Kyle Fitzgibbons's Blog, page 10

The Feudalism of America Today

Living in a modern nation-state requires a complex interplay of state centralization, rule of law, and political accountability. The latter two components are necessary constraints on the former and are often carried out by developing institutions that can be labeled either inclusive or extractive. Inclusive institutions tend to create prosperity, while extractive ones tend to ultimately lead to ever increasing concentrations of wealth among an elite who eventually find themselves having to answer to the majority, either in non-violent or violent events, or by simply draining the state of its prosperity over time.

State centralization is important for creating a monopoly on force and violence, which can be used through the rule of law to create inclusive institutions that allow citizens to interact freely in the knowledge that their innovations won’t be stolen or extracted by force by those who have the most might. Extractive institutions are those that essentially embrace the idea that “might makes right” and as result often completely stifle innovation and the creation, propagation, and dissemination of new ideas, which might challenge the extractive process that so enriches the empowered elite.

One form of power that is extractive in nature is that of the medieval form of political and military structure known as feudalism. It is defined below:

Feudalism: The dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.

The idea that “peasants are obliged to live on their lord’s land and give homage” is largely what exists in today’s America. This might seem dramatic or hyperbolic, but let’s examine it more closely. There are three major ways in which one might see this as true today: labor mobility, income tax, and debt.

Labor Mobility

​Free movement of labor (people as workers) is an essential liberty among free people. In its most extreme negation, you have slavery, where people are viewed as property, and just above that you have feudalism, in which peasants are tied to the land they work in order to pay their lord homage. But are people tied to the land in today’s America in the same manner that they were during feudal Europe? In one major way, yes.

People do not have the freedom to move between nations as they please. Some do not even have the freedom to move between states due to restrictions. Of course, these areas of land are much larger than previously, but the fact remains that a person in America cannot simply buy a ticket and fly to North Korea or vice versa, even if they can afford the cost, because of visa and immigration restrictions created by the state powers of those nations. Even movement from America to prosperous nations such as Singapore or South Korea that America is on good terms with, requires huge amounts of work, red tape, and worker restrictions with all sorts of stipulations on what work can and cannot be done with caveats for deportation at all turns.

This is hugely important when capital is given freedom to move between nations. When capital can move, but people cannot, “a race to the bottom” begins. Corporations are able to move their capital to whatever nation will supply the cheapest labor. In recent history, American companies moved their capital to China so as to capitalize on the lower wages workers were willing to earn compared to their American labor counterparts. As China’s labor becomes more expensive and wages rise, we see capital already moving to other nations in and around Southeast Asia, primarily Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, and parts of India. This primarily happens as the incomes of these nations, such as China, rise over time due to increases in real GDP and workers begin to demand higher wages. Rather than acquiesce to demands from labor over wage increases, capital can simply move to a new location.

Once Southeast Asia becomes too expensive, we are likely to see a larger movement into Africa and parts of South America. Of course, we can say that this would eventually lead to some sort of global equilibrium where wages rise among the nations that capital temporarily stops over in. This would happen in the long-run and as Keynes famously said, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Luckily we don’t have to wait for the long-run equilibrium on world wide wage increases. If people were given the freedom to move their labor to nations that had higher wages, they would surely seize it. This is because people as laborers understand that their geographic location accounts for most of their income (60 percent of variability in global incomes). In fact, we see this even though it is technically not legal in places where poor nations border richer ones. Mexico and America, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, India and the UAE, and the Philippines and Singapore. All of these nations have huge migrations of people trying to escape being tied to their own lands that suffer from poorer working conditions and poverty.

This begs the question on migration from America for a better a life. America is quite rich already, but many Americans would still be better off trading their labor in other nations if given the opportunity. Allowing this to happen more freely would also create “a race to the top” as nations and corporations would be forced to pay labor more in order to attract the best workers available today, rather than tomorrow in some distant global wage equilibrium described above in the “race to the bottom” scenario that currently operates.

Not only would this freer movement of labor benefit Americans, but it would also benefit the entire world. Many economists agree this would increase world GDP somewhere between two and three times what it currently is. Some have even stated that it would be “the world’s best anti-poverty program,” exceeding even the current benefits seen from free trade, which is really just free movement of capital.

Income Tax

​A lack of labor mobility keeps people tied to the land in which they are born, creates a “race to the bottom” in wages, and prevents world GDP from increasing as quickly as it could otherwise and therefore hurting efforts to alleviate world poverty. However, one might argue that within a given nation, there isn’t much feudalism happening. That free labor movement is just a larger global issue that needs to be resolved.

That isn’t entirely true. Both income tax and the next section, debt, are ways in which America in particular, but any country with large financial and corporate interests in general, keep the general public in states of servitude. This relates closely to the definitional aspect of feudalism above that refers to “a social system in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service”. In this case, we have financial sector billionaires acting as the Crown by granting “lands” to politicians in the form of campaign fundraising in exchange for government legislation that grants them use of “military services” in the form of militarized police forces who are able to assert laws drafted by lobbyists to extract income tax and debts from the majority of Americans as dictated by the IRS.

Of course, society does in fact have good reason to levy taxes. We need roads, bridges, dams, schools, police, and firefighters. Taxes pay for all of these public goods and we have to raise them from somewhere. This section is in no way an argument against taxes or their societal benefit.

One way to raise taxes is corporate taxes. Another is capital gains taxes. And of course, the main option we rely on today is the income tax. The income tax needs to be quite high today in America because of the fact that other taxes, such as the corporate and capital gains taxes, are kept so low. This is the result of massive lobbying interests writing legislation that benefits the financial sector of America and other countries that follow our precedents. This legislation is then enforced by the tax system through the threat of police force if one fails to comply. Anyone refusing to pay income taxes will quickly get a knock on their door.

So rather than extremely wealthy businesses and individuals who make the majority of their money in assets that are taxed under corporate and capital gains tax codes paying for a large share of taxes, the larger majority of working and middle class individuals are forced to pay higher taxes from income. This means they keep less of the wages they earn and therefore must work a larger number of hours to afford their consumption practices (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, etc.). This is basically a modern day “homage” that is described in the definition of feudalism at the start. If one wants to live on the lord’s land, one must pay the homage, which of course they are obliged to live on because they don’t have freedom to move across borders.

Debt

​Finally, we come to debt. This works in tandem with income taxes in many ways. It forces people to work longer and harder in order to service the ever growing proportion of debt that makes up average American incomes. David Graeber, in The Democracy Project , asks:

How much of a proportion of the average American family’s income ends up funneled off to the financial services industry? Figures are simply not available. (This in itself tells you something, since figures are available on just about everything else.) Still, one can get a sense. The Federal Reserve’s “financial obligations ratio” reports that the average American household shelled out roughly 18 percent of its income on servicing loans and similar obligations over the course of the last decade— it’s an inadequate figure in many ways (it includes principal payments and real estate taxes, but excludes penalties and fees) but it gives something like a ballpark sense. (Kindle Locations 1220-1225).

Coupled with state and federal income taxes, sales taxes, and the excluded penalties and fees Graeber mentions for financing the debt, it is easy to see that the majority of Americans could be paying as much or more than fifty percent of their income to service debt and pay taxes for the “privilege” of living and working on American soil, which they have relatively few options to leave.

Many might argue that modern Americans do not have to take on debt, but that seems to be a rather un-American statement to make. Here are the figures on American debt composition (also from Graeber):

TOTAL DEBT BALANCE AND ITS COMPOSITION
Mortgage 72%
Home Equity Revolving 5%
Auto Loan 6%
Credit Card 6%
Student Loan 8%
Other 3% *2011Q3
Total: 11.656 Trillion (Kindle Locations 1250-1256).

Americans are constantly sold the idea of home ownership. It is part of the American dream. It also has very large tax incentives, meaning banks highly encourage it, although some economists are beginning to question the validity of this system of incentives and the adverse effects it can have as demonstrated in the Great Recession of 2009. That “American dream”, turns out to be largely a dream for the financial sector, which is then able to extract interest, fees, penalties, and the like for helping you achieve it and pointing out that you’re wasting money by renting because of the tax code they have written, a problem that largely doesn’t exist in Germany where people get by just fine by renting. Auto loans are nearly a necessity if people wish to get back and forth to work in large sprawling suburban metropolises, another problem that doesn’t exist in many countries that make better use of public transportation like Korea and Singapore. Try getting to work in California without a car. Next to housing, cars are typically the largest purchases Americans make and that typically requires financing with the attendant extractive fees and penalties.

Then we come to student debt. Another financial sector dream. Higher education is no longer about the development of our collective humanity or the exploration of the world and what makes life meaningful. Instead, it is the route that must be taken to enter professional work. In order to work in a field that gives one even the slightest chance to break out of the state of serfdom described so far, one must engage in a professional career. This leaves the average American exiting university with over $30,000 in student debt, that cannot be unsaddled even by bankruptcy, at the start of their working life where the median income in America is currently just over $30,000.

This student debt is the ultimate manner in which the financial nobility are able to keep serfs tied to them. One must pay the student loan fees in order to work because of the degree, licensing, and credential requirements of professional fields or risk very serious likelihood of arrest or police threat of violence as they dispossess you of your house, car, and future pay for defaulting.

There is simply little pragmatic alternative for most people in the United States other than getting a student loan, home loan, and car loan in order to work in a profession, live without throwing money away on rent, and commute back and forth in most major cities so that one can turn around and pay those loans and taxes before keeping the little left over for food, clothing, and a bit of leisure and entertainment.

A Path Forward

​Americans work the longest hours of any comparable developed nation. The reason should appear obvious by now. We live in a system where the financial sector can lobby government officials for the rules that most benefit them and give them the greatest opportunity to extract income and wealth from the working and middle classes, not unlike southern elites managed to successfully vote for the secession.

They are able to do this in a few major ways: gaining rights to move their own capital around the world freely, while not allowing labor to do so; keeping corporate and capital gains taxes low, thereby shifting the burden of taxation to income taxes; and ensuring a society that requires the majority to take on debt in the form of home ownership, car ownership, and student loans to meet the requirements of professionalization.

None of these rules that harm the majority of US citizens must exist. They largely exist because of the insecurity that breeds within the system itself. If a person is financially insecure and always worried about the harsh consequences from missing even one debt payment or an inability to pay taxes, they are much more likely to act in conservative manners that attempt to create a sense of stability in their life. Psychology is showing again and again that a feeling of stress caused by scarcity turns people inwards, lessens their thinking capacity, and generally makes them more self-interested.

This can help explain why so many working class people vote directly against their own long-run economic interests. They are much more concerned with the predictability of tomorrow by voting for a conservative than the unpredictability of voting for social change that could harm them in the short-run as various social programs and policies are fleshed out.

How does a society overcome this? Unfortunately, there is no simple or quick answer. Francis Fukuyama summarizes this well:

The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems— past and present— are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain one in perpetuity. (pp. 428-430)

What’s worth adding to his thoughts is that the higher level of education he mentions ought to be made free of the oppressive student loans currently being issued in order to avoid serfdom where people become tied to working any job they can find in order to pay the banks back.

While this is by no means a radical or even new proposal, the reasoning should be clear enough. Higher education levels create citizens that can think, act, and work more productively. In thinking more clearly, they are able to find jobs that pay better, ultimately allowing them to overcome their debt, have more discretionary income post-taxes, feel less financially insecure and thereby be able to vote in ways congruent to their own interests.

Clearly, this is a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. What comes first, the voting for better education or the better education needed for the voting? It’s a bit of a “catch 22”. Hopefully, understanding how America closely resembles a feudal state can help in the education process needed to keep government accountable when voting so that legislation is created that benefits the majority and the corrosive institutions that currently exist can slowly be dismantled.

The Future of Work

Driverless taxis are here. I asked my 12th grade economics class yesterday what they would do when they couldn't grow up to be taxi drivers. They pretty much all laughed. That’s to be expected in a school where most students are children of very wealthy professionals. None of them imagine a future for themselves where driving a taxi is a legitimate choice.

I then asked them what they would do for work when they grew up and couldn't work as accountants because programs like TurboTax begin to outperform all accountants except the best in the world, thereby replacing 99% of all future accountants. That got fewer laughs.

Then I asked them what they'd do when IBM's supercomputer Watson, which famously beat all human competition at Jeopardy, was successfully reprogrammed to become the world's best doctor (something currently underway). They pretty much all stopped laughing at this point.

One student, after about 10 seconds of reflection, answered very simply, "Give everyone an allowance." Bingo!

If the industrial revolution replaced muscle power with machine power and the current computing power is replacing brain power and making most service-based knowledge work redundant, the only reasonable answer to come up with is a creation of a universal income. Several nations are already talking and beginning to experiment with that idea. I imagine it will take awhile for America to take it seriously though.

Don't you think there will be new "occupations" created that we cannot comprehend today?

Humans have muscle and brain power to work with. If you strip them of the ability to employ either of those, there are few occupations imaginable. One area, of course, would be in socio-emotional services - something computers are bad at - that don't necessarily require massive levels of muscle or brain power (of the logico-mathematical variety anyway). This would essentially mean teaching people to simply be kind and compassionate towards one another, but it’s hard to see it as an avenue for massive employment. This is essentially the realm that feminism has being attempting to legitimize for the past century, but without any luck in applying it toward paid services.

Innovation is slowing down more generally and it takes more and more expertise, training, and schooling to reach the edge or frontier of complex fields like computer science where most technological breakthroughs happen. This greatly limits the number of people capable of contributing economically in terms of productivity through innovation. This isn't because of inequality either. Even if education were completely free at all levels, there simply aren't that many people capable of having insights at the level needed to create progress in the fields that generate prosperity, such as the STEM subjects.

This is exaggerated by the "winner take all" system that has developed due to mass communication and transportation. The best in the world at accounting can now have a computer programmer create systems like TurboTax and then sell that product to everyone without being limited by geography.

