Axiom About Insatiability

As soon as he died, Juan found himself in a gorgeous place, surrounded by all the comfort and beauty he had dreamed of.
A fellow dressed in white approached him and said, “You have the right to have whatever you want; any food, pleasure or amusement.”
Charmed, Juan did everything he dreamed of doing during his life. After many years of pleasures, he sought the fellow in white and asked, “I have already experienced everything I wanted. Now I need to work in order to feel useful.”
“I am sorry,” said the fellow in white, “but that is the only thing I am unable to give you. There is no work here.”
“How terrible,” Juan said annoyed, “I will spend eternity dying of boredom! I’d much rather be in hell!”
The man in white approached him and said in a low voice:
“And where do you think you are?”

Paulo Coelho

In my post about basic concepts of the theory of society I listed eight statements about human feelings—eight axioms—that should be taken into account by anyone, who debates about economics, politics, law, social philosophy or life itself:

About Humanism: Only humans feel; collectives do not feel.
About Isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts.
About Insatiability: It is impossible to overcome all needs.
About Tastes: People value powers differently.
About Egoism: Strangers' needs are not important.
About Love: Loved ones are only few.
About Justice: The worse the offense, the more offender is hated.
About Envy: The richer the person, the more he is hated.

Today it is turn of the axiom about insatiability: it is impossible to overcome all needs. Ilsebill—a fisherman’s wife from fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife by Brothers Grimm—acts quite natural. Her behavior is not fairytale-like, not magical, as well as the one of her husband, whose main wish is to satisfy his insatiable wife so that she wouldn’t yell at him and just let him be.

Unsatisfied needs prompt to act. Satisfying the need brings joy, but you quickly find another concern, another need demanding satisfaction. As soon as you satisfy this another need, the next one occurs. And so on for the rest of your life.

Scarcity. Wishes can be fulfilled only by the means of powers. There are not enough powers to satisfy all of the endless needs. Powers that we feel short on called scarce. They are also called deficit, rare or economic.

Scarcity of alienable powers. All axioms are based on experience. Experience tells us that our insatiability extends not only to unalienable powers—such as life, health, beauty, intellect or skills—but on alienable powers as well, the most popular of which is money. Only valued alienable powers—assets or property—prompt us to communicate: trade, ask, steal or rob. Should we become absolutely satisfied with alienable powers, we would not need anything from other people and stop communicating, keeping ourselves busy only with increasing our unalienable powers, our unalienable wealth—long, lonely and even sexless life.

Karl Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program proposed a slogan of total communism—very rash from scientific point of view, though attractive for masses: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. However all needs cannot be satisfied.

Scarcity cannot be overcome totally. We can imagine overcoming scarcity of primitive needs. For example, we can imagine surplus in simple food and clothes, simple houses, when everyone gets some. Having a good imagination one can even imagine surplus of all material things, like Harry Harrison did, when described a device called copying machine or duplicator in his series of novels about Stainless Steel Rat. This device could easily copy anything in any amounts.

But even in fantastic world of abundance of familiar things it is impossible to satisfy all needs. One would wish for new, unseen things, which need to be created before copying, and most importantly—for attention of other people. For example John would like Mary to pay attention to him, but not to Bill or any other man. But Bill could also want exceptional Mary’s attention to himself. Such wishes of John and Bill regarding Mary are incompatible. Mary’s favor to one person is a scarce alienable power, an asset that can belong to either John or Bill. But Mary in her own turn may dispose this asset disregarding John or Bill’s wishes. She might choose someone different or not limit herself with only one man at all. She might dispense her favor amongst many men if she has a generous soul.

Scarcity is a consequence of human insatiability, which inevitably faces shortage of some powers—their rarity or scarcity. I should stress that when we talking about scarcity of powers, we always mean alienable powers. It means that human insatiability will inevitably make some of the alienable powers valuable and thus scarce, i.e. turn them into assets or property. In the light of axiom about humanism we should remember that only humans experience scarcity, not collectives. Thus statements that not only people but also the whole nations feel shortage or scarcity of resources should be treated as false statements, as the case of dangerous illusion of collectivism.

In summary, assets—i.e. scarce alienable powers—exist and will exist forever as long as humans exist. In other words, it is impossible to overcome scarcity of all alienable powers.

