Voltaire and Fools

Voltaire was one of history’s great thinkers, with many insightful quotes attributed to him. From those few below you can see that he had his common-sense hat on firmly. He captures in very few words a vital aspect of daily life that deserves our attention. We are in constant conflict with each other, often quite negative. Much of this conflict arises because we have a deep emotional need for certainty, to be right, a frequent topic of mine, and part of all four quotes. And it is also because we have raised self-deception to a fine art. We often believe, for example, that we are quite objective and have little or no need for certainty, views incomplete at best and wrong at worst.

To a greater or lesser degree, the quotes share the common theme of self-understanding and self-improvement. They express the hurdles we have created for ourselves, in part through the need for emotional certainty, a condition completely at odds with the way a constructive society can work. It also undermines healthy interpersonal conflict, ensuring only frustration and disrespectful action. And it just as easily compromises quality thinking and beneficial discourse. And perhaps the biggest problem of all---those afflicted by such adverse emotional and cognitive conditions live in near complete denial.

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere"

 The "chains" represent emotional capture. Because we are all snared to some degree, usually be different things, we are all fools to some degree. We are not unintelligent, but foolish in allowing the chains to exist and even grow. A chain is any position, view, value, belief, etc., held in an emotional death grip, one of complete certainty, and which generally leads to behavior detrimental to others. Reason and common sense have no place in this construct. Objectivity is compromised, often in the extreme. We live a challenged life, constantly wondering why we have so much trouble with people we disagree with, whose views we often find repugnant. Even those we care for can be the recipients of this unfortunate behavior. But we assure ourselves, as only those practiced at fooling themselves can, that it is all the others' fault.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd"

The world is in constant flux. Movement and change are inescapable, and are increasing in American society and elsewhere, leading us to try to find certainty somewhere, anywhere. We seek to reduce the fear arising from society's mounting upsets to stability, a significant one being more people who disagree with us or who do so more virulently. Past support systems that once offered a degree of stability are weak or non-existent. So, we may react to this instability by seeking, sometimes in desperation, for something solid to believe in, to hold us together. Lacking anything substantive in the way of real stability, we imagine that certainty will provide us emotional support, which it fails utterly to do. But it does ensure that any person or view threatening our fragile and near useless structure of solidity will be punished severely. 

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason"

We often unwittingly allow our prejudices to consume us. Having no idea of their existence, we self-righteously think we have none, a view held with certainty. But we have lots of them, which nearly always lead to bad outcomes for others who dislike the prejudicial messages we are sending. We like seeing ourselves as rational, our thinking and discourse untainted by the unpleasantness of prejudices. Acknowledging damaging and disrespectful prejudices upsets this vision, and must be denied or destroyed. This allows us to wander "happily" and blindly in an artificial world of our own creation, one in which true reason and common sense are absent. For prejudicial pyrotechnics, just ask a political partisan of one party about the moral condition of the other party, and then duck. Either party will do because the emotional construct of partisans of any stripe unites them more than they know, or would ever admit. 

"Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes"

Like prejudices, which we assuredly do not have, we are loaded with opinions, freely acknowledged and shared with abandon. Fine enough. The problem is not having opinions, which are seen by balanced folks as tentative. The problem is the emotional capture causing us to see them as Truth, not having a wisp of the tentative about them. They are not subject to honest and courageous critique, and are propounded with certainty. Validation? Evidence? Openness? Why do I need those when I KNOW my opinions are correct. As I was informed when an undergraduate at Berkeley many decades ago, "Whatever you feel is good." You feel your opinion is correct? So it is. A fool's errand. 

Chains, certainty, prejudices, and opinions may be the modern incarnation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Driven at root by fear, these produce little more than unhealthy conflict and damage to everyone around, including ourselves. They exist for us at some level because that is what we want. Some folks imagine that their undesirable behavior is justified because they are righteously indignant or angry about something. This justification allows them to act with little restraint, taking no responsibility for the bad outcomes of their actions. The emotional capture by the four "horsemen" makes us among the most dangerous fools.

"Great Passions Are Maladies Without Hope" Goethe

Some will find the title quote from Goethe disturbing. After all, aren’t we constantly regaled with, “Find your passion” and “Find your bliss”? Presumably, once this great identification occurs, you are on your way to Nirvana, or some such. Well, I’ll let that piece of “wisdom” pass for now, although I may assail it later in life.

My definition of passion is the potentially explosive melding of an idea and huge emotion. The frequent result is absolute certainty, which I addressed in an earlier post (“The Problem With Certainty”). This condition can lead potentially to great harm or, in some cases, to great benefit. Notwithstanding the possibility of benefits, my focus (and Goethe’s) is on the malign outcomes of great passion. I do not think all passion is bad, it is a ineradicable part of being human. But when it is bad, it is really bad. At its worst, the horror and suffering it perpetrates are indescribable. Think of Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Inquisition, witch-burners, Islamo-terrorists, and numberless of atrocity perpetrators who likely believed passionately, and with great self-righteousness, in their goals and methods.

Passionistas (forgive my dig) relish their absolute certainty, often seeming to obtain their identity from it. Naturally, given this level of emotional commitment, it practically guarantees dysfunctional conflict with friends, relatives, strangers on the street, the man in the moon, and anyone who has the temerity to disagree. The passionista cannot be wrong, or even have an incomplete view. Those who see the world differently are not only wrong on all counts, but evil as well, justifying any behavior, from simple name-calling to slaughter.

