Here’s where I describe the “good.” There is no such thing as the good. A healthy psyche will have a baseline positive, life-affirming feeling. But a healthy psyche will still be complex – from life’s infinite stimuli and their effects that make the brain – and will value all sorts of things that can have no intrinsic or objective meaning of value or good (such as old movies or purely physical sex). A healthy psyche must start, in pre-birth and birth, from love, which is a feeling that will radiate outward to Life, but that complexity and its effects will limit how far that love will go, to whom and to what. Bertrand Russell wrote that the ancient saints who claimed to love all living creatures including vermin such as a louse were simply faking beatific feelings. You can’t love a louse or a tick. Can you really love self-satisfied, aggressively obnoxious haters or murderers? A whiner? From these compromises of complexity and love, a definition of the best “good” is discolored.
Ayn Rand was
certain that the good is “that which is proper to the life of a rational being,”
and that the “two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational
being are: thinking and productive work.”* Sam Harris,** human expanding
universe of all-knowing, is certain there must be an objective science of
morality that is based on the maximization of “well being.” Rand’s “rational”
must always die in the idiosyncratic. Is it rationally “productive” to
manufacture methamphetamine and sell it to eighteen-year-olds? If Albert
Einstein, Thomas Edison, Aristotle and I were stranded on a desert island with
one last piece of chicken between us, would it be rational that I’d want to
live to the sacrifice of these geniuses?
Harris’s
concept dies because well-being has no meaning and because its meaninglessness
is statistical not cardinal: what aids the lives of the majority.
I have recently
seen, for a few sessions, two women who believe they are good, value the good
and know the good. I mention these two because neither can keep a job owing to her
paranoid sensitivity and social atrophy; both actually hate their adult
children (“fucker” and “loser”), children whom they obviously warped in the poison
atmosphere of their personality disorders. Both are blind, if “sight” includes
seeing the world without a ready prejudgment of all people, and not having a baseline of chronic dissonant music running through their nervous system. If these women
know and live the good, then what are we?
I would say
that however much organic, unrelieved pain is embedded in our systems from birth
and childhood, creates structural limitations on our sense of love and hate, happiness and dysphoria, good and bad – completely
irrespective of our beliefs, our reaction-formation and Pollyanna-ish defenses,
our desire to love and to be good. A psychopath, all fire, pain and scar from
birth, may smile the day through, enjoy a fine meal, yet will be the anti-matter of the
world. A dysthymic*** person, always constricted by subtle pain, won’t be able to
love as much and will have a correspondingly diluted moral sense. This can be
checked out, if you look deep inside, feel the meanings of your molecular mess.****
Conclusion: Maybe there is a good. It would be owned by the one healthy person out there. The rest of us, not so much.
Conclusion: Maybe there is a good. It would be owned by the one healthy person out there. The rest of us, not so much.
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Image: Ayn Rand
**** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_10.html.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.