A Bear - Poles Apart

June 29, 2019 / Congau

What People Want

If people know what they want, why are they self-destructive? It happens again and again: We get what we want but are not satisfied. Our wish is fulfilled but it lets us down.

Ask the people, listen to them and grant them their wish; that’s democracy. Give people want they want; that’s democracy. But the people may not want what they say they want. What is democracy?

If the child wants a knife, do you give it to him? If the people want war, do you give it to them? Citizens are not children; their weapons are much more destructive.

People should have what they want, but how do you know what they want? Do you always know what you want?

Everyone wants to be happy. Make them happy and you give them want they want. How do you know what will make you happy?

Political leaders promise happiness. Ideologists explain how it can be achieved. They don’t have to ask for they think they know what people want. Just give it to them then, grant them their happiness, force them into it if you must, and their real wish will be fulfilled. You would rather be happy than having your faulty and destructive wish come true, wouldn’t you?

Some democracies have failed miserably. Some have brought war, and some keep themselves in poverty. Some are very successful. Maybe democracy is the best form of government, but that is not a forgone conclusion.

Why do they have to flatter us? Why do we flatter ourselves? We are the people, the real people, but we are a faulty people. We are human and we don’t always know our own good. Ask us, and we will answer, but we may be wrong.

Democracy doesn’t give people what they want, only what they say they want. We don’t want democracy, we want happiness.

June 28, 2019 / Congau

The Art of Happiness

Only one thing matters:

Happiness.

Only one thing counts in human life:

Pleasure

This is what it’s all about:

Having fun

Only one thing is valuable:

Art

And the list goes on. More items may be included, but nothing can be added, for there is only one.

They are all the same.

We all want to be happy. It is not possible not to want to be happy. Whenever we want something, we think it will lead to some happiness.

Happiness is a good feeling. A good feeling is pleasure. Pure pleasure (pleasure without pain) is happiness. They are both the same.

Having fun is a pleasure. Pure pleasure is pure fun when it’s not overruled by boredom or punishment. Fun without suffering is fun, is pleasure, is happiness.

They are the same.

Art is pleasure. Art is creativity. Creativity is fun. Whenever something pleases us, it stimulates our imagination and that is what creativity is. We enjoy what others have created or we create ourselves. We imagine, we play games, we invent, we converse; we have fun. Whatever stimulates creativity is a piece of art. Art is thus the essence of pleasure and it is happiness.

It is all the same.

Art for art’s sake. Art has no purpose other than itself. Art is the goal.

Happiness is the goal; the only goal.

Why do people want to be happy? What a stupid question. It is simply what they want.

Why do people make art? Stupid question. They do it because they are people.

People are artists.

You are an artist too. You want to enjoy yourself; you want to be happy and you are human. There is no other way.

You must pursue your art of living. You must strive for happiness. You must be human.

It is the same.

Have fun!

June 10, 2019 / Congau

Unruly Ethics

A good man breaks the rules. For him there are no rules, in fact. Be good, he tells himself, don’t hurt others and don’t hurt yourself. That is all he can say. It is simple and so incredibly difficult.

The lazy man follows the rules. He finds it easy and he thinks he is good. He doesn’t have to work and he doesn’t have to think. There’s no need for reflection, no weighing back and forth, no room for doubt and no regret. He is proud of himself. He is not a good man.

Rules can be helpful. We are only human and can’t foresee all the consequences of our actions. It’s impossible to consider every single step we take and examine every minor move. Rules of thumb are necessary to avoid exhausting ourselves on trivialities and general guidelines are useful because they are generally right. But that’s all they are: generalities. They provide no excuse for not thinking, for sometimes they may go terribly wrong.

Generally, thou shalt not bear false witness, but if your friend is pursued by a mad murderer, you should definitely lie about his whereabouts.

Generally, thou shalt not steal, but don’t hesitate to take a piece of bread if that could save a life.

Generally, you should follow the law of your land, but sometimes the law is bad and tries to make you act unethically. Then resist! Disobey!

A rule can never free you from personal responsibility. Every action is unique because ever circumstance is different. What was once the right thing to do may be wrong another time.

Justice is blind, but an ethical being needs a sharp vision. The blindfolded stony lady with her dreadful scales can sacrifice persons for impersonal laws, but we, real human beings, are doomed to be human. For us there exists no exact measuring tool. We can only do our best and we will fail, for our best is never good enough.