You already see this in fields like music and acting, where celebrity was once confined by geography to the number of people you could perform live in front of. Now, the best musicians and actors in the world can sell their products on iTunes and Amazon to the entire world. The same will be true of just about all service-based knowledge industries given enough time.

Of course, something dramatic could happen that totally upends what we know of history and economics. Right now, we categorize economic output in only four major sectors: agricultural, industrial, service, and creation. Technology is eliminating the first three as secure employment sectors and that leaves us with only the fourth sector centered on creativity, which as pointed out above is essentially unreachable by most people even if they are endowed with unlimited financial backing and equal opportunity. New ideas are just really, really hard to generate.

This is why socio-emotional education based on caring and compassion become even more important. We will almost certainly need "an allowance", what economists call a universal or basic income, as my student put it above for most people. This requires that the majority of the voting public agree to endorse policies that have social welfare and the great mass of people in mind.

Our world is getting richer. Wealth is not the issue here. Technology allows us to produce more goods and services for a greater number of people, giving us more options, prosperity, and a higher quality of life overall. However, we currently believe that the inventors and innovators deserve to capture all of the rewards for themselves. This is just one viewpoint, not the only one.

Another viewpoint is that we can choose to live in a society where we educate all, with the expectation and knowledge that only a small percentage will continue to create wealth through innovation, while at the same time requiring them to share that wealth once it is created. It only requires that we care enough to do it and stop believing that individuals deserve to keep whatever they create all for themselves. After all, they are able to create their innovations only because of the entire system that is in place: state infrastructure, state education, state laws, and state citizenship that leads to state protection.

Instead of seeing people as rightful owners of wealth, we need to view them as stewards of wealth. If they are not stewarding wealth appropriately, meaning using it to make everyone better off, they are not entitled to it. This follows the same vein of thinking as the original idea of a social contract between the populace and government, only now it is extended to a social contract between the populace, the government, and the wealthy.

We can make these changes civilly through education, legislation, and democratic consensus, or we can wait until movements like Occupy Wall Street go from non-violent demonstrations and protests to violent revolutions. The choice is ours.

On Learning: Who Not to Listen To

People learn primarily through social interactions of one kind or another. We talk to people, we read, we listen and watch TV, movies, and the news. There really isn’t much variety to how people learn. We take in information in one form or another and that information has to come from somewhere.

Of course, it is possible that we learn by creating knowledge, either for ourselves without help or for the first time, but that is much more rare. That is essentially what academics do. They create knowledge through their research projects by analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting the data they collect, whether quantitative or qualitative. Assuming you aren’t an academic or some other knowledge creator, you probably learn from others through the methods mentioned above or possibly even direct imitation like a child or athlete does with their parents and coaches, respectively.

This begs the essential question: Who should we get our information from? Who should we listen to, believe, and regard as valid deliverers of knowledge?

Technical Knowledge

The quality of technical knowledge comes in a huge variety of forms. Just like the quality of food we take in daily impacts our physical health and robustness, the quality of information and knowledge we absorb day to day impacts our intellectual health and robustness.

Dilettantes and Charlatans

One of the most important areas of knowledge in today’s world is technical knowledge. This is what we typically rely on experts to generate and disseminate and is considered the “bottleneck of all expertise”. Yet we often don’t get our knowledge from experts.

One example of this is demonstrated by using Amazon to search through books on various topics, something I enjoy doing on a regular basis to try and notice what books have the most reviews, which authors have the highest sales ranks, and what books are topping the bestseller lists in different categories.

For instance, Dan Harris, correspondent for ABC News and the co-anchor for the weekend edition of Good Morning America, has one of the most reviewed and top ranked books in the category of “happiness” on all of Amazon. It has over 2,200 reviews (an astounding number for Amazon) and as of this moment, ranks #9 on the bestseller list in this category.

While happiness might be considered a field that is accessible to anyone with an opinion and open for advice from all parties, there is in fact an entire field of empirical, and therefore non-anecdotal, research devoted to the topic. You would think that anybody serious about learning about happiness would take the time to investigate the preeminent researchers in that field (positive psychology) and begin their reading and learning with them. This is not to say that non-researchers have nothing valuable to say, just that the validity is immediately questionable until proven otherwise.

In continuing a search within the category of happiness by “most reviews” on Amazon, the very next page has a book titled The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology The Fuel Success and Performance at Work and is written by Shawn Anchor. This would appear to be a better start. After all, the title directly references the field of positive psychology that I just mentioned. His biography also includes working and lecturing at Harvard. Yet, if we dig a little deeper, we can find out that he worked as a dormitory Freshman Proctor at Harvard after receiving a master’s degree in divinity and helped lecture as a teaching assistant for a professor that taught a course on happiness. He is hardly the academic expert on the subject that first glance might convince us that he is.

Mystics and Pop Expertise

Continuing our search, we would stumble upon the The Art of Happiness a few pages deeper into the search results of Amazon. This has about 100 reviews less than Anchor’s book and about 1,500 reviews less than Harris’ book. It is co-written by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, the spiritual and former state leader of the Tibetan people and a psychiatrist respectively.

This is a much better starting place. The Dalai Lama has spent, quite literally, his entire life studying happiness through subjective introspection, argument, and experiential reflection. Cutler has a medical degree and has practiced for years as a psychiatrist, working with actual people who seek his help in becoming happier.

If you don’t like the idea of getting advice from a professed spiritual leader (always a murky area that contains a lot of nonsense and supernatural mysticism), but do like the idea of an MD or PhD who has spent their entire life rigorously studying the subject then the search would have to continue even further.

To get away from dilettantes like Harris, charlatans like Anchor, or spiritual mysticism like the Dalai Lama (someone I do greatly admire), you have to go all the way to the seventh page of search results on Amazon before you come across a book titled, coincidentally enough, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. This book has a little over 500 reviews on Amazon as of this writing and so would not necessarily show up as the first search result. However, it is written by a social psychologist who received his PhD from Princeton University and now works at Harvard where he does in fact research human happiness and has done so for the length of his career.

Peer-reviewed Expertise

While popular psychology books like Gilbert’s are great, they are still written with sales in mind and try to package material in ways that are palatable to their general public audiences. This can be fine, but it can also put focus on topics that might not be as important as the field of research in general suppose them to be. An even stronger start would be to find a textbook on the subject, even if it is an undergraduate introductory text. This will contain the broadest survey of agreed upon facts, important researchers, and controversies within the research community of the given field and not be filtered through just one researcher’s and his or her publicist’s and publisher’s demands.

These types of books usually won’t even show up in the search results because they have such few reviews on platforms like Amazon. An example textbook, A Primer in Positive Psychology , which is very readable, has only 43 reviews - a far cry from the 2,200 for Harris. In fact, you wouldn’t find it just by searching through the most reviewed books on happiness because it isn’t even labeled under that category. It is labeled in the categories of “social psychology”, “reference”, and “education”.

This is where understanding how key word searches can fail you is important. Sometimes it is worth figuring out the field of research that studies the topic you’re interested in - in this case positive psychology is the field of research that studies the topic of happiness. Searching for just they key word of happiness may not get you to the best source of information as described immediately above.

So generally speaking, people interested in a field of technical knowledge should begin with either a popular book like Gilbert’s or an introductory textbook. Both of these have information that have been evaluated against the entire field of research by professionals who spend their entire careers immersed in the subject. This is a much stronger base than beginning with a book written by someone like Harris, who simply did some investigative journalism and regurgitated it into a book without having a background in the topic himself. It’s his media platform and minor celebrity that earned his reviews, not his credentials to talk about the subject.

Of course, no one is saying that you only have to read one book on a subject and it is always good practice to read multiple sources. However, if you were to read just one book, the textbook is recommended over the journalist every single time.

Procedural Knowledge

Another large area of knowledge is that of procedural knowledge. This is knowledge that requires practice and skill development. Things like learning to play a sport or instrument are good examples. This is the type of knowledge typically studied by the field of expertise under the topic of deliberate practice. Here the advice is much simpler and straightforward.

Find someone with the hat trick.

What’s the hat trick? The hat trick is when a person has three different and specific types of credentials: technical knowledge, personal experience, and coaching experience.

Technical experience. I’ll use examples again, this time from my own life. I recently found and paid an online coach, John Meadows, for help in meeting my physical health goals at the gym. The coach I chose has extensive technical knowledge, having received a degree in exercise science, multiple certifications in personal strength and conditioning training, and has worked with multiple PhD researchers on nutrition. He knows more about anatomy, physiology, endocrinology, and diet than the vast majority of humans.Personal experience. While technical knowledge is something any good coach should have, it is actually the least important when pursuing procedural expertise in most cases. Technical knowledge alone won’t get results. It has to be paired with knowledge of how to apply it. This is more evident in this category and the next. Taking my current coach as an example again, he has 25 years of personal experience as a strength trainee. He has squatted, bench pressed, and deadlifted more than I ever will. Furthermore, he was also able to win his professional card in the top bodybuilding federation in the world after attempting to do so for 20 years. He has personally worked very hard, experimented, and changed strategies to figure out what worked and didn’t while working towards his goals.Coaching experience. This last category is even more important than the previous two. It is great if someone has technical knowledge and was able to apply it to gain success in their own endeavors. However, that is not actually what you are looking for when selecting a teacher, trainer, coach, or mentor. You are looking for them to be able to apply what they know and have done to gain success for you. That is why the ultimate qualification for learning from someone else in the area of procedural knowledge is a proven track record of success in teaching other people the knowledge and skills you are looking for yourself. Again, my coach selection matches this criteria. He has successfully trained multiple professional and amateur enthusiast trainees to reach their selected goals. The latter is important. It is often easier to get results with professionals than amateurs. Amateurs, such as myself, typically don’t have all the extra benefits that professionals have at their disposal and getting results with them is often even more difficult.
Conclusion

If one is going to spend the time to learn something, it is worth getting the best information possible. This often takes very little extra effort on one’s part. The above rules for doing so can help enormously.

For technical knowledge, find technical experts. Read their books. Watch their YouTube lectures. Take their classes. Enroll in their programs.

For procedural knowledge, find somebody with the hat trick. That is, find someone who has a degree of technical knowledge in the procedural knowledge you wish to attain, has personal experience with the procedural knowledge themselves, and has already gained success for others by applying their technical knowledge and personal experience.

The most important aspect in acquiring either of the two types of knowledge outlined in this article is knowing what you are after. Always take the time necessary to focus your goal(s) so that you know what you are really aiming for. If you don’t have a clear target, you’ll never be successful, regardless of the qualifications attached to the knowledge you gain.

​

Democracy's Flaw: Media. Simplicity. Extremism.

Democracy is a difficult form of government to get right. It requires a delicate balancing act of education, non-discrimination, and non-repression. These components make it possible that representatives, policies, and legislation are selected that benefit as many people as possible without tyrannizing over minority groups and individual rights. This requires a nation’s education system to be robust so that individuals learn how to think critically about issues and for the media to provide adequate information on facts for the public to deliberate on.

This deliberation can become very messy, complex, and nuanced. It’s hard not to in any society that has cultural diversity and pluralistic values. Beliefs will often conflict and create situations in which at least one party will potentially lose. Even when that is true, the public should hope to elect representatives that understand this messiness and make decisions with the greatest benefit in mind.

Democratic Deliberation

The main issue seems to be that democracy requires deliberation among the electorate on how best to organize society. Societal organization can’t hope to land on the best system on the first try. It requires constant change and experimentation. Even if democracy did select the best possible organization for society on the first try, it would need constant updating and change due to fact that new people and needs will enter the system over time and change the balance of what is best.

In order to choose the best organization for this moment in time, the voting public needs to have access to information. If the public doesn’t have access to valid, nuanced information, they can’t deliberate from facts.

Deliberation in a democracy ought to be based on reason, argument, and evidence. If the public is voting on a candidate that is addressing a complex issue like immigration, they ought to be aware of exactly how immigration affects the country in both the short and long term. This requires understanding complex ideas in economics and politics and cannot be boiled down to a simple headline such as, “Immigrants Steal Jobs” or “Everyone Wins with Free Trade”.

The Media

News outlets are our primary source for the information we need in making choices. These news outlets can be either publicly or privately owned and both have negatives. Public ownership of news outlets has the potential to be abused by currently sitting politicians who can manipulate information to their advantage. Private ownership, as the majority of the media system is structured now, obligates companies to maximize profit if they have shareholders and generally compete with firms to remain open and be able to cover their costs.

This latter point often requires getting as many eyeballs on the news outlet’s channel or paper as possible. In order to do this, media sources act much like other companies in that they turn to catchy headlines and soundbites that drive ratings, in essence giving their customers what they want. Many people have written about the “banality of good”, but I like Matthieu Ricard’s short summary from Altruism best when he writes, “everyday good does not make much commotion and people rarely pay attention to it; it doesn’t make the headlines in the media like an arson, a horrible crime, or the sexual habits of a politician” (p. 94).

Complexity versus Simplicity

One way of interpreting the media’s insistent negative press is to view it as a product of “cause and effect” thinking. Most of modern society has been built on the scientific method in some capacity. We use it everyday, even if we aren’t always aware of it, to make our lives better. The roads we drive on, the buildings we inhabit, the food we eat, and just about everything else we can point to is a product of scientists’ and engineers’ thinking very hard about how to improve our lives by searching for cause and effect relationships and isolating variables.

However, this reliance on cause and effect thinking that arises from our societal love of the scientific method creates a problem when situations are complex. We intuitively look for a single cause and try to point to it as the solution of whatever problem we might be facing. This has the typical result of destroying nuance and multidimensionality in problem solving. This destruction of nuance and complexity when it is needed, such as in the political and economic arena of democracy, makes differentiation among candidates difficult without resorting to moving away from the center to more extreme positions.

Partisan Extremism

Now we come to the real problem. Democracy requires information. That information is distributed by news outlets that must maintain ratings to make a profit. This forces the media to focus on simple and direct cause and effect thinking that is easily captured in soundbites and short phrases, or even single words. This simplification of what is needed for positive change by eliminating nuance and complexity promotes extreme positions taken by candidates for a very simple reason - the need to differentiate to win votes.

