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> Research | > Happiness | > Mutual Happiness |
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| Seek happiness, but not just any kind of happiness. Seek mutual happiness! |
Mutual Happiness is what results when people choose to spread happiness. To build happiness among more than one person or animal, it is necessary that each of them understands what motivates the others. It is further necessary that they have some means of communication and cooperation so that they can achieve it together.
Mutual happiness is also possible between people and many kinds of animals. Although the animals are limited in their ability to communicate, they can communicate somewhat using gestures and sounds. In the species that people often select as pets, the animals have empathic motives as well, that help them to interact with people in mutually-beneficial ways.
For mutual happiness, each person seeks for himself (or herself) to fulfil the desires that are the components of happiness. These motives include empathy, so that people are also motivated to help each other.
There is typically more than one way for each motive to be satisfied, which provides a lot of flexibility. For example, on the matter of hunger, there are a variety of foods to choose from that provide energy and nutrition. Similarly, on the matter of curiosity, there are an infinite number of things available to be explored. So, when a person is satisfying their desires, he (or she) can pick among many options. For mutual happiness, he needs to choose options that don't interfere with the happiness of other people or animals with whom he could cooperate.
When mutual happiness is the goal, it gives rise to opportunities for synergy, where more can be achieved together than by any individual alone.
This also means that each person must take care to handle counterproductive motives in ways that prevent internal conflict and misery that may arise from instinctive ways of responding to those motives.
If a person has both kind and malevolent motives, one might ask why he might prefer to curtail the malevolent motives and act instead on the kind ones. Certainly he could choose to do the opposite, if he wished.
The answer has a lot to do with his aspirations. He could ask himself:
Over time and across generations, the choices people make shape the characteristics that are passed on to the next generation. People choose who they will marry, according to the kind of person whom they admire, and they choose the kinds of behaviors that they teach their children. There is an advantage to societies who make decisions that bring them greater cooperation and less conflict; it tends to put them in a position where as a group they have more capability to achieve the things they want.
People can choose to be part of that trend, if they wish.
If we wish to devise a solution in which each person can be happy, and whereby many animals can be happy as well (insofar as we can arrange it with them), it would be very helpful if one could identify exactly how happy each one is, and then take action to fill gaps in happiness.
Being able to measure happiness, or at least to develop an approximate measure, could be useful for some kinds of social policy decisions. At first glance, it might seem like one could tally the motivational satisfiers for each person in a population using the scoring described under components of happiness. It turns out that's an oversimplified approach that won't quite work. In reality it can be difficult to do, so there a long explanation covering it, under the topic Estimating Wellbeing.
However, there are many situations in which the available alternatives each have very wide differences in satisfactions among those affected. One alternative creates joy and the other creates misery! These are easily decided without having precise measurements.
Also, most problems are better solved with creative means, rather than by picking the best from among several mediocre or undesirable alternatives.
Consider a situation of a famine, where you are presented with various alternatives of whom you shall leave to starve. You may busily occupy yourself trying to calculate which one "maximizes the happiness," which in this case is really only minimizing the misery.
A more ethical solution would have been to avoid the problem in the first place. What was causing it: bad farming practices, a lack of sufficient food storage to cover inevitable periods in which weather gets in the way of food production, overpopulation...?
Gradually over time, societies face these problems and they may learn in an evolutionary manner, to put standards and processes in place to prevent the problems from occurring.
Having the solutions in place, such as better agricultural practices, food storage and transport to bring food into shortage areas, etc. yield not just tiny differences in happiness, but huge differences! There is a lot that can be improved without the need to measure happiness precisely.
Even in a situation where it's too late to prevent the problem, often some creative thinking can bring to mind solutions beyond the obvious rationing and "minimize the misery" methods. In the case of a famine, one might look outside their own country and make an appeal for help from other nations, where people will often be pleased to contribute to both short-term and long-term solutions.
Over time, people develop ideals, which are preferred ways of satisfying motives. Ideals include such things as preserving the environment, telling the truth, setting standards of fairness, etc. In many cases, these have indirect ways of supporting motivational fulfilment, but whether direct or indirect the result is greater happiness. You can find out more on the cross reference of basic ideals to motivational fulfilment.
Strategies can certainly be employed to help a person overcome their temptations and weaknesses, but often a person may wish they could change their inherited characteristics fundamentally.
For example, if a person tends to be high strung, they may wish they could be cooler by nature, instead of having to take strategies to calm themselves. If a person tends to be so cool as to be indifferent, they may wish to be more enthusiastic and warm, and to admire people who have those characteristics.
