For a group of autonomous agents to coexist in a limited space,
they need to behave in a coherent manner.
For that coexistence to survive in the long run,
those agents need to behave cohesively.
To maintain their autonomy while bearing in mind
the limited nature of the space in which they need to do their thing.
Riding bumper cars is great fun!
But have you tried to get anywhere driving like that on a real road?
Happiness is an illusion. A figment of our own imagination.
Hence we shouldn’t waste our time thinking about it.
Various sources all over the internet.
Here’s my take on this subject.
The more imaginary a thing is, the easier it is to make it happen.
IF you do it your own way! According to your needs and wishes…
Now that I’ve put behind the easy part…
Like many other natural things, happiness is a gift.
You get a healthy dose of endorphins after a workout, an orgasm after having sex and a moment of happiness after doing something right.
IF you put your heart in it!
In any of the above…
But there’s more to it.
While you can work-out anytime you wish, you need a partner in order to build an orgasm.
Did I hear a chuckle? Thinking about working out a single handed orgasm?
Can you do it without using your imagination? Really?!?
Not only that you need a partner – at least an imaginary one, the intensity and quality of the orgasm vastly depend on the interaction between you and your partner. And on your mind set before, during and after the ‘close encounter’.
Happiness, whatever moments of happiness we’re blessed with from time to time, is the result of a far more complex interaction.
To experience it, you have to be in sync with the universe. Not with yourself or with your partner. With as much of your patch of the universe as possible.
When working, out or in any other way, you’re basically alone.
The quality of your involvement depends basically on you. Irrespective of you working alone or you being part of a team, you ‘come first’.
When making love, you and your partner become one. For a while, your two me-s get close enough to experience synchronicity.
Getting in sync with the universe – doing the right thing, is like making love ‘on steroids’.
There are a couple of catches though.
You need to conserve your me. Your inner self. Not your identity. That, your I, is only the exterior shape of yourself. Constantly rebuilt to match your exterior. What you need to preserve is the inner spectator. The entity constantly watching over your identity. The entity which maintains the coherence of your identity during its constant reshaping. Your inner spine, if you will.
And you must refrain from hunting it. From hunting happiness.
You can build up muscles through training. Hard. If you do it right, you get endorphins.
Because you’ve done it right, not hard. If you do it only hard, you get torn muscles, not endorphins.
Or you could build up muscles by swallowing chemicals. And end up with a ruined liver. While experiencing absolutely no endorphin rush. Because you fucked up. You chased ‘muscles’ and forgot about yourself. About the self ‘inside’ yourself.
You can get ‘relief’ by wanking. But that’s no orgasm…
You’d prefer ‘masturbate’ instead? Would that make any real difference?
Bring the experience any nearer to an orgasm?!?
Same thing with happiness.
If your goal is to be happy, you’re too focused. On your ‘identity’.
Your inner self bestows too much attention on its ‘skin’. On your identity.
And not enough on what’s happening farther away.
That being the reason for you not being able to get in sync with the rest of the world around you. Not being able to do the right thing.
‘Six packs’, orgasms and happiness must come naturally.
As a consequence of things well done.
Otherwise neither are genuine.
Social cohesion is a key concept in modern sociology.
There are many definitions – most of which complement each other, and the gist of them is ‘glue’.
Do you actually perceive modern society as being glued? Bonded? Together?!?
As an engineer – MSc in Mechanical Engineering, Bucharest Politechnica University 1986 – I’m primarily interested in ‘consequences’. ‘Causes’ come second. A close second but still second. Because it’s ‘consequences’ we have to face/endure directly, not ’causes’.
Whenever I feel bad, really bad, I begin by stopping everything that I was doing. To have enough time to determine the proper cause for my malaise. Identifying/dealing with causes ‘on the go’ – usually by having faith in what I already know, without realizing that it was exactly that which had led me to where I am now – is not such a good option.
Very few societies (countries, nations) continue to behave coherently. Many of them – most of them, actually, used to. Until very recently.
Yet most of my ‘recent’ colleagues – B in Sociology, Bucharest University 2009, continue to discuss about ‘cohesion’.
Communities continue to be cohesive. And, as a consequence, continue to behave coherently.
Why?
The easiest answer is ‘by definition’.
That’s how you recognize a community. A group of people who act coherently because they are ‘bound together’ by ‘social cohesion’. How that happened to be? Some other time!
Societies, on the other hand, no longer are.
Nations, which used to be whole, are now ‘fractured’. Not entirely, but they certainly behave a lot less coherently than, say, 50 years ago.
OK, this is not the first time that something like this had happened….
Civil wars are nothing new.
None of them had been ‘civil’ though. Which makes ‘civil war‘ an oxymoron…
Something so ‘impossible’ that we haven’t coined a proper word for it. Something so horrible that we speak about it using an ‘impossible’ name in order to properly mark its utter impropriety.
What is new is the amount of knowledge we currently have about the whole matter. About the inner workings of our collective psyche.
How we use that knowledge, what we have understood from learning it, the manner in which we allow that information to shape our actions … that’s another matter!
Whose consequences are in the making.
There are no other ‘makers’ but us.
Also, there are no other people to bear the consequences of what we’re doing now.
nicichiarasa 