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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Sam Harris

Courage Can Be Misunderstood

26 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ Comments Off on Courage Can Be Misunderstood

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army, battle, Bravery, Courage, Fighting, Jocko Willink, Leading Marines, marines, navy, Sam Harris, Tim Ferriss, War

Marines

“Courage can be misunderstood. It is more than the ability to overcome the jitters, to quell fear, to conquer the desire to run. It is the ability to know what is, or is not, to be feared. An infantryman charging a bunker is not hampered by the fear that he may be struck down a few paces from his fighting hole. A pilot is not afraid of losing all hydraulic power in his aircraft. They are prepared for those outcomes. A Marine in battle fears disgracing himself by running. He fears not losing his life, but losing his honor. He may not be able to preserve his life, but he can always preserve his honor. That much is within his power… To fear disgrace but not death, to fear not duty but dereliction from duty — this is courage. The truly courageous do not live in anxiety from morning to night. They are calm because they know who they are.

We overcome our natural fear and fight for three chief reasons: First, we are well-trained and well-led. Second, we have convictions that will sustain us to the last sacrifice. Third, we fight for one another…

There is another kind of physical courage — a quiet courage that affects those all around. It is the kind of calm, physical courage that a leader has when all around is chaos and noise…

Many times, decisions will have to be made in the rain, under the partial protection of a poncho, in the drizzle of an uncertain dawn, and without all the facts. At times like that, it will not always be possible to identify all the components of the problem, and use a lengthy and logical problem-solving process to reach a decision. In combat, the decision often must be immediate, and it might have to be instinctive.”

__________

Pulled from the section “Individual Courage” in chapter two of the Marine Corps handbook Leading Marines.

They are calm because they know who they are. I’ve recently gotten into Jocko Willink’s podcast, after hearing his interviews with Tim Ferriss and Sam Harris. Jocko is a former SEAL who led the reconquest of Ramadi and a nationally ranked jiu jitsu player. His podcast focuses on applying military leadership strategy to business and personal decision-making, and he discusses Leading Marines in his Podcast #8.

Image credit: BlackFive.

Go on:

  • Who wants it more?
  • If
  • Glory’s moonshine

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Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

Tags

Adam Gopnik, and the True Enemies of Free Expression, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen, extremism, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Hypercacher, Islam, Islamism, Islamophobia, liberty, Maajid Nawaz, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Podcast, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, Waking Up Podcast

[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

__________

Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

Go on:

  • Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, talks about “the tyranny of silence”
  • A brief reflection on 25 years of the Salman Rushdie fatwa
  • Douglas Murray shows us some strangely uncontroversial cartoons

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

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Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Essay, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Daesh, France, interview, ISIL, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadis, Jihadism, Lawrence O'Donnell, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Paris, Paris Attacks, Podcast, religion, Sam Harris, Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, terror, Terrorism, The Last Word, violence

Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

__________

Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

  • The ultimate poem about the city of lights: “In Paris with You” by James Fenton
  • Meet Napoleon Bonaparte
  • A few of the best words from some indomitable Frenchmen: Jules Renard, Blaise Pascal, Edmond de Goncourt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus

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Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Childhood, Children, ethics, family, Four Hour Work Week, Francis Bacon, interview, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Kennedy School, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Parent, parenthood, Parenting, parents, Quilliam, relationships, Sam Harris, Tim Ferriss

Sam Harris

Interviewer: You’ve briefly discussed the ethics of having children and the evidence that parents are less happy and less productive than their child-free counterparts. Why did you decide to have children?

Sam Harris: I guess there are two possible answers. One is it’s just a failure to be emotionally moved by the data. There are certain things you may understand to be true, but you just can’t make their being true emotionally relevant enough to have it guide your behavior. That’s one explanation.

I don’t think it’s the most likely reason in my case. I think it’s more a matter of my feeling — based on who I am and who I’m married to and what she wanted and what I wanted — that we were very likely to be exceptions to the rule. There’s no doubt a certain amount of self-deception if not delusion on offer there, when you begin looking at scientific data and imagining it doesn’t apply to you.

But in our case, I think we stood a very good chance of being happy parents, having happy kids, and being glad that we were parents — and finding the alternative, alas retrospectively, unthinkable.

And that’s sort of where we are. I’m a very happy father. I love my daughters. The idea that I might not have had them does seem unthinkable now.

But I’m also aware that having them has created forms of suffering that we wouldn’t otherwise know. And we’ve certainly given hostages to fortune, as Francis Bacon said.

You worry about the future, you worry about all sorts of things that you’d be quite insouciant about if you were just on your own, living out your adulthood.