Think about it this way. If you know that whatever you say will be captured in a headline and that many people will not read the entire story or place it within a larger context, you cannot argue over details and minutia that separate you from another “center” candidate. You have to aim at a headline that will grab attention while avoiding complexity. This necessitates a move outward to further positions on the left or right or you will sound just like every other candidate when broken into center-positioned soundbites by the news.

We see this today on both sides of the political spectrum in America. A good example from the Democratic platform was Obama’s entire 2008 message of “Hope” and “Change”. You literally can’t get anymore simple than single word platforms, but in reality these two words are meaningless outside of complex contexts and it would be genuinely idiotic to endorse him and his party on the basis of these two words.

We ought to immediately ask ourselves, “What kind of change? What specific things do you plan to change, and how?” This obviously involves much more digging into details and specifics with possibly conflicting solutions for multiple problems. But until we know these things, we can’t assume any change is good change. Plenty of change can be bad.

Which takes us to his second message of “Hope”, which is essentially the opposite of what we should be looking for in a candidate. The electorate should not be closing their eyes, crossing their fingers, and hoping for a better tomorrow. They should be digging into the messiness that is political economy with eyes wide open and experimenting with solutions continuously to see what does and does not work.

This requires no hope at all. Just a willingness to do the work. And a willingness to suffer through some failures of experimentation to arrive at a better future.

Getting to the Point

The point is positive improvement for the greatest number. Democracy generally accomplishes this better than other systems we have experimented with as humans trying to organize society, but that doesn’t mean it is perfect.

The system itself pushes potential representatives to extreme positions in their attempt to differentiate and win elections. Occasionally, an extreme position may be just what is called for, especially on issues that entail more socially inclusive policies around human and civil rights for disenfranchised, discriminated against, or oppressed members of a society.

But more often than not, the changes necessary to make daily life better for all require a holistic image of the entire system and how it will be impacted by shifts of its different components. This type of “routine” change doesn’t require flashy language and partisan extremism. It only requires engaged, caring, and knowledgeable representatives who have everyone’s best interests at heart. In cases like these, sometimes (most often) the best candidate will be the boring one who has done the work, not the exciting one who yells the loudest.​

The Exercise Algorithm

I’ve always exercised for only a couple of reasons: to feel able enough to experience more of life and to avoid preventable diseases and injuries as I age. The latter reason is the primary impetus for me even when I feel unmotivated, but the former is a nice perk, almost a bonus as it were, and what has given me some of my best memories and feelings of accomplishments.

Examples of the experiences I’ve had because of physical health include climbing Mount Whitney and Mount Baldy in California with some of my closest friends, squatting 402 pounds, deadlifting 500 pounds, running two half marathons, completing a triathlon, doing 20 pull ups at one time, spearfishing in Malibu, and otherwise enjoying outdoor leisure activities such as camping, hiking, bodysurfing, and various board sports. These memories and accomplishments due to physical health rival every other good memory I have outside this realm of physicality, including earning a Master’s degree, self-publishing Kindle and Audible books on Amazon, getting married, and helping students learn about and fundraise for valuable organizations.

However, as I said above, it is really the prevention of diseases and injury that motivates me to maintain a minimum of physical health. Anyone who doesn’t know me that well won’t know this, but I’ve grown up with a father that has a genetic variation of emphysema. It is a disease that, as he has described it, “takes one new thing away from you each day, week, or year”. It’s progressive and miserable.

He used to be able to lift heavy weights, run trails through the California hills and mountains, and play tennis vigorously as a serious hobby. Now, he is lucky to finish 18 holes of golf while using a cart and oxygen the entire time. Bending over to remove weeds in the garden can make him lightheaded and dizzy. Even showering, dressing, and putting on shoes and socks (bending over again) can be exhausting.

With his ever looming physical presence in my house, I’ve been interested in warding off major surgeries and illnesses via prevention since I was a teenager.

The 10 Leading Causes of Death Worldwide

According to the World Health Organization approximately 56 million people die each year and the leading causes are as follows:

Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections and chronic obstructive lung disease have remained the top major killers during the past decade.

HIV deaths decreased slightly from 1.7 million (3.2%) deaths in 2000 to 1.5 million (2.7%) deaths in 2012. Diarrhoea is no longer among the 5 leading causes of death, but is still among the top 10, killing 1.5 million people in 2012.

​Chronic diseases cause increasing numbers of deaths worldwide. Lung cancers (along with trachea and bronchus cancers) caused 1.6 million (2.9%) deaths in 2012, up from 1.2 million (2.2%) deaths in 2000. Similarly, diabetes caused 1.5 million (2.7%) deaths in 2012, up from 1.0 million (2.0%) deaths in 2000.

Leading Causes of Death in the USA

According to the Center for Disease Control, the leading causes of death of the approximately 2.5 million annual deaths in America are:

Heart disease: 614,348Cancer: 591,699Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103Alzheimer's disease: 93,541Diabetes: 76,488Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773
To be even more specific, according to Harvard’s School of Public Health, approximately 2 million (of the 2.5 million total) deaths are preventable each year and are due to “dietary, lifestyle and metabolic risk factors”. The number of deaths annually due to these specifically preventable risk factors are:

Smoking: 467,000High blood pressure: 395,000Overweight-obesity: 216,000Inadequate physical activity and inactivity: 191,000High blood sugar: 190,000High LDL cholesterol: 113,000High dietary salt: 102,000Low dietary omega-3 fatty acids (seafood): 84,000High dietary trans fatty acids: 82,000Alcohol use: 64,000 (alcohol use averted a balance of 26,000 deaths from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, because moderate drinking reduces risk of these diseases. But these deaths were outweighed by 90,000 alcohol-related deaths from traffic and other injuries, violence, cancers and a range of other diseases).Low intake of fruits and vegetables: 58,000Low dietary poly-unsaturated fatty acids: 15,000
And to be even more specific still, according to the CDC again:

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related morbidity and mortality among older adults, with more than one in three older adults falling each year, resulting in direct medical costs of nearly $30 billion. Some of the major consequences of falls among older adults are hip fractures, brain injuries, decline in functional abilities, and reductions in social and physical activities. Although the burden of falls among older adults is well-documented, research suggests that falls and fall injuries are also common among middle-aged adults. One risk factor for falling is poor neuromuscular function (i.e., gait speed and balance), which is common among persons with arthritis. In the United States, the prevalence of arthritis is highest among middle-aged adults (aged 45–64 years) (30.2%) and older adults (aged ≥65 years) (49.7%), and these populations account for 52% of U.S. adults. Moreover, arthritis is the most common cause of disability. (p. 379)

What this all points to, if you live in the United States in particular, is a need to address long-run physical issues through prevention. Avoiding smoking, drinking, trans fatty acids, and high dietary salt and sugar aren’t that difficult. Neither are including poly-unsaturated fats, fruits, vegetables, omega-3 fatty acids, and exercise.

Even though diet is clearly very important from reading the above, I find most people understand and know this. Rather, like flossing and other simple things involving willpower, they simply choose not to eat and drink well because of a host of reasons, sometimes individually based, but often social as well.

What I find most people don’t do is make clearer connections to their exercise choices and the long-run prevention strategies that should become obvious as one looks over the data above. Exercise has a clear and robustly supported impact on some of the largest causes of death in the United States.

Causes of death such as heart disease, respiratory disease,  Alzheimer’s disease, intentional self-harm, high blood pressure, overweight-obesity, and the number one cause of death in old age, “falls”, are all directly connected to and can be decreased by our choices of exercise. So let’s examine what I believe to be the best overall approach to longevity given what the data above tell us.

The Algorithm EfL = f(M, TS, ES) Exercise for longevity is a function of our mobility, tissue strength, and energy systems.

Of course, overall health and well-being will include more than exercise. As mentioned above, diet will be one large aspect. Sleep would be another. Stress yet a fourth. And take a look at my algorithm for subjective well-being for variables regarding your mind, which also have a strong impact on your physical health. PH = f(D, S, E, St) Physical health is a function of diet, sleep, exercise, and overall stress levels.

I won’t go into all the variables in the PH equation directly above, but will spend some time fleshing out the first equation on exercise for longevity.

​Mobility

This dimension seems to be the most confusing to people. As physical therapist Charlie Weingroff puts it:

Being fully mobile simply means the ability of a joint system to move through a definable range.

That desired range must be defined first because if you are looking for a quarter squat as your indicator of success (not sure why you would), that is the mobility you need to have “good mobility.”  Good or lousy mobility is always related to the movement at hand.  It should be a very relative term by definition.

This definition is great because it puts mobility into perspective. Mobility’s job is to let you do the tasks you wish to do. Nothing more. Being able to do a full splits may demonstrate extreme mobility of your hips, but if it doesn’t let you perform any other tasks that you deem important, then it is probably a bit silly to spend an inordinate amount of time gaining that ability.

Gray Cook, another physical therapist, states it nicely when he urges us to “manage our minimums”. Our lack of mobility often gets us in trouble when it is asymmetric more so than when it is somewhat limited. What all this means is that you don’t have to take up yoga to become more “flexible”, i.e. mobile. You don’t win points for being more mobile than someone else unless that person can’t live a normal, independent life because of their poor ranges of movement.

In general, once you decide that you do need to improve your mobility, physical therapy work will be the most effective practice, much more so than simply stretching. “You need a trigger point technique, a soft tissue technique, and a joint technique.” A good place to start for self maintenance is on physical therapist Kelly Starrett’s Mobility WOD. If you really do have mobility issues, this will get you much further than yoga or static stretching in much less time and energy.

But again, mobility is relative to what you want to do with yourself. With longevity in mind, you are mostly worried about being able to get up and down off the floor and up and down off the toilet, along with reaching upward or downward to grab or pick up things. Those are really the biggest demands on most people’s mobility as they age. Anything past that will be mostly individual wants and needs.

What improved mobility won’t do is prevent any of the major causes of death described above except perhaps “falls”, but this is more often related to muscle weakness and atrophy and is better addressed in the next dimension of exercise - tissue strength.

Tissue Strength

Human tissues come in two forms: soft and hard. Soft is easier to describe as saying it is everything that isn’t hard tissue, i.e. bone and tooth. That means that soft tissue comprises tendons, ligaments, muscles, fascia, nerves, blood vessels, skin, and a few others.

In strengthening both hard and soft tissue, one can alleviate the chances of several of the risks above, including accidents, diabetes, high blood pressure, overweight-obesity, and inadequate physical activity. The best way to strengthen your bodily tissues is to exert stress on them through external weight.

This means weight training, strength training, bodybuilding, Crossfit, or whatever other form of training you wish that involves weights of moderate load (60-85% of maximum), for moderate repetitions (5-20), and moderate sets (3-10). This is because weight training is the most effective way to increase bone density, tendon/ligament strength, muscle size, and regulate blood pressure, hormones, and hypertension. Basically, “Barbell training is big medicine.”

The three best understood methods for maintaining muscle size and strength according to Brad Schoenfeld, PhD in exercise science, are through mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress.

Mechanical tension is created on a muscle, bone, tendon, or ligament any time we use a relatively heavy load. This is generally understood to be 60-100% of our maximal effort. Muscle damage is best elicited through exercises that have not been done recently, by providing a greater than normal stretch or lengthening of a muscle, and the use of heavy or slow eccentrics (lowering of a weight). Lastly, metabolic stress is the buildup of metabolites in a muscle and is best described as the “burn” we feel in our muscles from repeated contractions with little rest. Basically anything that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have described as a “pump” back in the 70’s is likely to induce metabolic stress in a muscle.

A host of interrelated reasons explain why increased tissue strength and size are so effective at combating the above risk factors. Accidents are far less likely when we have strong bones and muscles that we have learned to coordinate through the coordination of our own bodies and external weights. Diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity have nearly zero chance of occurring with frequent weight training because more muscle means a higher rate of metabolism, as our tissues are where metabolism occurs. The repeated spiking of blood pressure during weight training actually works as a stressor that keeps our blood pressure lower when not exercising, just like raising our heart rate during running keeps our heart rate lower when not running. This type of exercise also has a large and positive impact on our hormones, causing several to be released and regulated in a healthy manner.

Jonathon Sullivan, MD and PhD in physiology, summarizes all of these effects from strength training on longevity perfectly:

And before you ask: at present there is absolutely no solid evidence that strength training—or any other exercise or dietary program—will substantially prolong our life spans. But the preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost. There is much talk in the aging studies community about “compression of morbidity,” a shortening of the dysfunctional phase of the death process. Instead of slowly getting weaker and sicker and circling the drain in a protracted, painful descent that can take hellish years or even decades, we can squeeze our dying into a tiny sliver of our life cycle. Instead of slowly dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, our death can be like a failed last rep at the end of a final set of heavy squats. We can remain strong and vital well into our last years, before succumbing rapidly to whatever kills us. Strong to the end.

That, my friends, is Big Medicine. (p. 6)

Energy Systems

Finally we come to energy systems training, which can help prevent the major causes of death, including heart disease, respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and suicide due to depression.

We actually have three overlapping energy systems. These include the phosphagen system, anaerobic system, and aerobic system. The first two are used for short-term, high-intensity outputs like jumping, sprinting, weight lifting, etc. You can typically sustain the phosphagen system for up to 10 seconds and the anaerobic system for a couple of minutes (think 800 meter run) before you start to feel your lungs and muscles scream and burn. Both of these are easily addressed with whatever weight lifting you do for strengthening your tissues, but interval training can also do the trick.

The third system, aerobic energy, uses oxygen and is what most people think of when they think of “cardio”. Anyone swimming, biking, jogging, or otherwise covering a lot of ground over a long time will be using this energy system. However, people today seem to have gone to extremes with ultramarathons, Ironman triathlons, and century bike rides.

