Some people doodle at work

I think about the fate of the universe.
There's a lot going on here, but it started with me just writing down the question, "Is Happiness the Good?" as in Plato's Good, the thing we ought to aim for. Lately I've been thinking it is. The more I see depression everywhere, the more I think I have a moral duty to be happy, and to let that happiness flow outward, hopefully spreading the joy. All that stuff about Bodhis from earlier.

To get at the question of whether or not I've really hit on something, the rest of the page is a sort of meditation on the way people usually think of things, that the Good results in Happiness. In Plato's Republic, this is because the Good is Good in itself, and that's what we want, and so by partaking in the Good we are Good and it's all a big party and we can all say to each other, "Good times." I wasn't thinking out loud to myself about Plato, but the section at the top right is where the awareness of the issues from the Republic show up. "Can we see it any other way?" In a sort of emotional/logical way, it seems impossible to think that the Good will not result in Happiness of some sort, and while the way it works for Plato (the Good is Good in itself, right now) makes a ton of sense (and feels a lot like bodhi, in my mind), the rewards for whatever is presented as the Good have been presented through the millennia as happening in all sorts of ways, from simple success and well being (which happens over time) to a better re-birth or heaven or nirvana or what have you, or through rewards of whatever sort (winning the lottery or whatever) doled out by a judging god, or sometimes just fewer punishments.

The various ways of expecting rewards result in different demeanours, and different ways of thinking about what the Good really is. An overrunning theme though is that the Good is presented as Good for YOU personally, so long as you behave properly, you get the rewards. Your behaving properly might benefit other people, but yours are the real rewards. But I'm pretty conscious of the fact the people are mislead by all sorts of things, and maybe sometimes what you're being told is good isn't good for you at all, even if it is good for other people, and maybe even the most people. A lot of punishment follows this sot of logic, especially the extreme forms of punishment. Some people might be deluded into thinking that prison is actually good for the prisoners (ProTip: it's not.) but almost no one thinks that the death penalty is good for those who get it, unless they can perform a heroic amount of doublethink.

So then we get the question of who the Good is for, this thing that results in happiness, whose happiness does it result in? So I listed out some options, and it struck me that it is when the happiness of WE is aimed at, WE is preserved and thus stability is maintained for the most part. By WE here I mean whatever community an individual (and the Heidegger in me wants to make it clear that I'm dealing with any possible Being-Here (Dasein) as the sort f individual I'm thinking of) is a part of. Like your body is a community of organs which are in turn communities of cells. Your body operates on a WE should be happy moral/ethical system, if it makes any sense to talk that way at all (it might not...). Cells that are not playing along are destroyed. Muscles are used til they are straining or damaged in times of danger to preserve the good of the whole. Sacrificing one part for the sake of the whole is always, always preferable to letting the body die (at least from a sort of tunnel vision, My-body-is-all-there-is kid of perspective).

So, in a parallel way to your body, I think successful cultures are the ones that best manage to create that sort of behaviour in their members that benefits the whole rather than the parts, which is obvious of course, but since morality and ethics are in most cases what defines a given culture, and those ethics and morals are always presented as being good in whatever way for those that follow the rules, it's important to take any of those promises of reward with more than a few grains of salt. Because WE will sacrifice a part in a heartbeat if it means preserving the whole. So that's sort of disturbing if you think that there's some core of truth to the rewards promised by your culture for abiding by it's rules.

I do point out at the bottom that we do reward dedication to a cause because rewards encourage that dedication, and so sometimes there are indeed as real rewards as WE can come up with for whoever plays by the rules the best. But it is not good in and for itself (which I miswrote "iaois" with 'of' instead of 'for') to play by the rules. Not much is good in and for itself, except within some context, like say your life in which happiness is good in and for itself, just because we all want to be happy and feel good. That happiness might be bad for other things sure, we are all different and it takes different conditions to create happiness for us, and if nothing else we've got to eat to live.

But that brings me to the stuff going down the right side of the page: there is a sort of deadly dance between Division and Synthesis, where Division means promoting the well being of ME and therefore making copies of myself (usually) or just spreading in whatever way, and Synthesis means becoming a part of some WE of whatever sort, by friendship or absorption or whatever. Competition vs Cooperation. Animal life (and anything that reproduces sexually) is pretty interesting because it requires being part of some WE in order to procreate at all, which is pretty neat if you ask me.

Then there's some futurism there, just a guess by me that before we start communicating with life on other planets that did not originate on Earth, there will be life on other planets that did originate on Earth. Or we will communicate with life that has already colonized multiple planets. Just because evolution runs in parallel. Which is pretty far afield o where we started of course. But the lesson there might be that thinking that the Good results in Happiness in anything but the most direct of ways (in which Happiness is the Good) means spiraling out of control, ever upward and ever outward, without ever reaching the carrot on the stick. Which is the sort of thing that leads people to think that if people we happy and content the world would stop getting better, and oh how horrible that would be. Which is insane of course. Panic and fear and pain are powerful motivators for sure, but they are by no means the only possible ones.

The last little bit at the bottom is hard to read even on the original. It says: 'the solution of course is in the dissolution of the dichotomy but FEELING that is difficult'. If it's about ME vs. WE things are going to be a mess. The happiness itself just has to be, and we've just got to let it, and encourage it, and help it grow.

And I think that's a pretty good tour of what was going on in my head that day.
Hooray work?