Countless times over the week I was told that it didn’t matter what was making me unhappy, and also that it didn’t matter what forms of belief or action, however mendacious, selfish or fanciful, I adopted to stop feeling that way. My personal reclamation project took precedence over everything else in life, and anything, but anything, that “worked for me” carried its justification with it. The point, as Kaufman writes in Happiness is a Choice, was to “stretch ourselves continually and passionately to live more fully with a clear and prioritized intention.” Of course.
The same impasse happens now when I object to the idea of “seeing ourselves in God’s eyes” to my dialogue partner. “Whatever you mean by God,” she assures me, beaming away. But I think: Uh-uh, not good enough. Either we’re talking about something in particular, or we’re not even talking—we might as well be rubbing our tummies. Nietzsche’s dismissive phrase for this kind of reassuring nonsense was “metaphysical comfort”; a simpler one is pleasant but dangerous delusion. People say Nietzsche was nihilistic—he said it himself—but there is no nihilism more degenerate than the one in which we make ourselves cheaply happy by refusing to face the challenges of reason, and life. With truth out the window, it’s no wonder that whatever-God-is-to-you, the weak-minded bromide of the moment, has come in through the back door.
And here’s another:
If magic is simply the science of another form of belief—one in which not all connections need be causal, not all links logical—then what we see on offer in the marketplace of psychic technique is a peculiar mixture, sometimes in one and the same method, of pre-scientific and pseudo-scientific trappings decorated in blithe, and necessarily unfalsifiable, claims to generate happiness.