Andrew Hallam, summarizes the research well when it comes to cardio:

Earlier this year, five researchers published a study in the Journal Of The American College of Cardiology. They found that, on average, joggers live about 6 years longer than couch potatoes. But those who run too far, too fast, or too frequently die earlier. They live about as long as a typical T.V. loafer.

The best survival rate came from those who ran 2 to 3 times per week, at an easy pace. Those who ran more than 2.5 hours per week died earlier. Those who ran faster than 7 miles per hour met the same fate.

Cardiologists Justin E. Trivax and Peter A. McCullough published Phidippides cardiomyopathy: a review and case illustration. They say endurance sports can hurt the heart. “It has been shown that approximately one-third of marathon runners experience dilation of the right atrium and ventricle, have elevations of cardiac troponin and natriuretic peptides, and in a smaller fraction later develop small patches of cardiac fibrosis that are the likely substrate for ventricular tachyarrhythmias and sudden death.”

Researchers from Rome’s Institute of Sports Medicine and Science published equally surprising findings in the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology. They studied 2,354 Olympic-level athletes between 2002 and 2014 to “assess the efficacy of the Olympic pre-participation screening protocol.” Tests determined how the athletes’ hearts performed under stress and whether there were any cardiovascular issues.

They concluded that, “Olympic athletes, regardless of their superior physical performance and astonishing achievements, showed an unexpected large prevalence of CV [cardiovascular] abnormalities, including life-threatening conditions.”

Cardiologist James O’Keefe, however, does give us hope. In his TED talk, he referenced a study on mice. One group ran hard on a treadmill over an 8 week period. Their resulting heart abnormalities were similar to those of humans who run too far, too frequently or too fast. But when researchers took the mice off their tough regimes, their heart muscles recovered.

Putting It All Together
​
While all of this seems rather complicated, it’s actually quite simple. To do our most to prevent long-term health problems due to illness, injury, and death when it comes to exercise, we essentially want to physically train much like a bodybuilder. This means:

Weights three to five times a week,Easy, low intensity cardio two to four times a week,And physical therapy style mobility work as necessary.
This will keep our tissues strong and healthy, our cardiovascular system in optimal condition, and our joints and movement patterns capable of the ranges of movement we need so we don’t succumb to dying by “fall” once we get over the age of 65. If we are living up to and beyond our 70’s and 80’s, we must plan accordingly.

I’ve seen my dad suffer from pretty much all of the major risks above, including heart disease, lung disease, overweight-obesity, accidents, depression, and those are just the ones I know about. I do not wish to suffer the same as I age, especially as I don’t have any genetic reason why I would.

None of this needs take any longer than traditional hour long classes at a local gym or the 10K you run 4 times a week either. Thirty minutes of weights, followed by 20-30 minutes of cardio, and zero to 10 minutes of mobility work will still only take an hour out of your day and can be done just two to four times a week like most recreational exercisers do anyway.

Conclusion

​While the algorithm best suited for ensuring longevity from exercise is rather short and straight forward, it doesn’t take into account a host of other factors, some of which were touched upon earlier regarding diet, sleep, stress, smoking, drinking, and risky sex practices.

In addition, it’s equally important to point out that on a day to day basis, driving is one of the most dangerous activities that we participate in and anything that you can do to reduce the miles driven on roads, the better. It’s also worth noting that accidents are the number one cause of death in the 25-44 age group and that suicide, homicide, and liver disease are numbers four, five and six.

This implies that living in a country or city like Singapore, where a person typically drives less because of efficient public transport, has access to good psychological health services, is very unlikely to be a victim of homicide, and is forced to pay expensive cigarette and alcohol taxes, can actually be of great service in making it through a person’s midlife and into their later years unscathed by youth.

I also realize that the most popular forms of exercise are not actually included in this algorithm. Yoga, running, biking, and swimming (ultra) long distances, Zumba, Pilates and the like really have almost no use outside of the psychological and social benefits they might provide you, which I think is what most people are actually searching for when they undertake these activities. They are similar in nature to the glass of wine people drink after work “for the health benefits”. The truth is they just make you feel better.

The goal of this algorithm regarding exercise for longevity is ultimately to fill gaps in thinking for people. Many view running as a complete exercise program or something like yoga and Pilates as “all you need” for complete physical health. This is objectively not true. While both of these types of exercise give some narrowly received benefits, they completely miss the tissue strength enhancements that will be your biggest ally in in keeping independence and functioning in old age and do little to ward of the metabolic diseases of modernity.

It isn’t that you can’t do the things you love and enjoy. It’s that by going about designing and thinking about exercise on the basis of what is objectively needed to prevent our leading causes of death and injury, we can also feel subjectively better. There are very few things as subjectively rewarding as being physically fit in all three of the dimensions described above: mobility, tissue strength, and energy systems.

At the end of the day, there is no problem with doing things because they make you feel better psychologically, but it is important to separate facts from the delusions we often tell ourselves and realize that empirically and objectively arrived at choices for exercise can also be enjoyed subjectively while keeping you healthier in the long run. Even if it means learning and doing new things you initially find uncomfortable or possibly even painful, the payoff for both you and society is more than worth it.

From Boredom to Joy and Everything in Between

If we accept that most of life is suffering and we are goal seeking entities, then inquiries naturally follow about what sorts of goals and activities let us avoid boredom and suffering while experiencing joy. A recent conversation and extensive bout of reading has driven me to explore these questions in more deeply than I have previously. Below is my attempt to develop answers in which I will find recourse to extensive quotes from my most recent reading.

Boredom

In The Reasons of Love , Harry G. Frankfurt describes boredom and its connection to goals and joy in the most beautiful manner I’ve seen to date. He paints boredom as not just an uncomfortable state of being, but as essentially an attack on our vitality and the death of our self:

It is an interesting question why a life in which activity is locally purposeful but nonetheless fundamentally aimless— having an immediate goal but no final end— should be considered undesirable. What would necessarily be so terrible about a life that is empty of meaning in this sense? The answer is, I think, that without final ends we would find nothing truly important either as an end or as a means. The importance to us of everything would depend upon the importance to us of something else. We would not really care about anything unequivocally and without conditions.

Insofar as this became clear to us, we would recognize our volitional tendencies and dispositions as pervasively inconclusive. It would then become impossible for us to involve ourselves conscientiously and responsibly in managing the course of our intentions and decisions. We would have no settled interest in designing or in sustaining any particular continuity in the configurations of our will. A major aspect of our reflective connection to ourselves, in which our distinctive character as human beings lies, would thus be severed. Our lives would be passive, fragmented, and thereby drastically impaired. Even if we might perhaps continue to maintain some meager vestige of active self-awareness, we would be dreadfully bored.

Boredom is a serious matter. It is not a condition that we seek to avoid just because we do not find it enjoyable. In fact, the avoidance of boredom is a profound and compelling human need. Our aversion to being bored has considerably greater significance than a mere reluctance to experience a state of consciousness that is more or less unpleasant. The aversion arises out of our sensitivity to a far more portentous threat.

The essence of boredom is that we have no interest in what is going on. We do not care about any of it; none of it is important to us. As a natural consequence of this, our motivation to stay focused weakens; and we undergo a corresponding attenuation of psychic vitality. In its most characteristic and familiar manifestations, being bored involves a radical reduction in the sharpness and steadiness of attention. The level of our mental energy and activity diminishes. Our responsiveness to ordinary stimuli flattens out and shrinks. Within the scope of our awareness, differences are not noticed and distinctions are not made. Thus our conscious field becomes more and more homogeneous. As the boredom expands and becomes increasingly dominant, it entails a progressive diminution of significant differentiation within consciousness.

At the limit, when the field of consciousness has become totally undifferentiated, there is an end to all psychic movement or change. The complete homogenization of consciousness is tantamount to a cessation of conscious experience entirely. In other words, when we are bored we tend to fall asleep.

Any substantial increase in the extent to which we are bored threatens the very continuation of conscious mental life. What our preference for avoiding boredom manifests is therefore not merely a casual resistance to more or less innocuous discomfort. It expresses a quite primitive urge for psychic survival. I think it is appropriate to construe this urge as a variant of the universal and elemental instinct for self-preservation. It is related to what we commonly think of as “self-preservation,” however, only in an unfamiliarly literal sense— that is, in the sense of sustaining not the life of the organism but the persistence and vitality of the self. (p. 53-55)

Naturally, if we understand accept Frankfurt’s description of boredom, we would want to figure out a way to prevent it and at the same time find a method for selecting a non-local goal (i.e. a final end). Thankfully, he doesn’t make us wait long, as he immediately turns to answering this question:

There must be certain things that we value and that we pursue for their own sakes. Now it is easy enough to understand how something comes to possess instrumental value. That is just a matter of its being causally efficacious in contributing to the fulfillment of a certain goal. But how is it that things may come to have for us a terminal value that is independent of their usefulness for pursuing further goals? In what acceptable way can our need for final ends be met?

It is love, I believe, that meets this need. It is in coming to love certain things— however this may be caused— that we become bound to final ends by more than an adventitious impulse or a deliberate willful choice. Love is the originating source of terminal value. If we loved nothing, then nothing would possess for us any definitive and inherent worth. There would be nothing that we found ourselves in any way constrained to accept as a final end. By its very nature, loving entails both that we regard its objects as valuable in themselves and that we have no choice but to adopt those objects as our final ends. Insofar as love is the creator both of inherent or terminal value and of importance, then, it is the ultimate ground of practical rationality. (p. 55)

This too makes a lot of sense, but we should investigate what Frankfurt means by love and the use he applies to it here. He does this most brilliantly in a separate work discussing the value of truth.

Love and Joy

In On Truth , which looks at the nature of truth and why we as humans should value it, Frankfurt finds it useful to build on the work of Spinoza, one of the first humanist philosophers in spirit:

Spinoza explained the nature of love as follows: “Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium). As for the meaning of “joy,” he stipulated that it is “what follows that passion by which the…[individual] passes to a greater perfection” (Ethics, part III, proposition 11, scholium).

I suppose that many readers will find these rather opaque dicta quite uninviting. They do truly seem forbiddingly obscure. Even apart from this barrier to making productive use of Spinoza’s thoughts, moreover, one might not unreasonably question whether he was qualified, in the first place, to speak with any particular authority about love. After all, he had no children, he never married, and it seems that he never even had a steady girlfriend.

Of course, these details concerning his personal life have no plausible relevance except to questions about his authority with respect to romantic, to marital, and to parental love. What Spinoza was actually thinking of when he wrote about love, however, was none of these. In fact, he was not thinking especially of any variety of love that necessarily has a person as its object. Let me try to explain what I believe he did have in mind.

Spinoza was convinced that every individual has an essential nature that it strives, throughout its existence, to realize and to sustain. In other words, he believed that there is in each individual an underlying innate impetus to become, and to remain, what that individual most essentially is. When Spinoza wrote of “that passion by which the…[individual] passes to a greater perfection,” he was referring to an externally caused (hence a “passion”—i.e., a change in the individual that does not come about by his own action, but rather a change with respect to which he is passive) augmentation of the individual’s capacities for surviving and for developing in fulfillment of his essential nature. Whenever the capacities of an individual for attaining these goals are increased, the increase in the individual’s power to attain them is accompanied by a sense of enhanced vitality. The individual is aware of a more vigorously expansive ability to become and to continue as what he most truly is. Thus, he feels more fully himself. He feels more fully alive.

Spinoza supposes (plausibly enough, I think) that this experience of an increase in vitality—this awareness of an expanding ability to realize and to sustain one’s true nature—is inherently exhilarating. The exhilaration may perhaps be comparable to the exhilaration that a person often experiences as an accompaniment to invigorating physical exercise, in which the person’s lungs, heart, and muscular capacities are exerted more strenuously than usual. When working out energetically, people frequently feel more completely and more vividly alive than they do before exercising, when they are less fully and less directly aware of their own capacities, when they are less brimming with a sense of their own vitality. I believe it is an experience something like this that Spinoza has in mind when he speaks of “joy”; joy, as I think he understands it, is a feeling of the enlargement of one’s power to live, and to continue living, in accord with one’s most authentic nature (emphasis added).

Now, if a person who experiences joy recognizes that the joy has a certain external cause—that is, if the person identifies someone or something as the object to which he owes his joy and on which his joy depends—Spinoza believes that the person inevitably loves that object. This is what he understands love to be: the way we respond to what we recognize as causing us joy (emphasis added). On his account, then, people cannot help loving whatever they recognize as being, for them, a source of joy. They invariably love what they believe helps them to continue in existence and to become more fully themselves. It seems to me that Spinoza is at least on the right track here. Many paradigmatic instances of love do exhibit, more or less straightforwardly, the pattern that he defines: people do tend to love what they feel helps them to “find themselves,” to discover “who they really are,” and to face life successfully without betraying or compromising their fundamental natures.

To his account of the essential nature of love, Spinoza adds an observation about love that also seems accurate: “One who loves necessarily strives to have present and preserve the things he loves (emphasis added)” (Ethics, part III, proposition 11, scholium). The things that a person loves are manifestly and necessarily precious to him. His life, and both his attainment and his continued enjoyment of personal authenticity, depend on them. Therefore, he naturally takes care to protect them and to ensure that they are readily available to him. (p. 38-45)

The above account is perhaps the single best explanation of joy and love that I have come across. I have added emphasis to three points above because the first two resonate deeply with me, but the third point on “necessarily striving to have present and preserve” does not. In fact, this having orientation to life in which we feel possessive towards the things that bring us joy is described in great depth by Erich Fromm in his landmark work, To Have or To Be , as one of the prominent causes of suffering in our world due to the fear and insecurity that it engenders.

