So intelligence evolved to make the world home to life: make the world into domus, dominance.

***

Military Dominance Requires Technological-Scientific Dominance:

Having the most superior technology is not just a question of employment and economics, it’s foundational to national security. What was true in the cave is still true in the galaxy at large. Many will say, and have even said to Putin to his face, that “today’s era is not of war” and that Putin should “move onto a path of peace,” as India’s PM Modi told the Kremlin tyrant on September 22, 2022.

However, Putin, and dozens of powerful individuals around him are psychopaths. Typically, the head of Russia Today said that “either we lose in Ukraine, or there will be a world war. Knowing our leader Putin, there will be nuclear war“. This is no accident. The problem is that the fascist system of government that we have today, the representative oligarchy, attracts psychopaths, and selects for them, in a self-serving organization. 

And, as said above, intelligence is tightly related to dominance, so it’s hard to outlaw the latter without forgetting the former…. 

***

When the Barbarians got better weapons, and a better art of war than the Romans, they replaced them.

First so did the Goths, then the Franks… The latter, fortunately established a second foundation of Rome: by the late Fifth Century, the Frankish army was the Roman army in Gaul, under the elected king and Consul Clovis.

Clovis’ own father was a Roman imperator (top general), or at least Childeric was buried with the famous purple mantle of imperators. So the Franks replaced the Romans… but as friends and cultural descendants.

The foundation of the Franks was itself Roman, in the Third Century, and the Salian law was originally written in Latin… probably by Roman generals cum lawyers who were anxious to romanize the Germans, and helped to create the Frankish confederation. By 310 CE, would-be Augustus Constantine’s best troops were Frankish, and with them he conquered the empire.

With China or Russia, we do not have a comparable situation. Neither was really created by the West… So we can’t afford to hope that they will restart the West sometime in the future after the biosphere collapses….

Speaking of which, the solution to the greenhouse catastrophe can only be technological: behavior modification will not be enough. Humanity already uses the equivalent of several Earths in various crucial goods. We can’t shrink back, because that would mean diminishing radically the size of humanity (that is seven billion dead in conflict, to start with…)

Humanity must develop new tech it needs, so that humanity can solve the various environmental crises…  We are condemned to innovate, and that means, ultimately Quantum Computing and tech we can’t yet dream of. Nothing short of that will do to find the solutions we need for spaceship Earth.

But none of these solutions will arise if we are not outraged enough to create them in our minds. 

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Being “revolted” (Camus original word in his famous book’s title) is to want, etymologically, to evolve again… (re-evolve). Camus was thinking mostly of European (political) revolutions (above we also evoked tech revolutions).

However, briging the rage out (out-raged) is more useful, and more general a concept than just re-evolving (or re-turning). Outrage is omnipresent when confronting, say, ferocious animals. They are typically ferocious because outraged. Outrage is so universal that even snakes have it. Once a lethally venomous snake expressed outrage towards my presence on a path, hissing and charging me in the mountains. The long creature was up slope, and heading down in its rage (I had a stone and killed it on the first lucky strike, snapping its neck; the whole story happened so fast it was over bedfore I understood what happened; I honor the memory of that foolhardy reptile by evoking its feat)