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By practical, we are saying it ought to work at the level
most of us live, that practicing it should only make us better at it, and
that we should be able to learn enough about how and why it works to be
able to pass that on to our children without much outside help and advice,
and no coercion. In other words, it ought to be something
self-evident and self asserting, once accepted and understood.
Like all self-evidently true, nature-derived practices,
Practical Hedonism suffers a failure to generate aggressive parasitic
memes. The ability to
demonstrate something as true removes that pressure from all scientific
knowledge. There is no need to "cover up" such ideas with coercive
practices, no urge to gather crowds together in emotional assemblages and
get them fired up to go on the attack. The only hiding is from such
people, once they have decided your proposals threaten their own beliefs,
and that you are endangering their memeplexes with your evidence-laden
theories.
What kind of evidence supports Practical Hedonism? Think of
pleasure and pain as corrective guides. Pleasure is a reward (you will do
more of what brings pleasure) and pain is a corrective warning (you will
avoid experiencing pain by doing less of whatever incites it). With that
in mind, if you have never struck your thumb with a hammer, consider doing
so now (or, better, if you have never done that, consider something
similar you have done). You know the feeling of smashed flesh, and the
shock of seeing your own spattering blood. The result was either the
giving up ever using a hammer again, or determination to learn how to
control the thing and to keep your fingers and thumb out of the way while
driving nails. You did not continue on in exactly the same way
while never giving your pain another thought.
Consider purposefully choosing between these:
|
Pains |
Pleasures |
| Allowing a truck to drive
slowly over your toes. |
Eating the most luscious
example of your favorite fruit you have ever tasted. |
| Diving into a pond filled with
alligators and allowing yourself to be eaten alive. |
You have finally succeeded at
the one ambition that has driven you all your life, and now the
world recognizes you as a master. |
| Falling from the tenth floor
of a building onto a crowded city street. |
The boss gave you praises
along with a raise you had never asked for. |
| Listening to someone discuss
something you completely disagree with, while you are forced to
remain completely silent. |
You have just remembered the
name of that song that has been going around in your mind, and have
now located it on an album so you can hear the whole thing. |
| Getting captured and raped by
a gorilla who does not care which sex you are. |
That tedious book took you so
long to read and, now that you have thought about it, you suddenly
understand what it was all about and want to read it again. |
Yeah, we know: Pleasure is about sex and nothing else,
right? That's what they taught in church, the lusts of the flesh, the
seeking of earthly knowledge, the harlots and witches and daughters
knowing their father. I feel sorry to have to inform you that there are
many pleasures this world has to offer, that most of them have nothing to
do with sex, lust, lasciviousness, or whatever your favorite
congregationally approved evil happens to be.
Most pleasures require work to get the most out of them;
that is why pleasure is called a "reward". You earn pleasure by doing
things that will gain it for you. Things handed you in the name of
pleasure quickly beget boredom and an urge to (to WHAT?) go find some way
to earn yourself some pleasure. That makes you aware of another one
of Practical Hedonism's fundamental rules: You gain
 pleasure
by doing, sometimes for others, sometimes for yourself, sometimes for your
behavior (such as while acting responsibly) and sometimes for enduring
pain while learning to master a tool or instrument, a subject of study, or
the wooing of a potential mate. Pain that feels like pleasure.
And, by enduring such kinds of pain, you become aware of
another rule: Pain with a goal begets pleasure upon achievement. Pain with
no goal gets you an education or, failing that, maimed or dead. Pleasure
with no associated goal begets, in one way or another, pain or boredom.
That explains why those who have made great achievements in their lives
seldom stop there, but go on to find another goal and seek new pleasures
as a result of accomplishing that. Those who fail to do so are made
noteworthy by the crashes they make when their success has ended and the
bottom has fallen out from their lives. It is not the drive for money and
riches, as we get told in our churches. It is the simple pleasure of
achievement that spurs self-actualized people onward. The true measure of
success, then, is in the amount of ongoing pleasure one enjoys.