Insecurity

By attaching our self to the things we have or can possess, such as Spinoza (Frankfurt) describes above, we live with the fear of losing those possessions and with them our identity and sense of self. Fromm describes this magnificently below where he contrasts the having mode of existence with the being mode:

If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I? Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living. Because I can lose what I have, I am necessarily constantly worried that I shall lose what I have. I am afraid of thieves, of economic changes, of revolutions, of sickness, of death, and I am afraid of love, of freedom, of growth, of change, of the unknown. Thus I am continuously worried, suffering from a chronic hypochondriasis, with regard not only to loss of health but to any other loss of what I have; I become defensive, hard, suspicious, lonely, driven by the need to have more in order to be better protected. Ibsen has given a beautiful description of this self-centered person in his Peer Gynt. The hero is filled only with himself; in his extreme egoism he believes that he is himself, because he is a “bundle of desires.” At the end of his life he recognizes that because of his property-structured existence, he has failed to be himself, that he is like an onion without a kernel, an unfinished man, who never was himself.

The anxiety and insecurity engendered by the danger of losing what one has are absent in the being mode. If I am who I am and not what I have, nobody can deprive me of or threaten my security and my sense of identity. My center is within myself; my capacity for being and for expressing my essential powers is part of my character structure and depends on me. This holds true for the normal process of living, not, of course, for such circumstances as incapacitating illness, torture, or other cases of powerful external restrictions.

While having is based on some thing that is diminished by use, being grows by practice. (The “burning bush” that is not consumed is the biblical symbol for this paradox.) The powers of reason, of love, of artistic and intellectual creation, all essential powers grow through the process of being expressed. What is spent is not lost, but on the contrary, what is kept is lost. The only threat to my security in being lies in myself: in lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness to have others take over my life. But these dangers are not inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in having. (p. 109-110)

Earlier in To Have or To Be, Fromm does take the time to explain with a few examples just what types of activity might be included in “expressing our essential powers”.

Essential Powers

It is easy to notice that all of the powers below “grow by practice” as Fromm describes above and so it is not difficult to use them as guideposts for other activities that are not included. The critical difference between activities that are classified as having or being modes of existence is the resultant “awareness of a more vigorously expansive ability to become and to continue as what we most truly are. Thus, feeling more fully ourselves. We feel more fully alive,” as Frankfurt described with reference to Spinoza above.

Fromm uses the Shabbat and Hebrew prophets as examples:

On the Shabbat one lives as if one has nothing, pursuing no aim except being, that is, expressing one’s essential powers: praying, studying, eating, drinking, singing, making love (emphasis added). The Shabbat is a day of joy because on that day one is fully oneself. (p. 51)

The point with the Shabbat as described here is not that people have nothing, but that “one lives as if one has nothing”. These experiences cannot be taken from us because they are not “possessions” which we can be deprived of. Fromm continues on to describe the manner in which “being” was taken up after the loss of “everything the Jews had”:

The real successors to the Hebrew prophets were the great scholars, the rabbis, and none more clearly so than the founder of the Diaspora: Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakai. When the leaders of the war against the Romans (A.D. 70) had decided that it was better for all to die than to be defeated and lose their state, Rabbi Sakai committed “treason.” He secretly left Jerusalem, surrendered to the Roman general, and asked permission to found a Jewish university. This was the beginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, of the loss of everything the Jews had had: their state, their temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they were left (as a group) with nothing except the ideal of being: knowing, learning, thinking, and hoping for the Messiah (emphasis added). (p. 53)

Moreover, Fromm later describes exactly what does differentiate pleasure from joy as he understands it, relying on none other than the same person Frankfurt did earlier - Spinoza:

Yet the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, particularly so in reference to the distinction between the being and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the difference, since we live in a world of “joyless pleasures.”

What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in different ways, considering its use in popular thought, it seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied. Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in having social success, earning more money, winning a lottery; the conventional sexual pleasure; eating to one’s “heart’s content”; winning a race; the state of elation brought about by drinking, trance, drugs; the pleasure in satisfying one’s sadism, or one’s passion to kill or dismember what is alive.

Of course, in order to become rich or famous, individuals must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the sense of the “birth within.” When they have achieved their goal they may be “thrilled,” “intensely satisfied,” feel they have reached a “peak.” But what peak? Maybe a peak of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or an orgiastic state. But they may have reached this state driven by passions that, though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. But they are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures.

In this respect, modern society is in the same position the Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins, Moses said: “You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things” (Deuteronomy 28: 47). Joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a “peak experience,” which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one’s essential human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being.

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have not increased. One has made the attempt to break through the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has unified all one’s energies— except reason and love. One has attempted to become superhuman, without being human. One seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has changed within oneself. The saying “After intercourse the animal is sad” (“ Post coitum animal triste est”) expresses the same phenomenon with regard to loveless sex, which is a “peak experience” of intense excitation, hence thrilling and pleasureful, and necessarily followed by the disappointment of its ending. Joy in sex is experienced only when physical intimacy is at the same time the intimacy of loving.

Spinoza gives joy a supreme place in his anthropological ethical system. “Joy,” he says, “is man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. Sorrow is man’s passage from a greater to a less perfection” (Ethics, 3, def. 2, 3).

Spinoza’s statements will be fully understood only if we put them in the context of his whole system of thought. In order not to decay, we must strive to approach the “model of human nature,” that is, we must be optimally free, rational, active. We must become what we can be. This is to be understood as the good that is potentially inherent in our nature. Spinoza understands “good” as “everything which we are certain is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model of human nature we have set before us”; he understands “evil” as “on the contrary … everything which we are certain hinders us from reaching that model” (Ethics, 4, Preface). Joy is good; sorrow (tristitia, better translated as “sadness,” “gloom”) is bad. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin.

Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourselves. (p. 116-119)

The only thing then left to consider is the “goal of becoming ourselves” and the “model of human nature we have set before us”. I believe this is best taken up by Nel Noddings’ in her work Caring , which lays out an ethical ideal predicated on just the type of loved described above by Frankfurt from which interest, joy, and our truest selves can spring forth.

​The Ethical Ideal and Self

What is this “ethical ideal” I have referred to? When I reflect on the way I am in genuine caring relationships and caring situations— the natural quality of my engrossment, the shift of my energies toward the other and his projects— I form a picture of myself. This picture is incomplete so long as I see myself only as the one-caring. But as I reflect also on the way I am as cared-for, I see clearly my own longing to be received, understood, and accepted. There are cases in which I am not received, and many in which I fail to receive the other, but a picture of goodness begins to form. I see that when I am as I need the other to be toward me, I am the way I want to be— that is, I am closest to goodness when I accept and affirm the internal “I must.” Now it is certainly true that the “I must” can be rejected and, of course, it can grow quieter under the stress of living. I can talk myself out of the “I must,” detach myself from feeling and try to think my way to an ethical life. But this is just what I must not do if I value my ethical self.

This “goodness” to which I have referred is an assessment of the state of natural caring. I am not arguing that what is is of necessity good. I am arguing that natural caring— some degree of which each of us has been dependent upon for our continued existence— is the natural state that we inevitably identify as “good.” This goodness is felt, and it guides our thinking implicitly. Our picture of ourselves as ethical inevitably involves a consideration of this goodness.

The ethical self is an active relation between my actual self and a vision of my ideal self as one-caring and cared-for. It is born of the fundamental recognition of relatedness; that which connects me naturally to the other, reconnects me through the other to myself. As I care for others and am cared for by them, I become able to care for myself. The characteristic “I must” arises in connection with this other in me, this ideal self, and I respond to it. It is this caring that sustains me when caring for the other fails, and it is this caring that enables me to surpass my actual uncaring self in the direction of caring.

As my receiving the other enables the “I must” to arise with respect to the other, so receiving the vision of what I might be enables the “I must” to arise with respect to the ethical self. I see what I might be, and I see also that this vision of what I might be is the genuine product of caring. My acceptance and affirmation of this caring for self will not tell me exactly what to do, of course. Neither does caring in and of itself tell me what to do in behalf of the other. But as caring for another engrosses me in the other and redirects my motivational energy, so caring for my ethical self commits me to struggle toward the other through clouds of doubt, aversion, and apathy.

Am I, then, suggesting that the answer to the question, “Why should I behave morally?” is “Because I am or want to be a moral person"? Roughly, this is the answer and can be the only one, but I shall try to show how this interest in moral behavior arises out of our natural impulse to care. At every level, in every situation, there are decisions to be made, and we are free to affirm or to reject the impulse to care. But our relatedness, our apprehension of happiness or misery in others, comes through immediately. We may reject what we feel, what we see clearly, but at the risk of separation not only from others but from our ideal selves.

It seems to me that a large part of the anguish that existentialist philosophers associate with our apprehension of freedom springs from our awareness of obligation and the endless claims that can be, and will be, made upon us. We feel that we are, on the one hand, free to decide; we know, on the other hand, that we are irrevocably linked to intimate others. This linkage, this fundamental relatedness, is at the very heart of our being. Thus I am totally free to reject the impulse to care, but I enslave myself to a particularly unhappy task when I make this choice. As I chop away at the chains that bind me to loved others, asserting my freedom, I move into a wilderness of strangers and loneliness, leaving behind all who cared for me and even, perhaps, my own self. I am not naturally alone. I am naturally in a relation from which I derive nourishment and guidance. When I am alone, either because I have detached myself or because circumstances have wrenched me free, I seek first and most naturally to reestablish my relatedness. My very individuality is defined in a set of relations. This is my basic reality. (p. 48-50)

By now we can see a somewhat hazy picture breaking through. In order to preserve the self and not allow boredom to destroy us, we must cultivate final ends. These final ends are found in love resulting from joy, which is “what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourselves”. This calls for us not to pursue pleasure and possession, but to make choices that favor relations of caring, our “basic reality”.

Obligation

​In the pursuit of caring relations, we necessarily develop obligations to those we care for. Noddings does an equally marvelous job of elucidating how these obligations arise and where the boundaries ought to be formed:

Now, this is very important, and we should try to say clearly what governs our obligation. On the basis of what has been developed so far, there seem to be two criteria: the existence of or potential for present relation, and the dynamic potential for growth in relation, including the potential for increased reciprocity and, perhaps, mutuality. The first criterion establishes an absolute obligation and the second serves to put our obligations into an order of priority.

If the other toward whom we shall act is capable of responding as cared-for and there are no objective conditions that prevent our receiving this response— if, that is, our caring can be completed in the other— then we must meet that other as one-caring. If we do not care naturally, we must call upon our capacity for ethical caring. When we are in relation or when the other has addressed us, we must respond as one-caring. The imperative in relation is categorical. When relation has not yet been established, or when it may properly be refused (when no formal chain or natural circle is present), the imperative is more like that of the hypothetical: I must if I wish to (or am able to) move into relation.

The second criterion asks us to look at the nature of potential relation and, especially, at the capacity of the cared-for to respond. The potential for response in animals, for example, is nearly static; they cannot respond in mutuality, nor can the nature of their response change substantially. But a child’s potential for increased response is enormous. If the possibility of relation is dynamic— if the relation may clearly grow with respect to reciprocity— then the possibility and degree of my obligation also grows. If response is imminent, so also is my obligation. This criterion will help us to distinguish between our obligation to members of the nonhuman animal world and, say, the human fetus. We must keep in mind, however, that the second criterion binds us in proportion to the probability of increased response and to the imminence of that response. Relation itself is fundamental in obligation. (p. 86-87)

What these two criteria clearly outline is a method for how and when to enter more deeply into caring relations - the ultimate source of joy, love, and growth of our truest selves. This is important because we are otherwise left to the tragic logic of utilitarianism with its impartiality and concern for all. That path quickly and dangerously leads us to become “happiness pumps” for all other sentient creatures in which we can quickly become depressed due to our helplessness: the belief that suffering personal, permanent, and pervasive.

Instead, we can engage actively with others on the basis of their presence in our lives in the here and now and the “dynamic potential for growth in relation, including the potential for increased reciprocity and, perhaps, mutuality”.

Self-actualization

​This valuing of caring as the preeminent method to achieving “self-actualization”, the highest form of “being” as Maslow put it, must always be done by keeping in “in mind, however, that the second criterion [of caring] binds us in proportion to the probability of increased response and to the imminence of that response,” as Noddings writes above. This is seconded quite clearly in another of Fromm’s passages from To Have or To Be:

The most relevant example for enjoyment without the craving to have what one enjoys may be found in interpersonal relations. A man and a woman may enjoy each other on many grounds; each may like the other’s attitudes, tastes, ideas, temperament, or whole personality. Yet only in those who must have what they like will this mutual enjoyment habitually result in the desire for sexual possession. For those in a dominant mode of being, the other person is enjoyable, and even erotically attractive, but she or he does not have to be “plucked,” to speak in terms of Tennyson’s poem [about a beautiful flower], in order to be enjoyed.

Having-centered persons want to have the person they like or admire. This can be seen in relations between parents and their children, between teachers and students, and between friends. Neither partner is satisfied simply to enjoy the other person; each wishes to have the other person for him- or herself. Hence, each is jealous of those who also want to “have” the other. Each partner seeks the other like a shipwrecked sailor seeks a plank— for survival. Predominantly “having” relationships are heavy, burdened, filled with conflicts and jealousies.

Speaking more generally, the fundamental elements in the relation between individuals in the having mode of existence are competition, antagonism, and fear. The antagonistic element in the having relationship stems from its nature. If having is the basis of my sense of identity because “I am what I have,” the wish to have must lead to the desire to have much, to have more, to have most. In other words, greed is the natural outcome of the having orientation. It can be the greed of the miser or the greed of the profit hunter or the greed of the womanizer or the man chaser. Whatever constitutes their greed, the greedy can never have enough, can never be “satisfied.” In contrast to physiological needs, such as hunger, that have definite satiation points due to the physiology of the body, mental greed— and all greed is mental, even if it is satisfied via the body— has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome. In addition, since what one has can be taken away in one form or another, one must have more, in order to fortify one’s existence against such danger. If everyone wants to have more, everyone must fear one’s neighbor’s aggressive intention to take away what one has. To prevent such attack one must become more powerful and preventively aggressive oneself. Besides, since production, great as it may be, can never keep pace with unlimited desires, there must be competition and antagonism among individuals in the struggle for getting the most. And the strife would continue even if a state of absolute abundance could be reached; those who have less in physical health and in attractiveness, in gifts, in talents would bitterly envy those who have “more”. (p. 111-113)

So while interpersonal relations are the source of our love, interest, joy, caring, and ultimately our final ends, we must be constantly vigilant as to not turn them into our greatest sources of misery as well. Striving to have others and possess those we love is not love at all, merely an appearance of it.

