(The Best and Most Philosophicohistorical) “Enough is Enough”, “Family Values”, “The Golden Rule”, Contentment——The FUTURE. (Part 1 of 3)
It has taken me some time to connect the dots which place all of the above as a philosophical package. To elaborate the interrelationship most clearly we need exam all of these terms in the order listed above, then connect these observations with a physiological basis for them. The latter was not really available until recently.
If we ever wish to maximize our individual contentment in life we need to learn just how important ‘enough is enough’ as a concept really is. In a nutshell—if we cannot do this, and instead follow the “more is better” concept, then we become doomed to compulsive behaviors of varied sorts, and compulsive behavior cannot, by virtual definition, lead to contentment. While all of this is a complicated process within the central nervous system, the gist of it all can be simplified—-at least I will attempt to do so in this long musing. It is so long that I have subdivided it into 3 parts so each part can be read in separate readings. After wading through a third of some of my musings, “enough is enough”. So this musing will be more palatable and better understood if tackled over 3 parts on different days.
Basically, we all have within our brain: pleasure centers, anger/rage/pain centers, craving centers, and appropriate behavior centers. For the best outcome, we need activate the pleasure center without activating the craving center, or inhibiting the appropriate behavior center. And, of course, we try to avoid stimulating the anger/rage/pain centers. That is, we need to stimulate the pleasure center in ways which do not come with a lot of downsides.
Unfortunately, we are all greedy, and if something stimulates our pleasure center, we seek it over and over again. Most of the pleasurable things in life which really matter do not come in rapid fire but more slowly over time. We gradually achieve academic or athletic success, our career most often proceeds over a period of time, we build strong bonds with someone over a period of time, we achieve family rewards over a period of time. IF all goes well, we manage to stimulate our pleasure center with things that really matter over a period of time, and only then are we most likely to end up with considerable contentment in our lives. Sounds simple. It is not.
“If all goes well”, that is a big IF since we often find ways to stimulate the pleasure center of our brain with things of little matter—via drugs, and a whole slew of self serving immediate pleasures such gambling, sex, eating, acquisition of money and things, TV, rooting for Sport teams, acquiring titles, power, shopping, video games, electronic game devices of all sorts, and so on. Anything pleasurable can become addictive. Addiction leads to compulsive behaviors and boom, just like that we have gone down the path which cannot lead to contentment, just compulsive behaviors. All that glitters is not gold.
The key here is to control any activities of lesser importance to our lives which will over stimulate the pleasure center repeatedly and too often. There may be a lot of truth to the saying that it is best to not get all you want in life too soon or too easy. Of course there are probably exceptions. I taught college kids most of my life. Kids that were pampered, overprotected, and given endless material things all their lives were, more often than not, not very contented kids. More is better did not turn out too well for them.
At this point we need remember that all of us are unique, diverse sort of chaps, and so much of what is being written in this musing has to be manipulated to fit a person’s unique genetics. Those who learn early in life when enough is enough have a good start in life. My dad made sure I didn’t have more or better ‘things’ than my neighborhood friends. He also made sure, after I became 18, that any further progress on the accumulation of ‘things’ was going to be on my own. He wasn’t going to loan me a lot of money or co-sign ventures, or be up in my face about endless matters. If I wanted his advice I had to come to him. It was never until much later in life that I understood how lucky I was for his behavior back then. Love doesn’t always, I now surmise, mean making things easy for offspring or never cutting the financial strings. Exceptions probably exist.
Okay, we have survived the formative years—to continue our topic here—we are on our own (really on our own), and most individuals will soon enough, but hopefully not too soon enough, have a family to manage. Parenting, at least it seems to me, is about as tough and risky an adventure as imaginable. It really is a roll of the dice. What parenting rarely is, however, is for any kids to be mirror physical images of a parent, and even more rare, mirror personalities of parents. If any one approaches parenthood with the idea that they will be creating little replicas of themselves they are delusional on this point. That is not the way evolution works. There is only one of us, and no need, from any evolutionary standpoint, for any particular individual to keep on producing the same ole, same ole. Diversity is a key to the evolutionary process and our offspring certainly meet that criteria. There are plenty of people out there who are closer to us personality-wise than our offspring will ever be. I used to tire of people saying to me: “Are you really Bud James’ son?” Most of the time it wasn’t even meant as a put down, just puzzlement.
Nevertheless, our offspring are the closest we can come to ‘creating’ something that only we could have created—if I can use the term created loosely. Just the amount of time and effort alone with parenting creates strong bonding—sometimes. The nature and strength of the bonding will be all over the place. There is no clear cut assembly line method in the formative years for raising children. Those who think there is, are in for a lot of rude awakenings. Every child is different, every parent is different, and the best way to parent a particular child has to be worked out. It’s a crap shoot in many respects. Some kids stick to parents like glue and other kids, more like me, are more aloof, and frankly—less lovable. But a good parent gulps down some patience and loves a less lovable child anyway. You might even be stuck sometimes having to raise an ‘idiot’. Talk about placing blind bets—hell football and horse racing are more predictable and they are unpredictable.
