Mental Wealth
There are only two important projects in life. The first is securing your physical well-being. That means getting enough to eat and controlling your body temperature. For citizens of the EU, this is a given.
The second project is mental wealth. When you have mental wealth, no other kind matters.
Mental wealth is not knowledge. It is not the accumulation of ideas or faith in ideas. It is rather the methods and means of processing ideas. The simplest definition of mental wealth is self-directed and frictionless thought. Can you think about what you want to think about and can you do it without annoying yourself? Can you make effective decisions? Can you achieve your goals, and if not, can you choose achievable goals?
Mental wealth is not like beatitude. It is not about being happy regardless of your circumstances. It is about estimating the goodness of information you have, how to induce information that you do not have, how to create back-up plans, and so on. It’s about dealing with your circumstances, as best you can with what you have — and being satisfied that you did exactly that.
There is also the possibility of a drug-like euphoria, even ecstasy. More on this, of course, later.
Having material wealth does not mean living in a house with every saucer, screw, and lamp you might possibly need. The materially wealthy live in clean spaces; they prefer to have around them only the things they immediately need, with the option, of course, of summoning new things.
This is the model for mental wealth. Mental wealth is having only information that you need for the decision currently before you, with the option of summoning more information if needed.
The implications are wide. It implies that if a schoolteacher in another district is conducting a steamy affair with a student, it is not information that you need, since there are no decisions you can make with it. If you are washing dishes and there is no decision to be made about what a coworker said to you the day before, then it is best to think about washing dishes. Washing dishes is at least neutral.
Mental wealth is therefore a kind of second awareness that is always fine-tuning, adjusting, and redirecting the lower awareness.
Imagine that you have received some information that makes you angry or sad. Now, you have two bad things instead of one. Your ability to make good decisions and react is hampered because you are now distracted by this attack on your mental-well being.
Having mental wealth is to decide whether you must react to the new information, how you might possibly react, and which possibilities further anything from your list of personal goals.
If this sounds like denial, remember that no one is insulted or outraged by being attacked by a tiger. A hungry tiger does not inspire anger or depression. One reacts, if there is such a tiger, or one does not react, if there is no tiger. The idea that every external problem be experienced as an inner attack is arguably mental poverty insisting on itself. It is like an addiction denying its own existence. It is the nature of addictions to lie to their owners.
This might seem counter-intuitive, if only because our culture insists on mental poverty. It provides vapid entertainment to distract us. It tells us to be outraged or insulted by deviancy from its norms. It tells us that we have no worth if we are not useful to the wealthy. We receive many messages from our culture that we know are unhealthy. It is therefore a rite of passage for each person to regain control of his/her own mind.
Other articles in this series: