Epicurus drew a clear distinction between

-    choosing a basic general attitude (diathesis) toward action in a given sphere and

-    choosing to do or not to do a given thing within that field.

Thus Epicureans were trained to make these two choices.

They were trained, for example, to first choose what attitude they will assume towards, for instance, death, the gods, pleasure and pain, necessity, fortune, political life, food, fame and friendship.

The choice of a basic and general attitude, however, by no means abolished the necessity of making individual decisions.

The proper attitude toward pain, for instance, is to regard it as inherently evil and to be avoided; nevertheless, in the individual case the lesser pain, such as that of the surgeon’s knife, is endured for the sake of the greater good.

Again, the proper attitude toward food is to prefer a simple diet, but this does not preclude and even approves the occasional indulgence.

In a series of articles I will touch upon those topics that are considered as possible sources of stress and therefore can act as happiness blockers. By showing the attitude Epicurean practitioners applied over 800 years, I hope to help today’s happiness-seekers to escape from the most dangerous happiness-blocker: stress.

-    Epicurean choices of attitudes and actions

-    Epicurean virtues implemented

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Mentioning this to a friend of mine he reminded me that people never value what they don’t pay for. Besides, these people were not a targeted audience, because they were not acutely in pain.

In the words of J.D. Salinger I must have acted “in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean” when they were satiated.

He asked me whether I learned my lesson and I am still wondering what lesson.

We learn very early which way to turn our face to get milk from mother’s  breast or avoid a slap  from mother’s hand, where to go for food, comfort, company and when to stop touching a hot stove. Our senses and our physical environment teach us what is good and healthy for us by producing a feeling of pleasure. What is bad for our health produces disgust. Pleasure and pain are the basic stop-and-go signals for our individual survival.

This would be enough if we weren’t so very social. But humans cannot survive on their own and therefore the social group will also teach us what is good and bad for the survival of the group.  The group’s teachings might differ from what we learned through our direct sense feedback. Your senses tell you to devour all the food but if you don’t share it with (some of) your group members they might punish you and not share with you their food the next time.

So you learn to work out your survival strategies balancing your individual needs as felt by your drives and tastes with the group values as experienced through daily practice, learning conflict and expectation management. This is hard enough and it takes years to find your place in the group in such a way that you can still live also according to your personal drives and tastes.

Your job to find orientation will get even more difficult or even impossible if your social environment keeps on sending you ambiguous messages by, e.g., commanding you not to lie but at the same time everybody lying to you about a life after death.

As a consequence you will be disoriented and will try to work out strategies to get along within this system.  You can choose to conform to the system and pretend to follow its rules, being incongruent with your own inner beliefs. Or you can choose “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing” become incongruent with the value system and acceptable behavior patterns of your social environment. In both cases you will ruin your mental and possibly also your physical health. You will perceive the most widespread incongruities mostly as conscience conflicts and stress.

What can you do if you don’t wish stress to ruin your health and happiness ? What other options can you have?

You could find a value system linked to behavior patterns and corresponding lifestyles in a congruent manner. In other words you might seek and find people who walk their talk and their thoughts, words and acts are congruent not only among themselves but they resonate with your own deepest needs as well.

I have good news for you: There is such a proven and viable model of pragmatic and easy to follow values system. It is the 2300-years-old practical Epicurean philosophy. It makes it easy to be honest and happy at the same time. It has been hushed up and defamed by the competing philosophies and worldviews of the Platonist, Stoic, Skeptic as well as Christian theoreticians and theologians but it never stopped giving simple practical orientation to reasonable, rational and honest people. For an enormously long period of 800 years, from 300 BCE till 500 CE (almost four times longer than the existence of the US!), it was even the most widespread worldview and lifestyle of the non-fanatical, pragmatic middle class of the Greek and Roman world.

Professional philosophers mostly know how relevant Epicurean attitudes, worldview and life conduct are today and how many of our stress-related and ecological problems would be solved if we only adopted and applied them. Unfortunately they don’t know how to say all this in simple language that is understandable also for everybody. The overwhelming majority of psychologists and sociologists, educators and life coaches has either never heard about Epicureanism or if they did, they erroneously believe that it is about eating and drinking. Anyway they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.

I will endeavour to make the practical Epicurean happiness guidance available for everyone who needs orientation but cannot accept childish myths or spiritual hocus-pocus supplied by organizations, groups or individuals with the aim of turning you into a docile instrument for their profit/power increasing machinery. Re-discovering the Epicurean system of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns might make you feel reborn in a friendly and sustainable world, enabling you to live in harmony with yourself and with your social and natural environment.

