Humanism is joy of living 

Life is more simple than we think. When we cannot understand life we build a complicated vision of reality that is most likely alienated from its objective essence. Through history, authorities have created knowledge that helps us understand nature and natural laws better. Unfortunately, besides that they created a huge ballast of very questionable, wrongful, and unessential knowledge that very often prevents us from finding the simple truth. Social sciences failed especially. In this field there is a large number of authorities, but I have not analysed their work because it would require a large effort while the result, in my opinion, would not be useful enough. That is the reason why I did not provide references from any authority, not even into the introduction to the problems. It should also be emphasized that authorities in the field of political and economic system I have developed do not exist because I have created it from the foundation alone. Despite of the risks of mistakes, my presentation is based only on my own analysis of a man and society and on pure logic. 

In this essay I will talk about how to create a good and healthy society with special emphasizes on happiness and joy of living. That is a field very well elaborated by Erich Fromm. He analyzed the work of the greatest authorities in the field and gave his own recommendations on how to achieve a productive and healthy life. However I've wanted to accomplish much more and that is the reason I created a new political and economic system that will unconditionally and unavoidably give a good, healthy, and joyful life to everyone. 

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Our society strongly wishes to have a happy life but it is not successful in finding it. I will try to explain in this essay why. Happiness is a result of satisfying needs. Needs may be objective and subjective. It should be said that the objective and subjective determinations of reality interweave with each other and almost never exist in an absolute form. Absolute subjectivity would be total craziness while absolute objectivity is just an ideal of men’s life. I am speaking here about tendencies of subjectivity and objectivity.

Happiness is always a result of overcoming some kind of unhappiness. Happiness and misfortune depend on needs and therefore they also may be objective and subjective. Objective misfortune is a consequence of the inabilities of satisfaction of objective needs while the abilities of satisfying objective needs create the objective happiness. Objective misfortunes are for example shortages of freedom or basic means that insure existence such as food, while objective happiness is reaching the freedom and finding the food. Such a form of objective happiness and unhappiness mainly does not exist in the developed world and especially, will not exist in the system I have proposed so that I will not talk about it here any more.   

A man understands the nature of his basic natural needs such as freedom and overcoming hunger more easily than the nature of his mental needs even though they all have a unique nature. The mental needs may also be objective and subjective. Certainly the most important objective or natural mental need is a creative productive power of man because it brings the largest objective or natural conveniences. I will talk about it more, later. 

The roots of subjective mental needs lie in the objective limitations of man’s nature. Man should accept his powerlessness when he cannot overcome it. However, the man can easily use the freedom of his thoughts to assign himself an illusion of overcoming the limitations of his nature. Most often he accomplishes it through the subordination of people. He achieves it by using ideologies, power control, wealth, glory and all other alienated values that may give power over the people. Each success in this field in a man’s subjective conscience easily gives a characteristic of overcoming his objective natural powerlessness. The illusion of overcoming the powerlessness brings large alienated happiness that looks real to the man and he accepts it as such. A man who achieves power over people, or becomes rich, or famous, experiences an eruption of captivating happiness.  

The achievement of domination over people is success of subjective nature, therefore it certainly meets objective obstacles that always bring disappointment, and happiness disappears. When a man’s illusion of power comes to the contradiction with objective laws of nature he becomes very afraid for the survival of his vision of conveniences. The fear forces him to fanatically act in the field of his alienated interest. When a man satisfies his hunger he does not eat more because it would bring discomfort to his stomach. When alienated mental needs are at stake a man finds and accepts their satisfaction harder and easily acts endlessly in order to achieve larger conveniences. This is in fact the basic circumstance of alienation that brings big problems to society. Despite the fact, a man is most likely not aware of it, the final result is equivalent or even worse than when a man with a full stomach continues to eat. 

If a man mentally passively surrenders himself to captivating happiness then, after some time, he necessarily bears a painful reaction. Successful people mostly excel in stress and divorces for example and if they do not live reasonably enough, productively, and with discipline, which is a hard task to achieve under privileges they have, they very often excel in depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. If you pay attention you may find that powerful, rich, and famous people are very often not happy, they just work hard to present themselves as successful people in a good mood. As a rule they are very concerned about their wealth, glory, ageing and do not enjoy life because they have alienated themselves from their natural needs. Greediness gives insensitive hearts to them, perverts their souls and takes joy from their lives. 

