800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy: Part 3 - The Beast in Me

This is the first internet meme I remember seeing. I laughed so hard I probably watched it twenty-five times in a row. One of the more modest accomplishments of my life is that I can honestly say I have never destroyed a computer in a rage, though I’ve come close thousands of times. I even banged on a computer that was stalling hard enough that afterward it would randomly, instantly shut down mid-session without warning. Even so, I’m sure there are people who have come still closer than I have to destroying their computers.

I have, however, thrown phones across rooms several dozen times in my life. I never broke them completely, but I did once come so close that the phone would only work after I duct-taped it together. I’ve thrown glasses, full ones, against walls and floors. I’ve slammed doors hard enough to break the hinges. When I was fourteen I tore a painting off the wall and broke the class frame into thousands of pieces. When I was sixteen I nearly ran over two classmates with my car. As an adolescent I tore books from their shelves, set fire to pieces of paper, and once threatened someone with a knife. I’ve yelled so many times in my life that I’m surprised I still have a singing voice. I’ve neither provoked nor been provoked into a physical altercation since I was a college freshman, but I probably got well over a hundred before that. More often than not it was picked on me, but far more times than I’d like to admit, I picked it on them.

Imagine, at least if you care to, what it’s like to be diagnosed as a depressive at the age of eight, as I was. A third of your childhood, the third you have no trouble remembering, has been stolen from you. Days which should be spent in the happy ignorance of the adult trials that await are spent in the throes of the worst emotions with which life can bequeath at any age, and there is as yet no part of you which understands how to view the awfulness of what may come in proportion to its merit. There is only the ineradicable sense that life is an unremitting agony, constructed for the sole purpose of tormenting you alone.   

And yet it’s not the childhood years which I remember with horror, I must reserve that for adolescence. The realization that other people did bad things to you is ultimately forgivable and in some cases can be remembered with a certain black humor. But what can never be totally forgiven is the moments when you acted badly towards others, because each of us must live with the choices we make. I don’t know precisely when it was, but there was a moment when I awakened to an almost inarticulable realization that life perpetrated a terrible injustice on me, and I had no idea whom to blame for it; so I blamed everyone. To this day, it shames me to say that whatever evil was done to me, I repaid the debt to the best of my ability in a thousand ways. And in my still too frequent lowest moments, it is not what was done to me which I remember, but what I did to others. There are worse things in life than knowing that other people’s sins are on your head, and one of them is knowing that you did not turn the other cheek.

Today, we read about another young man who opened fire in a crowded area simply so he could kill people. Every time we read about a new adolescent killer, I do have to wonder…how close did I come at that point in my life? How close did other angry kids I knew come? The truth is, probably, not very; most adolescents have rage in them which they cannot articulate, and sometimes that rage is truly black. But was there really that big a difference between Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold and myself?

The reasons the Columbine massacre happened are extremely complicated; a confluence of too easy access to weapons, righteous anger, bullying, a culture of violence, family pressure, ignorant faculty, and (primarily) sociopathy. It takes an extremely fragile combination to provoke the correct chain reaction to result in a massacre. But frankly, if it hadn’t been the two of them, it might have just as easily been fifty-thousand other young adults that year, perhaps even a hundred kids I knew, or me. The fact that some angry kids outgrow their rage and progress to a fruitful maturity while others remain forever remembered as murderers may be simple luck.

But luck is never simple; it’s a relative term. I’ve been lucky to outgrow this adolescence into a reasonably content adulthood, with many good friends and a family that loves me. But perhaps a truly lucky person would never have undergone those dark years I did.

I freely admit, in the worst moments my temper is still the absolute poison it ever was. In order to keep it in check, I have to keep myself on guard every day of my life. When the alternative remains crippling depression or horrendous panic attacks, anger can seem like the best of all possible options. But aggression puts the pain which you feel onto others, and at least sadness does not transfer the blame for your lot onto innocent bystanders. If I have a surfeit of loyal friends, I don’t doubt that it’s because to an extent that surprises even me I’ve learned to shield my worst moments from them. Those moments certainly still exist, but to the maximum extent I can help, no one shall ever see them but me. Sadly, I have not yet learned how to shield many of those moments from my family to nearly the same extent. I pray that the day I can will come very soon.

(Part of why Crimes and Misdemeanors is an over-rated movie is that this is actually not a bad definition of comedy.)

