pissing on each other's happiness

Recently i had the opportunity, if i could call it that in any positive light, to witness up close and too personal the bitter battle over individual happiness in a relationship. The experience for me provided a lesson that i think serves many of us in our quest for cognitive liberty and understanding how our own values take on hierarchical frames that leech into our relations with others.

First let us at least agree that the US was created by people whose understanding of enlightenment philosophy predicated the principle of a citizen taking an active and fully aware role in their responsibility for insuring that their pursuits of their own personal happiness did not denigrate nor fundamentally interfere with other citizens' pursuits. This is the ideal and the core underlying principle of cognitive liberty and the first amendment's civil liberties. Thus one would like to believe that as we have evolved both as a nation and as an "enlightened" technologically freed society, we might have also evolved our responsibilities to suit. This of course is pie in the sky thinking, yet is at the core of the very debate on civil rights and civil liberties we are experiencing now in the US.

Now, for a variety of personal developmental reasons, the two people in the relationship i observed spend a disproportionate amount of their time trampling on one another's pursuit of happiness. Indeed they go out of their way to damage it, to interfere with it. And they justifying doing so through their perceptual constructs that are predicated on their personal values as the hierarchical matrix for judging behaviors. In this case it gets down, quite literally, to: "my gardening is better than your music." Do you see the disconnect here? Reducing another's pursuit of happiness to the targets of ad hominem attacks is justified by equating one's set of personal values with what is "good" for everyone. The examples of this just within this relationship are too numerous even to catalog.

Suffice it to say, the causality of the core dysfunction comes from the parties' upbringing. One experiences excessive degrees of paranoia about their material security in the world, grown from being forced by their own values to make life work along certain preformed patterns. This leads to the overt desperation to demand that others respect them through demonstrating control, power, and mastery of the immediate conditionality. By this i mean, that this person will make immediate verbal negative value judgements of whatever phenomena is being experienced, demanding that others in that event horizon acknowledge this individual's vast wisdom on a variety of subjects, many having nothing to do with the phenomenon, all streamed out in a verbal unending, unlistening assault. The insecurities of this person are palpable and visceral--enough to make one's skin crawl.

The other person, through their own lifetime of relating to dysfunctional upbringing and codependencies of friends and peers, reacts to the world through disengagement and alcohol. Refusing to become involved in "conflict" until it becomes too prominent and overbearing, then consuming sufficient alcohol in order to breakdown the inhibitions against engagement leading to confrontation and bitter rancor, all of which reinforces the now long held construct that one needs to avoid conflict. The circle is vicious and is spiralling more and more out of control i think.

The insecurity of maintaining material possessionship of property drives one to bitterly harangue the other into spending their economic resources on audio/visual reproduction equipment to literally drown out the nagging insults. The nagging then castigates the technology as a flawed path citing their own gardening as a vastly superior path, for no other reason than that there is nothing else for that person to do. It is also where the battle over dollars gets lost. If we allocate financial resources to each, we discover that the gardener has an income of approx $20K while the entertainment freak grosses $70K. Of these two piles of revenue each must expend an equal share for mortgage, utilities, food, etc. Thus the gardner has very little disposable income, and relies, insecurily on the other to provide funds for entertainment, transportation, recreation, commodities, and yes funds for gardening. The entertained receives in return for these funds some degree of domestic support, sexual pleasures, body work, and companionship up to a point--the point of nagging bitter paranoia which happens more than once per day. The entertained has considerable disposable income and chooses to expend it in a variety of ways including the development of the latest and greatest state of the art audio/visual equipment.

The gardner must garden to provide some food resources(zero protein, mostly complex carbohydrates) supplemented by expensive organic and natural foods(which are paid for by the entertained). What the gardner doesn't know, and chooses to ignore when discovered, is that the entertained expends considerable resources going into town each day and purchasing fast food meals to supplement the lack of fats and protein in their alcoholic diet. That hidden behavior, along with the sheer volume of alcohol consumed, increases the gardner's insecurity, and thus bitterness and anger, leading to more nagging and to the entertained seeking to increase the volume of the entertainment and alcohol. Round and round.

Now it has gotten down to whether gardening is more or less valuable than entertainment. At least that is the semantic battle; realistically it is all about using whatever means necessary to interfere with and stop the others' pursuit of happiness. My happiness is more important than your happiness because i say it is so. And like so much of our culture today, neither would recognize this, nor would they accept that they are engaged in this, even when directly pointed out to them from statements they just made. The classic "I didn't say that" response to being called out on what one just said, is all too common here in this little scenario as it is in the culture. The ad hominem attacks, the implications that the other is flawed and damaged while asserting that one is fine and without flaw, reiterates through the core of the relationship.

Is spending $2000 a year on growing flowers and view blocking plants(a real paranoid pattern here) "better" than spending $2000 a year directly on impacting one's own personal happiness? No i think not. Each represents a utilization of economic resources to facilitate the enhancement of one's personal happiness. Each represents efforts to disassociate from the world, hiding within a coccoon of protection from the outside by enveloping themselves in the warm fuzzy environment of happy. Neither serves to enhance the other, nor to provide substance to life outside of the happiness(one might try to argue that the vegetables grown serve some greater good for the other, but that is clearly belied by the endless use of vast resources to acquire fast foods). Both demand that they be judged to be the one in the right, when neither is functioning in a healthy sustainable compassionate manner.

Thus we live in times when we as citizens have completely forgotten our responsibility to not interfere, to not interrupt, to not damage other citizens rights in pursuing happiness.