If ‘family values’ is restricted to mean an ethical obligation to give a priority effort to raise your kids properly, then ‘family values’ is an obligatory ethical value and a primary focus. Period. Given the nature of parenting, wrapped with so many variables, failures will not be uncommon. Placing the blame is pointless. If the ball takes a bad sperm/egg bounce, what is the point of blaming the player or the coach? The best of parents have no control over bad bounces. And we all know the worst of kids sometimes come from good parents and the best of adults sometimes come from poor parenting. Talk about a complicated endeavor, and we for sure have one with this parenting thing.
The point is that family values has it’s place. BUT, written large and in bold print, when it comes to adult populations the GOLDEN RULE takes precedence. That is to say, no matter how strong the bond between a parent and their adult offspring, these offspring are no more valuable to the society as a whole than anyone else’s offspring. This concept is tricky and often misunderstood. Once grown, your offspring are no longer your own personal responsibility, they become ‘community’ responsibility. Look at it this way: when a parent says they want the very best for their kids, including a good future, this is an honest and understandable feeling. HOWEVER, for your offspring down the road to have a good future, the Golden Rule has to be applicable to everyone in that community or nation—and applicable to all citizens.
Family values, taken to the extreme with adult offspring, ensures society will implode in the future, and when it does, everyone’s offspring pay the piper. The Golden Rule prevents conflict, “family values’ promotes conflict. Sectarian Religious fervor promotes conflict, the Golden Rule promotes peace. Family values is required during the formative years, the Golden Rule supersedes and is required our entire lifespan. What does this really mean?
For a start it means we must not use family values to sequester the wealth of a nation into the hands of genetic cabals. When this begins to happen the distribution of wealth gets way out of line, and a society could end up like ours in America today where 2-5% of the people own 90% of the wealth. In the most practical sense, Family Values is imperative to ensure the best possible formative years for children in a society, while the Golden Rule, which does not favor genetically related adults, is needed to protect that society for the future. In other words when family values is used to benefit genetically related adults as a means to sequester wealth along genetic lines, the future of the entire society is doomed. Thus, in the long run, no one really protects their offspring by leaving their excess wealth upon death to their offspring, unless their offspring are clearly among the least fortunate financially in society. To word it differently, because our offspring are more important to us than others for quite natural reasons, we are obligated to protect the future economic stability of a nation, or things implode and the very outcome we wanted to avoid for our offspring becomes inevitable.
The choice, collectively, is clear. We can participate in the natural desire to give our excess wealth to our adult offspring, to help them in the short run, OR we can follow the Golden Rule and, through taxation, give our excess wealth to the less fortunate so that a healthy society exists in the future for our offspring. Of course this doesn’t work as a voluntary sort of decision. Wealthy people like Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates may well follow the Golden Rule when it comes to their distribution of excess wealth, but most people will not voluntarily pump their excess wealth, which they earned, back into the society from which it was acquired, but instead give their excess wealth as unearned wealth to offspring. That is why back in the days of Eisenhower the tax rate on the very wealthy was 90% and the inheritance taxes such that excess wealth could not be passed on to offspring. If this sounds outrageous from an emotional attachment to offspring standpoint, it must be remembered that back in the days of Eisenhower, the wealthy continued to have ‘enough-is-enough’ wealth and all economic levels of society were kept afloat by this Golden Rule distribution of excess wealth. The Golden Rule is the only principle which keeps a healthy, prosperous, peaceful society with leveled playing fields for all segments of a society.
We didn’t get to our current situation, in terms of wealth distribution, overnight. It took a good 50 years for us to get to the point where 2-5% of our citizens own 90% 0f our wealth, where 43% of our citizens don’t even earn enough money to qualify to pay federal income taxes, where there is 60% unemployment in some of our worst ghettoes, where globally 70% of people have no permanent job, and so on. We managed to pretend, for decades now, that our ever growing numbers of ghettoes were not our collective responsibility. We gated them off, and left millions and millions of children with poor schools, poor health care, drove businesses out of their communities with a war on drugs, left these communities unsafe for children or adults, left families living behind barred doors and windows, with children having no safe places to play, or have a ‘civilized’ society in which to pass their formative years. Then, when the products of these environments, which really were the collective responsibility of everyone in society, emerge from their formative years, we are infuriated by their behaviors. Well, we simply took our ‘family values’ too far, failed too often to understand when enough was enough for us personally, and allowed ourselves to acquire compulsive behaviors which neither helped ourselves attain contentment, or allowed the less fortunate to have a level playing field on which to compete as children or adults.
