A Human Strategy #537: The Problem with Happiness is that it is not a Concept

The Problem with Happiness is that it is not a Concept

537

I started out with a demand for unflinching honesty toward cheerful conclusions.  Now I realize that in doing so I place a demand upon conditions that forever precede “me,” which is not honest.

It is one thing to be cheerful; it is another to lie to oneself.  Or so one would hope.  But to demand a present and ready cheerfulness ought to have been an admission that the conditions which made that demand necessary already contradict its possibility.  An outcome cannot determine its own pre-conditions, even if that outcome is itself a demand that it be a different outcome.  The new demand is only absorbed as a minor element within the totality of a new condition it cannot see or know.  

As an allegory, it is downstream from the polluting factory that cleanliness is demanded.  If that factory belonged to one’s own ancestors, one could not admit to it without feeling an additional strain of uncleanliness.  

If however one kept only the demand in mind, one could rub up to one’s several interests in cleanliness and feel somewhat cleansed of the responsibility.  In short, what mental hygiene needs is a demand bright enough to blind itself to even its own involvement in the causal-complex, to prevent itself from wading neck-deep in the filth of confusion.

If dissociation is the disease, then what is sanity?  Healthy thinking is less closely allied with being reasonable than with sanitation interests.  There are many whose sanity is due to their incapacity to distinguish between the demands placed upon them and what they believe to be their own demands, and there are those whose weaker grip on sanity exercises a capacity to rebuild illusions, getting around countless failed demands — and for neither of whom would I trade the misery of my disillusionment.  I prefer sanity.  But I do not prefer it to intelligence.

It is almost enough to know this and continue making demands, albeit with a little more clarity ... that is, knowing precisely what one can not see and that our demands play such a small role within the totality that we must give them up at the moment of application for the benefit of a fuller observation.  This is the ultimate of any honest attempt at happiness.

I proceed, but what began as a goal now continues as a wager.