It’s not without its downsides, but even the downsides have a silver lining. Being concerned about the future because you have kids is good ethically. And it does lead to a kind of productivity that might not otherwise be available…

To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future — and a future that hopefully extends beyond your own.

__________

Sam Harris, speaking with Tim Ferriss in his most recent Four Hour Workweek interview (these comments can be heard at around the nineteen minute mark).

Currently on my nightstand is Sam’s newest book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a short dialogue with Maajid Nawaz. Nawaz is one of the truly compelling contemporary public figures. A former Islamic extremist, he spent five years in an Egyptian prison for trying to topple the Mubarak government and establish a caliphate. Now he cuts a suave figure in London as the head of the anti-extremist think tank Quilliam. I encourage you to follow the work they do, especially his. You can watch Harris and Nawaz’s illuminating discussion at their recent book launch at the Kennedy School below:

Read on:

  • Calvin Trillin gives some heartfelt advice about prioritizing child-raising
  • Maajid talks about why we need to comprehend how Islamic the Islamic State is
  • Harris riffs on cops — and why we may need to cut them some slack

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What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

Tags

Cecil the Lion, current events, debate, ethics, gun control, guns, hunting, interview, Just Babies, Moral Psychology, morality, Morals, Paul Bloom, Philosophy, Podcast, psychology, religion, Sam Harris, Veganism, Vegetarianism, Waking Up

Cecil the LionI imagine you have some thoughts about how well spent the moral outrage of seven billion people has been on Cecil the Lion.

“I do. Look, there’s some reason to believe the dentist did do something wrong. It’s not quite clear; he said he was hoodwinked by somebody else and he thought they had proper permits. And so, you know, if he did something wrong, broke the law, he should be punished. I don’t have any problem saying that. And also, I don’t have any particular love for big game hunting — I may be betraying my own liberal background but I find it kind of a repellant activity.

However, the lack of proportion in this case is astonishing.

I honestly think if the dentist went to Africa and shot an African, there’d be a lot less fuss. Instead he shot this beautiful lion… and the sentimentality combined with the mob attacks has been insane.

Of course, he was not hunting for food, he was hunting for trophies. Personally, I find myself totally unsympathetic to that, even though I can get right up to the door of it. I shoot guns because I’m very interested in self defense, and the truth is it’s incredibly fun to shoot guns…

So I can imagine that hunting is even more fun if you don’t have any scruple about killing the animal. And I’m under no illusions that my position as a non-vegetarian, as someone who eats meat and therefore delegates the killing of animals to others, is more ethical. I think the hunter who eats his kill is in a stronger moral position than I am. He’s owning the full process by which he’s arriving at his hamburger, or in this case, his venison steak…

What matters? What counts as a worse crime than another? What should one be allowed to do? And one can, as a reflective person, rank things. It’s worse to kill somebody than to beat them. It’s worse to steal one-hundred dollars than one dollar. It’s worse to kill an African human than an African lion…

If you feel the killing of Cecil is one of the biggest news stories of 2015, you’ve really got to reassess your values.”

__________

Remarks from two self-described liberals — Sam Harris and and Yale psychologist Paul Bloom on Harris’s Waking Up podcast last week (these remarks come at the 48 minute mark in the track below).

Bloom touches on many of these themes of moral psychology in his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

 

There’s more to see:

  • The curious case of fruit flies, grizzly bears, and Sarah Palin’s contempt for science
  • Will Self on the fatal flaw at the heart of Utilitarianism
  • Wittgenstein on the need to think hard about everyday problems

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Sam Harris: Let’s Cut Cops Some Slack

27 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview

≈ Comments Off on Sam Harris: Let’s Cut Cops Some Slack

Tags

Ferguson, gun control, guns, interview, Joe Rogan, justice, Law and Order, Lethal Force, Michael Brown, NRA, police, Police Brutality, Police Officers, Sam Harris, violence

Riot police clear demonstrators from a street in Ferguson

“People have erroneous assumptions about how violence unfolds.

If you’re deciding to block or defend yourself once a guy is already throwing his sucker punch, you are 9 times out of 10 too late.

I’m not making any claims to know what happened in Ferguson with the shooting; it could be every inch the homicide that many people seem to think it was. But the reality is that cops are having to work in a universe where they do a traffic stop and someone pulls out a gun and shoots them in the face.

So they have to assume that is a possibility no matter what you look like, no matter what kind of car you’re driving… You see them unbuckling the strap on their holster as they just walk up to give you a ticket. That’s because they don’t have the luxury of time. They can’t wait to see you produce a gun and say ‘OK, now my lethal force option is beyond reproach.’

