This immediately brings to mind the old adage about it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I’d imagine, from the pig’s point of view, that the loftiest height of piggy happiness was not terribly dissimilar from the baseline level of piggy contentment, so equating “happiness” to “contentment” would not be an inexcusable breach of piggy logic. Indeed, we humans pretty much have to infer this state of affairs when considering animal wellbeing (“appearance of sociobiological contentment approximates happiness”), as we don’t yet possess any means of engaging animals in philosophical conversation on the subject.
Yet it seems that those who would have us believe that “blissful ignorance” is a good thing as an absolute are confusing contentment with happiness unnecessarily. Happiness registers more as a positive, aspirational value within the context of the human experience range; contentment seems more a negative, absence-of-dissatisfaction value that indicates only that things aren’t going poorly. Doublethink and willful ignorance do not seem to be able to positively provide qualia that contribute to happiness; they can only obscure knowledge of things that are actually going poorly, thus creating a false sense of contentment.
That’s my general counterpoint whenever people speak positively of the “happiness” created by things like religion and opiates. Nothing is being added; your knowledge of reality is being obscured. It’s difficult to see how that approach could be considered a mature option.
This immediately brings to mind the old adage about it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I’d imagine, from the pig’s point of view, that the loftiest height of piggy happiness was not terribly dissimilar from the baseline level of piggy contentment, so equating “happiness” to “contentment” would not be an inexcusable breach of piggy logic. Indeed, we humans pretty much have to infer this state of affairs when considering animal wellbeing (“appearance of sociobiological contentment approximates happiness”), as we don’t yet possess any means of engaging animals in philosophical conversation on the subject.
Yet it seems that those who would have us believe that “blissful ignorance” is a good thing as an absolute are confusing contentment with happiness unnecessarily. Happiness registers more as a positive, aspirational value within the context of the human experience range; contentment seems more a negative, absence-of-dissatisfaction value that indicates only that things aren’t going poorly. Doublethink and willful ignorance do not seem to be able to positively provide qualia that contribute to happiness; they can only obscure knowledge of things that are actually going poorly, thus creating a false sense of contentment.
That’s my general counterpoint whenever people speak positively of the “happiness” created by things like religion and opiates. Nothing is being added; your knowledge of reality is being obscured. It’s difficult to see how that approach could be considered a mature option.