>No, happiness is the result of making others happy.
If only it was that easy. There are very self-content (happy) people who make others miserable.
If only it was that easy. There are very self-content (happy) people who make others miserable.
Well, I say they are truly happy, doing the thing they enjoy most inflicting pain.
> doing the thing they enjoy most inflicting pain
I'm not going to insult your intelligence by listing known sadists and sociopaths with childhood trauma or brain damage -- from serial killers to Hitler, you name 'em... but do you know of examples where no damage could be found? I haven't even heard of that once, nowhere in pyschological literature. And all the truly happy people I've known have been kind. All the cruel people I've known are weak and never really at ease. Your "I say" isn't even a "in my experience", you can't even commit that much.
> I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
-- Leo Rosten
This matches my experience. It's not the argument, it's the summary of it.
Saints were usually not contented people. Quite the opposite. Everything I have ever read indicates they felt tormented by things like sexually explicit dreams. To be canonized and officially become a saint, you have to be a martyr, iirc.
There are people who get tortured by life and "do the right thing" -- do things the world admires as selfless, morally righteous etc. And then there are people who get tortured and decide to hurt others and blame it on what happened to them.
Some people simply are born without a conscience or sense of empathy, etc. Sometimes, they are raised by people able to help them understand that behaving badly will eventually come back to bite you and they manage to be decent people.
Sometimes they aren't.
I have raised two special needs children. I've read up on brain differences and other pertinent things. I have a child who has no innate sense of empathy or a conscience, etc. I was able to help him understand "What goes around, comes around. So if you want good people in your life long term, you need to treat them right."
In part because of that background, I have a tendency to attract young people who are wired differently. It has gotten me repeatedly burned. Being kind because they have a sob story has not helped these people become better people. They took advantage of my kindness and generosity. They had no plans whatsoever to treat me well because I had been good to them.
I also have a sob story. Most of the world has zero sympathy. It doesn't get me the kind of support these users have managed to get.
I don't fully understand that. Presumably, it's at least in part because I'm not enough of a user to run around playing the victim card.
I've also known people from cushy backgrounds who, by all accounts, have never seriously suffered in life. Instead of being kind, compassionate and loving people, they were selfish, lazy, impatient, thought everything should go their way with minimal effort on their part etc because that's how their life had always worked.
Good people are often people who have suffered terribly and took that as a lesson in having compassion for others. They aren't necessarily contented people. They aren't necessarily happy.
Plenty of people feel perfectly happy with treating other people badly and either justifying it as "Well, I was hurt first" or they simply expect it as their due in life.
I've known some really good people. I've also known at least one genuine sadist who intentionally fucked me over for shits and grins after I was incredibly kind, supportive and generous to them.
But I'm sure you don't actually want to debate this or talk about facts. Your mind is made up and will not be changed.
My mind was changed by first-hand experience with people who did not want to change. They enjoyed being cruel and had endless justifications for why they couldn't afford to change. But when push came to shove, the real reason is they don't want to change. They enjoy hurting other people and taking advantage of others helps provide them a much more materially comfortable life than I have ever had. And their comfort and personal pleasure is the only thing they care about.
Have a nice day. I don't intend to discuss this further with you.
They love it when people promote the kind of dumb ideas you are promoting because it helps them get away with figurative and possibly literal murder indefinitely.
At no point will they ever actually have any compassion for anyone else. They talk a lot about the importance of caring in order to manipulate fools into catering to their whims. They absolutely don't care about anyone at all except themselves, not for a single nanosecond. Their claims that they care are all entirely fabricated BS. They laugh up their sleeve that anyone believes this shit from them.
Promoting the idea that such people aren't truly happy is both clueless and enabling. It helps them keep victimizing everyone they interact with without negative consequences while they play the victim card, pretend to not know how to behave better due to an unfortunate childhood etc ad nauseum ad infinity.
> Promoting the idea that such people aren't truly happy is both clueless and enabling.
You extrapolate so much from that. I also think Hitler wasn't truly happy, that doesn't mean I have more sympathy for him than for his victims. But I also wouldn't be shamed into unseeing what I see.
The adjective "clueless" doesn't move me at all, show, don't tell.
> It helps them keep victimizing everyone they interact with without negative consequences while they play the victim card
No, the victim card is what enables that. That they're deeply unhappy and getting a temporary fix by abusing others because at the core of their person is a howling, empty landscape, an abyss -- which, armchair simplification or not, is what I am talking about -- doesn't even come up.
If they are content and happy with their lives, and enjoy what they do (inflicting pain), then for all its worth, it is happiness.
Happiness is simply being happy (or, if you want, content and enjoying yourself).
If you do that by inflicting unhappiness, or by depriving others of things, etc, it's still happiness.
There's no part of the happiness definition that says it's incompatible to with "unhappiness to result in others". That might be part of Bhudism or Christianity etc, but it's not some given of human nature.
There are things that are true because they fit the proper description and there are people who use "No True Scotsman" because they don't want to learn the truth.
[Editing because I can't reply for a while]: The dictionary writers are not the definitive masters of knowledge. What I am teaching here is (obviously) not only unknown to most people but actively denied by most.
Happiness is an internal upwelling of feeling. Pleasure is a physical sensation. They are not the same. That is why a person can be unhappy but still experience pleasure and why a person with poor life circumstances can still be happy.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/happiness
Happiness: a) a state of well-being and contentment b) a pleasurable or satisfying experience
No where does it say that it comes from making others happy(which again, this is in itself illogical). Also, you claim many times that "sadistic pleasure" isn't happiness, but that clearly contradicts the second definition of happiness. You are free to misunderstand happiness as much as you like, but happiness has a meaning and trying to force definitions from your own universe down other people's throat and denying other's doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
Words have commonly understood and dictionary meanings.
Not some meanings you or some other person with a strong opinion gives them.
And the standard meaning of happiness doesn't include "not inflicting pain to others" as a requisite.
>Happiness is an internal upwelling of feeling. Pleasure is a physical sensation. They are not the same.
That's just pseudo-profound hocus pocus.
In fact the nuance goes even deeper: if you think you have the upper moral superiority, you could even think you do good, and are totally justified to feel happy, while inflicting untold pain on others (e.g. if you're a Nazi supporter hunting Jews, which you think betters mankinds).
So, it's not just that you can be happy inflicting pain because you're sadist and enjoy it, but also because you think you do something very good and laudable by inflicting said pain!
And, a third possibility, is that you could very happy with "an internal upwelling of feeling" because you got what you want, and your personal life and relationships go great, while still inflicting tremendous pain, if it's to people you don't even care about, and never spend a moment thinking about them (e.g. you're a rich person with a perfect family life whose riches depend on your minions exploiting lower classes which you never personally meet, and could not care less about).
How's that for nuance?
You are too stupid to know how stupid you are.
Is that you, McArthur Wheeler? Dunning & Kruger send their appreciation for inspiring their groundbreaking work.