Mill insists in his shitty book “Utilitarianism” that, in order to be a high functioning society, we have to reach up for “higher pleasures”, and if we don’t we’re doomed to be ignorant assholes forever. Higher pleasures include reading, writing music, practicing philosophy and being a complete pretentious douche hole. It doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist to discover that Mill’s own argument might be self-defeating: those are things that complete shut in assholes do, not things that “high functioning” members of society do. But it turns out, there is a little more to be said about the way that we actually live, which, for WHATEVER reason, is completely the fucking opposite of how Mill says we should live.
Being a huge asshole shut in makes you a bad person. I don’t mean “wasting your potential” bad. I mean, if you spend all of your time reading or thinking about the meaning of the world, you forget how to deal with people. You not only develop that moronic “high minded” asshole attitude, but you actually stop really caring about other people and are now studying for the sake of your own knowledge and education.
Not that this helps things at all. To make matters worse, it turns out higher education will leave you disillusioned and miserable. So being a pretentious asshole is actually literally hurting everyone, rotting you from the inside out and making the people around you think you are autistic and wanting to send you to work in a mine.
Now high minded people sometimes say something about sacrificing your own well-being for the greater good. If everyone chooses to sacrifice their own well-being in order to increase the average utility around them, everyone will be happy, right? Wrong. Not everyone is Mother Theresa or Ghandi or Jesus or whatever. Sacrificing anything will make you a little bit sadder, and usually the things that you have to sacrifice are so draining psychologically that no matter what utils you get from the other pretentious asshats in your society, your life is pretty much still going to be a total dick storm. Which would be ok, except for the fact that miserable people are far less likely to continue sacrificing anything for the greater good, and actually stop caring about the greater good in any meaningful way at all. Disillusioned by the world again, this people are also far less likely to teach their children to be good little boys and girls and their kids are probably that asshole who you look at and wonder how it’s humanly possible that he can be such a huge dick and still be as popular as he is.
The answer to that question is because a self-serving attitude, surprise, actually makes you happier. Science has proven what we already knew for thousands of years: buying a golden ice cream scooper will actually increase your utility to the point that you can be a more functioning member of society. Yeah that’s right. Science has given you an excuse to be decadent.
If you want scientific proof of any of this stuff, by the way, try to remember whose blog you’re reading. I’m a one man research institution and have conducted all of these studies painstakingly and at my own cost, despite the result of the study being that I shouldn’t have done the study in the first place.
