Saturday, February 2, 2013

Excellence and Freedom Brings Self-Respect and Well-Being

"Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment." - Viktor Frankl


I've written about this several times: the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence is a mistranslation. The word should be the Greek word "eudaimonia," which means "well-being," or better, "human flourishing."

Of course the next question is: how do you get it? The Greeks had an answer to that: "arete," which translates as "excellence" (sometimes the word "virtue" is used, which translate as "the powers of Man").

And how do you get excellence? Through mastery of what you are good at. Developing your inborn talents to their fullest, which schools are supposed to do but but stumble around so much they rarely succeed at it. And to get that you have to have autonomy and there has to be meaning in what you are doing. Autonomy, mastery, meaning.

Aristotle knew arete existed but never could define it, because it varied from person to person. The Greeks did know what didn't bring well-being and flourishing, which is why they made Kakia ("badness")the enemy of arete. Kakia offered a life devoted to wealth and pleasure - and great wealth and great pleasure never bring well-being, just degradation).

Those three qualities are necessary to attain well-being and have a flourishing life.

Unfortunately, a lot of our society is set up to keep us from attaining those qualities.

Let's start with the public schools. Like most everyone else, I went to them. I didn't necessarily dislike them, but I was bored by them. And boredom is the first sign of a lack of autonomy and meaning - and without that those you'll not get mastery.

I was able to create my own autonomy by retreating into my imagination. In a word, I daydreamed. In my imagination I gained meaning and mastery. In real life, no, except the one time a friend and I made a bong out of a coffee pot when we were 17.

In fact, more than once I was humiliated in school when I was very young - six or so. I was just stunned by it. I'm not going go into it, but I could not believe what happened to me. And it was done by teachers, not the other students. And is that what is supposed to happen in school - the humiliation of students?

I have seen the humiliation of students even today. The one thing all school shooters have in common is that they have been humiliated (bullied by other students) and got revenge on them. This is caused by throwing a bunch of strange kids together in the warehouses known as the public schools. (As one teenage school shooter said, "The world has wronged me, and I could take it no more.")

Developing your talents? What a joke. Schools are great at it if you're an athlete. Otherwise, forget it. You have to figure out on your own what your talents are, and that can be pretty hard. If schools aren't going to going to help you and in fact hinder many kids (the drop-out rate is 50%), then what the Hell good is school?

Then we have what passes for jobs today. The jobs pay nothing unless you are one of the "cognitive elite" who can do what is called STEM - science, technology, engineering, math. Otherwise, you're pretty much screwed.

This lack of high-paying jobs is caused by the exact same thing that has damaged the schools - interference by the government. When the government interferes in what is none of its business, it always damages and destroys and never helps.

When government exceeds its proper bounds it abuses, oppresses and humiliates people. It takes away their autonomy and freedom. It takes away the meaning and purpose of their lives, and makes it hard for people to master anything.

For all practical purposes, bloated government can be described in one sentence: its purpose, however unwittingly, is to humiliate you. And humiliation is always followed by revenge, which is why all bloated governments always fall.

To expand on things a bit, the purpose of excessive government is to take away your freedom, your autonomy, your ability to master many of the things you want to be, and therefore to take away any meaning to your life. It's Hubris, which is always followed by Nemesis.

The government's attempts to violate every one of the Bill of Rights - the right to defend yourself, the right to not be illegally searched, the right to free speech. Unless stopped, this contempt governments show the citizens will always get worse. It will never get better on its own. As Edmund Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

For that matter, the more the wealthy use the government to steal people's money, and the more impoverished people become, the worse all problems become - the lack of meaning and purpose, the lack of autonomy and freedom, and the lack of developing your talents and mastering them.

The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they connected economic and political freedom with human flourishing and well-being and developing your talents.


"If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not people or objects." - Albert Einsteain

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