"The world is infinitely complex, and an individual brain can only know
the little that it can handle through its own body. It turns out that
this view is well known to philosophers. It is called solipsism.

No one can truly feel what another person is feeling, though we can
empathize through shared experience. This separation has a good side, in
that each of us has the inalienable right to privacy. The bad side is
loneliness. And here, paradoxically, is where joy begins to enter.


Dancing is a way to happiness

Where we humans find joy is in surmounting this solipsistic barrier
between us and sharing our feelings and comforts. We cannot ever really
cross it, but, a bit like neighbors chatting over a fence, we can be
together. However, there is more to this communion than mere talking.
There is trust, which underlies true friendships and partnerships. What
is the chemistry of trust?

Scientists have learned that, when animals mate and give birth,
specialized chemicals are released into their brains that enable their
behavior to change. Maternal and paternal patterns of nursing and caring
appear. The most important is a chemical called 'oxytocin'. It doesn't
cause joy. On the contrary, it may cause anxiety, because it melts down
the patterns of connections among neurons that hold experience, so that
new experience can form.

We become aware of this meltdown most dramatically as a frightening loss
of identity and self control, when we fall in love for the first time.
Bonding comes not with the meltdown, but with the shared activity
afterward, in which people learn about each other through cooperation.
Knowing another person doesn't come with foreplay and orgasm. It comes
in cooperative activities during and afterward. Trust emerges not just
with sex, but also with vigorous shared activity in sports and combat,
through which people bond into teams by learning to trust each other.

So oxytocin is not a happiness chemical, but a brain tool for building
trust. Perhaps a million years ago our ancestors learned how to use this
mammalian mechanism to promote social bonding beyond sexual union, in
order to form groups and tribes. They did it, and still do it, with
dancing, rhythmic clapping and chanting, singing and making music
together all day and night, into exhaustion and collapse. When they
awaken, they are reborn.

Nietsche realized this. Emil Durkheim and other anthropologists have
shown how people engage in Dionysian orgies and religious ceremonies, as
the most effective way in which to create group identities. The joy they
experience comes in dancing and singing with each other, thereby forming
the bonds of trust. Trust comes when we are able to predict what other
people will do, and we achieve that by repeated cooperative actions.

Aristotle wrote: "Happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with
virtue." That is rather abstract. We can see virtue as a set of shared
goals for the good of ourselves and our children. Joy comes with
activities that we share with people we have learned to trust, and that
enable us to share meaning across the solipsistic barrier that separates
each of us from all others.

So happiness is not made by a chemical. That would be the same as
treating a violin sonata as nothing but rubbing horse hair on strings of
cat gut in order to make a wooden box resonate. Violin makers have to
know their materials to make one, and physicians have to know about the
brain chemicals in order to treat patients, when the chemistry of brains
has gone wrong, but they can't give us a pill to make us happy. We
create our own joys, and we feel happiest in learning to trust each
other."