To make such a fundamental change to one's self may not be possible, but a person can make a choice for the characteristics of their offspring, according to whom they choose to marry. A mutually agreeable selection of a spouse is not just a matter of having attractive similarities, but also of having complementary differences.
To continue our example of the enthusiastic but a bit high-strung person, they may find that having a calm partner would help them to feel better. So, if considering someone for marriage, that would be an important attribute to look for. And this could work well if a prospective spouse was looking for someone with some enthusiasm, to bring a bit of fun or joy into their calmer but less enthusiastic life.
Such differences can work well for the happiness of the couple, so long as the gap is not so extreme as to produce frustration in either partner.
Moreover, in such a pairing, their offspring are more likely to inherit moderated attributes of their parents, which in this case may put them in between the "enthusiastic but high strung" and the "calm but lacking enthusiasm" ends of the spectrum.
Earlier I asserted that happiness is created by fulfilling motivators, and that the motivators are inborn. But here we see that parents are changing the motivators in their offspring, by their choice of mate. That means that each of us have an influence on what shall constitute happiness for the next generation.
It is an evolutionary process, in which the nature of people changes gradually according to what their ancestors wanted people to be like. Each of us are the product of our ancestors. And now it is up to the current generation to decide the next step in the process.
It generally works well that this is a voluntary process, as each person seeking a mate will typically wish to find a suitable partner so that their offspring will be healthy and happy.
The behavior of each person arises from a mixture of "nature and nurture," so when choosing a spouse, character is just as important as physical attributes, if not more so. Parents who get along well become inspirations to their children, for whom they are a role model.
If someone else is choosing, other than the couples who decide it for themselves, the wellbeing of the children may not be the primary goal. We see an example of "someone else deciding" in the breeding of cattle, who may be bred to be fat and docile to suit the farmer's interests, rather than serving the cattle's interests.
Similarly, science fiction depicting a dystopian future will have dictators designing people for their own warlike ends, such as the cloned soldiers of Star Wars, who presumably would be designed to be fearless and cruel. That is incompatible with the world most of us would prefer to have.
Moral parents will do their best to produce offspring with good character and talent. But the next generation doesn't have to be perfect, and indeed, there is no single model of perfection. There are many kinds of personalities and talents, and this turns out to be convenient for filling roles in different occupations. It should be no problem for families that there are variations in their children's personality and talents.
There are many different kinds of happiness, built on similar motivators, but with differing personalities where some people value some things more than others. We seek happiness for all of them. Across the whole world, humans are pretty much equivalent across races, cultures, and genders. They are equivalent but not identical. People don't have to be identical to have mutual happiness.
Each of us may imagine what their perfect partner would be like, but real people cannot often be found to match a fantasy perfection. Some compromises are necessary, but in many cases imperfection can still be progress over the past, to serve as a desirable step in the evolutionary process. As I mentioned above, character is generally more important than physical perfection, and even intelligence can be varied significantly without it being a problem. Sometimes, however, a person may have an unwanted trait or defect can be so great that he (or she) does not wish to perpetuate it.
Earlier we cited the fictional example of the werewolf, who was advised to stay indoors during a full moon. Failure to do so would be to release a monster. But there is one more thing the werewolf could do when he is unsatisfied with his own condition, and if there is no way to mate except with another werewolf: he can simply avoid doing so.
Every person has a choice to make, of what kind of spouse they would accept for producing offspring, or whether they choose to produce offspring at all.
These choices each act as a vote for the what the next generation will be like. Moreover, each person chooses to equip the next generation with discoveries, inventions, the ecology that is left to them, and inherited infrastructure and property. Overall, we would hope that each successive generation will be better than the last one, with better prospects for happiness.
Across generations, the kinds of satisfactions that give the most joy to people may shift gradually; the personalities of future people will likely be quite different from that of pre-historic cavemen. Now in the present, we are somewhere between the primitive state of cavemen and the ideal people we might imagine for the future.
We are the product of our ancestors, so we get joy from fulfilling our desires such as they are, and perhaps we also make some adjustments to fit into our aspirations of the kind of people we would prefer to be. And furthermore, we create the next generation to be more like what we ourselves would prefer to be. So the nature of "what creates happiness" gets refined over time. Where this may eventually lead, we cannot be sure. It could be very wonderful, just as our own world is a big improvement over primitive life.
We must remember that our motives are one component of a well-functioning mind, and that we need to make use of all parts of our mind to produce mutually happy results. This means making use of learning, imagining, reason, as well as seeking to satisfy our desires.
Choose ways of achieving your happiness that are compatible with the happiness of other people, so that you may have mutual happiness. For your mind to function effectively, it helps if you make these resolutions for judging your own happiness:
These choices will lead to behavior that produces a better world: a world in which all people can be happy.
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