Some drivers like the smell of petrol. I like how wind farms look and enjoy kissing my
girlfriend under electricity pylons. When supermarkets run out of bananas or avocados
shoppers complain. People in the late 19th century thought they never had it so good. There
are tribes in Papua New Guinea where it is customary for every boy to suck an older boy's
cock and swallow the semen. David Foster Wallace started getting annoyed when the cruise
liner staff didn't fold his bedsheets right. High quadriplegics sometimes say their condition
does not stop them living fully.
What is this mess? When you peel back every vision of the good life, you find some encultured
melange mixed with innate characteristics. No-one longs for the 1920s because no-one
remembers the 1920s. There were conservatives in the 1930s who wanted to "go back to the good
old days" when that meant 1880, just as there will be conservatives in the 2060s who want to
go back to now. If you are complaining today, then you are going to complain in utopia. If
you are unhappy now, or dissatisfied, then you will be in paradise, even if you design it
yourself. And it still won't be your fault. The problem with living in the world's most
functional democracy is that you have to take a lot of anti-depressants. Many men and women
were happier during WWII than in peacetime. If every country was like Switzerland I would
rejoice and then kill myself.
I feel happier when I finish pissing than I do after eating an entire chocolate cake. Bhutan
has a National Happiness Index and is one of the highest scorers in the world; the young
Bhutanese can't get out fast enough. When you give tribesmen phones they tend to browse
twitter and look at porn. Some people derive immense pleasure, strength, and meaning from
superhero films. Who decided everybody could be happy at once? Why does my dream of the good
life look like a travel advert? You want what we tell you to want. In the medieval era,
people's teeth slowly ground down because of rocks in their bread; if asked to rate their
meals after a day's labour, they would probably give a similar rating that you would in a
4-star restaurant. If you had a little more, would that be enough?
In Miyazaki's epic saga Nausicaä, the eponymous protagonist chooses a world of polluted
forests, warring kingdoms, and corrupted humanity over one of enlightened,
genetically-engineered stability. Why does that feel like the correct choice?
When my human morality is expanded at infinite scales it invariably breaks down. The cliché
that one death is a tragedy whilst a million is a statistic was not always true but has
become so with the advent of mass-media. Not expressing emotion at a foreign victim of war is
heartless, crying every day, even for the deaths of hundreds or thousands of strangers, is a
sign of mental illness. Even at merely global scales, morality is spiritually and cognitively
unmanageable. As of yet, no-one has proposed a compelling utopia, a detailed picture of
heaven, nor a sensible description of a hobby for eternity. Culture has no effect size in
social studies on human behaviour when we ignore countries with radically different cultures.
No-one cares about groups so comprehensively exterminated that not a single trace or living
memory remains. Do-gooders who ignore their families and devote their entire lives to charity
feel creepy.
Living a life of tradition and ritual removes the unbearable burden of expression; living a
life of cyclical repetition without boredom seems like malfunction. An aristocrat who can
hunt, fish, eat, sleep, and love, in a cycle for all eternity, is a species of plant. Endless
variety and newness seem exciting, and then exhausting and overwhelming. Calculating a life
to have just the right amount of variety and newness, and just the right amount of tradition
and ritual, seems arbitrary and artificial, in the same way someone who has servants toggling
an electric fan and electric heater to get the perfect heat can hardly be said to be "at one"
with nature. Hard-nosed technocrats often fall in love with ineffable beauty before
destroying it. Children raised sailing the world and having adventures escape to become
management consultants. You have inconsistent desires but refuse to admit this. Completing
reflective equilibrium from higher-order moral principles to the order one cuts one's
toenails would create a monster. No-one holds a moral view which would not alter given the
ability to foresee deeper, wider, longer term causal chains. Given enough foresight, we would
cease to be human.
Modern conservatives, like nationalists, never introspect and realise the good life is
actually in someone else's childhood. You spoil the moment if you think too much about it.
Thoughtlessness is a terrible crime. People fantasise about local communities but do not live
in them. What do you need to be true? Rural Slavs think their way of life is the best;
nothing is falsifiable except the claims of my enemies. No-one knows why people are equal in
moral worth. Regardless of politics, everyone lives like a moderate liberal except criminals.
What if my authentic, best self is to make you miserable?
As crime rates fall, people become more concerned about crime. The more we talk about mental
health, the worse it gets. There is no reason to make another community remember its dark and
heinous deeds if those deeds have nothing to do with us. Cause prioritisation is meaningless
when value is measured in priceless subjective moments: a pigeon dying in the street is
infinitely sad, and thus, in theory, cannot be rationally considered less important than a
hundred orphans burning to death in a fire. The fewer reasons an exam board gives for its
marks the less parents complain. Most people, when they reflect on the good life deeply, just
want to have tons of money. Forcing someone to eat ice cream is wrong unless, following a
bonk on the soft part of the head, they insist they now want to. My autistic friend wished he
had never been taught language. Anyone who disagrees with my vision of paradise is
brainwashed.
Despite all of the above, I can somehow discern between what appears a better or worse
world. Perhaps it is best to see value, however defined, as a kind of ray of light which is
constantly obscured by countless layers of dense cloud. Every now and then, the historical
conditions align, and light comes through onto my face. This is Shakespearean ethics. I trust
people of robust character. I like sensitive and well-expressed art, literature, and music.
Abraham Lincoln and supersonic air travel. Grandparents with their grandchildren;
unselfconscious students; hot sun, cool breeze, a peaceful swimming pool and distant
mountains. A bit of fisticuffs will do you good. We're the only ones here. There are
libraries fading into deserts I want to visit soon. A very large dam. In hindsight, those
were happy days. That was undoubtedly one of the worst periods of my life. And yet it is over
now, and the clouds part.
Bernard Williams memorably wrote that if aliens descended and insisted on utilitarian grounds
their lives were more important than ours, it would probably devolve into us or them. There
isn't any reason to explain why certain aspects of life need to be favoured. If it can be
explained then it can be compared, extrapolated, and destroyed. You might agree with me. You
might have agreed, had you been born in a completely different culture in a completely
different time. But if you don't then we will have a fight. If I lose that's the way it has
to be. I evidently cannot be reasoned with nor shamed. I do not believe in free will nor do I
believe reflection will produce reliable or consistent outcomes. I am willing to chain my
morality on deep and long causal chains; I am also willing to abandon said chains and embrace
randomness. Anything to see those patches of sunlight.
Dr. Alexander Thompson