Besides, that the alienated success develops narcissistic features of man’s character that glorify his person and underestimate other people. Such a man loses respect towards other people and that means he losses abilities to achieve natural conveniences in the relationships with other people. Conveniences that originate from equal rights relationships among the people belong, according to their nature, to one of the greatest possible conveniences that man’s nature can achieve. The man who, because of his ignorance, refuses such conveniences is a big enemy to himself. 

In an alienated society not even ordinary people have satisfactory lives and therefore always think that happiness is somewhere else. They admire authorities and idols and try hard to achieve their alienated success. However, there is not enough space in this field for all of the people so that the unsuccessful people try living the lives of their idols in their dreams. That is all wrong. In first place, because the life of these idols only superficially presents happiness, in reality all these idols objectively do not have a better life at all than they have if idols’ lives are not even worse. On the other hand, a man who goes along with other people’s lives easily becomes envious and more unsatisfied with his own life. In such a way he develops his non-productive orientation.   

Neither the successful nor unsuccessful people in today’s alienated society can satisfy their alienated needs because no acting can reach the nature of the appearance of such needs. Man simply cannot overcome his objective powerlessness. The non-ability of satisfaction of such needs creates a subjective misery but unfortunately, it looks real to the man. It may be even more difficult than an objective unhappiness. For example, a man would never commit suicide because he could not satisfy his natural needs such as finding release from hunger, he would only do it if he cannot satisfy his alienated needs.  

In an alienated society a non-ability of satisfying needs makes painful tension and angriness. Angriness may be a natural need. When man’s natural needs are in danger angriness has its justification because it accumulates a huge energy in the fight for survival. In every other case angriness is most likely the consequence of alienation, powerless and it is very unhealthy for the man himself and for the whole society. Angriness is a form of hatred or just a step away from it. With a medical standpoint of view, the angriness poisons a man’s organism while with sociological standpoint of view it poisons the whole society. It easily develops destruction towards the world around this man. Such reaction develops irrationality and creates permanent miserable results from which it is very hard to find an escape. A man who cannot understand the nature of his needs easily acts against his nature and lives an unstable and unhappy life. 

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The conclusion of this introduction is not only that people should not strive towards great happiness but also they should avoid it as an unhealthy desire. An eruption of happiness in today’s society is mainly a circumstance of unhealthy alienated life and a man should be very careful towards such happiness because, according to its essence, it can hardly be real. Most likely it is a lie that necessarily carries in itself a big hidden misery. However, it is very hard to refuse happiness which is strongly captivating. Therefore the society should develop an orientation that would not allow people to be unhappy because in that case an alienated happiness would appear harder. That is exactly what the system I have proposed enables. This system is less based on reaching happiness but society will get a natural, joyful, stable and good life.  

Maybe it sounds unbelievable to you but all of the mentioned problems with happiness and unhappiness would start to find a good solution by the establishment of equal rights among the people. Today we have a formal equal rights proclaimed by the laws of human and civil rights. In reality such equality does not exist because a huge number of different privileges of the members of the society exists in every society. The new system starts solving this problem with the help of equal rights evaluation among the people. Each evaluation will have a small influence on income of evaluated person. The positive evaluation will increase the income a little bit and the negative evaluation will decrease it. Such an evaluation will force each individual to respect other people, to make the life of another man more beautiful and not to do anything what might harm the other people. This will be the basis for the establishment of a healthy, constructive, and productive orientation of society. 

Real equal rights among the people will contribute to decreasing possibilities for appearances of any kind of domination among the people and therefore it will decrease possibilities of appearances of false happiness and unhappiness. Full equal rights among the people will contribute to the establishment of a new form of convenience that is called joy of living. Happiness and joy of living are similar phenomena but there is also a difference. Happiness is often an intensive convenience that cannot exist without unhappiness and usually does not last long. Happiness is bigger when previous or possible unhappiness was bigger and vice versa. Happiness does not necessarily depend on man’s activities; it may just come or not come. Joy of living is certainly a natural convenience, usually something of a lower intensity than big happiness, but may be constant because it comes as a result of man’s entire productive orientation.  

