Don't Worrry, Be Happy

Edit: If you're here from La Stranezza's blog, there's more posts, though none quite as well thought out as this. Just click on that lovely title thing at the top of the page and it will take you to the home page.

So. I was talking about philosophy yet again yesterday. My friend said something about how ‘bad guys always win, otherwise why would we call them good guys?’ I find that singularly depressing, so I started writing a rebuttal and then my internet got shut off. So instead I finished it in Word and posted it here. It became a bit of an essay about ethical hedonism, so don’t read if you don’t like.

To begin with: Evil is an arbitrary label, yes? So is good, most of the time. However, people have this nebulous idea of ‘good’ floating around their heads, and the people to whom it applies do stuff like rescue puppies and help grannies across the street. That’s not exactly helpful.

I propose a semi-new definition of good, for the purpose of this discussion. Just for the time it takes to read this, consider good to mean ‘something which increases overall joy in the world more than it decreases it,’ while evil is precisely the opposite. It is ‘something which decreases overall joy in the world more than it increases it.’ It’s not the most precise definition, but it gives you the basic point. (Right here, I’m giving my own arbitrary label. I’m defining happiness, or joy, to be the greatest positive the world. If you’re in a depressed mood, you might want to argue with me, but think of it this way – it’s hard to be joyful when you don’t have enough to eat or a roof over your head, and so increasing world joy would first require those basic things. To create maximum joy you must first take care of a person’s most basic needs. Therefore, I’m not advocating anything like spiking the water supplies with TCPs, because dude, not cool. Real joy needs a foundation built on rock, not Mary Jane or mind control.) Joy = good and good = joy. Simple enough.

With this definition, it’s pretty easy to point a couple things out about the world.

1.       At least 90% percent of all people considered ‘good guys’ weren’t. At best, they were neutral.

2.       At least 90% of all people considered ‘bad guys’ weren’t. At worst, they were neutral.

3.       The remaining 10% of each knew something a lot of people ignore: people are basically selfish.

Now, that last one might not seem to be something really relevant, but trust me, it is. It’s a basic human trait. Everyone wants to be happy, and just about everyone wants their loved ones to be happy (exceptions are a few people I’ve met with really, really screwed up relationships). This basic desire leads to selfishness. If we have a little bit more than that random guy over there, then it’s going to be that much easier for us to become happy and make our friends happy. There’s a thing called the monkeysphere, or Dunbar's Number, that says we literally cannot have more than a hundred or so True Human Beings stored in our brains. Everyone who isn’t a True Human Being tends to get shafted when we’re trying to help ourselves and our friends become happier.

Coming back to that point above, the 10% know about this selfishness and acknowledge it.  The real ‘bad guys’ take advantage of it, and they use other people’s desire for happiness as a way to increase their own. Any dictator ever, for example, takes advantage of some people’s desire for happiness by convincing them that helping him attain power will allow them to reap some awesome benefits. The key trait of these people is that they actively disregard desire for happiness of every single other person on the planet who isn’t them or someone who can help them. 

The real ‘good guys’ on the other hand, do the opposite. They see this world-wide desire for happiness, and they think, “Huh. You know, if more people were happy, it would be a pretty cool thing.” They ignore their own selfishness, or in some extreme cases, don’t have to. Making other people happy makes them happy. So they go out, and they do what they have to, to make the world a better place. The key trait of these people is that they take the basic selfishness aspect, and apply it to the entire world – they want the entire world to be happy.

Then there are the vast, vast majority of people who aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ They’re just true neutral. They want happiness for themselves and their own, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I think the main issue with the world, the thing that makes everyone so depressed and pessimistic about humanity is something that’s intrinsic to the two characters just mentioned. The bad guys get a lot more press. It’s not because they deserve it more, because hell knows they don’t. It’s because they’re more obvious. It’s like the Joker and Batman, if Batman was an elderly lady knitting blankets for the poor, who happened to trip up the Joker with stray balls of yarn placed strategically in his way, rather than being Batman. The Joker is all flash and schemes and plots and making people miserable so he can have fun. But elderly-lady-Batman doesn’t call attention to herself. She’s successful, in fact, because she doesn’t. If she went around shouting ‘Look at me, I’m going to trip up the Joker tonight by leaving a ball of yarn here outside the Gotham City Hall!’ then the Joker would laugh at her and maybe stab her, I don’t know. Instead, though, she’s just a quiet old lady, doing what she does and occasionally getting the Joker thrown back into the Asylum, tangled in yarn like a really dumb kitten. 

The reason that the world doesn’t have superheroes, or even really famous do-gooder groups with spotless records is because fame and bad guys tend to go together really well. Fame=Money and Money=Happiness in the really simplistic math of greedy people. Superheroes would have every bad guy on the planet trying to gun them down, and no one’s quite that stupid, and famous do-gooder groups result in greedy people sliming their way in and embezzling all the money (I generalize.) Groups that do work and have spotless records are relatively quiet about it. They aren’t in it for the money. They’re in it to help people.

So the bad guys not only get more press naturally, they also angle for it. Again, look at the Joker. The guy could not call more attention to himself if he tried. A really easy way to get a cheap happiness fix for that guy is to do something that has all of Gotham talking about him. It’s the same for most other bad guys. We give them the attention, too. After all, conflict makes good television, even if it doesn’t make for happy people, and bad guys have no hesitation about creating unholy amounts of conflict.

But just because bad guys get all the press doesn’t mean that they are the only ones operating. There are at least as many good guys out there, doing what they do and increasing the sum of world happiness. Since they get less press, people tend to assume that everyone in the world is a bad guy.  That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, if it fostered new potential good guys to go follow that path. Instead, though, it seems that a lot of people just say screw it, and become the neutral-depressed character type. Seriously folks, angst is not helping anyone.

So I’m proposing something: Let’s all be elderly-women-Batmen and trip up the Joker with our excess yarn. Only, y’know, metaphorically. Because seriously, how cool would being a metaphorical Batman be?