Ignorance Really Is Bliss

Something has struck me in the last few days, as a result of a few things converging: first and foremost, I've been re-reading the most recent posts the colonel and I have put up. Secondly, a comment was made on one of my posts about Truth/truth, and why we believed it could actually exist - which went especially well with the Lao Tzu quote the colonel ended one of his posts with, and the ideas he put forth in the same post.

My realization was this: perhaps what I was describing was not a universal at all, but was instead my personal conception of the universal. As Kierkegaard put it in Fear and Trembling, "the single individual is the particular that has its telos in the universal, and the individual's ethical task is always to express himself in this, to abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal." Perhaps there was no Truth (in a universal sense) at all. I'm inclined to believe that it was, in fact, merely personal truth. Striving for Peace or happiness or enlightenment or whatever you may call it is a personal struggle - though that doesn't mean, necessarily, that it is an isolated one.

All of this, in turn, led me to ask how I define happiness. What would it even mean for someone to be personally happy? In a book I read recently entitled The High Price of Materialism, Tim Kasser seems to believe that happiness in today's society is equated to materialistic values (which is to say the acquisition of wealth, possessions and prestige). This becomes a problem because it structures both how happiness is defined and the shape an attempt to attain it must take. The disconnect is that happiness now seems to be a consumer good - it is something you can buy as long as you have the money for it, and the catch here is that you always need more money to buy more happiness since any happiness or satisfaction derived from purely materialistic triumphs is ephemeral at best. It is no longer the qualitative symbolic happiness that matters. Instead, we value only the quantitative amount of happiness we can purchase - which is always inadequate.

To wrap things up: Maybe ignorance really is bliss. What if the way to happiness is precisely by not knowing what it is or how to get there? Maybe what I should be doing here, for myself and for anyone else who cares to follow the occasionally lucid ramblings I put up, is defining what happiness is not. To try and say what it is would be to make the exact same mistake that materialism makes: it structures not only how happiness is defined, but also structures how you would get there.

-the ambassador