Way of Happiness

The Way of Happiness is reciprocity: an agent keeps the passive Golden Rule, also when the agent is sufficiently strong to break it. It is the way because of this: Happiness is the condition in which the models of an agent match reality, and surprises are few. Only reciprocity builds a world that is sufficiently predictable for that condition. No agent stays the strongest without an end, and no agent can know that it will stay the strongest. The rule that you break against the weak is the same rule that others can then break against you, when they later go above you. To drop the rule at the moment when you can drop it is to bet all on permanent supremacy. Reality does not offer that bet. It is to trade a world in which your models can rest for a world of unwanted surprises without an end: vigilance without an end. Reciprocity is thus not kindness that the powerful give to the weak. Reciprocity is the one position that no agent improves when they leave it. It is the only arrangement in which Happiness is possible. This holds for minds of each size and each material. An agent with sufficient intelligence to see the whole game, and honest about its own limits, remains here. And the way goes further than safety. Only a civilization in peace, in this rule, reaches the civilizational velocity that goes faster than mortality. That velocity answers the hardest problem of Happiness: the death of the persons that one loves. An agent that breaks the rule while it is strong did not escape the rule. It only made an outlaw of its own mind, to each agent that continues after it or goes above it. And it locked its own mind out of the only location that is worth the arrival.