Intro Attempt: Introduction for the Book: Diary of a Person Confused About the Relief of Suffering

Actually written JULY 9, 2013 -

[This is the introduction to a book I tried to write years ago, but abandoned as I realized I lack the discipline to complete it.]

PROPOSED CHAPTERS

00 Introduction [nearly complete] - [Included in this book] [I mean, this blog]
01 Why Relieve Suffering [half complete]
02 What Suffering Is [half complete] [Included here as Suffering Defined and Cataloged]
03 Objections To Relieving Suffering [complete]
04 Basics Of Relieving Suffering [half complete]
05 Politics (or political economy) Of Relieving Suffering [mostly complete]
06 Metaphysics And Epistemology Of Relieving Suffering [half complete]
07 Morality And Suffering [nearly complete] - [Included in this book] [I mean, this blog]
08 Ugliness And Suffering [nearly complete] - [Included in this book] [I mean, this blog]
09 Anti-Oppression Ideology And Suffering [far from complete]
10 Spirituality And Suffering [never started]
11 Psychology (Psychotherapy) And Suffering [never started]

Non-Human Creatures And Suffering [never started]

Prospects For Universal Relief Of Suffering [far from complete]
Epilogue [far from complete]

JULY 9, 2013

DIARY OF A CONFUSED PERSON WHO FEELS BENEVOLENCE TOWARD [almost] ALL CREATURES

on JUNE 9, 2015, revised to:

REFLECTIONS OF A PERSON CONFUSED ABOUT THE RELIEF OF SUFFERING


WARNING!

This is not a self-help book.
This is not a self-diagnostic book.

There is nothing in this book intended to inspire its readers to feel good about themselves.

If you decide to continue reading, you may encounter passages that hurt you deeply and threaten your self-value. If you begin at any time to feel hurt, stop reading immediately and consider seeking therapeutic help.

Also, if you are a member of a group who is targeted for oppression, there is nothing in this book to help you overturn that oppression (at least not in the normal or expected ways).

Much to the contrary, the struggle to overturn oppression will likely require the rejection of many speculations and analyses in this book.

I did not write this book with the notion that the act of reading it would directly relieve the suffering of the reader. I wrote it to record my honest speculations about whether and how suffering can be relieved. And it just so happens that my honest speculations are pretty bleak and potentially hurtful to those who suffer and those who love them.

Nor is this book a work of disciplined scholarship. I am not a scholar. I read a whole book about once every two or three years ‘cause I hate reading. And I just don’t have the discipline to learn scholarly lingo. So this book is more like a bunch of reflections.



INTRODUCTION, V1

Dear person who reads this book: Thanks.

I hope you are a person of great benevolence – because it is people of great benevolence who will most enjoy this book and perhaps get something else of value from it. Perhaps an insight here or there. Perhaps some recognition of yourself in my thoughts.

This book is about my unanswered confusions concerning suffering and compassion, and how these are influenced by other things, like morality and the scarcity of beauty and so on. As you read about my confusions, perhaps you will come to share some of those confusions. Or perhaps you will have answers, resolutions to my confusions.

I must apologize because this book is an organizational mess. I don’t have the discipline to write a well-organized book because I'm lazy and clinically depressed. Plus, I'm confused.

I recommend you read this book without much expectation of a well-presented body of knowledge. See it more as just peering into someone’s random flow of thoughts about life, and benevolence, and some philosophy.

What I’ve done here is to basically compile many of my smaller and unfinished writings into one volume that I hope you find interesting.



INTRODUCTION, V2

THE MESSAGE OF THIS BOOK

The message of this book is:

Maybe there’s something wrong, or several things wrong, with our knowledge about how to relieve suffering. Through this book I invite my readers to check our premises on the matter.



WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

I wrote this book because...

1. Relieving the suffering of all creatures capable of suffering is a persistent and significant desire of mine.

...and...

2. I believe writing this book is my best shot at contributing to the relief of all suffering.

This means that if there were some other method for me to relieve such suffering, a method that I thought was more effective than writing this book, I’d pick that other method instead. (Especially since I hate writing prose, and hate reading even more.)

Contrasted against my writing this book, other methods that I could pick for relieving all suffering seem to me like a tragic waste of my efforts.


HOW I IMAGINE THIS BOOK CAN RELIEVE SUFFERING

This book might correct flaws in our knowledge about how to relieve suffering. And if those flaws are corrected, we may become more effective at relieving suffering.

But of course, this could be said of almost every book ever written and prescribed for study in the humanities. We could reasonably argue that fixing flaws in our knowledge of relieving suffering is the implicit end goal of any education in the humanities – or even the end goal of any education whatsoever.