Joy of life is based on activities that satisfy natural needs. It is especially hardly accessible when man does not have freedom of acting and taking decisions. That is exactly the situation we have today and that is a reason it is very hard to find a joyful man today. Joy of living is always based on the productive activity of man and therefore it necessarily requires an activity effort. It is quite easier to perform such an effort in the field where man likes what he is doing than in the field he does not have any interest. That is one of the main reasons why the new system opens to every man the right to work at any public work post at any time. But we certainly need a criterion for filling the work posts. The only one reasonable criteria lies in giving the right to work at every public work place to the best worker. 

Such division of work will enable each man to get the job they like more. The man who likes some kind of job more will invest a larger effort for achieving the best productivity for the desired work place and as result he will accomplish the right to work at the desired work place. When a man invests a larger effort in the field he likes, such an effort does not need to be inconvenient. Such a work opens up abilities for the creative performances and realization of man’s productive being power that brings large conveniences in the form of joy of living.  

It should be added that the new system would balance the interest for all work posts by the help of a new market and democratic regulation of the height of incomes and by the help of the newly defined responsibility regulation of workers. In the new system all work posts will be equally desired and therefore the problems connected to division of work will not exist any more. When difference in desire to choose the different work posts will not exist any more, then one of the biggest origins for the alienated happiness and unhappiness in today’s society will disappear as well. A stable joy that normally results from the realisation of freely chosen work tasks will come. 

Besides that, such a measure will achieve significantly greater productivities than private companies may achieve, so that capitalism, with all its negativities, will be sent to history. Last but not the least, the new system offers a new distribution of incomes that will be formed by direct democratic decisions of the people. This will form a new righteous distribution of goods that will be equally acceptable to all. The new way of goods consumption will demystify the alienated values of goods and bring optimally high conveniences to society. 

The described system will ride the people of authoritative pressure and give them freedom to follow their own interests, while at the same time forcing people to mutual respect. Such experiences will demystify the values imposed by authorities, and will teach people to live in accordance with their proper nature, which will in turn free them from all types of alienation characteristics of present-day society. Furthermore, the system will teach people to set their needs in accordance with the possibilities of satisfying them. This is the chief prerequisite for overcoming destructiveness in society, because people who permanently satisfy their needs are not destructive.  

Besides that, a joyful man accepts the limitations of his nature more easily, so that, the false subjective happiness and unhappiness can capture him significantly harder. The joyful man will not be necessarily able to satisfy all his needs. In a natural society the inability of satisfaction of one’s needs would not produce angriness any more because the objective righteousness and respect among the people that the new system establishes will prevent it. Who ever invests a large effort in satisfying his needs and cannot achieve the satisfactory result in such a society will be sad. Sadness is a much healthier and better emotion than angriness because it is more rational. Sociologically, contrary to angriness, sadness do not produce conflicts. Psychologically, sadness compared to angriness, allows a man to understand an objective reality more and therefore to solve problems more productively and constructively. Sadness, contrary to angriness, can develop a soul. It may direct a man towards a better life.

Happiness is temporal. In trying to retain it as much as possible, the man does not stop at nothing, and easily becomes egotistic, greedy, and develops many negative characteristics of his character that cause damage to himself and to the whole society. The natural joyful man lives a productive life and knows that his conveniences depend on him alone. That is the reason he is very ready and willing to share, ready and willing to cooperate on all levels of human relationships and thus, contributes to creating conveniences to society. 

The proposed system will enable a man to be productive, satisfied with himself, and to believe in his future. Such a man is able to love. Today we distort the meaning of the word love because love among the people almost does not exist. The ability to love cannot be received; it must be earned by the productive way of living. It is in fact the highest accomplishment of the productive life and gives the biggest joy of living. Besides that, the proposed way of living will enable a man to reach the greatest knowledge – wisdom. A wise man has everything he needs nevertheless how quantitatively or qualitatively it is, and therefore he is the master of his emotional states and lives a full, peaceful, and joyful life. This man is a free man. 

The system I have proposed will enable the people to correctly develop themselves and to be mentally and physically healthy. Healthy individuals will develop a healthy society and a healthy society will form even more healthy individuals. The process will develop cyclically and as a final result, a harmonic and good society will appear with individuals full of joy of living. The proposed system promises a natural and highly prosperous development of society, beyond the wildest dreams today. The system is defined, in detail, in my book, “The Humanism” available free of charge here.

April 8, 2004 

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