Anatomy of misery

[Still writing..]

It is natural for us, human beings, to frequently think about different areas in our lives where there are misery and pain.  It is important to think about them because realizing the miseries is first of three important steps towards em betterment our lives.  Ignoring that, unless we absolutely realize it is not possible to ameliorate, is not a solution as that leads to unhappiness for long time.  The second step is to understand the imaginary situation in which that misery does not exist.  This is not always rather easy.  There can be multiple situations where that misery does not exist, but we may get other miseries which cause our overall pain to increase and we may find ourselves in worse overall situation.  So it is important to understand which set of situations, if any, will remove the misery in a way where we can improve the overall situation.  The third step, of course, is to analyze ways in which we can reach to that state where overall condition is improved through removal of misery.  It is important to understand that when we say misery, we talk about a pain that our body and/or mind is undergoing at an instance.  The relationship between physical pain and mental pain is quite close.  Yet we can, most of the time, identify the reason of misery to be physical or mental(emotional).  For example, source of hunger is physical even though it has significant impact on our mind.  Similarly, lack of freedom and dignity is an emotional misery even though that may also have significant physical impact.  E.g. in case of slaves and wage earners in various manufacturing institutions. Let us get back to this later.

Even though they cause one another, just as we discussed, emotional and physical miseries have different characteristics.  Human beings can realize physical miseries much more readily than emotional miseries.  Under usual circumstances our body responds quite promptly to discomfort.  For example if I am seating on a chair that is not comfortable, we realize it quickly and then we change the chair or seat somewhere else or do something else to remove the discomfort.  Our mind however acts lot slower in responding to uncomfortable situations.  Of course some have more tolerance than others, but overall our mind tend to tolerant some amount of discomfort.  For example, apart from some extreme cases, generally it takes human beings some time to find out whether two people can adjust well with each other.  There are of course examples of love at first sight and hate at first sight.  But they are quite rare compared to the usual cases where two people become friends and then slowly starts to develop a joyous or a hateful relationship.  When it comes to understanding the future states where a misery is removed, we are much better in imagining about removal of physical miseries, barring our scientific limitations, than emotional miseries.  For example, if I get a burn it is easy for me to understand the state where the burn is cured.  But if a relationship is broken, it is mostly complicated to analyze the future states in which the emotional misery of the breakup is cured.  When we try to analyzing different ways of reaching the possible better states from a state of misery similar kind of results resurface.  It is generally much easier to figure out how to reach a future state where a physical misery is removed, as opposed to find a way to remove an emotional misery.  One clear proof of that is the observation that study of cures for physical misery is a well established branch of science, whereas the study of cures for emotional misery, psychology, is, even today, largely a field of philosophy and science mixed. 

One aspect of misery that needs good understanding is how do we realize it.  One way to think about this is that any kind of misery is always realized by our mind.  Let us talk about physical miseries first because that is easy to understand.  Say I got a burn,  The pain does not come so much from the chemical degeneration of the cells but due to the electrical signal that our neurones carry to our mind which then interprets them generating what we feel as physical pain.  Now suppose someone lost his one finger in an accident.  That causes a complex set of miseries.  The misery from the pain of the wound.  The utilitarian misery in the future rising from not being able to use that finger.  The emotional misery rising from the realization that how the future could have been with the finger and how it is actually going to be without it.  Also, the misery from the loss of aesthetic appeal of his hand.   One can categorize the first two as physical memories and the last two as emotional miseries.  But one thing that is common is that all of them are realized by the mind. 

Physical and emotional misery, from the point of view of realization have one important distinction.  Physical misery is more or less absolute in nature.  For example, I am either hungry or not.  The fact that some one else is more hungry than me does not make my misery of hunger go away.  If I my finger is burning, my pain will not be ameliorated by hearing from someone that his finger is burning too.  On the other hand, emotional memory has some relative aspect.  For example, we realize lack of freedom when we see other people who are more free than us. We feel a sense of sadness when we don't have something that we deserve but at the same time many others have the same thing even if they don't deserve.  Also, emotional misery may lessen with time without any change in any external or sensory factors.  I don't believe in the statement that time heals all miseries, but we certainly learn to live being less hurt by our emotional miseries with time.
One distinction between physical and emotional misery lies in the way they originate.  Physical misery always originate from our sensory organs and carried by neurons to our brain.  Brain then creates the sensation of pain which we feel.  On the other hand emotional misery has much more  complex origin.  It is created by our brain by complex analysis of information received by brain from memory and/or different sensory information.  It consist of much complex analysis of quite a lot of information to give us a particular feeling.  That is one of the reasons many times even we ourselves don't know why we feel sad or happy.  Emotions are much more complex and abstract forms.  