Beneficially passionate people may agree that Pol Pot-type excesses are horrific and a tragic part of passion. They cannot see that their passion may be a problem even though the goal is a good thing. The problem is not the goal, which may very well be admirable. The problem is the passion itself. For most folks passionate about something, a problematic identification may have occurred: the outcomes they seek may well have merged with their egos, their sense of self. This produces a staggering level of emotional commitment to the object of their passion. Anyone who does not hold the same view of the goal cannot be tolerated. That person’s very existence represents an assault, not just on the goal, but on them as persons, on their personal moral righteousness. If he were in his right mind, the passionista may well see that hostile treatment of those who disagree is unhelpful at best and wrong at worst. He is not in his right mind, but in his righteous mind. Trashing of those who differ is seen not only as necessary, but obligatory, because the other person opposes a wonderful thing.

Passionate folks often fail to see that their immense emotional commitment to and support for something automatically brings into existence an equal (or at least significant) level of passion against something----against ideas and people in conflict with their view, a violation of their often-espoused values of tolerance and inclusion. Passion against moves easily into rage, with unfortunate outcomes for those who disagree. The passionate person may do wonderful things at one level, but very unpleasant things at another level. He is animated by a possibly beneficial vision of the world backed up by near boundless anger.

I have a friend who is passionate about the rights of those in this country illegally. Although his goal of helping is admirable, his passion consumes him, and when he encounters another who does not agree, his anger and attacks are something to behold. His passion completely blinds him to the idea that he could have a laudable goal even while others might disagree with that goal, or with the implications of pursuing such a goal. Dissent is not possible and must be instantly and powerfully eradicated. He cannot allow divergent ideas to exist, a defining characteristic of many consumed by their passion.

Passions are “maladies without hope” because the passionista is committed completely, both intellectually and emotionally, to the absolute righteous of his idea and to his own personal purity. This identification is an unassailable barrier to inner reflection, objective thought, and balance. To avoid challenges and to assure himself of support for his fragile emotional state (see prior posts on fragility and anti-fragility), he engages mainly with others who share the same passion, thereby ensuring the false reality retains its “validity.”

Sadly, while passionistas may do considerable damage to those who disagree, they also damage themselves. Off balance and emotionally needy, they cannot engage reality on its own terms, living in an unhealthy artificial world, in great, unacknowledged fear that the whole edifice will collapse.

“All doctrines are to be suspected which are formed by our passions.”

David Hume

Wisdom

A big a topic for a small blog. So, I’d best think narrowly.

From Wikipedia: “Wisdom is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. There appears to be consensus that wisdom is associated with attributes such as compassion, experiential self-knowledge, non-attachment and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.”

The first sentence is familiar. Wisdom is understanding and acting on the world effectively, abilities usually arising over considerable time and often with considerable effort. This “aging” produces a broad and deep perspective that significantly enhances successful action. A wise person sees what is really important in a situation, sees where the leverage is. When confronted with a challenge, a wise person winnows down options quickly because of long experience in what works well and what does not. Wisdom often arises more through failure than success, lessons derided or feared by most folks.

Like Wu-wei, wisdom means accepting the world as it is and working within that, never trying to force an outcome. Not an either/or phenomenon, wisdom is a matter of degrees, and with no one being wise in all areas. Anyone can possess wisdom. In the definition’s sense, an exceptionally knowledgeable gardener, truck driver, attorney, or software programmer could be wise.

But wisdom must be about more than having knowledge and using it effectively to get what you want. The Nazis had great knowledge about how to kill millions of people in gas chambers, hardly wise actions. This reveals the importance of the definition’s second sentence, emphasizing traits very much a part of Eastern philosophical thought. Either directly or indirectly, these traits are concerned with the wellbeing of both self and others. Wisdom is about acting morally as well as practically. It is as much about managing our interactions with others in the most positive way as is it about accomplishments.

While many people might agree with this sentiment, experience tells me they are mostly unaware of its implications for acting wisely. After all, who among us does not want to be seen as both wise and compassionate! That is why, of the traits in the second sentence, I consider the most important to be self-knowledge. Without it, we act out our unconscious needs and desires, many of which are harmful to others. Since the story we tell ourselves that we are wise and compassionate is inviolate, we cannot see the harm we do. When others react badly, the false story must prevail. We defend ourselves or attack the other---hardly the stuff of wisdom. But even self-knowledge is not enough. It must be followed by changes in any behaviors that harm others.

We live within our constructed stories (nearly always laudable, and just as often false), as though asleep. Wittgenstein had a neat comment about that. “We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.” Sadly, few ever wake up. But for those who do, the benefits to them and others are significant and of great value to society as respect and attention to the wellbeing of others becomes the primary mode of interaction.

Finding wisdom may be impossible without recognizing that we exist within the context of something larger than ourselves. At its core, that “something” must be a set of values with the wellbeing of both self and others as its paramount element. The source of those values may be a religion or God, a clan or tribe or family, an ideology, or even an intellectual construct such as offered by Humanism. Implementing the values gives meaning and definition to our lives, and offers connections with others beyond our everyday, often self-centered existence. We transcend ourselves.

Wisdom arises with the conjunction of deep understanding of how the world really works with  application of our key moral values. The wise person lives a Wu-wei life. Her key values are implemented in all situations, including, and most rewardingly, those in which she is faced with hostile circumstances or people. She does not waver, her actions flow like water (effortless effort) no matter the obstructions, and she lives an enduringly positive life. Her commitment is to a higher purpose---to manage all interactions for the wellbeing of all.