Those who crash after their great achievements have
generally been unaware of a primary rule Practical Hedonism enforces:
Making your biggest accomplishments first will enable the lesser ones.
Their big success behind them, the feeling that smaller accomplishments
are too inconsequential to bother with, accompanied by a need to answer to
the demands of managers and other handlers, leaves such people with a
sense of directionlessness and loss of control. Life becomes like running
fast just to stay in one spot. They forget, or are caused to forget, their
drive is not toward fame and money, but toward pleasure as a reward, and
not pleasure as an end in itself.
Even the smallest achievements are rewarded with pleasure:
Finally getting that troublesome sentence to say exactly what you wanted
it to say. Expressing an opinion to someone, and having them appreciate
the way you showed them a new way to see some thing. The first time your
baby takes her first step or two without your help. All of them are just
minor reinforcements of the idea that doing right brings pleasure, and
doing wrong brings pain: What if that sentence still awaits that perfect
expression? What if that person scolded you, and demanded to know how
you'd dare to say something like that? What if your child had tripped and
gotten hurt because of your failure to observe all the hazards where you
were?
Never misunderstand there is something to condemn about
unearned pleasure. There's not. Pleasures one may bestow upon another as a
gift must somehow have been earned in order to be deserved, and that is
not something for others who are uninvolved to consider. It is nobody
else's business. The natural reluctance of a person's body and flagging
spirits are enough condemnation for any kind of pleasure, for they are
signs that pleasure has evaporated and that what might once have been
pleasurable has now become something to be endured.
What you learn as a result of applying pleasure versus pain
to the Practical Hedonism that you have, perhaps unwittingly, been
practicing all your own life is what guides all of us in spite of what
sex-starved preachers and their congregations might claim. Hedonism
competes with organized religions in every aspect. In any study of
Practical Hedonism, you will learn that pain is the cost of pleasure,
whether pain comes beforehand or after, and so pain is a personal measure
of pleasure's worth to any one of us. You will seldom find any case where
this is not true, given a wide understanding of definitions of pain,
including that pain may be a cost paid by others made to suffer from
pleasure in which they had no part. It is from understanding this that
morality arises from Practical Hedonism in a fashion superior to any
organized religion.
With no evidentiary support for their side, organized
religions resort to vilifying all their opponents, and to choosing the
easiest target on their strongest competitors to distract attention away
from the truth. Humans have always had problems dealing with their sexual
natures, and organized religions have all found that to be a convenient
strawman to keep their flocks in the dark by telling them the opposite of
the truth, and by avoiding any mention about hedonism's strong points.
Omitting facts to uphold a doctrine is a form of lying. To describe events
that never happened, places that don't exist, consequences that never
occur, expressions never spoken or written, and then use those to vilify
competing ideas is also a form of lying.
Practical Hedonism demands that pleasure be seen and
understood as reward, and pain works to steer us toward pleasure by
avoidance. There remains one aspect of this that, being not so obvious,
allows the religionists to get away with their scam. We saw a hint about
it earlier, but it needs to be clarified.
We can use the religionists' fetish about sexual lust for
our own examples, since most readers will have dreamed about it enough
times to have a pretty complete picture (accurate or not) about that
subject.
We also have plenty of other material from which to draw
examples, but it all boils down to one picture: Performing any kind of
action beyond the point of maximal familiarity begins to feel laborious. A
musician may gain national prominence, fame, more money than he or she can
possibly spend in several lifetimes, and then discover the requirement to
continue the circuit while following the same frenzied routine leads to
what is known as burnout. You may love to drive across country, see where
new roads lead, and think, "I wish I could earn my living this way."
Succeed at gaining your wish, and then start counting down to the point
where you start wishing to have your old life back again, or start
thinking, "There must be some better way to earn a living than at this
boring job." Lay yourself down for a nap, and ponder what it would be like
to never have to get back up. Ponder further, about what it would be like
to be made to stay asleep, no matter how demanding is your present urge
for some rest, long after your body has revived and is once more ready for
action.
