Pleasure and Pain Are Relative: Another’s Suffering Is a Spectacle is a proposition within the theme of the self, suffering, and motivation. It holds that, in the eyes of an outside observer, pleasure and pain are badly distorted: the sufferer others picture is not necessarily as wretched within as the surface suggests, and the radiant one is not necessarily as happy as the surface suggests—on the whole, when you add it all up, things come out “much of a muchness.” And it is precisely other people’s suffering that furnishes the material to be watched, enjoyed, and called a “good story”—the films people praise almost never have a protagonist who is not miserable, so that, as the saying goes, “the films you love are someone else’s road of pain.” The proposition splits “suffering” out of being a single objective quantity into two layers—the sufferer’s actual experience and the onlooker’s projection—and points out that the two routinely come apart.
The Distortion of Pleasure and Pain: The Onlooker’s Misjudgment
The first layer of the proposition takes aim at the most common cognitive error of everyday life—measuring another’s inner world by one’s own eyes. Seen through the lens of evolution, a person’s feel for their situation is calibrated over the long run; when an outsider imagines another’s suffering by his own standard, he tends to overestimate that suffering. And of those who look glorious, he tends to overestimate their joy.
Do you really think their inner lives are as bitter as you imagine? Not necessarily. And conversely, those who look radiant and glamorous to outsiders—are they truly that happy, that content? Truly, not necessarily.
This is a “misplacement of the frame of reference”: the onlooker carries his own frame over onto the one observed, so the reading of pleasure and pain he comes away with is, naturally, distorted. The proposition lands on “on the whole, much of a muchness”—not that everyone’s pleasure and pain are equal, but that once inner experience is fully counted in, the external ranking of the glossy and the bedraggled is far less trustworthy than it appears. This shares a root with Seeing Is Not Believing: Belief Is More Useful Than Truth: the “misery” or “bliss” that is seen is surface; the real pleasure and pain hide beneath the surface, not on the onlooker’s retina.
”Much of a Muchness,” Seen Through Evolution
Why should pleasure and pain be calibrated to “much of a muchness”? The proposition draws on evolutionary thinking: feeling is not an absolute scale but a product of relative adaptation. For one who has long inhabited a given situation, both the threshold of pain and the baseline of pleasure drift along with it, so that an enormous gap in outer conditions does not map linearly onto an enormous gap in inner experience. In other words, put a person back inside his own situation and his own time, and both his suffering and his joy get “flattened out.”
This is exactly the individual-feeling-level extension of Seeing the World Through Evolution: Home Is the Safest Ground, and Seeing Through the Prison of Fame, Wealth, and Power: through evolution’s eyes, a difference in the hand of fame, wealth, and power dealt to two people is not the same as a difference in the experience of happiness. It also corroborates Unhappiness Springs from Craving, Not from Lack—if suffering arises mainly from craving rather than from objective lack, then those who are objectively “lacking” are not necessarily more wretched, and those who are objectively “abundant” are not necessarily more joyful, and it all comes back to “much of a muchness.” The proposition does not deny that suffering exists; it only denies that “you can count up who suffers more just by looking from the outside.”
Another’s Suffering Is a Spectacle
The second layer of the proposition turns the gaze from “the misjudged sufferer” to “the onlooker who consumes suffering.” The stories people agree to be good are almost all built on the protagonist’s misery.
The films we love, the ones we call good, almost never have a protagonist without some miserable experience. The films you love are someone else’s road of pain.
The goodness of a so-called “good film” is, to a large degree, another’s suffering processed into watchability. The audience sits in a safe seat, savoring the protagonist’s struggle, fall, and reversal along the road of pain—and there suffering is transmuted into a spectacle, a source of entertainment and of meaning. This connects with The Essence of Desire Is the Hunt for Novelty: a person’s fascination with “someone else’s road of pain” is, at bottom, a novelty-hunting exploration of extreme situations, of perils one would never wish to live through oneself; suffering is “good to watch” precisely because it is rare, because it is hair-raising.
The Asymmetry Between Suffering and Spectating
Set the two layers side by side, and the proposition reveals an asymmetry: as onlooker, a person is eager to consume another’s suffering and to take it for a good story; as sufferer, a person is routinely misread by others according to the surface. The very same “suffering” is, in the theater, an admired high point, while in reality it is an experience overestimated or underestimated. Watching another’s pain, a person lavishes meaning and value upon it without stint; but when it comes to measuring the real other, he reaches for the crudest external yardstick.
This asymmetry is a reminder: the “value” of suffering is, to a great extent, an after-the-fact, onlooking, narrativized ascription, not a property of the suffering itself. It thus draws a boundary around Suffering Is the Tempering of the Soul—suffering can become a tempering, but “good to watch” does not equal “deserved to be borne”; to romanticize suffering, to treat another’s pain as a plotline he had coming, is the onlooker’s bargain. It also stands in tension with Growth Need Not Cost You Pain: since the “value” of pain is mostly conferred after the fact by the onlooker, one should not, in reverse, take pain itself for a necessary ticket to growth.
How the Proposition Is Used
This proposition is meant not so much to console as to dispel two illusions. First, it dispels the illusion of “judging suffering by appearances”: do not decide who is happy and who is wretched by outward looks; both the glossy and the bedraggled exteriors are untrustworthy, and real pleasure and pain must be seen back inside the person’s own situation and experience. Second, it dispels the illusion that “suffering carries value in itself”: the suffering in a good story moves us because it is told, watched, and given meaning—not because the act of suffering is itself noble; to take another’s pain for a spectacle, one must be aware that this is the onlooker’s position. The proposition closes, then, on a restrained attitude: a little less taken-for-granted measuring of another’s suffering, and a little more honest self-awareness about the “good stories” one consumes.
Sources
- Manuscript —“The films we love, the ones we call good, almost never have a protagonist without some miserable experience. The films you love are someone else’s road of pain.”
- Manuscript —another record of the same assertion
- Manuscript —on, through the lens of evolution, “the sufferer not necessarily suffering, the radiant one not necessarily joyful, much of a muchness on the whole”