A lot of the time more recently, I’ve had trains of thought that would make great fodder for a (random/philosophical) post here, but I’m losing the inclination to write them down. The enjoyment of just thinking them, freely, outweighs any “satisfaction” from increasing my post count.
This is mainly due to my current work-related business, which I hope to reduce at least a little in the autumn; I’ve learnt huge amounts in this job, but none of it has been cerebral in the way that my degree was. That’s a good thing – but I want to get back to academic thinking, with a bit of an urge to go in the philosophy direction. My job’s focus on practical skills has left most of my mind not-quite-caring for long enough to write stuff down if the topic isn’t in the here and now.
Anyway, I’ve got this far already: what I was thinking about this morning was “aims” – for Life, I mean. Goals, objectives, targets, dreams… that stuff. I don’t really know what mine is, yet, which is fine – my middle-term plan is to take enough variety of jobs/activities that I can narrow it down.
It occurred to me, though, that there aren’t really all that many aims to pick from. We (can) all have short-, middle- and long-term aims: but as far as I can tell, these define each other in latter-to-former order. I suspect that everyone has more trouble defining their long-term aim(s), but actually, you can get an idea of the shape of them from the nature of the middle-term aims. Likewise, the (usually well-defined) short-term aims help to define the middle-term aims.
So, what if each of us, psychologically, is basically acting on a single meta-long-term aim all the time? The nature and style of all sub-aims alludes to that one meta-aim. In which case, what possible meta-aims are there? After much pondering, I think there might just be two: personal happiness (in a ‘nirvana’ sense of the word), and group happiness.
An aside: “group” would have to be defined as “all the other entities in one’s sphere of conciousness that the individual perceives as having an ability to affect the state of, to some extent, directly or indirectly”. So for most of us, “group” would just be immediate family and friends, coworkers, etc – people who we have contact with. Some people realise that they actually are able to affect entities that are more socially-distant – be it a local charity or organisation, a nearby community facing some problem due to obfuscating politicians, “the environment” locally or generally, or “the starving masses in Africa”. The ones who realise that they can affect these latter categories are the ones who go to rallies, demonstrations, join Amnesty, join Greenpeace, or organise huge rock gigs to raise money…
Back to the main argument. I postulate two primary meta-aims: achieving personal happiness; and achieving group happiness. Is this really a surprising conclusion? Probably not, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I can imagine somebody arguing that “getting rich” would be a meta-aim, but it’s really not: money is (or can be) a means to happiness, either of oneself, of ones’ group, or of both.
Another aside: it occurred about here that we as a developed society have a huge problem distinguishing money as “a common unit of worth for ensuring equal exchange of goods and services” from money as “a bringer of good things”. It is, in fact, only the former: your desires and decisions are what bring the good things. I might expand on this another day.
Of course, defining either as “complete” is tricky: but perhaps they’re more of a path to be travelled, rather than a destination. Continual, gradual increase in happiness for as much of one’s lifetime as possible. Everyone wants to die happy, right? But do they do that because they ended up sitting on a great pile of money and possessions, having had many huge meals, wild experiences, and memorable encounters; or do they do it because they know that, thanks to them, fewer kids are dying on a far-away continent?
It should definitely be noted that raising the happiness of oneself is also an effort towards raising group happiness, provided it doesn’t actively detract from other people’s personal happiness in the process (e.g. theft). Earning money in order to gain experiences, meet new people, and fix happy memories is fine: other people are probably going to come off better too, or at least not worse. Earning money by theft, of course, would be a different matter. But “group-happy” people will, and should, do things for themselves too – not to do so would in most cases make them less motivated. The difference is just that they see the point in helping others, as well as themselves, whereas a “self-happy” person wouldn’t do, necessarily.
I should also make clear that “self-happy” people are not necessarily bad, evil criminal people. I think there are plenty of perfectly well-balanced people who come into the “self-happy” category, but still go about being useful members of society because it helps them achieve their goal in a simple, honest way. Our legal system would appear, mostly, to tend towards encouraging “group-happy” mentality, but I think that’s probably a bad thing. This distinction of primary aims is a different kettle of fish from morality: and pushing naturally “self-happy” people into a “group-happy” box is just going to cause trouble. On the other hand, having a double-standard legal system that treats the two types of person differently, would be rather silly as well. I don’t know what the resolution to this problem is!