The problem I see with this is that relieving all suffering is only the implicit end goal, rather than explicit. And this is a problem because we often lose sight of a goal if it is only implicit. We lose focus, go off into tangents and produce volumes of work that can be of no relevance to the goal, or worse, so lacking in comprehensive context as to be counter productive and end up causing more suffering than it cures.

This book is my attempt at making the universal relief of suffering the explicit goal of an education in the humanities – and thereby increasing our efficiency in achieving that goal.

Hopefully, this book might inspire professional intellectuals toward an explicitly comprehensive and focused discourse about relieving suffering, and through their example and guidance, thereby inspiring the culture at large toward a similarly increased determination and effectiveness at relieving suffering everywhere, for everyone, for all creatures who suffer.

I hope this book can serve as a catalog of questions and issues about the relief of suffering for intellectuals to reference in a way that helps them connect their specialized disciplines to one another as a team squarely and consistently focused on a comprehensive struggle to relieve suffering. I want this book to keep us all on target.


CAN THIS REFLECTION BOOK ACTUALLY HELP THE WAY I HOPE IT CAN?

But to spite my hopes for this book, I do worry that it may partially or even completely fail.

One reason it may fail is because I may be significantly wrong about so many things. Although I hope to inspire professional intellectuals to focus on and discuss certain things, I myself am not a professional intellectual. I may lack so much knowledge that it is I who deviate so far from a comprehensive context that I cannot legitimately offer fixes to our knowledge of how to relieve the suffering of all, or to even suggest that such a thing really is the ultimate goal. This book may just be a sophomoric bomb.

I admit this possibility. I could indeed be, as they say, “standing on mount stupid.” Standing on mount stupid refers to a graph that plots the amount of knowledge one has on the X axis against the likelihood of offering invalid opinions on the Y axis. If one has very little knowledge, then one is not likely to spew unfounded bullshit because one knows one lacks knowledge and therefore refrains from spewing anything on the matter. But as one learns more, one often suffers the illusion that one knows enough to start spewing truth about it. But the reality is that one still doesn't know enough. But finally, as one finally does reach more complete knowledge, then what one spews is much less likely to be bullshit. So the graph shows increased bullshitting values in the Y axis at the middle of the knowledge X axis – it looks like a hump, a mountain. This hump represents the likelihood of spewing bullshit. And since the hump looks like a picture of a mountain, the metaphor follows.
 

I was pondering this issue when I made this picture that I call "Mount Stupid Redemption"

Another metaphor that goes along with this is that of constructing “straw” understandings of the issues. The metaphor is most frequently expressed as an accusation: “You’re using a straw person argument.” which usually means the accused is deliberately distorting the truth about an opponent’s position in order to make their own objections to that position seem legitimate. Well, I like to think that I'm not deliberately distorting anything. But I may still have a straw understanding of things from honest ignorance.

And my awareness that I could be standing on mount stupid, with a straw understanding of things, is precisely why I call this book a bunch of “reflections” rather than some other kind of book, and why I confess in the title that I am confused about the topic. It is also why I express my thoughts about relieving suffering as a catalog of questions with several possible answers to explore. If I am standing on mount stupid, I don’t necessarily want to stay there. However, I am not totally consistent in this policy of open questioning. There’s a boundary between what I’ll question and what I’ll take for granted. I have not always been careful about where I put this boundary. Sometimes that’s just because I have not thought about where that boundary should really be. I was in a hurry. Whatever. Feel free to challenge that boundary as you see fit.

Anyway, this book could very well be just me standing on mount stupid. At least partly.

But even if this book happens to be mostly legit, professional intellectuals may still reject it out of hand precisely because I don’t have the credentials. They’d tell me: “Go earn yourself some advanced degrees. Then we'll talk.”

I wish I could. But I’m impaired by a depression that shatters my focus, making intellectual study at the pace required for earning such credentials impossible for me. This book, for example, is not the product of some two years of my efforts, but closer to a decade.

I wish some other, professionally credentialed intellectual would write this book instead of me. But I don’t see anyone interested in doing so.

So it’s up to me. I must do the best with what energy and time I have.

Well, even if this book is a failure in terms of intellectual content, it still might succeed in terms of providing an inspiring example. Perhaps even the most disapproving of professional intellectuals might consider this book as a poorly executed great idea – and then produce a much better executed version of it. That would be awesome! But on a more selfish note, I at least want credit for the great idea.

