http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6611967/not-google-plus

http://www.politicsofwellbeing.com/2011/06/kalle-lasn-founder-of-adbusters-on.html?spref=fb

Ancient Epicureans had up to 30 “buy nothing days” a month. Even wealthy Roman Epicureans reserved 3-7 days a month for austerity: they slept on the hard floor and ate only bread and drank only water. The sense of this exercise was to keep up their faith in the doctrine that what [is thought by most people as] hard is in fact easy to put up with. It showed them that they can be happy without their belongings, supplies and services – a state pretty often achieved in cases when the emperor wanted their property for his friends and exiled them.

I had periods in my life when I had to live on extremely meager resources and I can say that this fact never affected my mental well being. Even if I don’t need to convince myself of this fact I still keep a bread-and-water day every now and then, just as a reminder of one of the techniques of stress-FREEDOM.

I knew, I even signed a paper proving that I was told, that radiation therapy of the abdominal area can cause, among other side effects, also diarrhea.

Which it did.  At first only on the treatment free days on weekends giving me a good excuse to skip the mandatory family walks.

The last three treatments were made with higher doses of radiation on smaller surfaces, in order to boost the curative effect. Which I assume they did, but they definitely boosted the side effects as well.

For the last three weeks (two weeks before and one week after finishing the radiation therapy)  I have had the worst case of diarrhea in my life. The last three days I have been practically living on crackers, broth and cranberry juice.

However, during the 6 weeks of treatment I lost 12 pounds (5.4 kg) weight, a side effect of the side effect diarrhea, that I don’t mind at all.

The flipside is that the side effects of the therapy should dwindle away in 3-4 weeks after finishing it and I am going to put on weight again, adding to my overweight – if I don’t dwindle away myself in the process. Which would be too much loss of weight, even if my body mass index had turned into ideal.

Which I hope it won’t since  my last  motto is:  better overweight in the bed than ideal weight in the casket.

I am planning on a wild experiment today: to gormandize a whole  boiled potato and a whole grated apple today, on top of the beef broth and cranberry juice liberally served by my wife. It will have a win-win outcome: if I can hold them, I will keep, or, maybe even slightly increase my weight while definitely increasing my energy and pleasure levels. If I can’t: I will improve my body mass index.

If this isn’t positive thinking, I don’t know what is.

The philosophy of Marx and Engels, on the other hand, as interpreted and implemented by Lenin and his followers substituted the greed for money with the greed for power and served as “philosophical and scientific” foundation for the most oppressive and hypocritical communist regimes of almost half of the world for more than half a century.

http://www.facebook.com/stressfreedomguide

The Epicurean communities, on the other hand, have always been based on a cooperative, non-competitive attitude and behavior.

How could such as subspecies not only survive for 2300 years but also positively thrive and flourish for almost 800 years?

Had they followed the laws propagated by evolutionary biologists they must have died out long time ago – just like many small religious communities, including Christian ones, based on non-competitive cooperation. The Scandinavian type of socialist economy based on cooperation could never function, either, according to mainstream economists. But, in fact, it not only does, but makes its “players” happier, more content and less stressed than the people forced to “play” by the rules of a competitive system based on greed. And numerous religious sects (like the Amish in the US), cults, fraternities and sororities, based on non-competitive sharing are still up and running.

I am not sure about the future of anything in general and Epicureanism in particular, but I can imagine that it might continue as a narrow or broad alternative anabranch or backwater, a tolerated or persecuted minority for another few hundreds or thousands of years. It might turn into mainstream only if and when the present mainstream lifestyle based on competitiveness and greed will prove to be a dead end  …and leaves enough survivors for an Epicurean revival experiment.

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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.

Nowadays philosophy is hardly more than scientific speculation about linguistic phenomena. Even ethics consists mainly in the discussion of its own methods. In most forewords to philosophical books on ethics you can read that the author’s aim is to find ways how ethical norms could be established but no author even suggests that he could set up such norms of behavior.

On the contrary: Epicurus has given us practicable ethical norms – practiced by his followers unchanged for 800 years. He showed a practicable way how to live if you want to be happy and he did this in a simple language understandable for people with basic education.

At the same time Epicurus didn’t only teach and preach but he lived in accordance with his own teachings and so he became an inspiring role model for all those who decided to lead a happy life.

Epicurean philosophy applied in everyday life has been guiding and curing stressed, disoriented, suffering people for 2300 years now. It is easy to understand and simple to follow. It is compatible with science and its practice has such side effects as producing  a major contribution to sustainabilty.  

All you need is to take the decision: I want to be happy in tghis life because there is no other life ahead.

We use science to subdue and overexploit nature, to produce unnecessary products and awake a sense of greed for these products in the belief that all this process will lead us finally indirectly to happiness.

Taking the direct way would be more efficient for us and more sustainable for nature’s resources. The Epicurean approach results in a faith in nature’s laws that work independently of our wishes and desires and therefore we needn’t care or worry about them, even if some of our theories prove to be false. “How could be a man disturbed by a failure, if he’s free from ambition and fears neither death nor pains?” states Hossenfelder.

Hossenfelder doesn’t say this but any Epicurean (and many others) would agree to it: science should primarily do the following:

• develop ways for producing more food with less effort
• develop more efficient medicines with less side effects
• develop better housing solutions for more people

and communicate its accomplishments in such a way that food-, health- and housing-specialists can apply the findings. 

Malte Hossenfelder sees Epicurus’s topicality in the first place in the fact that the economy propagated by Epicurus and practiced by his followers for 800 years was a needs-based economy. Practicing it today would eliminate two of the major problems we are facing:

a.The overexploitation of natural resources:

b. The social tensions between rich and poor

to be continued

Beyond a good understanding of Epicurus’s philosphy Hossenfelder expresses his conviction that the Epicureay Way of living has a high topicality for all of us today. He sees Epicurus’s topicality in the 21^st century in five fields.

As his book on Epicurus  (Epikur,  Verlag C.H. Beck, 1998, München) is available only in German as far as I know, I will summarize here his recommendations.

1. The role of needs-based economy in producing happiness
2. The role of science in producing happiness
3. The role of autarky in producing happiness
4. The immediate and direct availability of happiness
5. The role of philosophy in forming ethical norms and defining a lifestyle

I will shortly present each of these domains in the next days.

You may get more information in German on Professor Hossenfelder here:

 http://www.uni-graz.at/malte.hossenfelder/site.php?show=1