The Necessity Of Making A Meaningful Life: People, Power, And Freedom
by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
People who lack meaningful fulfillment in their lives seek to exercise power over others as a distraction. As this becomes detrimental to liberty, finding true meaning for one’s life becomes a foremost means of creating a better future.
(American Institute For Economic Research) One of my more memorable exchanges with a student came in a principles of economics class. Part of the assignment for that week was chapters from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Ridley compared the living standards of an average worker today with those of The Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1700. Some of my more ahistorical students were incredulous at Ridley’s description of the grinding poverty of the average person just a few centuries ago.
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The King had an opulent lifestyle compared to others. Louis had an astonishing 498 workers preparing each of his meals. Yet his standard of living was still a fraction of what we experience today.
Ridley outlined the miracles of specialization and exchange in our time — an everyday cornucopia at the supermarket, modern communications and transportation, clothing to suit every taste. If we remove our blinders and see how many individuals provide services to us, Ridley concludes we have “far more than 498 servants at [our] immediate beck and call.”
Then, the memorable exchange occurred. One student shared that he would prefer to live in 1700, if he had more money than others and power over them. My first reaction was amusement; I thought the student was practicing his deadpan humor skills. He wasn’t. For him, having power was an attribute of a meaningful life.
If only my student’s mindset were an aberration.
During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.
Pascal asks us to imagine a king with “all the blessings with which you could be endowed.” A king, Pascal told us, if he has no “diversions” from his thinking, will “ponder and reflect on what he is.” Pascal’s hypothetical king will be miserable because he “is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease.”
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition.” That is why “war and high office are so popular,” Pascal argued.
Pascal argues individuals seek to be “diverted from thinking of what they are.” I would argue a better choice of words is what they have made of themselves.
I’ll let the reader decide how many modern politicians Pascal’s ideas apply to. With Pascal’s insight, we understand why conflict is a feature of politics and not a bug.
Pascal spares no one’s feelings. Some “seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness.” For them, “rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. [They] must get away from it and crave excitement.”
Let that sink in. A person able to exercise coercive power can use their morally undeveloped “wretched” mind to create endless misery for others merely because exercising power distracts them from their failures as human beings.
Many of America’s Founders had a classical education and they understood the dangers of power. John Adams wrote, “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
Read More @ TheFreeThoughtProject.com
Originally Posted at https://www.sgtreport.com
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