The desire/need doctrine of motivation.

I, being a high school student, am in debate.

In the form of debate I most often do, ("Lincoln-Douglas" or "LD" for short; LD is philosophy debate), in every argument it is required that you state a

(1) Value, and a
(2) Criterion.

A value is whatever you deem worthy of being upheld, and do uphold by stating your argument. A criterion is how you measure whether or not you have upheld your value.

[ex. If you are debating about good cars, I could make my value "luxury", or "speed", etc.; the the criterion would be how I measure if the car is good- like "cost", "quality of leather", if my value was luxury- if my value was speed I might use "horsepower", for instance. Get it? ]

So, as a new debater this year, and being exceedingly lazy, I did not actually write a case before my first tournament.

Yes; I went empty handed.

So, being there, I borrowed a fellow debaters case he was not using that moment.

I used it once, for my first debate ever, and I lost- some technical foul I had committed. I had done really well, they said, but I made a fatal flaw.

So I sat there pondering the case in my hands in the time I had before my next debate.

The value was democracy, and the criterion was capitalism. "Why do we want democracy?" I asked myself.

And I thought, and I thought some more, and some more. I wanted to think philosophically at first- "because America tells us democracy is good, and we believe that."

But I had to think logically. The key thing about democracy & capitalism is that it allows own private ownership.

Why private ownership?

We want things, and we want it to be ours..... Those are prerequisites for personal prosperity.......We want prosperity.....Why do we want prosperity? Why big houses?.......Because that is how we measure success- why else do you need 22 rooms?........Why do we want success? Because we want......We want.....

I paused, wheels turning.

Happiness. That's what it is all about. Anything, everything- all values are upheld because we believe that upholding it will make us happy.

Since then it has been my value on every case I have written (all two of them), and I just change the criterion to fit the case; but the implications of this are astounding.

How interesting- do you realize that your life's pursuit, everything you do, is done because you believe it will bring you satisfaction, which you equate with happiness in your mind? That's why you eat. It's why you do your college work. It's why you sit down and eat ice cream. It's why you buy a car, why you date someone, why you play tennis on the weekends, why you bought that sexy new watch, and why you seek the approval of those around you.

In some twisted way, by twisted logic, everything you do is somehow wired towards happiness and fufillment. Simple as that.

Three questions arise:

What is happiness?
What will make us happy?
Should we pursue happiness?


The first question is important, because how we define happiness will determine what we do with our lives- what are we pursuing? Happiness, it seems, is fufillment; fufillment is the meeting of a need.

This is crucial: The most fallen for misconception is that happiness comes from meeting a desire.

[Thus questions 1 & 2 are answered; but let us continue.]

You pursue what you desire; allow for elaboration.

You have desires and you have needs; needs are both emotional and physical- love is a need, and food is a need. A need is something abstract, something you are embedded with internally, to require functionality. In our basic, unblemished state, we desire our needs, and nothing else-our desires are that our needs be met.

Dissonance in life comes from an imbalance of need and desire- this can happen two ways:

One may believe that they need something they do not, i.e. addiction- one believes one requires something to function that one does not, in reality, need to function.

The other cause of dissonance results from a misunderstanding of how a need can be met; i.e., believing that one's need for love can be satisfied through sex.

That is a philosophical pillar I stand upon, and I wanted to share my observation with the world to make it a better place... As to the last question, that is another article in it's own right, for another time.

L.

Politik

Here in America, it is taken for granted that capitalism is the ideal form of government, the right way to run a country. But we Americans usually don't give it much thought...really, any thought we do give it ends up answering the question "What is good about our way of government?", rather than "Is this the best form of government?".

I cannot help but feel injustice has been commited when I juxtapose the American aristocrat's mansion with the failing school that, if he so chose, he could revive; is it immoral for one man to have so much money, at the expense of so many others? It seems on the surface that it is right for a man to be allowed to keep what he has worked for... yet he is accountable to no one. He wallows in rediculous luxury, whilst others live hungry and lack good education- the life and time of so many are wasted, at the expense of a single man being pampered... this scenario is not limited to one instance.

Assuming it is wrong for one man to live in luxury at the expense of another's poverty, two questions arise: (1) does our government say we should force others to be moral? & (2) should we force others to be moral?

To what degree does our government go to enforcing morality on it's citizens?

"America has roughly 300 million people, and ther are roughly 6 billion people on the earth- that makes us a little less than 5% of the population. Yet we have a hugely disproportional amount of wealth. 'The plain fact is that we arestarving people, notdeliberately in the sense thatwe want them to die, butwilfully in the sense that weprefer their death to our owninconvenience."
--Victor Gollancz

On a similar note:

America has taken over the world; it may not seem that way in a strictly beurocrtic sense, but all nearly all countries have accepted our standard of economics, and our measuring stick for success: money. In turn, the world revolves around us- we defined success as what we do best, and that's be materialistic. Since everyone else has agreed to play by our rules, we're on top.

I do not lack questions, but answers are a rare find.

L.

I read on someone's blog today, the following statement:

"Augustine knew, first of all, that Heaven is not a place of reward for a life
well-lived or some kind of a spiritual retirement home that one can pay one’s
way into with just enough earthly good deeds in the bank to keep himself out of
the fiery pit. (To even have such an aim, to live life trying to be “just good
enough” to make it to Heaven is hypocritical and false, and even childish
[behaving one’s self to get a cookie rather than because one truly wishes to be
a good person for its own sake]—and seeking to become “perfect” and thus
deserving of eternal bliss on one’s own merit is even worse, a megalomaniacal
striving after a delusion and a chimera, which, paradoxically, can only lead to
the deadly spiritual sin of self-righteousness.) Rather, as Augustine teaches
us, Heaven is something much better than a “final resting place” of physical
leisure (or an escape from hellish torture) or even a “karmatic reward for good
deeds;” it is the fulfillment of a love-relationship with the Divine for which
we have always longed and sought and which we have cultivated to the best of our
ability on earth—an endless existence in and of pure love, in which all things
transpire and are experienced in unadulterated, untainted love, the final
reunion of lover and beloved, a state of being striven for directly and for its
own sake. And so it is that good deeds are not what lead to heaven, but rather
loving and desiring love, seeking to unite oneself with the ultimate in Love,
which is God, with no motive other than this. (Good deeds here on earth may, and
will be a natural byproduct of this seeking after God, but they are not some
sort of currency, something one “has to do” in order to get something else—in
fact, a “good deed” done without love behind it or done in order to get some
sort of personal benefit, either here or in the hereafter, is just selfishness
and is dead and of no use whatsoever.)"

How true those words are.... and how I desire for a passion that would consume me until it's connsumation.

.Timothy