The Best Self-Help is Free: The Greatest Problem of the Human Condition

The problem with the contemporary view of happiness, as discussed in Chapter 3, is that such a view is necessarily static. It sees happiness as a state in which all of an individual's desires are met and nothing troubles him - either physically or mentally.

The static view of happiness, of course, has another side to it - which was embraced by such Oriental philosophies as Buddhism. If happiness is the fulfillment of all of one's desires and the freedom from trouble, said the Buddhists, then why not minimize how much one desires and what one considers to be trouble? Why not just be content with whatever is and not aspire for anything more? After all, the fewer desires you have, the easier it will be to fulfill them all. And if you have no desires at all, then you will be truly enlightened and attain the state of nirvana, or complete inner peace.

Alas, the Buddhist way taken to its full conclusion simply does not work in the real world - even though it might be useful at helping some individuals abstain from pursuits that would indeed be unnecessary and damaging for them. The problem with this approach is that, whether or not you desire anything, there are thousands of things, phenomena, and people out there that threaten to hurt you, rob you, and even kill you. A man with few or no desires is just as likely to suffer from bodily decay as a man with abundant desires. And as anyone who has been to public elementary school knows, the bullies of the world do not hate their victims for any particular reasons. For them, the hatred comes first, and then they try to find external reasons to justify it. Whether or not you desire anything will not save you from the bullies and thugs - be they children or adults.

The great problem of the human condition is not a problem of the mind. If it were a problem of the mind, then it would be quite easy to resolve just by thinking about it. All of the pressing problems of life are material at their core. The greatest harm that can befall a human being - death - is the disruption and disintegration of the material components of his body, so that the body ceases to function as an organized system and becomes simply a heterogeneous lump of tissues. The causes of death are not abstract in your mind; you cannot just wish them away. They are quite concrete and material. Whether it is a knife that slices your body apart or virus that replicates inside it; whether the cause is a physical act by another human body or a physical law followed by an inanimate object, the very process of death is entirely oblivious and apathetic to the state of your mind. Unfortunately, as matters stand today, it threatens to occur to everyone - happy or sad, desiring much or desiring nothing. This state of affairs should not be tolerable to any sane, rational, just human being.

And yet, if you are dead - or, for that matter, in you are in tremendous physical pain, starving, or severely paralyzed - you do not have much or anything desirable going on in your mind. Mere psychological satisfactions pale in comparison to the inescapable, nagging fact that your very existence is in danger. It is possible to overcome some physical disabilities, provided that one can still maintain some stable state of health and activity - but it is not possible to live well when faced with a steady degeneration of one's body and faculties.

Besides, happiness, love, morality, art, culture - what have you - all require you to be alive to enjoy and think about them. Thus, the question of how to keep existing must always take precedence over every other question - because nothing is possible in your life unless you exist in the first place.

Therefore, the first goal of any person's life ought to be the minimization of threats to his existence. Once the most urgent threats have been addressed, one can move on to the less urgent ones. But there are literally thousands of ways in which our lives could end every day. Anytime anybody devises a means of eliminating even one of those ways, he becomes one of the greatest heroes of humankind.

Today, we are able to successfully evade many more causes of death than our ancestors could. By curing diseases and establishing better sanitation and disease prevention, people have nearly quintupled the typical human lifespan in prosperous countries - a lifespan which ended in the late teens during the Paleolithic era. Due to economic growth and technological progress, most of us can be well fed and assured of good hygiene and adequate shelter. More humane political and economic arrangements - founded on free markets, free speech, heterogeneity, and toleration - enable most of us to avoid killing one another in senseless wars, political persecutions, and mob violence.

But so much more remains to be done. Cancer, heart disease, and degenerative conditions of the brain kill millions of people every day. Humans have still not discovered how to establish a government that does not devolve into either chaos or tyranny. Moreover, a single sufficiently large calamity on Earth - such as a giant meteorite, a chain of volcanic explosions, or a new Ice Age - can still wipe out all human life. Preventing these calamities - or at least settling on other planets so as to eliminate the risk of species extinction - ought to be the concern of many more people than those few who are addressing it today. Furthermore, with the current level of technology, death is still inescapable for humans living today - no matter what they do. Every human being - if he is truly serious about his life and its continuation - needs to give these matters some thought and develop ways to combat today's gargantuan perils in his own personal way. Securing one's own health, economic prosperity, and intellectual development is a good start.

In the face of these problems, we can see how absurd it is to hold a static view of happiness, life, or anything else at all. Any unchanging state, by definition, is stagnant - leaving one an easy, sitting target for the forces of death and decay. If any happiness or purpose is to be obtained in life, it must be defined dynamically, as a process and not as a state. We all need to act just to survive - so if we ever arrive at a state of contentment, this will simply mean that we will stop acting and, in our illusory happiness, rapidly decompose.

But if instead we think of the good life as a life of incremental progress against the forces of death and deterioration - a life in which we increasingly assure for ourselves a freedom from external perils - then our lives can be happy, meaningful, secure, and so much more. Much more can be said on this, and we shall discuss it next.

Read all chapters of The Best Self-Help is Free.