The above passage does give a quiet hint as to why people might pursue possessive having love over true, meaningful, being love. That is fear. However, whereas Fromm posits that fear of losing our “possessions” drives us to fortify our positions by gaining ever more and thereby driving competition and antagonism, fear also drives us to avoid being.

In order to be, we must “unmask” ourselves in front of others and allow them to see us as we really are. “This concept of being as ‘unmasking,’ as is expressed by Eckhart, is central in Spinoza’s and Marx’s thought and is the fundamental discovery of Freud” (p. 97). This unmasking requires “daring greatly” as Brene Brown has written about extensively.

Daring greatly can be threatening because we expose ourselves and open our inner worlds to others who are able to judge us, accept us, or reject us and possibly trample on our vulnerability. In seizing this mode of being, Noddings explains:

One under the guidance of an ethic of caring is tempted to retreat to a manageable world. Her public life is limited by her insistence upon meeting the other as one-caring. So long as this is possible, she may reach outward and enlarge her circles of caring. When this reaching out destroys or drastically reduces her actual caring, she retreats and renews her contact with those who address her. If the retreat becomes a flight, an avoidance of the call to care, her ethical ideal is diminished. Similarly, if the retreat is away from human beings and toward other objects of caring— ideas, animals, humanity-at-large, God— her ethical ideal is virtually shattered. This is not a judgment, for we can understand and sympathize with one who makes such a choice. It is more in the nature of a perception: we see clearly what has been lost in the choice. (p. 89-90)

And while the ethical ideal may be “shattered” and we may “see clearly what is lost”, Fromm assures us that:

The only threat to our security in being lies in ourselves: in lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness to have others take over my life. But these dangers are not inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in having. (p. 109-110)

Conclusion: Making the Change

​Much of modern society is a never ending roller coaster of boredom, excitement, pleasure, and fear as discussed in depth above. None of these states and experiences need be innate to our existence. We can choose a radically different mode of living and being. We can choose to pursue activities that enlarge our capacities and inner powers towards “a greater perfection”, that form deeper, caring connections to others, that result in joy and love and ultimately a sense of vitality and exhilaration.

Ultimately, everything above requires a change of character. This change in character is possible. Not only is it the premise of the entire modern day field of positive psychology that character change is possible, but Fromm outlined the path to personal change quite perfectly over 40 years ago in 1976, when he drew on the Four Noble Truths from Buddhism, Marx, and Freud to write the following in To Have or To Be:

I suggest that human character can change if these conditions exist: We are suffering and are aware that we are. We recognize the origin of our ill-being. We recognize that there is a way of overcoming our ill-being. We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life. (p. 168)

In following the above four step process of becoming a new person, Fromm held that the following qualities would be exhibited:

Willingness to give up all forms of having, in order to fully be. Security, sense of identity, and confidence based on faith in what one is, on one’s need for relatedness, interest, love, solidarity with the world around one, instead of on one’s desire to have, to possess, to control the world, and thus become the slave of one’s possessions. Acceptance of the fact that nobody and nothing outside oneself give meaning to life, but that this radical independence and no-thingness can become the condition for the fullest activity devoted to caring and sharing. Being fully present where one is. Joy that comes from giving and sharing, not from hoarding and exploiting. Love and respect for life in all its manifestations, in the knowledge that not things, power, all that is dead, but life and everything that pertains to its growth are sacred. Trying to reduce greed, hate, and illusions as much as one is capable. Living without worshiping idols and without illusions, because one has reached a state that does not require illusions. Developing one’s capacity for love, together with one’s capacity for critical, unsentimental thought. Shedding one’s narcissism and accepting the tragic limitations inherent in human existence. Making the full growth of oneself and of one’s fellow beings the supreme goal of living. Knowing that to reach this goal, discipline and respect for reality are necessary. Knowing, also, that no growth is healthy that does not occur in a structure, but knowing, too, the difference between structure as an attribute of life and “order” as an attribute of no-life, of the dead. Developing one’s imagination, not as an escape from intolerable circumstances but as the anticipation of real possibilities, as a means to do away with intolerable circumstances. Not deceiving others, but also not being deceived by others; one may be called innocent, but not naive. Knowing oneself, not only the self one knows, but also the self one does not know— even though one has a slumbering knowledge of what one does not know. Sensing one’s oneness with all life, hence giving up the aim of conquering nature, subduing it, exploiting it, raping it, destroying it, but trying, rather, to understand and cooperate with nature. Freedom that is not arbitrariness but the possibility to be oneself, not as a bundle of greedy desires, but as a delicately balanced structure that at any moment is confronted with the alternative of growth or decay, life or death. Knowing that evil and destructiveness are necessary consequences of failure to grow. Knowing that only a few have reached perfection in all these qualities, but being without the ambition to “reach the goal,” in the knowledge that such ambition is only another form of greed, of having. Happiness in the process of ever-growing aliveness, whatever the furthest point is that fate permits one to reach, for living as fully as one can is so satisfactory that the concern for what one might or might not attain has little chance to develop. (p. 170-172)

Any world in which the above qualities make up the majority of individuals’ beliefs and values is a world that would be radically different than our current reality. We desperately need this positive change. The above has been an outline focused on providing direction for change based on some of the brightest minds and their findings over the past century. So stop chasing the excitement and pleasure that ultimately leads to boredom and contraction of the self and instead choose to pursue joy and the ever enlargement of your capacity to be more fully human.

Acceptance and Tolerable versus Intolerable Harm

The last two articles on being happy or being good and the communication market explaining why we speak honestly, lie, or not at all has led to a couple different conversations on the difference between acceptance and tolerance. If you’ve read much of my writing, you have probably noticed a thread that circles around acceptance being highly important, but I haven’t said as much on tolerance.

Acceptance

We should be unconditionally accepting of other people. It strengthens social connections and affirms others as thinking, feeling humans who are embodied and live within sociocultural contexts. It also makes forgiveness possible and dissipates anger for one and the same reason - it necessitates seeing people as valid products of their environments who couldn’t act in any other way.

Acceptance is really about doing away with the illusion of free will and that people are acting with the intention of harm toward others. It recognizes that, like us, they are doing everything they can to be happy and live with a sense of well-being, satisfaction, and as little pain and suffering as possible.

Tolerance

On the other hand, tolerance is much less a belief about others as it is our actions toward them. If we allow the existence of a behavior or endure it with forbearance, we are acting tolerantly. It is not necessary to also be accepting of another person in order to be tolerant.

As individuals, we can be both tolerant and accepting, tolerant but not accepting, neither tolerant nor accepting, or accepting but not tolerant. Our acceptance depends on our inner beliefs about others and our tolerance depends on our actions regarding them.

Some examples can make this easier to understand. If I think that religion is divisive and always harmful, I may view it as an unacceptable belief to hold, but still tolerate others who practice some variety of religion. In the same vein, I could be very hateful and disdainful towards LGBT community members, but still tolerate their participation in society without actually accepting them as people of worth and value. This tolerance may even be socially enforced due to laws with consequences that keep my hatred from turning into violence.

On the other hand, I could be hateful and intolerant. For instance, I might be hateful of people with disabilities and see them as “less than” and also not wish to tolerate them in my presence by excluding them from my clubs, workplace, or leisure spaces. The opposite case, in which I am both tolerant and accepting, is easy to imagine. I could see the worth, value, and validity of people that are different from me (i.e. be accepting) and also demonstrate tolerance of their differences of thought and action without imposing restrictions or oppression.

Tolerable and Intolerable Harm

The last category, acceptance without tolerance, is the most tricky for people to understand. This is the state of being that seems to go against many of our initial predispositions and habits of thinking, but marks a significant level of mature coping and understanding of the world we live in.

There are people in our world who need to be separated from the rest of society. These include a huge variety of people, not limited to murderers, rapists, terrorists, and psychopaths that display little empathy for others and take actions to only benefit themselves, such as many of the bankers involved in the destruction of both the housing market and thousands of pensions during the 2008 economic crisis. This is harm that cannot be tolerated by a society that hopes to be cohesive, inclusive, and stable in the long-run.

The above examples demonstrate harm that should not be tolerated. That does not mean we can’t accept the people who commit harmful acts as humans with understandable motives; we can explain their behaviors as attempts to be happy while simply suffering from ignorance, insanity, confusion, or some kind of biochemical neurological disorder. They may have acted harmfully, but that doesn’t make them innately bad or inhuman.

Even truly sadistic, psychopathic individuals are often suffering from some genetic, developmental, cognitive, or environmental issue that left them with limited or no ability for rational thought. They are not choosing to commit crimes or harm others. I recognize that understanding this may be difficult for people with conservative, individualistic, and religious beliefs, but we do not make our own choices. We do not have free will and we are the product of a system, not lone actors.

Three Categories of Intolerable Harm

Since I’ve written so much on unintentional actions causing harm and that life is essentially suffering, it begs the question: Which harm should we tolerate and which harm should we not? I think it’s simpler to consider harm we shouldn’t tolerate because that is the much shorter list of categories.

Physical harm. We should not tolerate any physical harm to another that is intentional and foreseeable. This includes actions such as murder, rape, torture, domestic violence, road rage, bar fights, etc. It does not include instances in which we have no choice but to harm someone to prevent them from harming others. This happens all the time in war and police work. Obviously, a ban on all physical harm, even for military and police, would have left the world at the mercy of Hitler’s Third Reich and other despots throughout history.

Intentional acts of malice. This goes beyond physical harm and includes actions aimed at emotionally, reputationally, or financially wounding others in ways that are foreseeable and avoidable. Examples include school bullying wherein the perpetrator never actually harms the victim physically, but does shame or embarrass them for no reason other than the schadenfreude derived from the activity. Typically, gossip and spreading rumors would take place in cases like this. This would also include acts of revenge over previously real or perceived injury.

Active participation in oppressive behavior, institutions, and systems. This is the most abstract and possibly the most difficult to avoid. Systems such as capitalism, nation-state governments, and the like could be argued quite fairly as being oppressive, but are extremely difficult to extricate ourselves from. However, other systems are more easily avoided, such as human trafficking and prostitution. These systems exploit and profit from human oppression and we should not be actively participating in them.

Why Deciding What Is Tolerable and Intolerable Harm Is So Hard

The aim is to be unconditionally accepting of all people. There is no reason to see others as objects that can be dismissed as less than the humans they are, deserving of both respect and dignity. This does not mean that we must tolerate everyone’s actions and beliefs, which form the premise from which our actions take shape.

If someone is not foreseeably and intentionally causing physical harm, acting maliciously, or participating in systems or institutions of oppression, then we should largely leave them alone to do as they please. This is living in a state of both acceptance and tolerance, even if some differences in choice do upset our feelings or clash with our beliefs.

This conclusion also makes it much easier to see why issues like free trade of capital goods and climate change are so difficult to manage ethically. Typically, consumers in developed countries like America are not actively choosing to harm people in any of the three ways described above. Of course, American consumerism does in fact cause physical harm to people, business owners do take advantage of workers, and the entire system is oppressive in nature to many of the actors involved.

​This unintentional harm from consumerism is also the leading cause of climate change, which has the potential to kill millions of people in the coming decades and result in what Naomi Klein has described as a “genocide through apathy”. It’s not that we want present and future people to die as a result of climate change, it’s just that we aren’t willing to change our current lifestyle to prevent them from doing so.

But what is the alternative? Consciously deciding about every purchase we make? Even that gets us only so far when our governments, largely beyond our individual control, enter into trade agreements with foreign countries involved in extracting oil from the ground at gunpoint. Deciding not to buy oil or goods is simply a sacrifice beyond what most of us are willing or able to make.

I don’t necessarily see this as meaning we are evil people. We should attempt to avoid the intentional physical harm, acts of malice, and active participation in behaviors, institutions, or systems of oppression elucidated above. Being able to do even that much on an individual, person-to-person basis is a great accomplishment. We can’t expect all of our happiness to be overturned tomorrow in order to help others all around the world. It is yet another aspect of life we will have to accept while doing what we can to change it.

Rather than be overwhelmed, do your best to “be good and enjoy”.

The Communication Market: Speaking Honestly, Lies, or Not at All

This is an idea I’ve been toying around with for about a year now. The more I explain it to other people and the more I reflect on it in everyday life, the more I’m convinced it is the best model for communication between two people or parties that I am aware of. Perhaps it has already been studied in economics or psychology somewhere, but I have not seen it anywhere and it is something that is empirically testable, which makes it even cooler.

A Market of Goods

​In economics, a market is any place, real or imagined, that brings producers and consumers together to exchange goods or services. We have markets for things like meat, which is a good, and markets for things like accounting, which is a service.

In any given market, you can typically find a variety of goods or services that compete with one another or complement one another. Goods that complement each other in a market are labeled complementary goods. You can imagine goods like peanut butter and jelly that are typically bought together. When the demand for one of them, say peanut butter, goes up, the demand for the other, jelly, also goes up. The same is true for things like shoes and shoelaces. As people buy more shoes, they also buy more shoelaces.

Goods that compete with one another are called substitute goods. These are goods wherein the demand goes up because the price of a competitive good goes up. You can think of very similar goods like Coca Cola and Pepsi. Sure, you probably have your preference, but if the price of your favorite, say Coca Cola, goes up too much, you will substitute it with Pepsi. Hence they are called substitute goods. Other examples might be things like bacon and sausage or cake and pie. Of course, services can work as either complementary or substitute goods as well, they don’t have to be material items like I’ve been using for these examples.

