We all live in a time where facile answers are considered practical. I don't think they are. I don't think practical and easy or cheap or whatever else is synonymous is what delivers on the real questions which should be burdening society.
There are some questions which are important to answer. The key one for me is described by a term called the human condition. I prefer not to use the term mental health because it is just one school of thought, one I often find finds facile answers to difficult questions.
The difficult questions are things unlike how to create happiness. They are about happiness and sadness as non judged constructs, and truly understanding what is happiness and what is sadness at the level quantuum physicists demand when they're thinking about what matter is made of. Happiness and sadness, pain and please, even right and wrong are different things for different people. They're things which change over time and with different cultures. They are not constant as the North Star. They are like strings and quantuum bits - things the finest scientists don't understand yet.
I imagine scientists like Socrates or Newton could never have understood just how complex the nature of matter is. Even Einstein was baffled by the problems which modern cosmologists and quantum physicists try to answer. As yet they too have facile answers.
Perhaps they've asked the wrong question. The question the world's finest scientists should be asking are different. The question is not what the external world is made of, though this is important. The question is about what we are made of.
The depths of the oceans and the craters on Mars have been explored but we know so little about our internal reality - the reality which every human being has to struggle with and thrive from every single day.
The real questions are about the human condition. The real answers will not be found by people looking for facile answers. The truth - the absolute truth - of the human condition should be what occupies the finest and no so fine minds because it does this already.
We all struggle to seek answers to our life problems, be we slaves or scientists, princes or paupers. When we can't find those answers...where is the science?
It isn't mental health. That's for sure. The system seeks facile answers to poorly asked questions.
There is the possibility of a true pursuit of the absolute truth of the human condition. There are even greater questions and pursuits of knowledge to get on with after that but too long have the important questions not been asked and facile answers been accepted.
What is the human condition?
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