True Happiness

If I told you that one plus one equals two, will you ask me that on what authority to I base my conclusion on? Or, will you decide the truth of ‘two’ from the structure and content of the argument itself? Before anyone can find hope in understanding others, and in doing so understanding the reasons why certain people find happiness in what THEY do, one must suspend all bias of illusory authority and suspend judgement on all things.

We, the learned and modern class of students, know that all knowledge is a production of culture rather than a progressive system that develops its methods for finding greater truths. Students of both Anthropology and Philosophy know that all systems of knowledge can be correlated to the history which gave rise to its existence, and so no ‘truth’ is eternally recognized. Because we understand knowledge to be both contingent and relative, as in through the study of production of knowledge through history, we now see knowledge or pure truth as that which is independent of true authority. If we base all knowledge on authority, we accept that our culture – which is the very one that produces this knowledge – is superior over others.

Have you ever asked? If some person during some time period can claim his culture to be most superior over others, that if in every epoch of history some one person can do that seemingly truthfully, then why in history are there the rise and fall of Great Empires? As History has proven continuously, the conflict between the varying and ever-changing forces of production of knowledge waivers between nations like a vicious nightmare that never ceases but takes newer and newer forms all the time. That is, technology and form of corporations, regulation and order, media and political propaganda, scientific and psychiatric-medical knowledge are all mere products of historic conflicts between the forces of production of knowledge and its means of strength of one over the other. What one deems to be superior in the Roman times in religious or social ideals are considered ancient in the 21st century. We can neither determine the truth of any political or social or economic ideal without already having some bias which itself is never well-formed in proof of the rise and fall of Civilizations. We can only determine knowledge from and through itself. If we base anything on authority than on pure reason, history plainly shows otherwise.

The learned of the past assume that there is so-called social equilibrium when people of different classes come together. But why are there even classes? If we understand that each culture is equal, and that each culture has its own particular mode of production of knowledge, and that the knowledge thus produced is unique in itself and not inferior in source and produce, then classes of knowledge do not exist. Modes and forms of technology and political formation, social and economic modes of stratification and even idealized knowledge are all mere products of the social arrangements of the culture of interest. If, that culture is inferior at all, how can it persist till today? How can then there be the rise and fall of Empires throughout time? If Empires can fall and the weak become strong, no class of knowledge or authority actually exists. Social class becomes an illusion of the culture. We too know that all and each of us are naturally ethnocentric. But we never recognize the fall of empires in history. When we are ignorant, we cannot understand and comprehend pure truth. Once we understand that the social arrangements are particular to one culture, and that theirs are as superior as ours – as in the history of fall and rise of civilizations and empires – then when people of different cultures come together there can never be so-called equilibrium. Instead, there is only a blend of the modes of production of knowledge between two entities.

Also, ideas of social progression are illusory. That is because if we assume some universal social ladder exists, then we are imposing our mode of production of knowledge (or productive technology) upon other modes of productive technologies. Yet, how can one say democracy exists as the best of any worse political structure if we nonetheless persist to impose illusory authority on one mode of productive technology over the other? This is being plainly hypocritical.

If we accept democracy, that cultures are unique, that history creates and manoeuvres authority between modes of productive technologies of knowledge, that history too contains the rise and fall of total civilizations and empires, then we must be able to be relative about the true productive technologies.

To be happy, then, is to eliminate of thought of absolutism and embrace historical relativism. Also, one too must base the truth of knowledge because of what it contains rather than on the authority which insists on its truth.