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Happiness! [Security]

26 (31%)

Freedom! [Liberty]

58 (69%)

Total Members Voted: 84

[Leafsnail]

Except, what if you get tired of being a prince?

What if you make a lousy prince...  Don't like making laws, handing out decrees, visiting the neighboring kingdoms, meeting with ambassadors...  Just get sick of all that.  What if want to spend your days working with metal or growing plants or whatever?  And you can't, because you're too busy doing all your princely stuff?

What if the kingdom needs you to marry some specific princess for political reasons, but you feel absolutely no attraction to her.  She's stupid, and boring, and has the wrong color hair, and doesn't bathe.

You may have lots of luxuries...  But without freedom you're going to wind up in a situation you don't like sooner or later.

That, in a nutshell, is pretty much the point of this thread.

What opportunity is that?  Do you need some million-dollar house to be happy?  Do you need a fancy car to be happy?  Do you need to marry a supermodel to be happy?

Happiness is an internal mental state.  It isn't some outside force acting on you.

You can be happy slaving away in the mud all day long...  You can be miserable with billions of dollars at your disposal...

A large part of happiness is being content with what you have.

But a very important part of happiness is self-determination.  Choosing to work in the mud all day long is very different than being forced to work in the mud all day long.

Since the question is happiness or freedom, I assumed that a straight choice is being offered.  In practise, freedom would almost always allow you to achieve happiness.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Put it this way - if you don't know freedom, you won't be unhappy not to have it if everything else you do have. In a good zoo, animals can be perfectly happy, if the people provide for them. Being born and living in cages or special "environments", they don't know true freedom. They're only "not free" from the point of view of the animals and people outside of the zoo. Likewise, without some external effect, a prince may be happy for all his life without making a single real choice. He'd be very restrained even by the standards of the peasants, but for him, it's great life. He wouldn't know better.


sidenote: I'm rather terrified of the idea of being absolutely free, but denied happiness. If I'm not mistaken, someone wrote a novel on that as well, some immortal omnipotent being was wallowing in self-pity because everything just became boring to him.

[HAMMERMILL]

Yeah, not sure why I implied legs were critical for smoking reefer, in retrospect.

But anyways, freedom does suggest you have the oppurtunity to do certain things that could make you happy and you are not in some doomed situation without any way to meet your basic human needs.

I suppose total freedom and unlimited oppurtunity might still not make you happy. Maybe you have a brain disorder that keeps you from experiencing joy or elelation from anything you do. Best you could do then is just make an intellectual judgement about your well being.

While the only way I can see being happy with absolutely no freedom is if you were like one of B.F. Skinner's rats, stuck in a box with an electrode hooked to your brain.

Or maybe I'm missing the point entirely.

[Sean Mirrsen]

That's because you know freedom. If you were a rat, living in a box for all of its life, you'd have a mighty different view of the world. You wouldn't have the experience to know what's beyond the box, and barring a sudden cessation of food input, you'd likely never want to find out if your other basic needs were met.

[HAMMERMILL]

Well, I meant a human version of a Skinner box, where you could push a button and receive a drug like euphoria whenever you wanted.

I'll have to argue that experimental animals that grow up completely isolated turn out to be pretty maladjusted and miserable. Same with humans, too.

But I suppose if you had no concept of freedom, the option would seem alot less attractive.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Put it this way - if you don't know freedom, you won't be unhappy not to have it if everything else you do have. In a good zoo, animals can be perfectly happy, if the people provide for them. Being born and living in cages or special "environments", they don't know true freedom. They're only "not free" from the point of view of the animals and people outside of the zoo. Likewise, without some external effect, a prince may be happy for all his life without making a single real choice. He'd be very restrained even by the standards of the peasants, but for him, it's great life. He wouldn't know better.


sidenote: I'm rather terrified of the idea of being absolutely free, but denied happiness. If I'm not mistaken, someone wrote a novel on that as well, some immortal omnipotent being was wallowing in self-pity because everything just became boring to him.

Wouldn't the peasants be even more constrained though? Their options would be rake shit all day, or rake shit all day. The prince, having more or less jack shit to do most of the time, would be free to do whatever the fuck he felt like, up to and including raping and murdering said peasants. You're looking at this as being analogous to modern society, with peasants being working class and the prince being the scion of a repressive upper-middle class household.

In fact, I believe the whole "Prince vs Peasants" comparison was initially brought up to illustrate that a shitraking peasant (who has no freedom to speak of) could be happy, while a prince (who's more or less on top of the world and free to do more or less whatever he wants) could be miserable. Then someone turned it into some convoluted wealth vs poverty thing (which is also a blatantly untrue romantic idea, given that statistically, the more money someone has the happier they are, albeit with diminishing returns).

That's because you know freedom. If you were a rat, living in a box for all of its life, you'd have a mighty different view of the world. You wouldn't have the experience to know what's beyond the box, and barring a sudden cessation of food input, you'd likely never want to find out if your other basic needs were met.