The Communication Market

What the short introduction above allows us to do is imagine human communication as a market with producers and consumers. One person is producing communication and one person is consuming it, the speaker and listener respectively. Obviously, humans communicating aren’t producing material goods, but rather language.

Once you understand that communication between two people is a market, it is easier to see the types of “goods” possible in the market. We can choose to speak or not. If we choose to speak, we can speak honestly or lie. That leaves us with three alternative “goods” to choose from and they happen to work just like the substitute goods described above.

Everyone will have their preference for communication, just like everyone has their preference for Coca Cola or Pepsi. Some people might prefer to speak honestly as their favorite form of communication. Some might prefer to lie, say a pathological liar, who lies for no reason. And some might prefer not to speak at all unless necessary, perhaps someone who is both extremely shy and introverted.

The exciting part of this communication framework or model is the recognition that substituting one of these communication goods for another happens for the same reason that someone switches to Pepsi whose first choice is Coca Cola, the price on their preference becomes too high.

Taxing and Subsidizing Communication

Everything above gets us to this point. If we want someone to speak honestly who isn’t or tends not to, we need to subsidize that mode of communication or tax the other two forms of communication. This simply means encouraging speaking honestly and making it costly to the individual to lie or not speak.

If we pay attention to communication, we see this all the time. Our society generally sets up communication so that lying is extremely costly to most people in serious matters. Examples like plagiarizing in school, committing perjury in court, or defrauding customers or the IRS all have serious consequences. These situations also tend to make not speaking very expensive as well, which leaves most people in the situation of speaking honestly because it is dramatically cheaper than the other two alternatives.

However, even more interesting than the situations in which we tax communication in order to ensure a higher rate of honest speaking are the situations in which we give lip service to wanting honesty, but turn around and tax it when it is produced. This is the exact opposite tactic we would expect if people were genuine about their desire (demand) to consume honesty as their preferred good in the communication market. We see this most often between close friends and family and promoted in most cultural norms of social connection.

Examples of this second situation are friends that tell us we can share anything with them, but get extremely angry when we disclose some character trait, feeling, or action they disapprove of, perhaps something like not liking one of their other friends or smoking cigarettes. Naturally, these types of feelings and action may not be great in themselves or some of our best qualities, that’s why we might tend to lie about them, but we also can’t be expected to speak honestly about them if we are taxed by the listener with judgement, rejection, or contempt.

Deciding What Matters

It’s been my experience since viewing communication in this format that most people don’t actually want honesty between close friends and family. If they truly did, they would do everything they could to subsidize that form of communication by showing gratitude and acceptance whenever someone is honest with them. Instead, they lavish heavy taxes in actuality and then become even more self-righteous when they find out someone is lying to them. We can’t have it both ways.

If we truly, deeply want honest communication, we have to be prepared to hear whatever honest communication gets produced. We have to be willing to listen openly. We can’t punish, take revenge, or act vindictively. We have to attempt to build stronger relationships and work together through constant dialogue.

It’s fine not to like what someone says, that in itself does not count as a tax. Plenty of rational adults can disagree on what is best. Two adults can even agree that the feeling or action being shared in speech is not the best part of what makes the speaker a person. But that absolutely is no reason to treat them as "less than" or make them feel small. Instead, it is an opportunity to look at the person can grow and develop in their process of becoming a more fully actualized, fulfilled, and congruent human.

So this is what it comes down to, speaking honestly, lying, or not speaking at all is not just a product of the speaker’s character. It’s also a result of the interaction with the listener. A listener needs to decide what matters most to them in any relationship they have with another person and do their best to convey that as authentically as possible. The more demand you show for honesty as a listener, the more honest communication the speaker will produce.​

Be Happy or Be Good?

I’ve been writing a lot recently on responsible action, suffering, depression, emotions and greatness, deciding who loses, children, competition, political-economy, and well-being, but not much directly on “goodness”.

However, I’ve recently had a bit of what I would consider an insight on the sticky and intractable nature of goodness that I think is worth sharing, discussing, and analyzing a bit more. Being good is inherently a social quality. Goodness depends on relation to others for it to make any kind of sense at all. A person is not “good” in a vacuum, but only in how they interact, treat, and respond to those around them.

Happiness, or well-being, certainly involves others, but is not solely comprised of our relations with them. It has other aspects. See my algorithm for well-being to see how hedonistic pleasure, life-satisfaction, and social connection are all major components of well-being. Recognizing how goodness and happiness are fundamentally different - innately social versus innately individual respectively - lets us see how they often (always?) work as trade-offs.

​Defining Goodness

Being good can be defined rather simply: don’t harm others and help them when you can. Putting this into practice is the tough part. The tricky parts are the two verbs, harm and help.

What classifies an action as harming or helping? People have struggled to answer that for centuries. Consequentialists believe that the consequences of an action make it good or not. Non-consequentialists typically believe that intent matters most in deciding the answer. Utilitarianism of the Bentham, Mill, and Singer variety best exemplify consequentialist approaches, whereas duty ethics of the Kant variety are the foremost non-consequentialist approach.

Intent seems to matter more for self-evaluations of whether we believe ourselves to be good. We often will still see ourselves as good if we intended the best possible outcome given what we could foresee. However, we are often judged on the consequences of our actions and very often are not able to plead ignorance as our defense when others are involved in evaluating our goodness. This is particularly true in law, but also of our acquaintances, friends, and family.

How Your Happiness Harms Others

​Putting aside some of the philosophical difficulties outlined above in deciding how to decide what is good, let’s look at some examples. I’ll use examples from the three components of well-being listed above.

Hedonistic pleasure. I most typically think of things like sex, drugs, and food in this category.
Does having sex with a partner other than your own count as harm? Society says so. Clearly there is no physical harm, unless we bring some sort of STD home to the unsuspecting. So that means the harm is psychological in nature. Often it is hurt feelings attached to ego, shame, or jealousy. Hurt feelings are typically not considered good reasons for not doing things outside of relationships. You rarely see anyone saying not to buy an expensive watch or nice car because it will hurt the feelings of someone else.

Then there is the single female who sleeps with many partners and is considered a “slut”. A bad woman. Less than pure. Probably not respecting of herself. Often she and her family with have to live with shame and potentially be the victims of outright mean and hurtful comments or actions from others. So even sex between two consenting, single adults is often troublesome. This is another societal belief, but does seem to be slowly changing. However, we do still see examples of news stories where girls are shamed for being involved in the legal business of pornography, even while attending Duke University.

How about drugs and food? These may cause harm to others as well. Drugs can lead to direct physical harm of others, but also the emotional pain of family and friends who believe you are being self-destructive. Again, this is really dependent on the social norm attached to the drug. Alcohol is very tolerated in most of society, even though it is much more harmful than many illegal substances.

Food? Yes, absolutely. Obesity costs America over $200 billion annually. That definitely harms the economy, productivity, and relationships of all kinds. An example unrelated to obesity is the jealousy, anger, resentment, and hatred that can be aroused by those who cannot afford to dine at expensive establishments like Ruth’s Chris or other high-end steak houses. This latter type of harm is much closer to the infidelity described above. On top of the emotional harm that is possible, we can consider the opportunity cost and environmental destruction the food we purchase incurs. Ideally, we would eat vegetables grown in our backyards that don’t require long-distance shipping or destruction of rainforests.

Naturally, these aren’t the only ways to engage in hedonistic pleasure. The use of electronics, cars, and air conditioning can all be pleasureable experiences. They are also directly connected to oil and mineral use that often employ highly extractive and destructive means in regards to both the environment and human lives.

Life-satisfaction. This is connected to meaning, purpose, goal accomplishment, and congruence. Many of these will overlap with the basic pleasures mentioned above. It is difficult to accomplish major goals without utilizing resources, many of which are attached to corrosive trade practices.

One of the few ways in which life-satisfaction would not lead to harm is by becoming some sort of ascetic monk that lives alone and sustainably in the mountains. The downside with this lifestyle choice is that it effectively makes one subject to chance illnesses and injuries. It is pretty difficult experience a sense of well-being when suffering from a preventable disease or broken limb. You may not be harming others through consumption of material goods or interactions that lead to their psychological suffering, but you may very well be causing harm to yourself.

This also would assume that no one would be suffering because you chose to leave their life. Most of us have loved ones that would find it akin to sudden death if we picked up and left from their lives for the sake of eliminating harm. They might even be inclined to label us as selfish for voluntarily walking out of their lives permanently, instead of being taken away by some unforeseen, unchosen tragedy like a car accident.

Social connection. This aspect may seem the least likely to cause harm, but easily does so in many situations. This often stems from the difficulty we looked at above between defining good on the basis of intent or consequence. Others almost always judge us on the consequences of our actions, not our intent. Generally speaking, this leads to them becoming angry, hurt, or experiencing some other form of destructive emotion.

It is a rare day that someone doesn’t misunderstand a joke not intended to be mean-spirited, or interpret not picking up coffee for them when you out as thoughtlessness or forgetfulness due to a lack of care and concern. These misunderstandings between people based on outward results is the general bane of social interaction.

These are rather small examples, but they escalate quickly when we connect them to larger social issues like abortion. Is terminating a fetus causing harm? To whom? Does this interfere with the well-being of the would-be mother because she has to postpone or walk away from her goals and break with what makes her feel like a congruent person? Does it preemptively cut off all well-being whatsoever for the future person that no longer exists?

Clearly, not harming others is a very difficult business. The best we can do is decide when it is acceptable to harm others, in what ways, and to what extent and then try to make good on those agreements.

Deciding Who Loses: Part Two

In the article linked directly above on deciding who loses in mutually exclusive circumstances, I introduced a simple tool that could help find the solution with minimal social grief. The two parties could each determine how much suffering or well-being the choice would make for them, and in comparing the two subjective realities, select the “lesser of two evils”.

This, of course, was after first trying to find situations that were win/win. There is no need to resort to someone losing when it comes to deciding what to do if both can win. What I failed to do in the initial article was make the connection between figuring out how to maximize well-being for the two parties involved compared to maximizing the good. After all, selecting maximal well-being is simply one goal worth pursuing.

The tool introduced in the original article is simply not needed if merely one of two parties is focused on the goal of maximizing their goodness. If they are focused on maximizing their character trait of “goodness”, then they can simply submit to whatever choice the other party wants instead of trying to decide what is subjectively the least worst option. In this case, being a good person simply means volunteering to let the other party have their way. Although, even here, we need to make sure that letting the other have their way doesn’t involve them intentionally hurting others. In that case, being good means preventing those actions.

Good vs. Happy

What should be clear by this point is that deciding to maximize well-being is a goal. We select our goals. We decide to put happiness above other options. In an era where research on happiness and the field of positive psychology are flourishing, this seems natural. This hasn’t always been the case, however, and we could easily select maximizing being good as our goal.

This is essentially what the “effective altruist” movement is doing. A slew of books have popped up recently detailing how to do The Most Good You Can Do by Doing Good Better , protecting The Life You Can Save , or by saving Strangers Drowning . All of these books are not about individuals getting the most happiness out of life, but rather helping the most people and doing the most good.

In doing this though, there is an inevitable trade-off with happiness. Joshua Green, author of Moral Tribes , has termed this disposition for sacrificing your own happiness for the sake of others as turning yourself into a “happiness pump”. What he is hinting at is that in the extreme, we can always donate our time, energy, attention, and money to causes that would make others better off up to the point where we have literally none of those resources for ourselves. In fact, that is close to what Peter Singer has argued for - donate all of your money to those in need up to the point at which donating more to someone suffering would cause you to ultimately suffer more than they are.

By taking this stance, you have become a “happiness pump”. Taking whatever potential happiness you could have and turning around and pumping it into others who are less fortunate. Greene argues that this hardly seems like a worthwhile way to live. That’s true if well-being is our goal, but not if goodness is. Maximizing the good really does require becoming a happiness pump.

Social Democracy as a Model

In seeing this tension, I find it useful to turn to the political arena where the tension between liberty and equality was seen long ago. Political scientists have recognized that unconstrained liberty leads to high levels of inequality and the strife that accompanies that state. Conversely, perfect equality does require sacrificing individual liberties to ensure that everyone has the same political and economic outcome. As Jonathan Haidt’s research has shown, this is just a difference in values. People who value caring and fairness are more prone to value equality. People who value liberty most will generally be in favor of tolerating more inequality.

Rather than settle on unregulated capitalism or unadulterated communism, which give maximal liberty and equality respectively, many countries are beginning to sort out a stable middle ground with social democracy. This seems to be exactly what ethics needs in the tension it finds between happiness and goodness.

This is not too hard to do in theory, but has been difficult in practice, largely to my mind because people simply aren’t seeing this trade-off as a trade-off. People believe that we can be maximally happy and maximally good. This simply isn’t the case. It’s like wanting to have maximal liberty and maximal equality at the same time.

Examples of this abound everywhere. Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tiger Woods are all celebrities that would be largely considered “good” people if it weren’t for their marital transgression that, at the heart of it, involved them chasing a form happiness within the realms of hedonistic pleasure and perhaps connection. Rather than condemn them, we can recognize their decisions for what they were, choosing happiness over goodness in specific circumstances unrelated to their other decisions where they did favor goodness over happiness.

Even the most generous philanthropist in history, Bill Gates, owns a $123 million home in Washington, something clearly aimed at happiness over goodness. Should we fault him for this choice or condemn him as bad for not adding that sum to his foundation?

The Cheat Meal Effect

Thinking about these necessary and innate trade-offs that must be made between between the two states of being happy or being good, I’ve come to think of them in a similar manner to “cheat meals” when dieting. In this context, cheating is relative to whatever you are dealing with when thinking about your own happiness or goodness. It can be splurging on a luxury travel destination with good accommodations to improve your happiness versus donating the same amount to Against Malaria Foundation to increase your goodness.

The main point is to recognize the goals and values you have first.