Axiom About Isolation

In my post about basic concepts of the theory of society I listed eight statements about human feelings—eight axioms—that should be taken into account by anyone, who debates about economics, politics, law, social philosophy or life itself:

About Humanism: Only humans feel; collectives do not feel.
About Isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts.
About Insatiability: It is impossible to overcome all needs.
About Tastes: People value powers differently.
About Egoism: Strangers' needs are not important.
About Love: Loved ones are only few.
About Justice: The worse the offense, the more offender is hated.
About Envy: The richer the person, the more he is hated.

Today it is turn of the axiom about isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts. This axiom is about unreliability of knowledge about feelings of other people, because we can’t know about those feelings directly. We can only get some information about their feelings from their acts—including speech or gestures. And of course they can lie.

Other’s soul is a thing-in-itself. Immanuel Kant referred to inconceivable, impenetrable as thing-in-itself. You can only feel your own soul, your own grieves and joys. Other people’s feelings can be known only through these people’s acts—for instance through what they say about their feelings. It is impossible to immediately, i.e. directly hear the “music” in other’s head, as it is to see other’s dreams.

Special tools or magic spells allowing immediate reading of others’ feelings can only be found in science fiction or fairy tails.

In Herbert Wells’s Men Like Gods the people of fictitious parallel world could communicate without use of words. Instead of speaking to each other they thought to each other. The one who received a thought clothed it in words. Notably that each one could clothe the thought in words most convenient for him, so there was no use in translators.

In the movie What Women Want the main character played my Mel Gibson after electric shock begins to “hear” the thoughts of women, which leads him to a fantastic success amongst them.

In reality we only can reconstruct thoughts of other people judging by their acts. The best way to understand what woman wants is to talk to her.

Immediate—i.e. without medium of acts, particularly speech—perception of other’s soul is as impossible as travelling back in time.

Only your own feelings are best known to you. We can only guess about other people’s feelings. Chances are that these other people may misinform you regarding their feelings. They may for example mislead others about some strong feelings and valued powers calling them sins to put off guard ones who they consider to be their competitors in order to seize such valued powers themselves. After all they may be just kidding.

In 1928 Margaret Mead in her book Coming of Age in Samoa, which then became classics of social anthropology, wrote about promiscuous sexual relations between Samoans. Only in 1983 Derek Freeman proved the failure of this work. American lady was just pranked by young Samoan girl who instigated her boyfriend. She let her believe in ridiculous nonsense about Samoan sexual traditions. But amongst Samoan traditions are pranks, not promiscuity.

The word is a door into other’s soul. Lev Uspensky in his book A Word about Words wrote about impression he had from words about simple conversation.

“It was about sixty years ago. I happened to read Kuprin’s nouvelle titled “Evening guest” in an issue of some magazine… A little scene stuck in my mind forever, although I was very young at that time—not more than ten or twelve years old. Why did it strike me?
A man is sitting in the room, while someone, some “evening guest”, is about to enter from the yard.
“Now he opens the door”, Kuprin writes. “Another instant, and the simplest, yet the most incomprehensible of things will take place. We shall begin to talk. With the aid of sounds of different pitch and intensity, he will express his thoughts in the customary form, while I shall receive those sound vibrations and decipher their meaning; and the other man’s thoughts will become mine…. Oh, how unintelligible to us, how mysterious, how strange are the commonest phenomena of life?”.
Having read these lines I halted in confusion. At first it seemed like author is laughing at me: what had he found so amazing in such a really ordinary thing—conversation between two people? Everybody talks… And it never seemed to me neither strange, nor amazing.
And now? And now I am deep in thought. Indeed: how is that?
Here I sit and think. No matter how much I think, nobody—not even a single person in the world—can know my thoughts: they are mine!
But I have opened my mouth. I began to produce “sounds of different pitch and intensity”, as written in the nouvelle. And suddenly as if everyone besides me had an opportunity to penetrate “inside me”. Now they know my thoughts…” 

Easy understanding of beloved ones. Love makes communication easier. Much less acts are needed to understand one another. Characters of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—Levin and Kitty—didn’t need words at all. Glances and initial letters of words were enough to confess about their love to each other:

“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, “Is it what I think?”
“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.
“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.
“It means never,” she said; “but that’s not true!”
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, have her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d…
…He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, “Then I could not answer differently.”
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
“Only then?”
“Yes,” her smile answered.
“And n…and now?” he asked.
“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!” she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, a, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
“I understand,” she said in a whisper.
He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.
For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over his arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”
“You’re playing secrétaire?” said the old prince. “But we must really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”
Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that he would come tomorrow morning.”