Civilization And Its Discontents

As practiced by most people, religion provides a “greatly exalted father” (13) who watches over and promises a happy afterlife. “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality,” that even the best attempts of great thinkers to imagine God as “an impersonal, shadowy, abstract principle” fail to improve the situation (13).

Life “entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks” (14) for people to simply endure. Rather humans apply three basic tools to assuage themselves: “powerful diversions” such as hobbies or scholarship, “substitutive gratification” in art and other “illusions in contrast to reality,” and intoxicants (14).

People assume that life must have a purpose, and this is part of the problem. Animals do not appear to do this. But, among humans, the pleasure-principle “draws up the programme of life’s purpose” (15). In other words, this drive for purpose is a human invention at odds with reality: “[T]he intention that man should be happy is not included in the scheme of Creation,” and “the whole constitution of things runs counter to it” (15).

Further complicating human’s ability to sustain happiness is the fact that “we are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts” and the pleasure-principle brings only “mild comfort” (15). Freud contends, “It is much less difficult to be unhappy” (15). And unhappiness can persist due to three factors: the pains of aging; the “the outer world, which can rage against us with the most powerful and pitiless forces of destruction;” and, perhaps worst of all, difficulties in “our relations with other men” (16). Many philosophies address this dilemma. The intense pursuit of pleasure can lead to extremes and “penalizes itself after short indulgence” (16); thus, most approaches focus on avoiding pain.

One constructive approach to suffering is “taking up the attack on nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science” (17). Another, less constructive approach involves intoxicants, which add pleasure and remove pain: By “‘drowning their cares’ [people] can at any time slip away from the oppression of reality” (17). Yet another technique is by “control of the instincts” through yoga or other practices, which can reduce pain but also limit pleasure and can lead to “perverted impulses” (18).

Some people substitute the pleasures of art and science for other urges in the belief that fate will thus have little power over them. However, not everyone is talented enough in these fields to make full use of this stratagem. And while pleasing illusions can take people away from the struggles of the real world, art’s influence “is not strong enough to make us forget real misery” (20).

Hermits solve many of life’s problems by turning away from the world. Others “can try to re-create it, try to build up another instead, from which the most unbearable features are eliminated” (20). Most people, now and then, resort to “substituting a wish-fulfilment for some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him, and carrying this delusion through into reality” (20). Chief among these are the “mass-delusions” (20) of religions.

Perhaps the most powerful method of pain avoidance is one that “makes love the centre of all things and anticipates all happiness from loving and being loved” (21). This is also one of the riskiest techniques, as it leaves people vulnerable to the desolation of loss.

Closely connected to the satisfactions of love is the appreciation of beauty, which “offers little protection against the menace of suffering, but it is able to compensate for a great deal” (22). Though beauty seems trivially useless, “civilization could not do without it” (22).

Despite the difficulties of pursuing happiness, “we may not—nay, cannot—give up the effort to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other” (22). Such a pursuit arises universally out of libido but must be shaped to the unique circumstances of the individual: “[E]ach one must find out for himself by which particular means he may achieve felicity” (22). However, people must not devote themselves strictly to a single approach.

For anyone “whose libido-components do not go through the transformation and modification necessary for successful achievement in later life,” the pursuit of happiness can swerve off course and end up in “neurotic illness,” “chronic intoxication,” or psychosis (23).

Religion, though it may save many from neurosis, nonetheless engages in “decrying the value of life and promulgating a view of the real world that is distorted like a delusion,” causing “mental infantilism” (24). The pursuit of happiness is an uncertain project; “[n]or can religion keep her promises either" (24).