Sexual activity, whether called lust, lasciviousness, or
demonized by any other name, does not escape from nature's rules. Whether
a dream or a nightmare, to be surrounded by panting, lust-filled naked
humans ready to perform your every desire, so many they reach to all the
horizons, each bringing your wishes in the form of drinks, luscious
desserts, and ribald fantasies would soon convince any one of us that the
religious picture results more from imagination than practical reality.
Such a picture of hedonism is not practical by any means, however driven
one might feel at any given instant in time.
It is that instant in time that you feel driven by sexual
impulses, however, that your preacher (by whatever terminology he gets
designated in your cult or sect) finds so unsettling as to be worth the
many fiery sermons he has given about it. It is when your attention gets
turned by natural impulses toward unearned pleasures and self
gratification the importance of his message within your mind is most
threatened.
Practical Hedonists must always be aware of pain's true
role in human life: to guide us toward pleasurable circumstances. In that
vein, pain may be endured for the sake of expected or hoped for greater
pleasure. The preachers promise us Heaven, but we cannot live to collect
their debt to us, however much pleasure we forestall in consideration for
their promise. Those of us fortunate enough to still recall our early
dreams, those that sang to us a siren's wail to direct us toward what
seemed like destiny and begat a yearning for accomplishment in one field
or another, may also realize for what we gave up those dreams.
"I wanted to be a nurse, but I
 married
you instead."
"They told me I showed promise early on, but Dad talked me
into giving up my impractical dream to take over his business."
"I played cops and robbers all the time as a kid. I wanted
to be a policeman, but being a doctor pays several times what I could earn
doing that."
I'll bet every one of us could write pages of similar
examples, just from the experiences of people we know. We dream the dream,
and then reality sets in and we make up excuses for never having tried.
What steers us away from our dreams is not fear of failure nor of success;
it is not a lack of talent, however much people laughed at you when you
told them about your dream; it is most likely not whatever excuse you give
for your own failure. It is the sense of expected pain, pain that we have
no ideas about how bad it will feel, nor how to handle it to help us gain
accomplishments toward our dreams. Practical Hedonism demands that pain
should steer us toward pleasure. We already dream about the pleasure of
success. We cannot perceive how the expected pain will help us get there.
That inability plays a large part in the generation of natural reluctance
to perform. Other opportunities compete and offer rewards that seem more
immediate. We choose, then live to regret or forget.
An inability to prioritize and plan also plays a large
role. An ability to establish priorities is a requirement for any kind of
accomplishment and a large part of planning. Inability to perceive what
steps any accomplishment will require one to take causes the foreseeable
pain to appear substantial and as a solid block, rather than segmented
into smaller, easily endured portions that mark each step on a chosen
path. Pain arrives as stress, injuries, soreness, boredom, threats from
others, fear, loss, and more, all of which absence of planning allows to
appear as though it will be too much for anyone to handle. Planning,
tentative prediction, and assessments made of pain to be expected at each
foreseeable step will allow anyone to realize how others have conquered
their dreams and made them into realities.
As a nation, The United States of America was founded upon
practical hedonistic principles, with a warning about how the freedom
required for pursuing those principles and putting them into practice
could be lost. That freedom has been lost to us, as organized religion has
encroached upon the pursuit of happiness and demonized it out of vogue.
The result of that is more than just the increasing rates of crime,
violence, and murders, it is also the increase in the general level of
stress and angst within our population, our increasing fear of each other
and of strangers, divisiveness rather than unity, and an absence of a
sense of direction at the personal level as well as for our country as a
whole.
I would suggest we take steps to cure that, by becoming
cognizant of the value Practical Hedonism offers to each and every person,
that we should understand how it works, and what it offers as guidance so
that we each can pursue the most enjoyable life of which we are personally
capable, that we each gain the sense of purpose that self-awareness
enables, and from that become aware of the harm we have done to ourselves
and to each other as a result of our falsely guilt-inspired, misdirected
avoidance of this.
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