 My son started asking these questions in the religion class. In German schools religion is a compulsory curriculum but you can opt for the Catholic or the Lutheran Evangelic version. Luckily there is a standard procedure when children make themselves conspicuous. The German word is “auffallen” and is used almost exclusively in a negative sense. When the kids moved to this country a few years ago, the Head Nurse of the Kindergarten wanted to send them to a psychologist, because they made themselves conspicuous by being much too friendly, almost servile. At that time I explained the Head Nurse that it was my mistake: I tried to educate them in conformity with the manners expected in that other country they were born in, forgetting that too much friendliness is interpreted in Germany as weakness and servility. They enjoyed my re-education because now they did not have to be friendly and were allowed to suppress the weaker ones. My son was so successful that he started beating his 2 years younger sister.

 This time, however, we had to go to the psychologist with my son. His verdict was terrible and had far reaching consequences: intellectual giftedness. The psychologist tried to soothe my fears: yes it’s true that these kids accept no authority, do not adjust readily to the expectations of their environment.  But on the other hand they can be persuaded by intellectual arguments. He even said that our country would need more intellectually independent persons. Had we had more of them, our whole history might have been different. I was thinking about Karlrobert Kreiten who was a talented pianist but he made himself conspicuous by questioning Hitler’s final victory. He did this in a small circle of friends and family but his mother’s best friend turned him in and they shot him dead a few months before the war ended without Hitler’s final victory. We lived in a street named after Karlrobert Kreiten and our friends were always irritated by the length and unusual spelling of our address so we had to tell them to type in their GPS Richard Wagner Street 68 and then just turn into the first street across the adventure playground. Had we had more people like Karlrobert Kreiten our history would have turned out totally differently, indeed: we would have had millions of people with difficult or unusual names questioning Hitler’s final victory turned in and shot dead.

 My son was only questioning the education system. Who invented it for whom for what end – he wanted to know, asking me the dreaded critical questions. He did not see any reason in getting up early and sitting for 5-6 hours in a classroom instead of learning those things at home in an hour and then be able to chase cars on the computer of a soccer ball on the playground.

 I did what I mostly do when I feel intellectually cornered gasping for a breath of fresh air: I clicked on the Wikipedia for a definition. This is what we found:

 Education in its broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another.

 After careful perusal of this information I had to go back to my son’s basic questions:

 What is the aim of HIS school education?

 Instead of trying to give a halfway intellectually honest answer I lapsed back into story telling:

-    All your friends go to school too

-    You all learn a lot of interesting and useful things there

-    This is the system, everybody has to conform

 His counterarguments were:

-    All HIS friends hate to go to school, too. If they want to meet they can visit each other or meet on the soccer ground.

-    He can learn from the internet and me what is interesting and useful for him

-    Have I investigated whether there are gaps in the system, like taking special long leaves? Why not move into another country where education might be compulsory but not necessarily at school? He showed me on the internet a list of countries where home schooling is accepted.

 Having no acceptable counterarguments I flew to another never failing educational tactic of mine: bringing in more aspects for consideration. I asked him what else he has learned at school, besides the curricula taught by the teachers. First he did not grasp what I wanted to hear, but I helped him with leading questions, so he would realize what a treasure chest of skills and culture techniques necessary for his future survival in society he had the privilege to acquire at school:

 -    how to cheat at tests

-    how to look down on those of his former class-mates who did not make it to the “Gymnasium” (the high school after the 4^th grade elementary school for the top performers in the 3 caste German school system) but lagged behind in the “Realschule” (high school for the second best performers) or even Hauptschule (the high school for the poorest academic achievers) and how to show the caste differences though hairstyle, clothing and language

-    how to impress the teachers by

• saying what they want to hear, rather than what he thinks
• feigning interest in what they say

-    how to impress the other boys by

• having the latest cell phone model and the coolest downloads
• distributing some of the cheat techniques in the computer games they play judiciously, selectively and profitably
• changing alliances and loyalties diligently

-    how to impress the opposite sex by

• using tough language towards the day care staff
• letting his hair grow down his neck endlessly

-    how to increase his revenues by

• falsifying his pocket money account
• lifting plastic bottles at home and at school and cashing the deposit

-    how to tease and make fun of his sister in such a subtle way that makes reprimanding impossible

I have the impression that he grasped the value of the skills transmitted by our education system – unlike his sister who, at 8, stills acts in ridiculous childish ways like

-    saying what she thinks

-    showing her emotions overtly

-    trusting her friends and parents

-    helping her friends with their home works

-    admitting to having made mistakes

 But then she has been only two and a half years through our school education system and therefore there is hope that it will take on more and more efficiency and society will “deliberately transmit its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another” so that she will only make herself conspicuous at socially accepted occasions.

Read more here:

http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/05/beware-of-intense-stress/8755.html