Science and The Pursuit of Happiness

Happiness, Bhikku, is like an Iraqi nuke. There is no such thing. And if you perversely go looking for it, you'll only get your ass whipped.

-- The Buddha's Diary, a Friday in June, maybe 511 BC

Note: Bhikku = Bhikshu, roughly the same as Monk.

The Hindu Jihadis have spoken. The Vedic Era, they wistfully whisper with tender nostalgia, was a rare Golden Age in Brownistan's history. Those glory days, they declare, were a long orgy of universal contentment in Brownistan. For once, they speak the truth. All brown people were satisfied in Vedic times. The men satisfied themselves by beating their wives. The women satisfied themselves by bullying the oldies at home. And while noone really cares what oldies think, even they were satisfied because they knew they'd die soon and go to Heaven or Hell, either of which could only be an improvement on Brownistan.

Contrast this Utopia with our own decadent times: Wife-beating is regrettably passe', and old people are indefinitely kept alive somewhere in Florida, instead of being slowly killed at home. Everyone, as a result, is thoroughly dissastisfied.

Sadly, this is not an isolated instance. Nay, it is part of a tragic pattern. Modern man, particularly in the West, is in a million ways more miserable than his forefathers; and the primary reason for his profound gloom is Science.

Let not the reader consider me ungrateful. I freely acknowledge that Science has given us much: Viagara to create real men, surgery to create unreal women, MPEG video to capture the combo in action, broadband internet to download the said video with, and Prozac to soothe the depression when blokes gets bored of porn, as blokes eventually do. (I am not talking here of my old friend SC. He never tired of porn, and probably never will. But he is a genius at lechery, while you, gentle reader, are only a genius at not being a genius.)

I salute Science: it is the giver of plenty. Nevertheless, it is also the root cause of the West's woes.

The problem with Science is that it fixes stuff that ain't broken. Like Rahul Dravid, it performs spectacularly under pressure, after first going through great trouble to create the said pressure. Note that Science heroically cooks up miracle cures for strange new diseases. It need not. If it had instead let sissy blokes die of urinary infection, they would not have lived to get these high-end diseases. Note that Science constantly develops ever more complicated and controversial theories about the universe. It need not. It could instead accept the entirely self-consistent claim that the Universe is Allah's third wife. Two damning examples already, and I have not even got to SMS messaging, iPod, TiVo, toilet paper, low-fat peanut butter, and remote-controlled microwave ovens.

Indeed, I submit that most scientific innovation is not only unnecessary, but decidedly detrimental to the Human Condition in some way or the other.

The apologist for Science might point out that this is not really an indictment of science. Innovation, like liberation, comes with a price tag. When one develops an extra-whitening toothpaste, one should not be begrudged a little carcinogenic effluvium. Bah! most human misery is but collateral damage, as Donald Rumsfeld constantly reminds us.

This is arguably true. However, it is besides the point. The real problem is not merely with the process or its side-effects, but lies at at the very core of Science. The nub of the matter is that Science has raised the bar. Before the Scientific Revolution, Man's highest hope was that his neighbor, and not he, would get the plague. Contentment was easy because expectations were low. Along came Science, and led white people to mistakenly believe that

(1) There is a thing called happiness.
(2) If only they tried, they can get it too.

The effects of the deception are manifold and profound. Nobody is better placed to see this than me. The great land of North Texas, where I roost at present, is a land of such dreadful monotony that even hurricanes and earthquakes do not come here. The only natural disaster that frequents these parts is George W. Bush. He has his points, but you'll agree he's not quite the same thing as a tornado. Yet, people regularly ask me what plans I have for the weekend. When I first moved in here, I found this quite hilarious. "Charming devils," I thought, "How wittily they allude to the storied Dallas dullness!" I was wrong. These blokes actually make plans for the weekend, and execute them. Their interests include, hold your breath,

(1) indoor suntan with discount rates for extra UV-protection
(2) kayaking in a large-sized artificial puddle, nay lake
(3) white-water rafting in the same puddle, nay rapid
(4) hunting imported African animals in a fenced-in mock-forest, and
(5) hand-gliding from nowhere to nowhere over miles and miles of nowhere.

One evening, I was driving to the grocery store when I chanced to see one of these blokes about to take off on his glider. (The highest point in North Texas is the overpass of Highway 635 over Highway 75. Taking off from there guarantees 20 miles greater range.) Unable to contain my curiousity, I asked him, "Why?". He looked at me, shrugged, and with a faraway look in his green eyes, whispered : "To have fun". It was then, my friends, that I saw clearly the canker that eats away at the hearts of my hand-gliding brothers, for a man who seeks fun in Dallas is a man whom not even Prozac can rescue from the loony bin.