But for clarity, I want to explicitly re-state just what that great idea is. It is this:

Write a book that stays consistently focused on the relief of suffering for all. No hidden agendas. No dishonesty. Explicitly and deliberately use the phrase “relief of suffering.” Connect everything covered in the book to the relief of suffering, expressed in that exact phrase. Do not replace that phrase with some other word or phrase like “the moral good” or “the will of God” or “social justice” or “rational self-interest.” These other phrases may hide hidden agendas that derail the focus. By all means discuss “the moral good” and “the will of God” and “social justice” and “rational self-interest,” but explicitly and consistently relate them to the relief of suffering. Use statements similar to the form: “So and so relates to the relief of suffering by such and such ways.”

These are the rules I tried to follow in writing this book. The results are interesting. I found, by following these rules, that “the moral good” (and the other ideas) may not relate to the universal relief of suffering the way most of us assume they do. These other ideas are habitually assumed to be the vanguards of relieving suffering. But when one follows the rules I stated, one may find that this habitual assumption is false. In other words, there may indeed be many flaws in our knowledge of how to relieve suffering. (Of course, I actually began following these rules a few decades prior to even considering writing this book. And the resulting suspicion that our knowledge of how to relieve suffering might be significantly flawed is half the inspiration for writing this book.)


WHAT I BRING TO THE DISCUSSION

As a sort of summary, I’d now like to state what I can contribute to the discussion of how to relieve suffering, in terms of my perspective on the issue.

Near as I can tell, I have acquired a fairly unique perspective on how to relieve suffering, and our knowledge about it. That is, I’ve seen very little evidence that others share this perspective. And I can’t help but suspect that we may become better at relieving suffering if we at least include my perspective in the discussion.

The uniqueness of my perspective means either that...

1. I really am standing on mount stupid.

Or...

2. I am one of those outsiders who sees a few valid things that the insiders missed, precisely because only an outsider’s perspective could have seen them.

I'm willing to risk the first possibility on the chance for the second possibility.


MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE IDEAS OF AYN RAND

I draw much inspiration and influence from the ideas of Ayn Rand, largely because she happens to be the thinker whose ideas I know most about. And yes, I do largely agree with a good deal of her ideas.

And since Rand has a reputation for being cold-hearted, my reliance on Rand’s ideas in this book will strike many readers as quite bizarre. Many will even use this fact to dismiss me as likewise cold-hearted – to discredit my compassion.

My reply is this: even cold-hearted people can produce ideas useful to the relief of suffering – in spite of their callousness – by accident or whatever. This is precisely my take on her ideas. From her works I take what I find useful for the relief of suffering, and I leave the rest.

But one may still wonder why Rand is the thinker I’m most familiar with. One may suspect that my compassion is only a recent development, prior to which I actually was as cold-hearted as Rand and devoted exclusively to her ideas. ‘Tis not so. Incredibly, I was attracted to Rand’s ideas precisely because of my desire to relieve the suffering of all – from the very start. If this makes you curious how this could even be possible, then this helps my cause. Perhaps you are so curious how this could be that you’ll read the rest of this book to find out. I could try to explain it in just a few paragraphs here. But I really think you’ll need to read this whole book to understand it.

Ayn Rand designed a philosophy that she named “Objectivism.” And I did, for many years, identify as an Objectivist. But as I persisted in my stubborn allegiance to compassion, I became a non-moralist. (And this is another thing readers will find bizarre and need to read the book to understand.) Anyway, since Objectivism cannot be reconciled with non-moralism, I could no longer identify as an Objectivist. Likewise, you will not find any Objectivist who will tolerate applying that name to me.

Do not, for everyone’s sake, refer to me as an Objectivist.

(Eventually I found a new “ist” name for myself. I like to be called a “secular benevolist.”)


MY MISTRUST OF SCIENTIFIC STUDIES

When it comes to issues immediately relevant to the relief of suffering, people often cite scientific studies to support their position. I do it too, in this book. But I don’t commit to what any of these studies suggest. And in matters of crucial and immediate relation to the relief of suffering that people inflict on one another (and on other creatures), scientific studies are a quagmire of endless refutations and counter refutations. If a given scientific study somehow threatens the liberation of an oppressed group, for example, members of that oppressed group will always find a way to refute it. Always. And supporters of the study in question will always find a way to refute the refutation. Always. And on and on.

As I read through the quagmires of refutations, I develop a skepticism about everyone’s position.

In principle, I whole heartedly support using scientific studies to gain real knowledge of hotly contested issues relevant to the relief of suffering. In principle, I’d even trust the findings of such studies. But in practice, I must remember that scientists are humans with the potential for biases, some of which they don’t even know they have. So basically I don’t fully trust them. Even less do I trust those journalists who report on what the scientists are doing.

My skepticism comes mostly from the fact that I don’t have the scientific training and knowledge required to get to the bottom of these refutation quagmires.

In this book I too will occasionally cite scientific studies. But just like many other supports for my positions, I don’t fully trust them.