Re: How should we live?

Peter Brooks wrote:

"One reason is surely selfishness, for it proscribes absolute
selfishness. Scrooge exemplifies the problems of being too kind and
considerate to oneself. "

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This is sometimes explored as a result of a "scarcity of appetite". For
example, we can all give ourselves praise - we can "That was clever",
or "That was a noble action!" or whatever and preen a little as a
result. Yet few people do. And those that do, seem to get trapped in a
cycle of escalation that leads to paranoia.

So why don't we reward ourselves when it is so easy to do? The answer
proposed is that we have a scarcity of appetite. The best use of scarce
appetite is to draw out consumption, and to choose high quality things
to consume when possible.

But if the process of regulating consumption and choosing targets of
consumption is entirely within our own hands, it becomes very easy to
give in to consumption temptations. So instead of regulating we end up
exhausting our finite supply of satisfaction with little real value for
our efforts. That is the reason that those who do reward themselves get
trapped in a cycle of escalation - to get satisfaction from self-reward
one has to increase the magnitude of the achievement each time. So the
self-rewarder progresses from "I helped the old lady across the street
- Wow" to "I am Napoleon reorganising the world in the face of numerous
threats from evil spies".

However ordinary folk tend to try to anchor their rewards on events
outside of their consciousness (i.e., in the real world) because those
events are not in their power to control. It is not only people who do
this, of course. The political theorist Thomas Schelling talks of
"bright lines" in understanding how borders between nations are agreed.
When two armies clash on an open plain, and both armies are tired and
resources are short, they nevertheless can't find a natural stopping
place in the middle of a great empty plain - so the war drags on until
one side pushes the other to a mountain range, or a river, or the
ocean, which is a natural stopping place or bright line. So the armies
are also anchoring their decisions on outside criteria that provide
natural goals to regulate their actions.

Now in human life other people and their actions are very often the
bright lines by which we regulate our own appetites and consumptions.
Relationships are great examples. For the other person in the
relationship provides a way of regulating our own satisfactions just as
we regulate theirs. In a marriage for example, you can't just have sex
on demand - you have to keep the other person happy too, as well as
carry out the chores etc. So when the sex happens, it is better and
greater satisfaction can be achieved. Similarly one cannot just laugh
at ones own jokes - one needs to wait for the other person to laugh and
then our own laughter can bellow forth.

So one reason for not being Scrooges - and there are quite a few other
reasons too - is that we desperately need others to regulate our own
internal satisfactions.

Lance

.

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