So the only mode to be in with a cop — no matter how much of an asshole he might be — is to stay compliant, and then you sue him later. In the middle of negotiating with a cop, no matter how unjustified the arrest may seem, that’s not the time to be telling him he’s an asshole or talking about how you’re such a good guy and this is a violation of your civil rights.

The sheer fact that a cop has a gun on his belt makes any contact a potential lethal encounter for him.

So if you just go hands-on a cop, push a cop, he doesn’t know that you’re not going for the gun on his belt. He doesn’t know that you’re not going to push him into a car and he’ll be knocked out, and then you’re going to grab his gun.

So it’s all deadly from a cop’s point of view. Very few people understand that.

I had a friend who was stopped by a cop recently. This is a middle-aged Jewish guy who is, in his mind, the least dangerous person on earth, thinking why on earth is a cop stopping him. But my friend said something to the cop, then the cop unlatched the top restraint on his gun, and my friend said, ‘What? You’re going to pull out your gun on me?’

And the cop said, ‘What does a bad guy look like?’

And that just cut through the misunderstanding for my friend.

My friend knew he was not a bad guy; but there’s no way for the cop to know he’s not a bad guy. People are just not aware of that, and they’re interacting with cops and it’s dangerous everybody.”

__________

Sam Harris, riffing in an interview with Joe Rogan last September.

There’s more:

  • Martin Luther King on when and how you should break the law
  • Sam Harris explores the idea that your mind is all you have
  • Pick up a copy of Harris’s newest book, a primer on the art and science of mindfulness Waking Up

Sam Harris

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Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

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birth, consciousness, Crime and Punishment, Epicureans, Epicurus, existence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, General Philosophy, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?, Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, Life, literature, Lucretius, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sam Harris, Saul Frampton, science, To Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die, When I Am Playing with My Cat

Dworkin-Nagel 1

Aggregated here are several attempts to address that simple question. Why do you want to stay alive?

Though they arrive there from different byways, each thinker finally rests on the same idea: the reason why we want to stay alive is, simply, to perpetuate our existence. We want to stay alive to stay alive. Sound absurd, or absurdly tautological? It’s not, at least in my view. The value we place in life has little to do with projected positive experiences — the quivering line graph that registers whether we’re ecstatic one moment, unsatisfied the next. Rather, what we want is to continue the oft-banal experience of merely existing. Read on. See if you agree.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Part II, Chapter 6 of Crime and Punishment:

‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!… And vile is he who calls him vile for that,’ he added a moment later.

In a recent interview with Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, author of the existential mystery Why Does the World Exist?, reflected on the question and offered a level-headed and explicit answer:

Interviewer: Jim, in your work there are some themes that keep reappearing, notably religion and mortality… do you think that perhaps you’re getting a little bit worried about death?

Holt: Actually I think in many ways it would be a good career move for me [laughs], and it would solve almost all of my problems.

I think that life is — and I don’t know what your life is like — but mine sort of hovers around the zero point that separates pleasure from pain and happiness from misery. And every once in a while I’ll get a little spike into the happiness region, but then I’ll immediately go back down close to the zero point, or creep below that into the misery region. Yet I fluctuate around that point. And what I really cherish about life is being conscious. And to me that’s the subjective counterpart to the question ‘Why should the universe exist?’: ‘Why should consciousness exist? Why should my self exist?’

And what interests me is the way that philosophers have tried to take the sting out of death by various arguments that go back to the Epicureans. Lucretius and Epicurus himself said, ‘Well, don’t get so worried about death because your nonexistence after you die is just the mirror image of your nonexistence before you were born.’

And you didn’t worry about not existing the centuries before you were born, so why should you worry about not existing after your death?

The great Thomas Nagel rigorously deconstructed the idea in his magisterial book The View from Nowhere:

People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous, existence.

It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable. This asymmetry is important. If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it.

If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.

Saul Frampton reflects on Montaigne and the question of existence for existence’s sake in his book When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?:

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas — There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune…

But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And, to close, Sam Harris nodded at the significance of life’s most mundane pleasures in a recent online Q&A:

Questioner: Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?

Harris: It is impossible to eat pancakes there.

__________

Have more to add? Send them my way: john[at]jrbenjamin.com.

The picture is of the headiest pancake breakfast of all time: Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel shooting the breeze at the local diner.