With this overview in place we can go back and expand a bit on a few key points. We could expand it a lot, but then the musing becomes excessively long (it will anyway). We stated that we need be sure our pleasure centers are not being overstimulated too often, too long, by matters not important to achieving contentment with our lives. What are these major matters, which we need stay focused on? It certainly includes good health, good education, a safe environment, a decent salary, healthy family relationships, enough skills to obtain a decent job, good friends, plus an understanding/appreciation of the evolutionary process of which we are a part, and some personal space to function as our own unique personality. While this is surely not a complete list, it illustrates the point. Other sources of pleasure are not sinful or have no place in life, but are sources of pleasure that need to be practiced via the ‘enough is enough’ principle. None of us will ever completely succeed here, but with effort, we can keep it all within reasonable bounds.
Of course humans have a genetically endowed ethical nature: this is essentially the Golden Rule and a major distinguishing feature of our species. Nobody anywhere argues that the Golden Rule is not an ethical principle. Others do matter—all others, and our goal should always be to treat all others as we would have them treat us. To the extent I can ascertain, anyone who lives their life according to the Golden Rule would earn a place in any kind of Heaven envisioned by all the major sectarian religious groups. So the question begs, what purpose do all these rival sectarian religious groups serve? Most all the conflicts today across the globe are religious or ethnic or cultural in nature. The more people who learn to appreciate diversity, the greater the peace, and prosperity for the most is achieved, and personal contentment is maximized for the greatest number of people.
Self control is a wonderful achievement. It pays many dividends. When I retired I established a charitable gift fund in which I give grants to charitable causes of my choosing. Surprisingly, it grew to become the basis upon which I kept any tendencies for compulsive behaviors over trivial activities under control. I find myself constantly saying “I could do this, like take a cruise somewhere for a week for $5000, but would this pleasure be worth letting 2000 kids go without proper vaccines to protect them from otherwise incurable disease? I was a kid once and caught a lot of diseases which good health care prevented me from dying. So I invariably feel better helping those 2000 kids get to adults than I personally would feel gawking at people and structures for a week. I could eat in fancy restaurants all the time, but I have the time in retirement to cook and learn to cook the kind of food I like as sumptuous as it is cooked in a restaurant, and thus I cook a lot at home and give that money saved to my charitable fund so that some refugees, with virtually nothing, might have a chance to survive to have a better life some day. Often, late a night, when most are asleep and there is a deafening serenity as far as I can see from the 11th floor of my condo, I just know for certain when enough wealth is enough for me, and feel good that my more-than-enough enables others to survive. On a yearly basis I spend much more on the less fortunate, or to protect this wonderful environment on our globe, than I ever spend on myself. By my age that sort of thing (my FANAFI Fund) is a meaningful pleasure. I reckon most other sorts of pleasures during my life have come my way, and ‘enough is enough’.
So many diverse people helped me not only survive in life, but achieve some successes in life, that I know what came around should go around. I suppose, if others had not helped me prosper in life I would understand even better how much help is needed from others. With no longer any titles or institution behind me, I can do little personally for the less fortunate, but my charitable fund empowers me to help others and the environment with any excess bounty built up in my life. If we live long enough, and end up with more than enough, then we can never do enough for those in need—to repay our personal good luck. At some point in my life I began to realize the long list of virtual strangers who saw fit to help, defend, or elevate me in life. Most were never really properly thanked. Most are dead now, or scattered with the wind. If all we ever have to cover our back is family, this is really not much of an army. Perhaps my father was a genius of some sort, even if accidentally. After 18 he made it quite clear that I was on my own, to behave and do things in ways which will generate help from others along the way. No more depending on mama and papa. I get some flack over no longer accepting personal gifts or giving personal gifts. But it just seems so useless to be exchanging gifts between individuals who don’t need any gifts. It is simply inane and too much like I will give you a gift worth X dollars this week and next week you give me a gift worth X dollars. Sometimes on the same day at the same moment people will exchange tit for tat gift values. To top it off, most of the time neither person got a gift they really need or even want. Giving gifts is a great idea and is good for personal contentment to give gifts, but always give gifts to those who really need a gift, not to those who don’t. If you are a good friend to someone and they don’t need a gift, just give them your friendship; give your excess wealth to those who do need help. If we raise our kids successfully they don’t need any more gifts, let alone dump all our excess wealth on them when we die. We live so long most of the time today that what is the point of leaving a small fortune to our kids who are probably nearing retirement? Unless one is already age retarded, retirement is a chance to get out of the rat race, seek peace of mind, not battle away for personal attention, titles, win meaningless battles, outwit anyone, pile up more things higher and higher, or demand others amuse us. Yes sir, enough is enough. Just follow the Golden rule and help the least fortunate get to that point. They won’t thank us any more than we ever properly thanked so many non relatives who helped us.
Part 2 to follow: The Physiology Behind All This