When you live knowing you have faults like these, and I suspect more people have similar ones than would ever like to admit so, what is there to do about it except to confess your faults and open yourself to the ridicule to which people would subject you anyway if they ever saw you act so stupidly? I have yet to meet a person better at self-deprecation than me (how’s that for an egotistical statement?), and for many years it’s been the best weapon I have to ingratiate myself. Some people can live their lives in blissful unawareness of their own ridiculousness – others have to embrace their inner clown head on. The anger which once coursed through me so viciously through my insides is now something I wear on the outside, a court jester’s outfit – ready at a second’s turn to do something outrageous.

(try telling me this wouldn’t be awesome…)

For three years, I’ve been trying to finish every page of The Brothers Karamazov – that great and greatly flawed novel among novels which my uncle gave to me as a present while I lived with him in Israel. I haven’t quite finished it for a couple reasons – some having to do with aesthetic concerns. But fundamentally, the biggest problem I have with this book is that it is far too great to not hit far too close to home. At heart, this is a book about a father and his four sons. When I first read it, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with myself and my relationships to my Dad and brothers. But as I got further, I began to perceive that every character in this family is me: Dimitri the well-meaning hot-head is me, Ivan the intellectual whose nihilism drives him insane is me, Smerdyakov whose meanness hides a lifetime of terrible experiences is me, even Alyosha the saint who forgoes his own desires in an effort to be compassionate to the sufferings of others can be me. But even the character who I thought could never be me is me.

If there was one thing in this book of which I was sure as I was reading, it was that the boys’ father, Fyodor Karamazov, was my Dad: nature’s provocateur; always doing what he could to be the center of attention, always trying to find the most outrageous thing to say, always trying to shake up people’s self-conceptions, picking at their insecurities and inflaming their resentments for his own entertainment; playing the part of the fool so as to mask a great intelligence, and so as better to make others uncomfortable. In my least charitable moments, this was how I always viewed my Dad, and here was an image of him staring directly at me from the page.

Yet that does my father as much a disservice to much else that he is as any description could. As a bookworm and as my father’s son, I must say that this description neither does justice to Fyodor’s evilness or to Dad’s goodness. In fact, if this comparison were in any way made seriously to either Dad or a real life Fyodor Karamazov, it would be incredibly insulting. And if anything, at this point Fyodor Karamazov is a better representation of my personality than my Dad’s.  

If Dostoevsky can create a family of five such characters, all of whom resonate so clearly within the same person, then clearly the book’s clearest insight is that we all have emotional beasts of burden; demons carried within us which gnaw as painfully as any cancer, and which will only fester without a proper outlet. Each of the Karamazovs is a part of us, carrying that same demon around which we all have and each trying to find a proper outlet for it.   

Perhaps these next questions get us off the hook a bit too easily, but are there really demonic (or even evil) things within us, or are what we see as our demons simply misdirected passion?  The will to live life intensely is there in us all, but if we’re (relatively) lucky, we can direct that will towards something that helps others, or at least doesn’t hurt them. I’m not a person given to quoting Bertrand Russell (and I read this quote in a classical CD review) but there is one by him which I love: “Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.” Some people have ready-made ways to be passionate, and find hobbies and passions which so inspire them that they feel at peace with themselves, utterly contented by what they do. I want to beat the shit out of such people.

Because no matter how much misanthropy and vengeful feeling is inspired by depression, anger, and anxiety, it is not bad feeling which inspires such terrible emotions. It is good feeling. It is the knowledge that somewhere, there is the possibility of a better life which we seem unable to lead. It is not a hatred for life that inspires black feeling, it is love of life.

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy: Part 2 - Being in Hate

We have all felt that energetic fission of the instant attraction – the moment when two people catch each other’s eye and feel as though they’d been hit by a thunderbolt. It feels as if the universe has conspired to bring them to precisely this moment at this place, and from the split-second they lock eyes, each sees their destiny bound up in the other. That destiny may last an hour, it may last fifty years, but they know at that moment that life as they know it is over, because after realizing the existence of that other person, colors look different, words no longer carry the same meanings, and the songs on the radio make sense. And from the numinous shock of that first contact they hate each other with the Promethean fire of a million supernovas and desire nothing more out of life than to devote their remaining years to making the other person miserable beyond measure.