A moral being is conscious of his shortcomings and he knows his guilt. A rule abiding being is happily unaware of the mischief he causes for he thinks it is not his doing. He imagines he is a good person when acting like a machine and not a person.

Since we can always do better, we are always more or less guilty, but to our relief the opposite is also true: We are always more or less innocent.

November 10, 2018 / Congau

Constitutionally Guaranteed Division

American domestic politics is international. That is both due to its global importance and to the great sense of show and entertainment in so much of what comes out of that country. It’s a reality show with all those basic ingredients of quarrel and strife that spectators love to indulge in, all while shaking their heads over the petty childishness of the spectacle.

The Americans themselves incessantly complain about the partisan division and their politicians being unable to cooperate, calling for more responsibility and sense to enter the debate. But in all fairness, irresponsible power politicians as they may be, the root of the trouble may not be found in their individual shortcomings. It may be a structural problem inherent in the system itself.

In other countries the debate is often fierce, but it doesn’t result in that kind of deadlock and only in times of severe crisis, when a breakdown of law and order is threatening, does it reach such a level of chaos. But in America that is normality.

It is the political system, the constitutional arrangement itself that makes it possible. Contradiction and dispute are built into it.

Look at the recent election result. What did the voters actually decide? They gave the House to the Democrats and the Senate to the Republicans and mind you, it was the same voters who did it. America isn’t just divided, it’s schizophrenic.

In presidential elections the same voters may give the presidency to one party and Congress to the other, but even when that doesn’t happen, Congress tend to work against the president. The system is made to pull in different directions at the same time.

Sorry, Americans, the parliamentary system of Europe is superior. There the voters cannot vote against themselves since each vote goes only in one direction. The voters elect only a parliament and it again chooses the prime minister and the cabinet. There will then necessarily be harmony between the majority of the assembly and the executive, because if there isn’t a new prime minister will soon be chosen. The individual MP has no interest in voting against his own fraction since he personally partakes in the responsibility of upholding government.

In America the strict division in government is hailed as a system of checks and balances and praised as advanced democracy. But why would it be a democratic right to be able to vote against oneself? Why would a rational voter simultaneously vote for candidates that are going to work against each other? The constitution guarantees the voters the right to sabotage themselves and the government to be undermined from within.

Division is constitutionally guaranteed. Stop complaining about the division then. The show must go on.

November 9, 2018 / Congau

The Morality of a Tree

Imagine a tree. Is it a good tree or a bad tree? Can a tree be good or bad? Well, good for what? Bad compared to what? Is there a good in itself?

The tree can be good for something. It can give shade or produce delicious fruits for people to eat, but can it be good in itself?

Good must be compared to something, but that something can also be itself. Or rather, it can be compared to its possible selves.

A tree, before it starts growing, when it is still a seed, has many possibilities, many potentials. Depending on the conditions, it can grow to be big or only quite small. If the circumstances are favorable, if it falls into fertile soil and gets the right amount of water and light, it can become a beautiful tree, well-proportioned and strong. If all conditions are ideal, if there is not too much and not too little of anything, it can become a perfect tree. That would indeed be a good tree. It would be good in itself.

If we could help the tree develop like this, shouldn’t we do it? If, without sacrificing anything else, we could provide all these perfect conditions, wouldn’t it be our obligation to do so?

Nature has set the standard for itself and goodness is the fulfillment of that standard. The only creature capable of acting morally, the human being, is thereby given reliable guidelines. Whenever we act for the advancement of perfection in nature, we act morally.

The tree may not suffer if we cut it down and we may need it to build a house. We need houses and sometimes it’s good for us to cut down trees. But for the tree, considered all by itself, it is definitely not good. Any organism that exists should be allowed to develop towards its maximum potential, unless it interferes with another organism. In that case another one takes precedence, but it is still nature that defines its own goodness.

Any man-made thing is good when it fulfills its intended function, but does nature have an intention to fulfill? Potentiality in nature is the equivalent of human conscious intention; what it is programmed to do.

Let the tree grow then. Let it be good.

November 8, 2018 / Congau

Anything Goes?

“Decide for yourself.” That seems to be the mantra of today’s popular philosophy. “I can’t tell you what works for you. Only you know what is best for yourself.” There are no rules, they say. Do whatever pleases you. Anything goes.