I’ve done this sort of agreement among geniuses thing before:

  • Does the beauty of the Gospels attest to their truth?: Einstein, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thomas Cahill, and Julian Barnes share a surprising conclusion
  • Science as child’s play: Einstein, Newton, Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson embrace the wonder of the natural world
  • The sovereign subject: Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Krauthammer agree that government is the most important subject
  • Can we just assume god exists?: Updike, C.S. Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Anthony Flew see eye to eye on whether faith can trump reason
  • We don’t march: Orwell, Steinbeck, and Einstein rage against militarism 
  • Is your life valuable? If so, why?: Ronald Dworkin, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Campbell, Michio Kaku, and Vonnegut give a counterintuitive answer

Dworkin-Nagel

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The Machinery of Happiness

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Contentment, happiness, joy, psychology, Sam Harris, Waking Up

Sam Harris

“There is nothing novel about trying to become happy. And one can become happy, within certain limits… But conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the stress of life continues.”

__________

From the opening chapter of Waking Up by Sam Harris (Read the entire first chapter at Harris’s blog).

More happy stuff:

  • John Updike wraps up his memoir with a totally banal moment of pure joy
  • Jerzy Kosiński: how happiness is shaped by age and experience
  • Barnes takes it from a different angle: experiences can’t add up to happiness
  • For politicos: Gore Vidal dissects what ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ means today
  • Charles Murray takes up Vidal’s argument

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Why We Struggle to Find Satisfaction in Life

04 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Why We Struggle to Find Satisfaction in Life

Tags

Contentment, mindfulness, Philosophy, Sam Harris, Satisfaction, The Buddha, Waking Up, Wellbeing

Ireland 2005 504

“I am sitting in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan, drinking exactly what I want (coffee), eating exactly what I want (a cookie), and doing exactly what I want (writing this book). It is a beautiful fall day, and many of the people passing by on the sidewalk appear to radiate good fortune from their pores. Several are so physically attractive that I’m beginning to wonder whether Photoshop can now be applied to the human body. Up and down this street, and for a mile in each direction, stores sell jewelry, art, and clothing that not even 1 percent of humanity could hope to purchase.

So what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of the “unsatisfactoriness” (dukkha) of life? Was he referring merely to the poor and the hungry? Or are these rich and beautiful people suffering even now? Of course, suffering is all around us—even here, where everything appears to be going well for the moment.

First, the obvious: Within a few blocks of where I am sitting are hospitals, convalescent homes, psychiatrists’ offices, and other rooms built to assuage, or merely to contain, some of the most profound forms of human misery…

Yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this. Even while living safely between emergencies, most of us feel a wide range of painful emotions on a daily basis. When you wake up in the morning, are you filled with joy? How do you feel at work or when looking in the mirror? How satisfied are you with what you’ve accomplished in life? How much of your time with your family is spent surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just struggling to be happy in one another’s company? Even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.”

__________

From the opening chapter of Waking Up by Sam Harris. (Read the entire first chapter at Harris’s blog, or check out another excerpt about friendship. You can find more words from Harris here.)

I took the above picture in Ireland.

Sam Harris

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Realizing Friendship

06 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Realizing Friendship

Tags

Contentment, Envy, friendship, happiness, Sam Harris, Waking Up

Sam Harris

“In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: I wanted him to be happy.

That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own…

Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you because…—now made no sense at all.”

__________

From Waking Up by Sam Harris. (Find the entire opening chapter, from which this excerpt is pulled, along with Harris’s reading of it here.)

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Why Lying Is a Waste of Energy

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Why Lying Is a Waste of Energy

Tags

dishonesty, Ego, Energy, friendship, honesty, integrity, Lying, Sam Harris, Trust, truth

Sam Harris

“Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it… In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

But the liar must remember what he said, and to whom, and must take care to maintain his falsehoods in the future. This can require an extraordinary amount of work—all of which comes at the expense of authentic communication and free attention. The liar must weigh each new disclosure, whatever the source, to see whether it might damage the facade that he has built. And all these stresses accrue, whether or not anyone discovers that he has been lying.

Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a direct accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons that they might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem like someone who is always dancing around the facts—because you most certainly are. Many of us have known people like this. No one ever quite confronts them, but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.

In fact, suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie: Research indicates that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might—and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in protecting their egos, and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.”

__________

From Sam Harris’s short e-book Lying.

At a mere 26 pages, this essay is an extremely rewarding and challenging read — one that will recalibrate how you process truth-telling and even the minor dishonesties we all encounter in the course of daily life. Harris’s essential thesis is as daunting as it is simple: we should prefer to be awkward or even impolite rather than dishonest.

Read on:

  • Also from Lying, Harris levels on why personal integrity matters
  • Confucius, asked what to look for in our leaders, stresses honesty first…
  • Barnes offers a devastating paragraph on a friend whose dishonesty eroded her identity

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