It’s like the time oil first laid eyes on water, or the dog on the mailman, or fingernails on a chalkboard. Occasionally a person comes along who so toxically offends your sense of everything beautiful in the world that you can only thank God every day for such a gift as a person who so conveniently explains our world’s division of good from evil. Had people like this particular person never born, the world would be a far better place than it is. All it requires is a single interaction, a particular emphasis laid on a certain word, a well-placed comma in an e-mail, and all the world’s evil makes sense.  In the annals of human villainy, there’s Hitler, Nero, Genghis Kahn, and this person.

Just like in love, if we’re lucky, we get the pleasure of being in hate more than half-a-dozen times during our life. Food tastes better, drinks are more potent, and the weight of life’s burdens disappears from our shoulders. When we’re in love, we experience a respite during which we think the awfulness of the world could be redeemed. When we’re in hate, the feeling is savory rather than sweet, and just like with savory food, it is sometimes more pleasurable than any amount of sweetness.  Rather than we having a respite from life’s torments, we possess something potentially better - a mastery of life’s bitterness, and an explanation for why life must be so. The act of living, with all the tragic messiness and misunderstandings which that carries, has meaning and explanation for the first time, and with such a divine gift the sour becomes more pleasurable than the sweet.  

We all have such people who offend every concept of what we think is good and decent in the universe. If we’re wise, we’re simply thankful they exist. How could we make sense of the world’s horrors without them?  But like love, hatred is fickle, and as a species we’re no more evolved to remain monogamous with the object of our sworn animus than we are to the object of our sworn affection. Human stuff is frail, and a surfeit of emotion makes him sway from the ground: too much love causes men to fly above the earth into the decompressed airlessness of the heavens, too much hate causes men to dig themselves into the suffocating dirt of the ground.

But all of us have those people who simply make the world lousy. Just as there is someone – perhaps a thousand someones – in the world for every person to develop a life-long loving bond in the correct circumstances, there are perhaps a thousand someones in the world with whom in the right circumstances we all can seal a lifelong bond of hatred.

Just as in love, there must be precisely the correct mixture of similarities and differences – both in interests and temperament. But there must also be that extra special something – a bond that can only be sealed in the moment when destiny conspires with coincidence who colludes with happenstance to bring two people together so precisely that the right circumstances of vulnerability, aspiration, and sensibility are met to produce this extra special bond. All one has to do is think of the other person, and the world’s confusion makes sense.   

Why do we feel this way? What is it within us which provides the dopamine and adrenaline, either in love or in hate, which simplifies the world so? Why do we feel so completely as though our instinct is completely right, and no rational consideration is necessary? Why can’t we separate ourselves from these powerful emotions to realize that we currently have no greater claim on how our understanding of the world is correct than we did before we met this person? What if such a person does not share our hate? Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, and is there any worse feeling than knowing that we reside in the mind of the object of our animus or affection with none of the intensity with which they reside in ours?

Is hatred more powerful than love? And if it isn’t…how terrible would it be for us if we found a way to make it so? Really. Would it make the world any worse a place if we found out hatred is more powerful than love? And would anybody really be surprised if that were the case?

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy; Part 1 - Politics

The New York Times ran an especially interesting op-ed last week from the president of the AEI (American Enteprise Institute, h/t Der Schneider) claiming that all statistics point to conservatives being happier than liberals. Given the reasonably nuanced, even-keeled tone of his article, perhaps the main point was not to crow about conservatives being happier people in the New York Times – though I can’t imagine such considerations were not in his mind – but to state an important fact of life about America.

Alright, so conservatives are happier than liberals. I know a lot of liberals, and many of them find their lives pretty miserable – sometimes with justification. I know a lot of conservatives too, for a liberal at least – and while they don’t really strike me as happier, in many cases they do seem more accepting of the personal flaws and foibles of people they like than liberals – and perhaps that goes a long way to making them happier. Perhaps you’d think it a paradox that conservatives are more tolerant of people than liberals, but consider then how the two philosophies work. Liberalism is an empirical philosophy: for liberals, trust, approval, and respect for the establishment must always be earned and can be taken away at any point. Conservatism is an instinctive philosophy: if a person is part of the group or establishment worth conserving, then a large degree of approval, respect, and trust must be given automatically. It is not a question of conservatives being authoritarian and liberals being meritocratic, it is a question conservatives tending towards belief, and liberals tending towards doubt. I know of no better example of the difference in these two philosophies than my own parents. My father is a moderate liberal, yet I think few people (himself least of all) would think of him as a person satisfied to give respect to those who do not meet his requirements. My mother is a (somewhat less) moderate conservative, and is probably the best example I will ever meet of someone who can live her own life as a model of tolerance, forgiveness, and open-mindedness (she lives with Dad and raised me…).