If there is no point, no purpose to our life, if anything goes, then why even bother to do philosophy? Anyone who tries to philosophize ever so much about how they should live, will run into a contradiction if they deny any purpose from the outset. The “should” already implies an assumption about how things are. Since it is like this, it should be like that. Since that individual is a carpenter, he should build houses. Since you are the person that you are, you should do certain things, that is, you have a purpose.

It is very possible to be wrong about oneself. You may think you are a duck, but that doesn’t make you one. You may think you would like to reach a certain goal, but once you get there you realize you don’t like it. What you think works for you, may prove to be totally unworkable.

You cannot become just anything. You have certain potentials in you that may or may not be fulfilled. If you try to go beyond what is in you, if you attempt to be something that is not in accordance with yourself, it will not work.

Yes, by all means, do what works for you. But that is not the same as saying that anything you may happen to choose is right for you and that anything you decide is the right decision. It is quite the opposite. There are only a limited number of choices that could possibly work for you and anything beyond that would be a bad decision.

Encouraging people always to decide for themselves gives the illusion that anything goes. There are indeed certain rules and guidelines that philosophers and psychologists have come up with that would clearly recommend one course of action if you want to fulfill your purpose. And there is always one purpose to all your actions, isn’t there? You want to be happy.

Different things make different people happy, but there is one common denominator: Be true to yourself. And where do you find that truth? Well, that’s the tricky part. Just don’t think you can do just anything.

November 6, 2018 / Congau

Raceless France

The French have done it again. They have made a law against a word in an apparent effort to make their citizens not talk about what they already think about. The word is “race”. It has now been removed from the French constitution by omniscient MPs who can explain that the concept doesn’t exist anyway.

There are no races in the scientific sense, that much is true. Mankind is not strictly divided into different biological categories like dogs and other beasts. There is actually (meaning scientifically) only one human race. Very good, but who says that that is what we are talking about when using the word “race”?

There is an obvious difference in people’s outward appearance and any time we notice general differences and similarities, we naturally tend to categorize. “Redheads” and “blue objects” are categories whether or not they have any scientific basis. Many categorizations that we make are completely irrelevant for the true nature of the thing, but we still instinctively make them.

Now, the original wording of the French constitution was meant to protect against a certain irrelevant category becoming relevant. It stated that citizens are equal before the law “regardless of race, origin or religion,” but now that this first category has been removed, this particular protection doesn’t exist anymore. Is it then expected that people immediately will stop making classifications based on racial appearance and thereby cease to discriminate on such grounds?

Anyone, even the most liberal minded, notices if a person is white or black. It couldn’t be scientifically measured or even defined in absolute terms, but there is something and we notice it. Sadly, this difference has often been the cause of discrimination and it makes sense to have a law that protects against this particular behavior.

It has been argued that the faulty idea of race is already found in other terms that are supposedly more real, like “origin” or “ethnicity”, but that is clearly not the case. If a black person in France suffers discrimination because of his skin color, it is not actually caused by his origin or ethnicity, as he could be perfectly ethnic French and having lived all his life in France.

If there is no race, racial discrimination is not possible. That sounds logical enough, but it’s just a sophistic game of definition. There may be no race in the scientific sense, but there is something we all know about and this something shouldn’t be a subject for discrimination. This something, a general difference in outward appearance between human beings, exists and since we notice it, we should also be allowed to talk about it. Except in France, of course…

November 5, 2018 / Congau

Bad Names

No one likes a foreigner. Those strangers, the others are not like us. That’s why they are given a bad name. Whatever they are called, it is pronounced with scorn, with a despicable accent, spit out with disgust. Gypsy! Nigger! Kaffir! Repeated again and again in that tone of voice, the word itself becomes bad; it becomes a word of abuse.

Then if you are a decent and enlightened person you wouldn’t want to take such a word in your mouth. If you are progressive and tolerant you want to combat this bigotry. You want people to respect each other, to change their attitude, to change their behavior. So you want to change the word.

But a word is just a word. It doesn’t have any other meaning than what is put into it. If the thing the word refers to is disliked, it remains so even when the word is changed.

Bad word? No, it’s not only bad. Some people don’t mind strangers and some even like them. They also used the same word when there was no other word to use. They were perfectly capable of pronouncing it without a hint of disgust. A gypsy was just a person belonging to a certain ethnic group and a Negro was the general term for someone of a certain race. There was the phenomenon and there was one word for it. It couldn’t have been clearer or more neutral.

