Rights and opportunities

So what’s the difference? The difference is between granting a right to an endeavor, an experiment, an effort, a labor, vs granting an actual outcome. No one, least of all the government, has the authority to grant anyone the right to a specific life outcome. Especially such a great and difficult and important matter as “a happy life”. But it is the duty of the government to protect our ability to pursue it, to ensure we are able to engage in that creative effort.

These days I think we’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick and have misunderstood some key words in our founding documents. We think the government is our mommy and its job is to actually provide for us and give us everything we need to succeed and be happy. We believe that’s something we have a right to expect. That everyone should have a basic guarantee to the same outcomes of happiness.

But far from assuming we have the right to manufacture such a good for other people, I’m not even really sure that we can. Happiness isn’t such a low and easy fruit to grasp. The great thinkers of the past had a much bigger and deeper conception of happiness and where it comes from that makes it the sort of thing the government can’t provide. It’s the function of so many moving parts and fulfilled conditions, and most especially it’s a function of things about us that have grown into a proper set of functioning and useful and balanced and attuned parts. And it’s deeply bound up with our own sense of individuality and accomplishment and responsibility and struggle. It’s not just a feeling, it’s a state of being, an outcome of existential development. And you can’t give someone that. You can only protect their capacity to develop it.

So actual happiness can’t be guaranteed. But these days we seem to think that’s something we can and should do, ensure equal outcomes for all. But this present challenges. Guaranteeing happiness for someone isn’t just a matter of controlling conditions around them or providing for them, it’s a guarantee about who and what they will (or must) be. You have to make them into a happy person, in a larger existential sense. You have to engineer them as well as the world around them. And that is government overreach.

Moreover, the amount of control you would need over both the person and their environment would need to be exceptional, even tyrannical. It’s easier to do for your children in your own home, where you can be present and aware at all times and exercise despotic power over them and their environment by familial fiat. It would take far more power to accomplish such a task in the wide and wooly world of an entire nation. Ultimately, you would need to be able to control everything and everyone to make such promises.

People possess a right to the freedom to pursue happiness, but happiness itself isn’t the sort of thing we can guarantee them from the outside without assuming godlike and draconian control of the world and of the populace itself. Because so much of our happiness comes from within (and happiness maintains a complex relationship with external circumstances), relocating the mechanisms for its production outside of the individual will have a very likely result of: first, making the individual completely dependent on the state’s control of their circumstances, and second, depriving them of their innate ability to produce happiness within their own person.

By always trying to ensure that someone is happy, you create someone who loses the ability to make themselves happy, and whose only semblance of being so is reliant upon very specific external provision and control. You end up with spoiled children who can only maintain any equilibrium so long as their mother is there to forcefully remove all offending elements of reality and produce those comforts which soothe them.

But as that scales up you aren’t just talking about a small child with simple needs and tastes in a small confined environment like a home. If you take that approach out into the real world with all its vastness and complexity and danger and different forces and thousands or even millions of people and conflicting characters and purposes, you get an unmanageable disaster. You get some very unhappy and ill-prepared babies, and you get demands for a more and more powerful mother.

And that is a cruel result. It is just as cruel

to refuse the the responsibility to develop maturity and just as cruel to protect and refuse to confront that which produces sickness, immaturity, dependence, weakness, and unhappiness as it is to directly and deliberately cause it. It just looks better. It is a respectable cruelty because it is kind and accommodating in its tyranny and abuse.

The thief who walks in and assaults you and robs you and leaves you destitute is not really so different, in effect, from the caring and doting parent who deprives you of the ability build anything apart from them, to be completely subject to them and dependent on them and their provision and protection to have anything. That’s not care, that’s a kind of doting, indulgent, morally self-congratulatory slavery.

The parent who never allows you to develop the ability to face anything or produce anything, who lets you be ruled and determined by your circumstances and your own unregulated instincts, who leaves you subject to the worst and most unbalanced and unproductive elements of your own character, who never confronts them or shapes them into something capable of producing long-lasting and durable and adaptable happiness for yourself isn’t loving you. They’re enlarging themselves through you at your expense, and making themselves look like a loving martyr while doing it.