I probably should have said this at the beginning, but in case there’s any doubt: politics is a horrendous way to gauge happiness. Political beliefs are of such little consequence to our everyday lives that they are perhaps the easiest way we have of projecting an imaginative world that would better meet our requirements for a happier life. How many liberals do we all know who came from tight-knit families with good values and came to their belief-system as a way to justify breaking out of from a good family’s grip? How many conservatives do we all know who came to their belief system as a means to justify doing everything it takes to raise themselves up from dissolute beginnings? We all know people like this, and there is no shame in reading into them a bit of the bad faith we all have in how we make the choices we do. Much more often than not, a person’s politics is a way of projecting what they want from their personal lives. This, and not that our lives have such potentially world-changing importance, is the true meaning of “the personal is political.”

Speaking for myself, I consider myself a liberal resolutely and happily stuck in the year 1954 who wishes all American history since the downfall of McCarthy should be wiped clean. Civil Rights should be redone, and done better. The marginal tax rate for the top 1% should still be over 90 cents to the dollar, with plenty more money to invest in better education, better research, better health care, better business regulation, better building and road maintenance, better job creation, better hospitals, better futures. Military might is inevitable so we might as well use it for good rather than evil. Support of an authoritarian dictatorship is a horrible moral choice, but if alternative is a totalitarian dictator, it's one the US should make with no regrets. And incremental liberal progress is better than conservative regression, so we should make whatever ideological compromises it takes to prevent conservatives from gaining power. How did I come to these conclusions? I can make a litany of reasons, but it would be sophistry to say that it came solely from impartial judgment. It is at least as much a matter of personal experience and wish fulfillment. My personal experience, which is perhaps inaccurate to the larger public, is that the family members in the generations before mine were better educated, as are my friends in European countries  – in large part because their schools were better funded. Without military might, much of my family in Israel would still die, as would members of my family in World War II without whom I’d not be here to write this.

I consider myself a liberal. I always have and I always will. But for years, many liberals have considered me a moderate – an accusation I find truly appalling. In a properly functioning society, a philosophy based on empirical data - for which hundreds of thousands of people in the world devote their lives to gathering with integrity – is the center of discourse; and liberalism is that ‘vital’ center. It is a philosophy whose core belief is the absence of a core belief. Socialism and conservatism are both belief systems in which the belief is more important than the facts, liberalism suits its beliefs to whatever the facts are at hand – and every generation creates a new version of liberalism to best fit the facts of its time.

But there are very few properly functioning societies, and we certainly don’t live in one: we live in the era of Bush v. Gore, of a mismanaged two-front war, of political appointments trumping expert credentials, of congressmen trying to let the debt ceiling collapse to score political points. We live in an era when a large membership within one party (and ONLY one party) insists again and again on bringing our country to the brink of economic and political suicide. So the thought that people to my left believe that to not agreeing with them about every little detail of their ideology is the same as giving tacit consent to the Republican’s worst excesses is simply maddening. So to all sixty of America’s lefties/socialists/progressives (every one of whom I seem to know…), you’ve been completely shut out of power now for 40 years and Barack Obama has finally given a chance for some of your agenda to be enacted. Being so picky about your friends that you can exclude Barack or me from your soiree is a luxury you cannot afford.  

But then again, my own political beliefs are as much wish fulfillment as personal experience, and as much wish fulfillment as anybody else’s. The way I’ve lived my personal life is every bit as extremist as any communist’s political beliefs. My biography (such as it is) is one long litany of refusals to compromise that have set me back for decades on virtually every front of my life. To put it simply and without going into detail, the idea of doing things according to other people’s instructions terrifies me. Any learning disabled kid (or adult) who can’t remember a time when he wasn’t yelled at or insulted for not properly following directions will understand this problem implicitly. The rest of you probably can’t.