Second, you figure out how to maximize your energies long-term to reach those goals by allowing yourself to discard the illusion of being both 100% happy and good at the same time by giving yourself an occasional “out” so you don’t go crazy.

What’s nice about this strategy is that it is more sustainable. It lets you “stick to your diet” the majority of the time and not feel bad when you decide to cheat every once in awhile. As any dedicated dieter will tell you, having the mental break from perfection can make compliance much easier. If you know that you get to indulge on Friday night by eating all the donuts and cupcakes you want, it is much easier to be strict and on your diet the rest of the week.

People use this tactic with diet and exercise already. Dan Savage and others are arguing that it should be more normal with committed, monogamous relationships as well. Similarly, I’ve already mentioned the case of spending time, energy, attention, and money on self versus others.

We can commit to a diet or exercise regimen 95% of the time and still get good results if we cheat 5% of the time. We can commit to a 50-year relationship or marriage with another person and still have other loves along the way. We can commit to donating 10-50% of our income to the most effective charities and foundations and still buy ourselves luxury items with the leftover. None of these things must necessitate self-appraisal as a bad person. It just means that we’ve recognized the conflict between happiness and goodness and made decisions about where to draw the line.

Conclusion

​I can imagine a future where physical needs for food, water, shelter, and clothing are taken care of for nearly everyone on the planet. It is possible that we become wealthy enough as a species that we don’t have to worry about the trade-off between consuming for our own happiness and donating to charities for the benefit of the destitute.

Even with that material “utopia” as it were, people would still need to figure out how to cope with the psychological harms we cause to each other in our relationships. That requires more than physical capital accumulation and (re)distribution.

It requires recognizing that the individual pursuit of happiness often causes harm in unintended ways. That psychological hurt is best coped with by searching for understanding and acceptance, not by assigning blame, guilt, or labels of others as bad, evil, or twisted.

That requires an evolution of the spirit within every individual on the planet. To recognize as Alain de Botton put it that, “My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways — and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings.”

The Well-being Algorithm

I realize I discuss well-being a lot in my writing, and it is one of my central interests, so it’s probably best that I explain where my ideas on the topic come from. Because it is a huge topic and one that I’ve spent so much time thinking and reading about, there is no way that I will be able to cover and include everything here. I am only attempting to capture a bit of the history of my thought on the matter and where I currently stand.

With that in mind, let’s get started.

Personal History

I first read about the topic in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in high school in which he settles on eudaimonia as “the good life”. This more or less entails reflective contemplation and the development of virtues, characteristics such as moderation and temperance in all things. This also known as “the golden mean”. This work and much of his other writings (see Politics ) have been classified as what modern ethicists describe as “virtue ethics”. It is a system, as the name implies, that believes in developing virtues as the path to well-being.

I then picked up an anthology of western philosophy, which I unfortunately cannot remember the title of, but was very similar in nature and scope to this textbook, Classics of Western Philosophy. It traced the development of ideas and philosophic concepts from the ancient Greeks up to 20th century thinkers. This was the first place that I read about Epicurus, Aurelius, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Mill, Nietzsche, James, and Russell. Nietzsche was the one that stood out and I began reading the majority of his works, along with the major works of Epicurus, Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Mill, many of Russell’s, Lakoff, and Noddings.

In addition to the primarily philosophical texts above, I read a number of Western and Eastern works that were primarily religious in nature. Those included Tao Te Ching, The Bhagavad Gita, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, The Analects, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Reason for God, The Imitation of Christ, The Joy of Living, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance.

These exposed me to the deontological ethical systems, or “duty ethics”, from Kant and utilitarianism from Bentham and Mill. Nietzsche argued that modern man would have to “overcome” his previous ethical systems in a complete “revaluation of values”, something I still largely agree with. Lakoff’s text above does a fantastic job of comparing philosophies throughout time and grounding ethics within an embodied system without resorting to anything metaphysical.

In college, I also stumbled upon the book Destructive Emotions , which is a dialogue between cognitive scientist Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence , a gift my aunt gave me while still in high school, and the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader and former head of state of Tibet. Both of these books predisposed me to reading The Art of Happiness , yet another work coauthored by the Dalai Lama and a western doctor, this time a psychiatrist instead of cognitive psychologist.

The Art of Happiness became a turning point because it was able to shift my mindset from that of complete relativism, to providing a foundation for morality in happiness. The basic premise is that we all seek happiness and wish to avoid suffering. By describing both the psychological phenomena examined in Buddhism and the brain science examined within neuroscience and psychiatry, the book made a huge impression on me. It persuaded through both subjective and objective evidence, something I often aim for in my own teaching and writing.

From here, I dove into the ever growing research in positive psychology. I began primarily with the wonderful textbook A Primer in Positive Psychology . I then quickly moved onto more specific aspects of positive psychology like flow, exercise and the brain, aging well, making decisions, stress, relaxation, motivation, rewards and incentives, mindset, creativity, meaning, mastery and expertise, humanism, optimism, self-actualization, the effects of our subconscious and free will, attention and energy management, intelligence, thinking, self-renewal, emotion, marriage, and learning. All of this happened over a two year period while I was also completing a master’s degree in education focused primarily on how we learn, largely by investigating both language, literacy, and culture.

Upon completing the degree, I moved to Dubai and then Singapore where my next bout of reading began. A friend in Dubai introduced me to the work of Sam Harris whose book The Moral Landscape had a huge impact. It discussed, similarly to the Dalai Lama and Goleman, that morality’s foundation should be the study of well-being and suffering, and that it is possible to treat that study scientifically in much the same way we study physical health. Seeing as I was already familiar with positive psychology treating happiness in this way, the study of morality in this manner made perfect sense.

After the move to Singapore, I stumbled onto the work of Peter Singer and his book The Life You Can Save . This, too, was responsible for a large shift my thinking. I had already studied the works of Aristotle and the Greeks who discussed philanthropy, or the love and service of humanity, at length. I had also been exposed to the idea from Buddhism of the boddhisatva, an enlightened buddha who chooses not to go to nirvana, but instead stays in our reality to help others reach enlightenment. So too with Maslow and his later work on self-transcendence who “proposed that people who have reached self-actualization will sometimes experience a state he referred to as ‘transcendence,’ or ‘peak experience,’ in which they become aware of not only their own fullest potential, but the fullest potential of human beings at large”.

Even with all of this exposure to helping others, on top of positive psychology’s largest single finding “that others matter” for our happiness, I never felt a sense of agency in being able to affect change among those suffering and only sought to affect my own happiness. I largely blame my undergraduate degree in economics for this outlook because of its focus on development work being rather unpredictable and often causing more harm than not. Sure, we could try to help, but we have 50/50 odds of just making it worse. Better to focus on the self.

Peter Singer’s work has convinced me otherwise. Millions of people die from preventable diseases and poverty every year. To not attempt to help is morally culpable. Obviously, without accepting the evidence from positive psychology and Harris’ The Moral Landscape basing morality on well-being and suffering, this argument falls apart. However, both are grounded in empirical research and as Harris points out, if we can’t agree that certain states of being are worse than others, then we really have no point of agreement for even having a dialogue. Being in a state of depravity is clearly worse than not being in a state of depravity and we should do our best whenever possible to help alleviate that suffering in ourselves and others.

What’s more, the majority of the research I’ve pointed to above demonstrates that helping others will make ourselves even happier. As the protagonist from Into the Wild states, “Happiness is only real when shared.” Turns out that all psychology, neuroscience, and economic research says this is true.
​
The Algorithm SWB = f(HP, LS, SC)
Subjective well-being is a function of hedonistic pleasure, life-satisfaction, and social connectedness.
OWB = f(H, W, E, S)
Objective well-being is a function of health, wealth, education, and security.
QoL = f(SWB, OWB)
Quality of life is a function of subjective well-being and objective well-being.

Subjective Well-being

The subjective well-being function is what I want to focus on. The objective well-being function is certainly important, but I feel more intuitive. People are often able to look at a person’s life and tell you whether they are objectively well off. This is often a product of the political and economic situation in which the person lives, but also socio-cultural circumstances. 

I personally have found the capabilities approach to economics and human rights the most useful to draw on with regard to objective well-being. Indices like the UN’s Human Development Index and the newly created Social Progress Index do a decent job of capturing much of these objective qualities, with the obvious caveat that they could also improve or become more comprehensive. 

So while national, international, and supranational organizations have already done a decent job in measuring objective well-being, therefore making it redundant to cover here, there has been less consolidation of the findings within the area of subjective well-being among the various social sciences and humanities. 

In the function for subjective well-being above, I’ve included three central dimensions. These come almost verbatim from  The Psychology of Desire , which states, “Finally, all might agree that happiness springs not from any single component but from the interplay of higher pleasures, positive appraisals of life meaning, and social connectedness, all combined and merged by interaction between the brain’s networks of pleasure and meaningfulness” (p.  129).

The chapter containing the above quote looks at and examines hedonia specifically and is what is referred to by “higher pleasures”, which the authors contrast with Aristotle’s eudaimonia or “cognitive appraisals of meaning and life satisfaction” (p.  129). Finally, they add social connectedness based on research within the rest of the text.

These aspects of subjective well-being fit within a much wider context of research on the topic. I feel they are capable of encapsulating the majority (all) of the other findings with the nascent field. Below I will explain just how this is so.

Hedonistic Pleasure

The first dimension is hedonism, which is concerned with life’s pleasures and pains. This goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, where it was most carefully reflected on by Epicurus in his major work referenced above. For Epicurus, hedonism was largely concerned with eliminating the pain in life and not nearly as self-indulgent as modern day “epicureans” would have us believe with their concern for food and drink.

Thankfully, we don’t have to go back that far as modern positive psychologists have found that positive emotions do in fact make us happier (no duh!). Even our dreaded materialism can, in fact, make us happier if we spend on and consume items which are congruent with our personalities or allow us to enhance our experiences, especially if they increase our relatedness to others discussed below. This aspect of well-being also includes the finding that novelty in our experiences and pleasures does make us happier.

Beyond mere material and experiential consumption as sources of pleasure, this dimension would also include pleasurable states of being, such as good health, physical and psychological security, engagement in flow, and the ability to exercise autonomy, all of which have wide support within research as contributors to well-being.

Life-satisfaction

The second dimension is about taking a step back from the present feelings of happiness that you may experience day to day in order to get a wider perspective on life. Broadly speaking, does your life having meaning, purpose, and a sense of accomplishment congruent with your values? Do you have a sense of competence or even mastery?

The category is largely about self-selected goal attainment, in contrast with the previous dimension’s focus on desire satiation (a subset of goal attainment). In exploring this variable, it’s best to begin with competence, which has one of the most robust findings as a basic human need among any of the items discussed here. Competence, along with autonomy and relatedness, can be found among many of the most prominent studies on what motivates human behavior.

As we grow in competence, we often seek ever greater challenges through self-regulation based on our values, purpose, and meaning in life. By self-regulating, we are able to experience a sense of congruence regarding our personal beliefs and the goals we seek. This sense of congruence and actual achievement of our selected goals provide a deep sense of accomplishment. By iterating this process enough times, often with the help of deliberate practice and deep work, we are able to approach mastery, a deeply rewarding experience that often fills us with great pride.

Social Connectedness

Last, but most importantly, is our deepest human need to experience social connectedness. This is almost certainly the most important thread tracing through all of the research on subjective well-being.

Connection to other humans is what allows us to most fully develop and grow as individuals and groups. In fact, modern neuroscience is beginning to show that morality is built on the foundations in our brain most closely connected to cooperation. Cooperation is the mode of goal attainment, in contrast to competition or independent striving, that most closely contributes to both of the previous dimensions above.

By cooperating, we are able to satisfy our desires better and develop greater empathy for others, the basis of human connection and forming a strong concern for others (i.e. altruism). In learning to see others as subjects and not just objects to be overcome, we allow them to be more vulnerable and are able to accept their flaws, mistakes, and shortcomings, a process that many psychologists have found integral for human growth.

Putting It All Together

As I mentioned above, I will not be going into the components of objective well-being as they are more straightforward, have greater agreement, and therefore would be redundant. However, in looking at the algorithm above, what is important to realize is that it is the combination of both subjective and objective well-being that make up overall quality of life. 

Living standards can be objectively high and a person will still not experience a high quality of life if they are experiencing depression or other forms of subjectively low well-being. This is most evident in the alarmingly high number of suicide deaths in the developed world (America has suicide as the tenth highest cause of death in the country). Worldwide, a person is more likely to die from suicide than homicide or war combined.

The most difficult aspect of this algorithm is finding the appropriate balance among the three components of subjective well-being. Oftentimes, our hedonism can stand in the way of our life-satisfaction and connection to others. Two short examples among an infinite number are when our short term desire satisfaction for sweets stands in the way of our chosen goal of being healthier, or when our hedonistic addiction to the pleasure of drugs destroys our connection to friends and family. 

This same issue exists for the other two dimensions as well. For instance, an obsessive focus on life-satisfaction within the narrow sense of goal attainment can lead us to avoid hedonistic pleasures and social connection through compulsive work, while an obsessive or dependent state of social connection can also detract from our enjoyment of self-centered pleasures and overall life-satisfaction by narrowing what it means to be fully happy and competent.

What this boils down to is developing an ever larger sense of compassion and understanding for each other, which can allow us to accept people when they do make tradeoffs in the various dimensions, instead of jumping to judgement, which only creates division and alienation. If we recognize that we are all striving to be happy and fulfilled in life and that pursuit encompasses more than just the emotional feeling of positivity, the person that is aiming to enhance their well-being through a different dimension than you think best won’t be seen as wrong or bad. As long as we aren’t intentionally hurting one another, it should be accepted by all when a person chooses to increase their happiness through any of the three dimensions above.

It is nearly impossible to eliminate suffering entirely, but we can alleviate it by cooperating and utilizing an “ethic of care” in our everyday lives. This propensity to enter relationships and address people with care as our first inclination can lead to a more connected and peaceful world, which will lead to a happier and better world.