Last week, the world observed the spectacle of a high-powered marriage blowing up before their eyes. A chief executive officer of a billion dollar, cutting-edge corporation had his arms intimately wrapped around the one official in his company who polices illicit relationships there.
Big as life and twice as natural, their moment, then their painful expressions of horror and guilt, was captured forever by a cell phone camera and spread globally via the internet.
Cheating in relationships represents probably one of the most misunderstood human activities. People grow swift to judge based on what they see and what they think they understand.
Too many who jump with eagerness to condemn what appears to be a betrayal forget the wisdom in “Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
Of course judgment and accountability do not always represent the same things. Holding a person accountable, in this case for breaking their own rules, does not rise to the level of emotion felt by one who feels compelled to call on that person to be judged in the full divine sense of the term.
Much popular mythology surrounds the notion of adultery and unfaithfulness. Many assume that the person engaging in these behaviors enjoys themselves and see happiness as an extension of that alleged enjoyment.
Proverbs, however, lays out the reality, saying “whoso committeth adultery . . . lacketh understanding.” A person who engages in it “destroyeth his own soul.”
It goes on to say “a wound and dishonor shall he get; and his reproach shall not be wiped away.”
These verses explain what the adulterer does to his or her own self. The lack of understanding comes in when the person makes a conscious decision to escape unhappiness, stress, or some other mental malaise by seeking escape in something that “feels good.” And wounds, physical,emotional, or those from dishonor, always afflict the person suffering from them.
The individual making these choices, the way in which they “lacketh understanding,” is in not knowing that most things that make a person “feel good” in the moment, whether adultery, opioids, gambling, alcohol, overeating, or other self-destructive behaviors, do not bring happiness. In fact, the added self-induced stress, anxiety, and eventual health effects will usually make the person even more unhappy.
The confusion comes from opposing points of view in Western Civilization.
“If it feels good, do it,” does not come from the easy going culture of the 1960s and 70s so much as the Greek Hellenistic hedonists.
Hellenistic culture emerged with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle and Near East. He brought under Greek rulership millennia old cultures steeped in wealth and pleasure. As a nation of philosophers, the Hellenistic Greeks sought to create intellectual rationalizations to do as they pleased.
In other words, to enact the somber conclusion of Judges 21, where “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
Epicurus, whose life and ideas correspond with the opening of the Hellenistic era during the years 341 BC to 270 BC, saw the fear of death and punishment for moral wrongs in the afterlife as an irrational fear. As he explained in his Letter to Menocecus, “accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death.”
Even Epicurus saw the need for limits. The same letter implored that “and since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures, when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them: and similarly we think many pains better than pleasures, since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time.”
He also urged that seeking pleasures in sensuality and overindulgences do not bring “freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind.”
Aristippus of Cyrene, a student and associate of Socrates, founded a school of thought that encouraged a more thorough hedonistic ideal. As Diogenes Laertius explained in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the followers of Aristippus claimed “that there were two emotions of the mind, pleasure and pain; that the one, namely pleasure, was a moderate emotion; the other, namely pain, a rough one. And that no one pleasure was different from or more pleasant than another; and that pleasure was praised by all animals, but pain avoided.
To them, pleasure belonged to the body, and constituted its chief good.” They also saw pleasure as only coming from overt actions and claimed the “absence of pain” sought by many Epicureans resembles more “a condition like that of a person asleep” or dead.
“Even if an action be ever so absurd,” they believed, “still the pleasure which arises out of it is desirable, and a good.”
Both philosophers speak much of how to find pleasure, or at least remove pain. Neither, however, dwells much on happiness or the lessons and value of the pain that comes from struggle.
While Hellenists find pain a condition of negation to avoid, the Judeo-Christian tradition sees it as a source of strength and wisdom. In Genesis 32, the Patriarch Jacob “wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” At dawn, the mysterious entity, often identified as God Himself, “saw that he prevailed not” against Jacob and asked to be released. Jacob did so on condition of receiving a blessing.
“Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel,” replied the entity. Jacob/Israel had no doubt who he had contended with, calling the land Peniel “for I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved.”
The word Israel itself can be defined in one sense as “struggle with God.” For those of the Jewish and Christian faith, the struggle represents the point. Seeing struggle as “baked in the cake” of each human life in itself serves as a relief.
Those who believe that pleasure or absence of pain represents a default condition with pain to be avoided at all costs will remain emotionally and intellectually stunted. They will find more misery and stress in the inevitable struggles of life because they see pleasure as the natural, and struggle and pain the abnormal, condition of humanity.
People with such mindsets will seek more escape in illicit, addictive, or other self-destructive pursuits in a feeble attempt to substitute some sort of pleasure for the pain in their lives.
Struggle does not belong solely to those with very limited resources in life. Despite the myth of wealth equalling happiness in the minds of some, the richest of men and women see struggle as well. As an old rapper once said, more money, more problems.
What determines happiness comes from how one engages struggle. Happiness can come often from the satisfaction achieved when overcoming struggle. Genesis 33 shows the reconciliation of Jacob/Israel with the brother Esau that he had wronged with expressions of love, joy, and generosity between the two.
This shows that life does not boil down to simply the pleasure and pain of the self, but also in how a person relates to family, friends, and others with love, forgiveness, and grace.
Jacob/Israel learned hard lessons from betraying his brother for short-term gain and it took struggle with himself, with God, and with Esau to reach the condition of the happiness of reconciliation.
Learning such lessons from one’s own experience can produce a powerful life-changing result, but it is more wise to learn first from the follies of others who seek escape from their pain instead of resolution of their struggles.
