Happiness & utopia - a brief new summary of my philosophy

Our lives progress from survival to happiness, like trees establishing roots and leaves, then producing flowers and fruit. Indeed, the implicit meaning of life is happiness because that motivation underlies all our endeavours. Even self-sacrifice makes others happier and fulfils some of our own potential.

There are two categories of happiness—being, which includes positive states such as serenity and ecstasy, and doing, which includes positive activities such as relationship and purpose. Both are great, but being is innate and reliable, whereas doing is circumstantial and fleeting. Therefore, we need to prioritise being until it is well-understood, otherwise we will subconsciously seek its reliability in unreliable forms.

Nevertheless, society promotes doing, as if it the only option, so we become addicted to doing. Then, due to the natural limitations of action, we sometimes fail to achieve our goals or we harm others in the process. The ensuing judgement of ourselves and others fuels a vicious circle of desperate and conflicted action. But if we stop leaking energy into society’s illusory priorities, the energy returns to its source, and we behold the fullness and innocence of being. Thereafter, doing augments our innate happiness without the previous addiction, harm, and waste.

However, action in the world also leads us to encounter others’ suffering. And since happiness entails sensitivity, this encounter contaminates our own happiness, and we feel drawn to help. Since globalisation has brought expanded awareness about the plight of others, we eventually realise that we need to create a worldwide utopia.

Creating utopia is easy. Steven Pinker points out that we have already reduced extreme poverty from 30% to 10% in only 30 years. If we stay tuned into the goodwill of being, rather than fighting over conflicting methods, progress can accelerate and diversify.

Objections to this theory are often just retransmissions of received societal illusions. This activity is a natural consequence of our circumscribed predicament. We have only experienced this one world and this one epoch. Lacking an instruction manual, humankind had to wander in the dark, so falls were inevitable. Therefore, negative conclusions about human nature and negative extrapolations about our potential are unfair. And it seems strange that when we gaze upon nature and the universe, we often see everything as good, except our own species. Indeed, negative evidence is biased because it comes from a planetary sample size of one in an otherwise positive universe.

Objectivity dawns as soon as we question our context, goals, and methods. The current context is a deluded but improving world, so if we question society’s illusory priorities, the hindrance to further improvement can be removed. Our goals are survival then happiness, so if we complete the survival stage for everybody, then we can fully realise happiness. Our methods are currently based on the belief that happiness is dependent on effort and goodness, so if we drop that, then energy will be released into being ourselves and cooperating naturally. 

I see clearing skies ahead.