Tuesday, January 6, 2015

The Most Important Thing in the World

What's the most important thing in the world? Is it equality, justice, freedom from want, health, wealth, survival, reproduction, pleasure...what? I have a simple answer. The most important thing in the world is...drum roll...how we feel. How I feel is important. If I'm poor, but I feel happy, then wealth is unimportant. If I'm treated unfairly, but it's water off a duck's back to me, then equality is of little importance, particularly if the person who is dishing out the bad treatment feels bad. However, if I feel good, but a person I care about feels bad then I won't feel really good and will focus on helping them feel better, so we can feel good together which will boost my mood even further. 
     You may say that health is more fundamental, but why does health matter? It matters because it makes the sufferer feel bad. You might say that it's also about the burden - financial, time or energy - that it imposes on others, but what is at the root of this? The burden makes the burdened feel bad! 
    How many people is we? There's me and the people I care about. If I and all my friends and family feel good, then all is well with the world as far as I'm concerned. But having said that I feel bad because you may be someone I don't yet know reading this post and I've effectively just said that how you feel is of no importance. But of course it is, not only to you and the people who know and care about you, but also to me because I could feel better than I do if I could expand my concept of the we who feel good. I'm not even sure if that's logical, but I believe it. We is everyone and everything that has the capacity to feel.
    Should some people feel bad because they have done bad things? If someone hurts or wrongs one of us, do I want them to feel bad? I think bad feelings exist for a reason. Perhaps one day we will evolve beyond them, but for now, in this less than the best of all possible worlds, they serve a valuable function. However, that doesn't invalidate the point. How we feel is still the most important thing in the world because if doing something that makes others feel bad didn't make the perpetrator feel bad there would be no motivation to increase the sum of good feeling in the world. Whichever way you slice it, the most important thing in the world is how we feel. Am I wrong?

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