Both the thief who steals your past and the parent who steals your future are a danger. They will both devour you and leave you helpless. The former will do their damage quickly and catastrophically and very noticeably, but at least after they’ve done it they leave. They don’t hang around expecting you to thank them and look up to them for it. The latter will stay and keep you dependent and reliant on them, enslaved to them, coddling you like a babe whose neediness fulfills their desire to feel the pleasures of new motherhood, with the dependent child duckling at the breast. And while that is all well and good and necessary for the infant, in the grown human it is a cruel and devouring fate without much hope of escape. And I sometimes wonder if this is not being done at a whole societal level, to whole classes by whole classes, and by whole races by whole races. And like an unweaned infant we cry whenever the attention is not on us and we feel a need we cannot understand how to fulfill on our own.

I think on the whole we lack the insight to realize the depths of danger in what we perceive as kindness. That kindness may only be kindness to ourselves, in sparing ourselves the disagreeable task of confronting that which should and needs to be confronted, whether in others or in ourselves. We like being seen as the doting parent, the nice guy who cares and provides.

But as a parental strategy and as a life strategy, this simply isn’t sufficient, and it can be dangerous, even cruel and unjust. Both agreeability and disagreeability have genuine value. And this isn’t an attack in agreeability, or mercy or kindness or accommodation. All are entirely useful and needful. They are often right. But they are not universally right or universally good.

Neither is disagreeability universally wrong or universally bad. And the same can be said about negative emotions and experiences in general. We seem to have decided as a culture that we don’t need negative experiences. That they have no value. Which begs the question why the production of them and the resultant negative emotions should make up such a large part of innate human psychology. Why have them if they have no use? Why even have the ability to have disagreeable feelings and experiences if they have no utility? Why have disagreeable people if they have no utility?

We need to reorient our entire approach to people and to our feelings and experiences. Because it isn’t so simple as “These people or these feelings or these experiences are uncomplicatedly, universally good, and these ones are universally bad.” The real question comes down to purpose, function, balance, ans integration. Both spectrums exist, therefore both spectrums are supposed to exist. What then? Then goodness or badness isn’t so simplistic a formula, but is dependent on a higher calculus.

Agreeable feelings, experiences, and people can be bad for us. And disagreeable feelings, experiences, and even people can be good for us. I think what people would really like is to have a simple world where their most basic tastes can be wholly and unquestionably and unthinkingly endorsed and will always yield the right results. Where the distance between “I want it” or “I like it” and “It’s good for me” is zero. Where things are simple and don’t require a lot of thought beyond basic instincts and feelings, and even those can be reduced merely to the ones we prefer and enjoy on a most basic level.

We desire the simplicity of infantilism. We want to overlay that simplicity on the whole world and on ourselves and return to that easy experience where our mother is our whole world and we desire and are fulfilled as we suckle at the breast of provision and indulgence.

But that phase of life is, by design, temporary. Eventually, in all mammals, the mother must push the child away from the nipple. That is not a pleasant experience. That is not an agreeable act. So why must it be so? Why does agreeability serve so well in infanthood but so poorly in the growing adult? Why is merely being nice not enough of a long-term strategy for a parent? Why is being pleased not enough of a long-term experience for the child?

These are very deep questions that require even deeper answers. But it suffices enough for now to observe that it is, in fact, the case. We need more than just positive and agreeable experiences to become truly mature and truly happy individuals. That is why we have the right to pursue happiness but do not have a guaranteed right to happiness itself. Not because we are giving up, but because we are hoping for so much more.

A guarantee of happiness is only a guarantee for a very shallow and compromised and dependent kind of happiness. And we want more than than. We’re willing to risk some negative experiences to secure something better. Real growth, real development, real independence, real happiness. You can’t have it if you won’t be weaned. You can’t enjoy the pleasures of adulthood of you won’t leave some of the safe and predictable comforts of childhood behind and take on some responsibility and the possibility of failure and some real stakes in life.

That is the genius of the right to pursue happiness. It has the nature of the thing figured out right. It hopes for more for us than merely to be the content wards of the state. It risks making us into citizens, able to truly contribute. And that is a frightening and an inspiring prospect. It is more than a gift, more than kindness, more than equality. It is a call. To be something. To shoulder the burden and bear the consequences of our own lives. To learn. To grow. To take our place among the stars.

To quote an erstwhile god, “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.”