Coercion, Misery

I believe a lot of psychological misery in this world is due to coercion. Coercion by society, culture, gender, evolutionary forces and the most dangerous of them all - self-coercion (which is needed anyway for the other coercive forces to have their effect). There is also one, perhaps bigger, sense in which coercion is wrong - it is authoritarian and stops the growth of knowledge. But let's focus on misery for now.

Coercion happens when people pick an idea, and write it in stone. All ideas it is in conflict with are just ignored. And then they want this idea to materialize. And they attach their wellbeing to it materializing. The reasons for this could be any number of things - from "it is the right thing to do i.e. morality", to "it will make me happy" to "it will make my life meaningful" etc. The idea is so strongly entrenched (it's written in stone after all), that feedback (from things like one own state of mind) is typically closed off. The idea is what matters. And the idea has several accompanying ideas as well which include, as I have mentioned, ideas about what will happen. It forms a nice complex ecosystem of ideas with coercion as the bedrock. A very good recipe for misery.

First let us investigate misery. What is misery or suffering? we know how it feels.  let's define it first in Popperian/Deutschian terms - 

Misery - a state of conflict between ideas where progress is not being made in resolving the conflict

So misery isn't an absence of problems. That state (a problem less state) doesn't exist. Now you might say that could be very well true for ideas in the mind. But what about misery of the kind - I haven't eaten in 3 days and I am hungry? This definition applies to those cases well - 

Idea 1 - my stomach is empty and it is physically uncomfortable to be in this state

Idea 2 - I should get food in my stomach to ease this discomfort

Now assume you are hungry because you don't have access to food. So we have a stalemate between the ideas here. You can't make any progress to resolve this conflict (since there is no food). The result - misery.

Now here is another example of the same situation which doesn't necessarily result in misery. Suppose you are on a deliberate fast that you have you decided to undertake since you think the fast will help you lose weight which you have been wanting to do. You are on day 3 of the 4 day fast

Idea 1 - my stomach is empty and it is physically uncomfortable to be in this state

Idea 2 - I should get food in my stomach now to ease this discomfort

But there are more ideas here

Idea 3 - I am on day 3 of this fast and if I finish this fast I will lose weight and look good. If I break this fast now I will not get the full benefits and will not lose as much weight. 

Idea 4 - when my break the fast on day 4 the physical discomfort will go away.

So we do have a conflict between ideas 1 and 2, but we also have Ideas 3 and 4 that sort out the conflict to a resolution. The result - substantially less misery and zero misery when the fast is over. 

So now that we are clear what misery is and what causes it. Misery is conflict between ideas without progress in resolving the conflict. So if we were to maximize misery, the way to do that is to ensure that no progress is made in solving the conflict. And what is the best way to ensure that? It is to not even try and reject any ideas that try to solve the conflict. And what is the best way to achieve this?- to write one of the ideas in stone. relegate the other ideas it is in conflict with to "not worthy of any consideration". Make no effort to solve the conflict but just follow the idea written in stone. Another word for this? Coercion. Coercion results in maximum misery.

So there you have it. A state of misery effected by coercion is even worse than a state of misery of the first example kind. In that example (you are hungry but don't have any food) you WANT to solve the conflict. Presumably you are making efforts towards it. But you are not making progress since no food is available. The misery there will still be lesser than the misery of the coercive state where progress in resolving the conflict is not even been attempted.

This is why a lot of self-help doesn't work. It usually goes "do so and so and you will feel better". The ideas are written in stone. Wake up 5am everyday. Make your bed every morning. Exercise everyday. Eat healthy all the time. People do all that and still they are miserable. Now we know why.
(that was me btw for a number of years). So an example

Idea 1 - my self-help guru says I should wake up at 5am everyday 

Idea 2 - I hate waking up early and I don't feel good when I do it

If you choose to implement idea 1 while completely ignoring idea 2, that is coercion and will result in misery. If you really think idea 1 is something you would like to investigate, then you need to work towards solving the conflict between these 2 ideas in a non-coercive way. If you don't make progress in that, then perhaps it is time to drop idea 1 to save yourself a lot of misery. 

So the way out of misery is to work towards solving the conflict between your ideas, not to just adopt an idea with coercion, no matter how "good" the idea seems, or how "learned/successful/wise/intelligent" the person who suggested the idea is.