The suicide bomber was smiling. Of course he was smiling. He was going to heaven.
The sentence above is taken from Pity The Nation, a book about the Lebanese civil war. The author Robert Fisk is describing a real suicide bomber who drove a truck full of 4,000 pounds of explosives into an American military compound in Beirut, blowing himself up and killing over 250 American personnel.
The fact that he was smiling really stuck with me. Oddly, it reminded me of the teachings of the Stoics. Not fearing death is a hallmark of their writings. This man, driven for different reasons, following a different God, nonetheless, seems to have arrived at a similar state of mind.
In my view, this is a representation of a truth that the Stoics have long acknowledged but the modern world has perhaps lost: there's no such thing as an objectively good or bad thing.
Big claim. Let's discuss.
"Good things" are easy to spot because they are things that people spend their whole lives chasing and maintaining: health, wealth, relationships, autonomy, etc. "Bad things" are equally obvious, as people spend their entire lives trying to avoid them. These include death, poverty, illness, loneliness, and maybe, OnlyFans subscriptions.
Implicit in these pursuits is the idea that happiness is, like a neat math function, a positive intiger that can be arrived at as long as Inputs[Good] > Inputs [Bad]. But think about our suicide bomber for an instant. Isn't he heading straight into what is supposed to be the biggest, fattest BAD there is: DEATH! And isn't he doing it with a nice, bright smile on his face? How do we reconcile the excel function with this new data?
Or if the suicide bomber wasn't really happy — maybe he remembered something funny right before the act — what about the millions who spend their lives in poverty, who have lost loved ones, who have lost homes, and yet go to bed with peace in their hearts and calmness in their souls? Or vice versa, of the people who supposedly have all the Inputs[Good], none of the Inputs[Bad], and are still miserable.
Clearly, there is a flaw in our little function. It has persisted for a long time because it's close to being right. It's a shadow of the true idea, close enough for you to spot but lacking the substance that makes it a universal truth.
The missing ingredient to the happiness function is the perception of the inputs. The Stoics, like people in the modern world, acknowledged that there are things that we seem to prefer and things that we don't prefer. But, ultimately, they qualified both as 'indifferent' — things that didn't truly matter for the achievement of happiness.
What I took from this idea is that our judgements of the events that we encounter are as much a part of the inputs of happiness as the inputs themselves.
When we look down upon death if it means the betrayal of the best version of ourselves, when we think ourselves lucky to have experienced the presence of a loved one as they slip away from us, when we meet success and failure with the same state of calm, we reduce the weight of the input variables, which are never truly our own to begin with, and raise the weight of our perception variable, which is always at our disposal, always our own.
That is what the suicide bomber did; that's why he was smiling. His perception of his deed — which he believed would send him to heaven and would avenge his kinsmen — took precedence over the input variable of death. The 'objectively bad' act of dying became a good thing.
Those who believe happiness is purely a function of external conditions are wrong. There is, of course, something called Objective Reality. The sky is blue whether we believe it is blue or not. But there's nothing objective about the human interaction with this reality because all interactions are seen through the prism of human judgement. We are like cooks — taking ingredients from the world and producing a meal. The best meals come with good ingredients, but a good cook can make even bad ingredients into a decent meal.
A Mountain Is Not A Flower, yes, but who says they can't both be wonderful?