But that man is not alone, nor is Dallas unique.The white man today, all over the world, is a pilgrim seeking the Holy Grail of happiness. All the world to him seems a veritable Paradise, except the place he currently lives in. And armed with the gizmos that Science constantly cooks up for him, he goes forth to find this Paradise in ever more unlikely places. He flies to the Grand Canyon to get married, because the old church wedding isn't fun anymore. He fights for Zion, because DisneyLand isn't fun anymore. He kills brown people, because killing bears isn't fun anymore. He turns gay, because being straight isn't fun anymore. He buys organic, because buying sex toys isn't fun anymore. He goes to Alaska, because going to the bar isn't fun anymore. He does yoga, because doing drugs isn't fun anymore. He loves Jesus, because loving the neighbor's wife isn't fun anymore. And in seeking greater and greater happiness, he only sinks deeper and deeper into his misery.

It does not have to be thus. Dark is the night, but the white man only has to look to the East for light. The trick is to accept, as colored people do, that life is a bad deal. If you aim for the stars, you'll only get to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder. If you aim for the treetop, you'll at least get a few squirrel-eaten fruits. The white man wants to use science to create Heaven on earth. He fails, for it is beyond him or anyone else. The brown man, on the other hand, only wants help in making babies. If science will not give it, he knows that Swami Premananda will.

This is not mere theory. A few years back, a survey was conducted to find how happy people from different nations were. To some people's surprise, the survey found that the happiest people on earth were the Bangladeshis. White people were deeply consternated, if that's the word I'm looking for. There was a mad scramble to locate the damn place on the map. Bangladesh is, after all, a nation that has both Allah and poverty but neither Al Qaeeda nor oil. Naturally, white people had formerly ignored it. When they dug up some more dirt on it, they found that it had once been rescued from cow-eating brown people by grass-eating brown people. They also found that it was the only of China's neighbors that China did not want to annex, because Chinese people know a bad deal when they see one. Such a land, said white people, cannot be happier than God's Own Country, and so saying they dismissed the survey as faulty.

They were wrong. Here is what really happened, as I found out from a reliable native.

The surveyors went out and asked the natives if they lacked anything they wanted. The natives said, "No". You see, it was the month of Ramadan and though they didn't have food, they didn't want it. The surveyors then asked the natives if they were happy. The natives laughed, because they found the question funny.

Naturally, the survey gave Bangladesh an A+ for sheer joie de vivre. Any survey would have, under the circumstances.

Somewhere in this story, gentle reader, there is a lesson for mankind. I wish I could tell you what it is, for you clearly lack the brains to see it yourself. But right now, I don't have the time. I need to suit up and go indoor wind-surfing. They tell me it is fun.

Prelude to a Profound Piece

Chaos confounds us and obscures the Omnipresent Truth. Forms deceive us and lead us to perceive the Many where there is but the One. Colors overwhelm us and blind us to the pure Light that pervades all. Yet chaos has been conquered, and forms deconstructed, by wise men blessed with extraordinary insight. The prism of Thought-that-is-beyond-thought has repeatedly reclaimed Light-that-is-beyond-color from the radiant but temporary hues of this world. If this hard-won Truth is to reach all, it must be simplified, for common eyes cannot take in uncommon Light.

The function of myth, as Joseph Campbell points out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is to simplify the Truth so that it will enter and ennoble the consciousness of the common man. There are many myths in every culture, and while they might differ in form, they all share the aim of elevating all men to the great heights first scaled by a select few.

Of course, the biggest myth of them all, and one that pervades all cultures, is that the common man will understand all this jazz. The common man, as the reader might have noticed, looks like a nincompoop, talks like a nincompoop, and behaves like a nincompoop. Applying the scientific method, it is safe to conclude that, barring any future evidence to the contrary, the common man is a nincompoop. No matter how much a thing is simplified, it is still too complicated for everyone to understand it.

Take, for instance, that touching, tragic and heroic Brownese myth, the Ramayana. It has been perverted so much that brown people take that great freedom fighter Ravana to be a lustful wife-snatcher. This is unfortunate, but not unexpected. Epic is, after all, creatively written history; history is, after all, the chest-beating propaganda of the victor; and the victor was after all that scheming Bhaiya Rama. In any case, brown people will believe anything they read in their textbooks, including the ridiculous theory of evolution, which directly contradicts the divine Ramayana.

