"KNOW THYSELF"

At first glance the aphorism "Know thyself" ranks with "Eat your carrots," and "Don't talk back to your mother." However, through the ages such people as Socrates, Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others have gone to the trouble of saying a great deal about the matter, so there must be something to it. The maxim even has its own page on Wikipedia.

"Know thyself" is being considered here because, for me, that advice also is a prime teaching of Nature. The teaching derives from Nature's unrelenting evolutionary drive toward diversity at so many levels, including among us humans. Each human is born with his or her unique genetically based predispositions, except for identical twins, and even the predispositions of twins diverge as different life experiences create different people of them.

Since such creative energy has gone into making my own personal package of predispositions, it seems clear to me that one of my primary tasks as a human is to recognize what my predispositions are. And, once I have that figured out, to take my predispositions into account in everyday life. My thinking is that I wouldn't have been created with definite predispositions if the Universal Creative Impulse hadn't "wanted" them to direct the course of my life.

When my Brazilian friend Iolanda was a child, she fantasized about having her own little cart on which she'd push around pans of water, soap, washrags and towels, antiseptic and bandages and drugs, and when she'd find people needing care she'd provide it. She grew up to become a nun caring for the very poor.

Even I seem the product of unambiguous genetic programming. When I was maybe twelve or thirteen I found myself on Saturday afternoons sitting at the kitchen table with information about plants and animals gathered from various sources, and writing about them in my own words. I knew no one else who did such a thing, but I felt compelled to do exactly that, and it felt good, and still does.

It's easy to see why such varied predispositions would be adaptive for the human species. In any random collection of humans, when the community reaches a certain fairly small size, automatically there are citizens predisposed to serve as teachers, farmers, handworkers, warriors, artists, exemplary parents and spouses, hunters, merchants, community leaders, etc. Our genetically programmed predispositions set us up to be useful in our respective communities.

A beautiful feature of the way all this is done is that when a person does what he or she feels most inclined to do, it makes them happy. I don't know anyone happier than Iolanda and I, even though neither of us has much money, and we're often considered by others to be cranks. My happiness, I judge, is fundamentally based on my own self knowledge.

Certainly Spinoza recognized the importance of self knowledge, and tells us exactly why: Only when we understand ourselves can we control our emotions, and that's the primary condition for sustained and rational happiness.

The corollary of knowing oneself leading to happiness is this: That by ignoring our personal predispositions we become unhappy.

In fact, maybe the great failure of our modern Western society is that so many of us have confused the needs of a materialistic capitalism with our own personal natural needs. We believe what we hear day and night -- that having this, consuming that, makes us happy.

It doesn't, at least not for Spinozas sustained and rational happiness. Moreover, my reading of history is that any society in which a large part of a population isn't happy not only is a sad society, but a dangerous one, because of societal neuroses that inevitably develop among unfulfilled, unhappy people.