tl;dr - be happy
Just Right; Do Read
parvenu [from the Oxford English Dictionary]
"A. n. A person of obscure origin who has attained wealth or position beyond that of his class; esp. such a one when unfitted for his position, or when making large assumptions for himself on account of his wealth; an upstart.
B. adj. That has but recently risen to wealth or position; vulgar display, etc."
People are curious. Curiosity is, as the logicians say, a necessary but insufficient condition for learning and understanding. People question things until they have an answer, and an answer is really anything that makes us stop our questioning... not necessary the right (i.e true) answer. Certainty, like Democracy, is always under threat of collapse and reaffirmation to some degree is necessary should our answers remain answers. But who is authorized to do the affirming, we wonder? Who's in charge?
Well, nobody but yourself alone we say as we encourage eachother to be completely self-determined, as if that wasn't a contradiction. Happiness has been reduced to "self-esteem," in effect making joy -- being happy that what you're feeling happy about is the right thing to be happy about (recursive happiness) -- all but impossible, at least to those of us inclined to recognize the existence of other people. Self-esteem is basically our reconstructed epithet for what used to be called "honor." Similar to feeling joy, "having" honor depends on the judgement of others, while self-esteem is a self-perpetuating, if only it were, charade for losers. Losers are those people who have, for reasons that may or may not be legit, given up on the judgement of others and retreated into the void of "the real me." But there's no one there, not even a self, to make them feel any worse (or better) than they already do.
The Real You
Or, "It's not my fault I have a genetic predisposition." Or, "It's society's fault!" Or, "It's a chemical imbalance, I need medicine not criticism!" Wrong. There is no "real you" beyond the apparent you, at least not until you're dead, if ever.
Our emotions and mental states are "caused" by neurotransmitters in the same way that consciousness is "caused" by the activity of neurons, or culture is "caused" by Richard Dawkins' memes. They aren't. These things don't somehow cause us to be what we are, they ARE what we are, in the objective sense of "being" (there is also a subjective sense).
A "cause," if it is to be in essence anything, is a temporal phenomenon: one things comes after and because of the other thing. But the reality is that the objective and subjective are two sides of the same coin, occuring simultaneously, but only capable of being understood in turn.
But what's the difference between a cause and the inherent nature of the thing? Perhaps this is where philosophy beings: giving "reasons" for how what ought to be comes from what is. It is the bridge between morality and science, a bridge that can't be built alone and which is a precondition for the feeling of joy. (I consider religion/theology to be the species of philosophy which permits the supernatural). What is taught as philosophy in schools these days is more like facts and history about philosophy or meta-philosophy. It's obscurity insures its incomprehensibility and irrelevance. It will not be discussed here.
keep reading the intro...
We're all Parvenu Now
While honor has been transformed into self-esteem, "emotional intelligence," has come to replace what used to be known as having "class." In the beginning, people assumed there was something other-worldly about those who had insight into others so that they were able to know how people "felt." Religious-based social structures dominated at least until the Enlightenment came along to tell us that no one was other-worldly special, rather they were just innately special. Hence, race-based social structures became common until the "leftwing" social movements came along to point out that class is, in a way, just a phantom used by people with stuff to make sure they keep their stuff. This is still basically where we are today (read Obama and Hillary's mentor, Saul Alinsky, for a reecent version). By now, the concept of having class has transformed into a gimmick of the self-help "industry." Now, it is only for those who reject the possibility of complete self-sufficiency: they feel like losers asking for help and as losers is how they are treated. We suggest that they seek professional help.
The hard-line egalitarianism which inspired the class struggle movements, along with a D.O.A. biological determinism (inspired by the scientismist's inveterate homunculus) keep those who would otherwise grow into full real-life persons, but lacking even the possibility of morality or direction via authority (morality's only source), confined to the infantile world of misery and confusion: the world we are all born into. "My brain made me do it," they say.
I believe this deeply destructive worldview is beginning to change thanks to the mass, effectively anonymous communication made available by the Internet. There is no longer an excuse for emotional ignorance just as there is no excuse for any kind of educational ignorance. At least in the West, everything that has ever been written by a human mind is available for free online if one knows where to look. It is as wrong for someone in the pursuit of happiness to obtain a digital copy of "the best that has been thought and said in the world" as it is for a starving child to steal a loaf of bread from the rich man.
Our Brains on Logic
It is the purpose of this site to show that there is Logic inherent in the universe. Not in a supernatural or theological sense, but in it's everyday sense, which as it turns out seems just like those old atavistic senses when it's not considered an illusion or artifact of some other "socially constructed" system or "dialectic" process. Nobody believes this today (except religious weirdos) but it's clearly true. Is there any obvious reason to say this is a nonsensical suggestion? Computers are physical things and they can "do" it, right? Perhaps it is on the same level as numbers which only "exist" in Plato's magical mystery realm of super-awesome becomingness?
Normally, logic is considered to be the way we get more true statements from previously agreed upon true statements. It is the "shape" of meaning and argument you could say. It is made up of the simplest mental thing, concepts/words (p's and q's) in combination with logical "operators" which are limited to a set of "truth functions" that no one really understands the nature of. We say something like "if something X exists, then..." as if we really knew what existence is or how some thing is even capable of having properties which distinguish it from some other thing Y, or p, or q, or whatever. To understand the nature of these beyond a single person's opinion we turn to science and its objective taxonomy of all the material stuff of the universe.
Logic usually stays in the realm of language and discourse about the material world, but I believe that Logic is, like matter/energy, space/time, geometric relationships, movement, and maybe a few other such concepts, an irreducible physical primitive. Except instead of a primitive thing it is, like numbers themselves, a relationship between things when "things" are reduced to their simplest constituent parts. Ultimately, physical things reduce to the statistics and geometry of some thing called "energy," which is nothing more than the "ability" to make things move: hardly what we would consider material or tangible, but has been shown epirically to be true. On the last analysis the physical world vanishes into a haze of imperfect language.
This seems impossible to those without an understanding of the implications of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, but is an accepted certainty to millions of nerds. What it "means" has yet to be agreed. (This site is my two cents). So, it seems we have a paradox in our understanding of the world: if we try to understand our concepts, we run into things that have to be explained through objective study of the physical world and if we try to understand the physical world we eventually run into our concepts that seem "merely subjective." But in this case the "vicious cycle" isn't bad at all; there is nothing left to be understood, the cycle is virtuous not vicious. We can freely move back and forth between the two understandings of the world in a process I like to call "philosophy."