“Gypsy” didn’t mean “bad gypsy” even if there were a few bigots who thought so. But what did the enlightened humanists do? Instead of explaining the real meaning of the word, that “gypsy” signifies an ethnicity, which as such is neither good nor bad, they conceded and let the bigots prevail. “Gypsies are indeed bad,” they affirmed, “but we will change the facts by changing the symbol. A new word was invented. “Roma” aren’t bad.”

Whatever we call those foreigners, the others, that doesn’t matter as long as the word has no other reference than that specific group. (It’s a different matter if the word already has another reference. It could never be acceptable to call a person an ape for example.)

Changing words changes nothing; attitudes must change.

November 4, 2018 / Congau

Sensitive Names

We don’t want to be called just anything. No one wants to be addressed with a name he doesn’t like. That is obvious and you cannot argue about feelings. If Peter doesn’t want to be called Paul, then by all means use his preferred name when talking to him.

But how far does the emotional attachment to a name really extend? When are we dealing with a sensitivity that should be respected and when has it gone too far? Don’t get me wrong, we should always respect people’s feelings, but sometimes there may be a reason to suspect that the reaction we get is not quite genuine or rather artificially enforced.

There is a difference between calling as in addressing someone and calling as in referring to someone. In the first instance we use the name in the person’s presence to capture his attention, (that is to get some sort of emotional reaction however mild) in the second we talk about the person usually when he is not present, and since he is not there, we don’t intend any emotional reaction from him at all. Therefore it is very important that we take a person’s feelings into account when addressing him, but those feelings are rather irrelevant when we just refer to him.

When naming a whole group of people this difference usually disappears since unless the speaker is addressing an audience (which most people don’t do all that often) it is only a matter of naming as referring. Then there should be no reason for any emotional reaction from members of the group in question.

Names that are used solely for reference, which are the case for most of the nouns in the dictionary, are arbitrary combinations of sounds that the speaker uses to convey the idea of whatever things or phenomena he has in mind. They are only conventions, any other name would have done just as well, and so as long as there is no ambiguity there is no reason to object to any particular name being used.

When referring to people (as opposed to addressing them) there should also be no reason to object, but still people to. There is an endless outcry against the use of this or that demonym. (The gypsies have changed to be Roma and the black are now native Americans.) It is all so unnecessary and these misplaced emotions are probably caused by confusion about what it means to call someone. To refer to people is not the same as addressing them.

April 7, 2018 / Congau

Feeling Good When Doing Good

If doing good makes you feel good, does that mean you are selfish when doing it? And if so, is it good at all? This question delights the cynic who enjoys revealing ulterior motives. It saddens the pious who searches for purity and it hardens the moralist who believes in stringent rules. But they are all mistaken.

It is hardly possible to do anything without getting a feeling of satisfaction when the act is well done, and from that fact one might be tempted to conclude that anything we ever do is selfish. It would simply be a contradiction in terms to say that an action was not selfish. But then, what claimed to be an observation of human psychology is reduced to a mere tautology; for something to be true it must be conceptually possible that it could be false.

The moment you try to do something you want to succeed and success in itself gives pleasure. But if that cannot be avoided at least it can be minimized, some would say. By choosing to do what is initially detestable to oneself, the level of satisfaction will be kept low even if the action is well performed. Someone who loathes being nice to people but who still forces himself to be nice, would reach the pinnacle of moral worth according to such a view (which, incidentally, is the view of the celebrated philosopher Immanuel Kant).

To strive for moral excellence would then involve nurturing an indifferent or even hateful attitude toward one’s fellow human beings. If you enjoy seeing people suffer, but still want them to be pleased, then you are utterly unselfish and thereby a good person, from this Kantian perspective.

Moral education would then perversely consist in learning to detach oneself from any emotional connection with others. You should get no personal satisfaction from seeing people satisfied, but still want them to be so. You should force yourself to want what you don’t really want.

As an educational strategy this would obviously be a disaster. Any sound pedagogy would try to make the student enjoy the subject of study. The ancient Aristotle, other than the modern Kant, understood that much. Learn to enjoy being good, he said. Get selfish satisfaction from unselfish action.

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