"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
I try and think about this often.
I try and think about this often.
As a related aside, that's why I continue to find it odd that many people take their phones when they're using the bathroom. Just further limiting the few places (with the shower being #1) where circumstances does force your brain to review and assess like it clearly wants to do.
The overwhelming majority of humanity's problems, such as they might be described, stem from the biological drive to survive and procreate. The quip presupposes that man naturally has a room to sit quietly in; this is not the case. The procurement of a room to sit in requires a significant amount of effort. It can entail the securing of territory and building of the shelter oneself, or it can entail the education, advanced skill development, and daily labour required to pay to reap the results of other people having secured the territory and built the shelter. To say nothing of food, mating, and rearing of offspring.
Pascal was born well-to-do, so perhaps he was removed from the general human experience. He was provided with the room to sit quietly in by the efforts of others, and may never have had to work a day in his life, affording him the luxury to make that statement. He also did not marry or reproduce. If everyone had lived the life he lived, there would be no rooms to sit in and indeed no men to sit in them. Being charitable, I suppose it's true that if all mankind were to stop reproducing, there would shortly be no more problems for humanity on account of humanity no longer existing.
Pascal also stated...
> as we should always be, in the suffering of evils, in the deprivation of all the goods and pleasures of the senses, free from all the passions that work throughout the course of life, without ambition, without avarice, in the continual expectation of death
while going so far as rejecting medical care for an illness that eventually led to his death at a young 39. In other words, his attained enlightenment was suffering in the name of his religion to the point of dying. He certainly committed to his beliefs, but I don't find his form of enlightenment inspiring, and do not believe that humanity should strive to follow in his footsteps of fatal self-deprivation. The only way sitting quietly solves all of humanity's problems is if all of humanity commits to doing only that until they wither away and die without any pursuit of the things they need to survive. He framed it as giving up ambition and avarice, but even without ambition and avarice you will endure struggles merely to sustain yourself if you are not born into wealth. I, personally, am quite content dealing with those struggles and have no interest in solving them by dying prematurely as Pascal might prefer to do.
Yes, it's hyperbole, it literally will not get rid of all the problems but the ethos of the view is being conscious of your needs and your actions and you only truly get that by having the space to think. As opposed to just go go go and not taking a step back and implicitly treating your mind as a hostile place you need distraction from.
I'll throw in another quote that sits nicely with the Pascal quote, from Ursula Le Guin:
> Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
just discrimination can only come from being comfortable to be with your thoughts, which can, but is not limited to, happen in a quiet room
The second quote does not comport with Pascal, because Pascal was not advocating for a path that led to internal happiness, but rather the abandonment of the desire for happiness altogether. He believed that suffering on Earth was the purpose of being Christian and would lead to salvation through God.