One may disagree with Kofuku-no-Kagaku in various things, but in this at least they hit the bullseye: You can't go off and create Utopia until you have thoroughly marinated in happiness yourself. Even if you are running over with happiness and your family and workplace sparkle with it, you still face an unimaginably harder task to transform society. Even a small town would be a challenge literally orders of magnitude greater.
It is a grotesque arrogance when someone who has no true understanding of happiness in their own everyday circumstances, still think they are qualified to change society in fundamental ways in order to increase the happiness of the populace. Go back to first grade! Find out what actually causes happiness and misery, find it out from hands-on experience, study your own life and those right around you, and learn. Then you can cautiously start talking. When you inspire joy and trust by simply being present, then you can show others the way.
5 comments:
That's true. Very few of us pay much attention to what makes us happy. I think I would find, if I did pay attention, that happiness comes most often in small doses from relatively insignificant events or things.
"It is a grotesque arrogance when someone who has no true understanding of happiness in their own everyday circumstances, still think they are qualified to change society in fundamental ways in order to increase the happiness of the populace."
Sorta reminds me of "Oh, I don't need to bother learning how to land a 767, just show me how to fly it..."
No?
Well, if one is a terrorist then there is no need to know how to land...
But the real tragedy, as I see it, is that there are people who fervently wish to help those they are hurting. They just cannot sit still and watch the misery and injustice around them, they simply have to act. Unfortunately they are like someone driving on ice for the first time: What they expect to happen is not what happens. Things get out of control, and the more force they use to correct past mistakes, the greater the future mistakes.
Of course you are correct, but in the darkest sense, isn't the terrorist just a more 'honest' version ('honest' is probably inappropriate)... the logical end extreme result, of the 'do gooder' who attempts to change people 'for their own good'? The logical conclusion of unswervingly continuing to push people into making 'changes' they don't understand or agree with, is that "Things get out of control, and the more force they use to correct past mistakes, the greater the future mistakes."
All those forced changes, they don't create order and harmony, but disorder and disharmony - and even resulting honest choices and actions on bystanders parts, are based on false actions, false information conveyed through artificially prodding others to act without understanding and choice... and that disharmony spreads like bullets shot into a pond.
If you can "... inspire joy and trust by simply being present, then you can show others the way." and education can be engaged in, real transformations occur, real choices resulting in real changes, and true information is conveyed to onlookers, and real harmony generates and spreads like an expanding and deepening musical chord.
That is true change, the other only a false, and destructive, copy. The surface appearance of change is tempting to try... but... temptation and good intentions don't lead to any place we want to visit.
Unfortunately this effect applies no matter which political group you align with, although some encourage it less than others. But I see Bob accidentally answered this already without having read it. ...it is not possible to save others unless we have first saved ourselves. Needless to say, horizontal Republicans will not save us from horizontal Democrats. Don't you sometimes get the impression that people's guiding spirits, angels or whatever, have been talking to each other before they talk to us...
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