In Genesis, it is written that God looked at all he had made, and saw that it was good, and He rested.
To my mind, this is the foundation of everything positive in the world. I will explain.
If it is truism that we mostly do things to either gain pleasure or avoid pain, it is also an underexamined premise, particularly with regard to the nuances of both.
There are short term, medium term, and long term pleasures, are there not? We weigh the short term pleasure, say, of infidelity against the long term pain of divorce, or at least a guilty conscience. So for long term pleasure, you need short and perhaps medium term relative pain.
Most of the best moments in life come from both the pleasure of an accomplishment that took a long time and a lot of effort, and from the daily smaller pleasures of personal balance and congruence, which depend, each day, on choosing a form of life likely to lead to long term felicity.
Here is my point: if you lack the capacity for positive experience, all this math goes out the window. No matter what you do, how hard you work, how good you are, you never get a feeling of worthiness, and pleasure and earned and healthy self satisfaction, then there is NO REASON not to pursue short term pleasure. That is at least reliable and concrete. Getting drunk and having orgasms are undeniably enjoyable.
The basic model for happiness is love and work, as Freud put it. That is one of the only things he said that I agree with fully.
And love of course IS work, isn’t it? So basically all pleasure in life comes from work of various sorts.
But you can’t work ALL the time. As I have said before, it is interesting to speculate how the Jews, as the Jews, survived roughly 2,000 years of being away from a land inseparable from their religion. One of the factors, as I have argued on many occasions, is likely the Day of Rest.
A happy life is roughly work, work, work, work, work, work, rest.
But even that is hard to sustain if you cannot find pleasure in your work. So many people I see–and I am one of them–mostly work out of fear of failure. Or they work to make money so that people will respect them. Or to get influence and power so people will respect them.
They work, in other words, out of anxiety, out of fear of loss, out of shame, out of incompleteness. This is a bad long term strategy, and leads, in my view, to most of the damaging manias in the world.
You have to be able to work, and see that it is good. You have to work and FEEL good, looking at what you have done. And from time to time, you need to rest, and look around you and smell the flowers.
But all of this depends on the capacity for positive experience, for pleasure in what you have wrought, from satisfaction in what you have done. You have to feel good at the end of an arduous expenditure of energy.
And it has been discovered, in fact, that happy people achieve more. They get sick less. They live longer. All of this makes perfect sense.
And making your work an important part of your personal identity is both an engine of honest progress, AND a de facto expression of inner direction. In my own view, that is the healthiest way to live. We all do better together when each of us can do well alone.
Other Direction, in Riesman’s term, amounts to indulging an ambient anxiety that one is not good enough, and that only by matching others can one ever be good enough. Positive feeling, in this case, is inverted: it becomes a daily avoidance of the bad feeling of being different.
And thus people become like schools of fish, changing direction at random continually, just because one did so, without really knowing why.
Where can you hang your hate in such a world? [note, that was a typo–I meant hat. But I am going to call that a Freudian Addition, and riff on it. In a world where you can never be yourself, are you not always frustrated? And do you not then NEED an outlet for your frustration and nervous energy, and does that outlet not, by the defining rules of the system, need to be a target chosen by the collective? And if you yourself are submerged in a collective, is it not easy to project on the rest of the world and assume they act in the same ways?]
Where can you do good work, see that it is good, and rest? You can’t. You won’t. You are never you. You are intermediated by the fluctuating whims of the Collective.
If politics is downstream from culture, culture in turn is downstream from individual health or psychopathology.
One way of putting the foundational premise of what is called Individualism (which has long seemed like a Socialist dig at something healthy, the way that Capitalism was a term invented by Marx as the black hat wearing villain in his cartoon opera) is that if we take care of the emotional health of each individual, the Collective will invariably also be healthy.
And conversely, a Collective consisting in extremely UNhealthy individuals can be expected to do JUST WHAT THE LEFT IS DOING TODAY. They are neurotic messes, saying they don’t know what, and for reasons they can’t, in the end, articulate or justify. And they know this, so they don’t even try.
And yes, neurotic is a bit passe. I would like to bring it back.