Except, human's don't really work that way. If a human lived their whole life in a box, with nothing but food/water shoved through a small hole they would end up extremely stressed and hopelessly insane. Any higher social animal would.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Would he now? Sure, he'd develop mental disorders from lack of stimuli, but you would only call him "unhappy" by our standards. Because for the premise to hold true, he'd have to be in the box since his birth, or soon after that. He'd have absolutely no way to know something existed beyond the box, he'd come to think of things as mere images if he could see them, not real objects. He'd think the food appearing next to him was just the way the world he was in worked. He'd be happy every time he got food, every time he, uh, performed biological functions. He'd never leave the "child" phase of development, wouldn't have a language, wouldn't know anything except the endless cycle of ingest/excrete. He would find his own happiness and wouldn't be miserable, except by our standards.

[Jude]

Assuming the two are mutually exclusive, happiness. In reality, obviously it doesn't work that way and freedom is a major predictor, and probably cause, of happiness

[Mfbrew]

Some of you are missing the point of the happiness/freedom tradeoff.

Theoretically, there is a correct choice in any given situation that will maximize your happiness.

It's lunch time and your happiness is n.  Given your biochemistry and current emotional state, a hot dog will increase you to n+10 happiness, while a chicken sandwich will increase it to n+20.  You don't know that, but you might get a hunch in the form of a craving.

To maximize your happiness, the chicken is the logical choice to maximize your happiness.  You have the freedom to settle for a hot dog, but by exercising your freedom you're worse off.  Really, god should just put a chicken sandwich in your hands, and you'll win.

 

[HAMMERMILL]

Well, then that brings up things like destiny vs freewill. Maybe god really is putting chicken sandwiches in your hand, like it or not.

But if you knew somebody else was making your choices for you and limiting your options, you'd be unhappy about it. So then there would be a point where the lack of options would be the largest obstacle to your happiness.

[Cheeetar]

All that means is that having happiness at the expense of freedom is impossible, rather than that choosing happiness over freedom is a bad choice.

[Mfbrew]

Imagine you become a firefighter because you like helping people and you like adventure and danger.

The only difference between you choosing to become a firefighter of your own volition vs the government reading your mind, analyzing the results, and assigning you to be a firefighter
is the happy thought you gain from the act of making a decision.

An entity that knows all of the variables in a situation is in a position to make better choices than you'd make freely.

Let's go back to the lunch example.

Freedom to make decision: +10 happiness
hot dog: +10 happiness

vs

freedom to make decision: +10 happiness
chicken sandwich: +20 happiness



So that person is better off being free AND buying the chicken.

But the less you value freedom and the more you value chicken, freedom becomes a huge tradeoff for happiness.

Let's say the government studies you and realizes that your actual best lunch option is a food you've never heard of, maybe Some root from the amazon, that is worth +50 happiness.

The marginal benefit is so strong there it outweighs the happy thought from making a choice freely.

I suspect that a lot of you guys place high value of freedom so it's unlikely that any god or government would have enough access to information to make better decisions for you in the near future.  For you, making a decision might be +100 happiness, while for me it's only +5

[Cthulhu]

Have you read Brave New World?  It's basically about this question.  A society in the future where everyone is grown in jars and then conditioned in their sleep to love buying things, to take narcotics whenever they feel bad, to hate being alone, to be promiscuous, and to only care about having fun when they're not at work.  There's a rigid caste system in place, and the castes get dumber and dumber until the lower castes are essentially hundreds of identical, mentally retarded twins who do all the work we wouldn't want to do (But still get mad at Mexicans for taking them away from us).  The sleep conditioning though, makes them happy with their predicament.  "I love being an epsilon, black is such a great color to wear.  I'm so glad I'm not an alpha, they have to work so much harder than me."

[alway]

Edit: hrm... guess on re-reading that it would be best not to say, might start a flame war...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Freedom. Why?

My prime example is George Orwell's 1984. For the uninformed, in 1984 there are three social levels. Proles, The Outer Party, and The Inner Party. Proles compose 85% of the population, and although they face oppresion by the Party, they are more happy and free than anyone else. The Party mostly ignores the Proles, keeping them content with cheap food, alcohol, and porn. If the Proles were to revolt agains the Party en mass they would almost certainly win, but they never will, as they are content. You might think this to be an argument for happiness, but the Proles survive off of the Party keeping them like this. And the Party won't last. The Outer Party alone shows this, with it's members being emotionaly and psycologicly grinded down their entire lives. The members of The Inner Party are no better off, being that they have real power. And in a world like 1984's, power is somthing easly lost. Thus, members of the Party are clearly losing their humanity with every passing generation, so the Party will eventualy implode. Without Big Brother to save them, what will happen to the Proles? They will die, having been conditioned to be happy under the Party.

You can be happy one day, but without the freedom to live, that day may be your last.

Also, this thread made me think of this, but I don't know why:http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-752