The very idea that a person like me has to follow someone else’s directions is not just nauseating; it’s an active source of unimaginable fear. And even if a person like me realizes that (in most cases) such fear is completely irrational, there is no way in which it can be overcome except to subject yourself to a completely fresh batch of horror during every day of your life in which you try to fight it (again, I’m not going into detail). People tell you that once you master the details, the terror will go away. Perhaps it will for that particular task, but then a new task arises, with a new infinity of details to master, and the cycle of horror begins anew. One can either resign oneself to a level of anxiety at getting things wrong with which no other human being could cope better than you, or one can simply go one’s own way and refuse to do those things which so many others find such an ordinary part of their existences. Out of necessity, my wit became quicker than other people so I could make quick work of anybody who decided to take practice on a target as easy as mine. It made me spurn decades worth of well-meant advice from teachers because they had no idea what fortitude it took to simply persist in classes. And after years of bad jobs, no jobs, and dashed dream jobs, I became as close as I could to my own man, a ‘professional idiot son’ in my father’s business and otherwise free to pursue my interests without the interference of the outside world – perhaps with all the loneliness which such solitary pursuit implies. Hopefully I do something of value for my family, but I’m glad my brothers have many talents I don’t. Hopefully there’s a way to include others in my musical and literary ambitions without my going completely crazy about the organizational end of it.  

But the fact that I have taken this latter ‘road less traveled’ is as much a source of pain to me as the fact that it was necessary. This desire for compromise comes from that honest-to-god wish I have, a wish that I perhaps carry with me more devotedly than any other, that I could simply let my guard down and compromise – to do what I’ve been told to do, and to learn at least some of those practical tasks to which a brain like mine could not be more ill-suited. Surely, even in the best of circumstances the process of learning some of them will be every bit as horrible as I imagine, but surely some will not be. But after a certain point, one has to realize that the anxiety of not knowing which tasks will be which, after so many years of precisely that struggle with tasks which others find so absolutely basic, is dangerously close to insurmountable. Other people dream of drawing lines in the sand because they’ve seen the damage which compromise does to their lives. I dream only of compromise, because I see the damage which its lack thereof has done to me.

It wasn’t long ago that this post was about an op-ed... In any event, after a certain point this op-ed alleged that all statistics point to the fact that the happiest of all people are extremists. Again, we have no way of knowing whether this is true. Do extremists feel coerced by fellow extremists into saying they’re happy? And if they’re told to believe that they’re happy, is that in some cases the same as believing they’re happy? I know a number of people whom I’d reluctantly classify as extremists (if you’d classify me as one, that’s probably a sign…), and by and large I have to conclude that yes, they do seem a little happier than the rest of us. Not much necessarily, but a little. They have a built in, ironclad network of solidarity. They believe they know exactly whom to trust, and whom not to. Their minds are unclouded by that pernicious human folly: doubt. The least happy are, of course, moderates.

It was moderates, by far, who came out the least happy in this survey, and one can easily see why. Moderates, true moderates by the standards of 2012 America, get a lot of shit – much of it deserved. They split the difference evenly between two ever more diametrically opposed ideological camps with little if any regard for what’s true, and for their troubles they find their position increasingly attacked by every side. In their effort to keep a part of themselves in two worlds, they are mistrusted and insulted by both for not pledging fealty to either. Many people’s political beliefs are a mere projection of opposite of their personal lives, but if the opposite of right is left, then what is the opposite of centrism and moderation except more centrism and moderation? It would be like multiplying zero against itself. Most people who consider themselves moderates in their political lives are probably moderates in their personal lives too – insulted by their parents for not going to church more often, insulted by their children for going to church at all. They, not liberals, are the true textbook example of people plagued by doubts and stuck between two diametrically opposed worlds. They may not deserve our intellectual respect, but they certainly deserve our pity.

It should also be noted that even among these extremes, the extremely conservative were quite a bit happier than the extremely liberal. Is this just because conservatives are nuttier than liberals? Well, considering that we still don’t know what motivates people to say that they’re happy, this is clearly not a valid thought. What is valid is to say what’s so obvious: that belief inspires greater happiness than doubt. Skepticism may be a good tool for understanding the world, but it takes an enormous emotional toll on those who use it. To have a system of belief which one can affirm in a community with others, and which tells you that a much greater future is in store, is the greatest potential source for happiness our misbegotten species yet possesses. In our era, it is still most easily derived from religion; the time may yet come when such beliefs are derived from collectivist anarchism or transhumanist science worship or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Who knows?

But there is one group curiously missing from this survey. Where are the apoliticals? What about those people who don’t bother themselves with politics and have no beliefs? My guess is that it would cast a bad pall over the whole poll – it would tell us something which no political person wants to believe. The happiest people in the world are the ones who never bother themselves with politics. 

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