The reader, being a seasoned nitwit, fails to see the connection. Let me explain. Clearly, as the Ramayana points out, North Indians are real men and South Indians are monkeys. Thus, the theory of evolution implies that North Indians came from South Indians, a proposition offensive to both parties. If brown people had any brains, they should see red, cry foul and let slip the dogs of war. Instead, they blithely sing hosannas to Charlie Darwin in 50-word answers to 3-mark questions. Has there ever been, I demand to know, a race more credulous or more laughable?

One might say that expecting brown people to understand myth is as unfair as expecting them to use condoms. After all, it is not without reason that brown people have been subjugated. The white man, on the other hand, is not a subjugatee but a subjugater. From him, we have come to expect better. Is he not the inventor of the highly unintuitive toilet paper, and its essential accompaniments, eau-de-cologne and the remarkable Scabex ointment which guarantees instant relief from painful sores in private parts? Indeed, as the Scabex promos proudly proclaim:

If your backside is all a-boil,
Don't simply hose it with oil.
Stick some Scabex up yo' ass,
'N walk again with some class.

To the refined white superbrain that developed these and many more wonders, myth, one would expect, is but child's play.

Alas, even the princely race of white men diasppoints, when in comes to interpreting myth. Consider that deeply symbolic tale of the fall of Man. The popular belief is that the first man and his missus were sauntering along the beachfront property that God had allotted them, when they came across Satan in the form of a serpent. You, gentle reader, are a real man. On seeing a snake, you would have smashed its head, fleeced its skin, and had shoes made for your mistress. Instead, the first man stupidly chose to leave the snake alive. On the other hand, the first woman did exactly what your wife does to every new reptile on the block: she talked to it. (As I have always maintained, only one gender in this species seems to be evolving.) Thereupon the snake convinced the first frau to bite off the Fruit of Knowledge, which is widely believed to have been an apple. In spite of God giving them express instructions to keep their hands off the said produce, Mr and Mrs Uno took a bite. Thereby they realized in stages that they were

(1) ugly,
(2) nangoo, and
(3) screwed.

This popular belief is, as always, exceedingly childish. The logical fallacies are numerous and egregious. For instance, we have reason to believe that God, for all his faults, is not a frigging vegan. If He went to the trouble of making a Tree of Knowledge, wouldn't He make it bear mangoes or jackfruit or some such respectable thing instead of God-forsaken apples?

And then there is the glaring fact that there is no Horse in the story of the Fall. As anyone who has followed the Aryan invasion debate knows, the role of the Horse is pivotal. A theory without a Horse is no theory at all, but merely a pseudo-secular far-left opinion, a piece of vile anti-national Chinese-sponsored propaganda.

Clearly, the popular understanding of the Fall is a pile of horse-manure. Fortunately, intelligent people can see past popular belief into the real meaning of things.

My comrade and partner-in-crime P~, for one, offers a very original and off-beat interpretation of the story of man's fall here. P~'s interpretation, which I encourage the reader to read, is highly profound. Unfortunately, it is also wrong.

First, P~'s story has no horse either.

Second, P~ implies that there really is no such thing as Evil on earth. He obviously hasn't met enough Tamil people.

Third, he naively tries to make everybody look good in the story of the Fall. While that is charming, it is highly unrealistic. Even in regular fairytales, where the author has license to dream, you usually get one good person, at best two. Clearly, even those in the fantasy business know that fantasy should be tempered with realism. In P~'s story, on the other hand, 4 different individuals--Senor God, Senor Uno, Senora Uno and Senor Sssss--are good. Tell me, gentle reader: Talking man to man, of all the people that you know, does not everyone except you strike you as a rather villainous serial rapist? Where, then, can this fantastic assemblage of four good individuals be found, except in P~'s ultra left-wing liberal mind?

Do not get me wrong: P~ is a frightfully intellectual bloke, who always keeps bothering himself about the Human Condition, as if it were a tooth about to fall. But the trouble with P~ is that for all his brains, he has no prior experience in busting well-entrenched myths. Your humble correspondent, on the other hand, is a past master at busting w.-e. myths.

Brownistan's greatest myth of the 1990s was that our class topper G~ was unbeatable in power systems. However, in the heady summer of 1998, one handsome lad outscored G~ in not one, but two, consecutive Power Systems quizzes. If P~ had been that lad, I would have bowed to him, kissed the ground beneath his feet and accepted his interpretation of the Fall of Man. As it turns out, that giant-slaying lad was not P~, but yours truly. Having thus proved my worth for once and forever, I exercise my right to call P~ wrong. Instead, I will give a parallel interpretation of the Fall in one of my posts, whenever the mood takes me.

Till then, gentle reader, amuse yourself with harmless pleasures. Covet your neighbor's wife if you like, but kindly covet from a distance.

Pip-pip.