Suffering vs. Happiness

I sometimes quip about the millennials, many of whom seem adrift and aimless, confused by the chaos of life. The Canadian clinical psychologist and educator, Jordan B. Peterson, has made it his mission, and his business (and a lucrative one at that), to help such people straighten out their lives. He may well be the best followed of today’s pop intellects, a cadre that includes Ben Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake and Sam Harris. I like Dr. Peterson. I suspect that he must have been a very challenging child; my expectation is that he was precocious, sassy, enquiring, and manic. He certainly thinks….and thinks. I find him to be an engaging speaker and a sharp and voluble intellect. Most of his following seems to be millennial males, and I am glad that there is someone like Jordan Peterson to challenge these young men and redirect their attention to new perspectives. 

Peterson points out that life is tragic, full of pain and sometimes malevolence. He seems to say we should embrace the suffering because that is what gives us depth. He says our goal should not be happiness. Yet he urges his listeners to make better decisions that will help them reduce their suffering and that of the people around them, and I find that contradictory. It’s a bit like the people who claim that heaven is this great place to where they really want to go when they die --- way better than life here and now --- and yet they fight to hang onto this inferior life. If heaven is so great and you are going there when you die, why resist death? Put your money where your mouth is. Likewise, if suffering is the richness of life, why try to reduce it?

I have not, so far as I know, heard Peterson explain what he means by “depth” when he says that it comes from suffering. Does he mean depth of understanding? Or, does he mean emotional intensity? Or something else?

Hindu philosophy seems to me to say that what we reap in this life is consequential to what we sowed previously. One would think that we should help people in distress because this would mean better rewards later, but No, to help relieve someone’s suffering means to be thwarting karma. If they are suffering, they are reaping it as they are supposed to, and we are not to be interfering with that. It’s a contradiction even as Peterson’s teaching seems to be.

I disagree with Dr. Peterson: we should aim for happiness. Our suffering comes from our rejection of our here and now. This rejection is characterized by emotions that don’t feel pleasant: boredom, anger, frustration, despair, and so on --- emotions that we feel when we do not like what’s going on. These are painful emotions. And they distract us from doing the wise thing. Or they sap the energy we would otherwise have for doing the loving thing. Or, as in the case of anger, they unleash energy that often is channeled into doing the harmful thing. Happiness gives us an equilibrium --- a balance or centeredness --- that allows us to focus on doing right.

I agree that someone who has never known much suffering is shallow…and yeah, I know I am not defining that. Suffering does teach us something for sure. But it is not productive to have it continue. That doesn’t mean that it is not productive to have the circumstances continue, for it is not the circumstances that produce the suffering: it is our response to the circumstances that yields the pain. The suffering can impel us to reprogram our minds to respond differently. I have long remembered what I heard Ken Keyes Jnr. declare years ago when he declared something like “now being in this wheelchair would be a problem for me…..IF I wanted to walk.”

Hope for the Hopeless

We tend to think of opposites that aren’t really always so. For example, we see hatred as the opposite of love. It might be more accurate to say that the opposite of love is fear, but since we tend to hate what we fear, we position hatred as love’s opposite. “Perfect love casts out fear”, and removing fear can remove hate, which is something that happens through understanding. “We fear what we don’t understand.” “The more I understand, the more I love, for everything understood is good.” 

Likewise, we think poverty is the opposite of wealth. Poverty isn’t so much about the lack of resources as it is about the lack of options it seems to me. The person without options is impoverished of spirit. Being without options can make a person feel trapped and hopeless. 

One of the joys of my life has been to help people see options. What a pleasure to see a hopeless person beginning to see a way out! To help people see possibilities is a process I recommend. Hopelessness morphed into hopefulness produces a positive energy, and I like being part of that event.

Experimenting with Moral Choices

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ is a website that allows you to test your moral compass. Moral dilemmas can be fun….when you are not facing one in real life but only discussing hypothetical.

Helping the Disadvantaged

If you pay any attention to the Christian world, you may have noticed that there are some people who teach that the world is ending soon and that your focus should be on personal growth --- yours and other people’s --- and that it is pointless to make this a better world since it’s all about to be destroyed anyway, but there are some whose focus is on social works --- trying to improve the here and now of people’s lives. Why such a variance in the application of the same book?

The teaching generally is that there will be a long period of peace on the earth, which, based on Revelation 20, is thought by many to be a thousand years. During this period, Christ will reign over all the earth. Some people are pre-millennial. This means that they believe that Christ is returning prior to that period. It will take him to clean up this mess and make the world right. Our job is to get ready for that. Others are post-millennials. They (and I think this is the larger body of people) teach that he is returning after that period. There will be long period of peace on earth, and then Christ shall return. The peace will have happened because the reign of Christ is in the human heart. Obviously a person’s belief on this matter makes a difference to their conduct.

Pre-millennialism was the predominant view for the first three centuries after Christ’s death. Augustine opted for post-millennialism, and from his perspective, that made sense: Christianity was flourishing, peace was spreading. Eventually it became clear that either Christ wasn’t returning after a thousand years of that, or that the thousand years had not begun when it was thought to have started.

By thinking that Christ is invisibly working in man to create some utopian era, people have been susceptible to delusive teachings that particular political movements are the means for this to happen. Witness the example of Hitler’s Third Reich. This was how the thousand years of peace would happen.

It is possible to be a pre-millennialist and want to contribute to social good. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is full of admonition to help the poor, widows, and orphans. Jesus said “The poor you always have with you.” Many pre-millennialists think he meant that you can’t do anything to fix that problem. I think he meant that we have lots of opportunity to help them. People who believe that Christ is living in them, should reflect his behavior and help the disadvantaged. Sometimes, particularly in a crisis, this means a bandage of immediate supply of the necessities. Other times, in the absence of crisis, it means enabling people to have options that they can choose to get themselves out of their mess, through skills development and other education.