We ignore the life of the mind at our peril
‘We are noisy, unhappy because we are motivated by our own desires’
South Africa is a noisy and unhappy society. So lost in our own noise that we are unable to examine the state of soul.
We are failed in this by our philosophers – if we have any. For it ought to be their task to explore the nature of our society and the desirable directions it could take.
We ordinary people tend to explain away our deep sense of emptiness by using the messiness of our national politics as a scapegoat. Yet politics is merely a symptom of our inner brokenness.
A teacher in the township is known as a shebeen frequenter. He hopes to recover his lost sense of self with fellow drinkers. But the following day he still feels empty.
Some among the poor, especially the youth, hope to find contentment in drugs and alcohol. Those of them who search their souls finally turn to church as a possible source of calm. Yet the drunken poor are as troubled as the believers who are sprayed with Doom by so-called “men of God”.
Seen from the windows of their glittering mansions, the rich look the happiest. But pillows are always drenched by the tears of wives who cannot understand why their wealthy husbands demean themselves by sleeping with prostitutes.
The rich man is forever haunted by an insatiable lust for more money, believing that the social status that comes with boundless wealth is a road to happiness. Still, the man can’t sleep at night.
Even the priest who declaims the word of God from the high pulpit is himself dealing with an inner turbulence emanating from the knowledge of his own dishonourable deeds. The wives of men of God are as shocked as we are when we see a man of the cloth being arrested by the Hawks on TV.
Whether you go to church or not, the grinding realities of life soon remind you that you have to do something to your own mind, if you are to attain a tranquillity of the soul.
The idea of success that is driving the lives of most South Africans is the very cause of social instability and our individual sense of emptiness.
The poor yearn for big houses and posh cars. The rich want more wealth and more love. The middle class envy the rich. The religious want Jesus Christ to come and rescue them from the suffering of this world.
Our belief in wealth as a source of contentment is further clouded by our erroneous conception of the soul as an entity distinct from the mind.
A poor person who wins millions from the lottery soon goes mad, confirming the truth that money can’t buy happiness.
When the rich can’t find happiness, they hope to find it in church. They soon discover the existence of serious warring factions in their church.
What most people have not yet discovered is that happiness comes from within us – that is, from my own mind as an individual.
In his Essays on the Wisdom of Life, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer correctly observes: “the most important thing for a man is the constitution of … [his] consciousness”. Consciousness is a state of mind, constituted by the kind of knowledge that a person sets out to acquire or that he permits to enter and shape his mind.
The contention here is that those who spend their lives seeking knowledge – in other words, constituting their consciousness – are the most content on earth. The corollary is that we South Africans are noisy and unhappy because we have neglected the life of the mind.
Study history, and you will find that the most content people in the evolution of mankind are not kings but men of letters.
When a teacher goes to kill time at a nearest shebeen after school, and when a rich man visits a brothel, he who has discovered the life of the mind immerses himself in a mental universe that blunts the very urges that drive mindless men to shebeens and brothels.
The beauty of the life of the mind is that both the poor and the rich can partake in it, and the contentment it generates is equally satisfying. That kind of life sharpens thirst for more knowledge, and it brings calm by opening up more vistas of understanding.
Here is a proposition: we are noisy and unhappy because we continue to ignore the most important question: How to make the greatest number happy among us?