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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, July 21-27, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Fear of happiness
Some major cultures and some individuals mistrust happiness (see article for reasons)-- if happiness is not a major value, how does this affect ethics/utilitarianism?
This seems to me like learned helplessness, which is probably a "farmer" adaptation. In my opinion, hapiness is always good for the individual, but sometimes my unhappiness may benefit the rest of the tribe, so there can be a cultural norm against happiness. And if other people punish you for happiness, you will learn that happiness is actually bad for you, and rationalize some wise reasons for it, or the culture will already provide you with ready rationalizations.
How is individual happiness bad for society? While people are enjoying sex at their homes, churches and supermarkets are empty.
It's not just that-- I go with Wilhelm Reich in the idea that getting people to give up harmless pleasures is a way of getting more extensive control of them.
Getting people to wear uncomfortable clothes or give up sleep for no good reason is also a way of getting them to overwork or get themselves killed for your purposes.
Making people give up sleep is a traditional method of reducing their intelligence, so they are less likely to see through the bullshit or design an escape plan. Every decent cult does this to their new members.
But reducing their attention by uncomfortable clothes -- that's subtle!
Either way, seems to me this is not about pleasure per se, but rather about reducing mental abilities using unpleasant means. There are also pleasant things that reduce mental abilities, such as singing or praying together, though. It would be interesting to have data about how this correlates with the "ban on happiness" -- whether cultures opposed to happiness consistently oppose both "anti-system" and "pro-system" happiness, or whether the ban on "anti-social" happiness is used as a motivation to engage more in the "pro-system" happiness.
If your first paragraph was true, wouldn't people continue to feel happy but just not show it? I feel like unhappiness must be adaptive (even without considering social effects) at least in some cases.
That gets into Hansen's theories about hypocrisy-- sometimes it's easier to believe the mask one is wearing is one's real self. And this overlaps what Vassar has said (as I understand him) about some people trusting what society says about what a person ought to be, rather than taking the light and flexible approach to language that the majority of people do. (Translation: being a geek can be being a sucker.)
I think that secret happiness is a real thing. Some people take pleasure in complaining, enjoy being passively aggressive about something, etc., but of course they would publicly deny it.
On the other hand, I agree that in some situations, unhappiness may be adaptive. Evolution does not care about our values.
There are other categories of secret happiness-- enjoying low status or otherwise deprecated pleasures and schadenfreude about high status people. Either of those could have social support, but sometimes they don't.
We could also say that the rewarded by it. Like most addictions enjoyment doesn't tend to be a part of it (after enough time).
Arguably, many consequentialists already fall in to this category. If you are unsettled by the image of a universe composed entirely of undifferentiated orgasmium, then it's a fair bet that happiness is not your (only) terminal value. To return to a common sentiment, "I don't want to maximize my happiness, I want to maximize my awesomeness."
That said, happiness is usually of some value to students of ethics. A system in which it had zero value could conceivably still be pretty happy for instrumental reasons, since happiness makes humans more efficient in the pursuit of most things that we can expect to be valued. Once you start creating non-human entities from the ground up, you would expect happiness to become rare, although not necessarily to be replaced with misery. (The paperclipper is such a force.)
Happiness can mean quite a lot of different things to different people. Even in the a single culture like the US the average 25 year old means something different with the term than the average 50 year old.
The article makes it even more worse by conflating joy and happiness. Furthermore translation of words over cultural boundaries is going to add additional challenges.
The article makes it even more worse by conflating joy and happiness.
Many articles that talk about happiness do that, including the often cited paper about how supposedly the connection between income and happiness breaks down at a certain level.
Yes, and as far as that argument goes I think the case ifs good that the connection between some forms of happiness breaks down while it doesn't for other forms.
That people do not value as the sole terminal goal is obvious by the high number of people unwilling to wirebrain themselves, that is to place their brain into a mechanical and chemical device that provides with the maximum pleasure biochemistry allows.
As members of this site like to forget: Homo Sapiens is not a rational species but a product of evolution and thus only a program that runs its course.