A classification of utopias

A system, whether scientific, social or political, goes through changes over time.  Some time such changes are perceivable, some time not.  But at any given point in time, such a system has a state, which can be called the present state of the system.  From that state, we look forward and try to understand what may be a possible future state of the system.  Also, what may be the desirable future states of the system in future.  Unlike scientific systems, an arena where most of the driving forces of change come from natural laws, in sociopolitical systems the significant actors are mostly human beings.  Of course we are sharing this world with other beings, but for now let us confine to ourselves.  That naturally makes us, human beings, more concerned about understanding the properties of both possible future states and desirable future states.  One can possibly argue that the desirable future states, which for lack of good word let me call utopian states, of such a system at any point in time may not be of much rational concern if it is not a subset of the possible future states.  After all what good it is to meditate over the properties of something that has no possibility of occurrence in future.  For example, we can think of an highly desirable future state of our society where everyone lives for ever.  Of course that will cause other problems in the society, e.g. food crisis due to over population.  But for the sake of the discussion even if we accept that those problems will be magically solved due to super scientific invention of some sort in food production, is it really of any importance discussing this since it is not a possible future state given death is a natural law?  Since no one will live for ever, ever, this is an utopian state which can be rejected through reason.

There are other kinds of utopian states of a sociopolitical system which have more discussion worthy values.  Such states are desirable, but we can not reason them out of possibility.  We also can not reason how we can reach those utopian states from the current state of the society.  It is not really known to be a state dangling in impossibility, but also we don't know which path of sociopolitical decisions will take us there.  But since that does not completely eliminate the possibility of existence of such a path going from current state to the utopian state, there is some virtue in discussing properties of such a state.  One needs to be careful that elaborate understanding of such future states does not necessarily give us a silver bullet.  That is, we may not be able to use that knowledge to compare between two possible future states to evaluate which one is a more desirable one.  Ancient and many modern thinkers have spent their life time in meditating on properties of such utopian systems, what can also be called ideal systems.  Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle left elaborate details of what they call the city-state system.  They thought there is only one good state of the society and it is job of the thinkers to find out what that is and how to mold the existing sociopolitical structure so that it will put us on the right track to reach the ideal city-state society.  They spent an enormous amount of thinking in understanding the properties of such an ideal state.  In more modern times, philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant, Rawls have spent a great deal of there thinking behind such an approach, formally called as Transcendental Institutionalism.

Then of course there are desirable states which are in the reach of reason and we can establish some rational theory based on our current knowledge on how to reach that desirable state from our current state.  One trivia about such an utopia that is worth discussing about is that almost all of us have good description of such a state of the society in our minds.  In fact a common human being, at any point in time, or at least in different points in time, will be able to provide multiple descriptions of such utopias.

Let's name these utopian states as Impossible Utopia, Transcendental Utopia and Rational Utopia.

The question that immediately comes to mind is what good of their study anyway?  Well, the study of rational utopias is intuitively and by experience justified because those thoughts are major driving factors in our sociopolitical decision making.  They are forces which are carrying the chariot of our civilization from one state to another.  The value of the study of other two utopias is not as apparent.  Because they are derived mostly out of a priori knowledge, their properties are not polluted by experience.  Hence, I think, study of their properties help us identify certain properties in our current state which are highly desirable and should be kept.  Also, certain properties in our current state which are highly undesirable and should be eliminated asap.  So in principle their knowledge works like a filter.  Unfortunately it is not always practical to get rid of the bad ones or implement the good ones.  For example - decease, something we know and understand to be bad.  But currently we are incapable of getting rid of it completely from the face of earth.  Nevertheless, it identifies that progress should be made in that direction.  Poverty is another example.

One serious problem with such utopias is the very existence of many of them.  Plurality.  The plurality itself is not as troublesome as the fact that the nature of those utopian worlds often contradict each other.  I would like to point out that I am not talking about the contradictions present in the rational methods of taking the current state of the society to those utopian states.  I am talking about the contradictions present in the very properties of those utopian states.  These contradictions are less visible in Impossible Utopias, E.g. we all will agree that decease should be eliminated from the face of earth.  As we move through transcendental utopias to more realistically achievable rational utopias, these contradictions become very prominent.  Some would like to think of an ideal world where every place is urban and full of thriving human activities.  Some would like an ideal world where there are nature and forests everywhere and human beings sharing the planet in harmony with other living beings.  On the other hand an utopia where decease is rare may not be the utopian thinking of someone who is a doctor by profession.  As funny as it sounds, personal interests and limitations of human mind consciously or unconsciously often influence the design of ideal worlds that we want to be part of.  Further I want to understand the relationship between human mind and the source of these contradictions in relation to the society that I am most interested in, India.