The Spanish philosopher and journalist Fernando Savater admitted during an interview with a well-known Spanish publication that he had discovered his major philosophical breakthrough as a child. When a professor asked him why we have come into the world, he answered “to be happy.”

We have come into the world to be happy; this seems to be a good response. Nevertheless, finding happiness is a struggle that may last throughout our lives. It requires us to be rebellious in confronting our own ghosts, dreads, and beliefs. These result from a deficient education, from external aggressions and from the inheritance of a system of exclusive values, in which some are rejected and others are accepted for their physical or intellectual qualities, or, what is even worse, are signs of having lived under the tyranny of others. The fact is that each person, depending on living condition, builds his/her happiness with the bricks of unhappiness.

False pillars
Life is a shipwreck upon which we try to float. Fed up with living in this constant sinking, we cling to whatever pillars we think are fixed and immobile. But once we are securely clinging to them, we discover with sadness that they are also sinking. I believe that happiness consists of learning to live in this sinking, enjoying the liberty it offers us, being thankful for each gift that life grants us, including those that sadness teach us, which are not despicable, for they transform us into good advisers.

Those people who lacked economic security in their childhood do not want to continue living without it, or allow it for their children. Their pillar is wealth. He who suffered abandonment searches for an eternal and undying love. His pillar is love. He who was the object of scorn for whatever reason searches for superiority before others. Our needs define us and, on their basis, we build those sinking pillars that we believe are firm. One example is a cult.

Cultural deficit?
When we mention the word “cult,” what comes to our mind? A group of people who lock themselves in a house, and all the members of the cult, driven absolutely mad by the malevolent power of a powerful mind, and who end up participating in a collective suicide. We believe that this will never happen to us. Nevertheless, cults can be more subtle than this. They can find shelter in our needs and our fears by convincing us that they are the only solution. Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, asserts that religion is the weapon, which the weak use against the strong.

Who does not bend the will before the dread of a terrible divine punishment? Why does God see everything? Cults use means like these to dominate the will. Generally, they are led by a spiritual being who claims to have attained a level of superior energy, who is capable of giving you the happiness you do not have, or of saving you from a inevitable danger that is threatening you, even though you are unaware of it. They claim that only the virtuous will be saved when the world ends. The bending of the will is obtained through all these tremendous predictions.

The followers of a religious cult are typically persons who find themselves in a state of emotional weakness because they live lonely and depressed. Often, they have suffered a loss and no longer know their destination. This state of weakness makes them more receptive. The people who fall prey to these enticements do not necessarily come from a low culture, as is commonly assumed. There are cults for all intellectual levels and for all religious dispositions.

When we are seized by a suffering that overwhelms us, we find tranquility in the positive messages of a person who assures us that he knows our future. Suddenly, we believe in palmistry, fortune-tellers, witches, tarot cards, tea leaves, snail shells and quack healers. Everything is welcomed--as long as it alleviates our suffering. We are most vulnerable to become addiction to gambling, to drugs, to bulimia, and clearly, to cults as well. We are not capable of recognizing that the solution is in ourselves, in our own fortitude, and that these outside consolations are merely facile recourses. We may be lucky to be surrounded by good friends who will know how to guide us through our weakness. Nevertheless, we continue delegating control of the rudders of our lives to other people. While we are not masters of our own present, we continue following, wandering in a drift.

There are no other miraculous remedies against sadness but those that come from our daily courage in believing that we have come into the world in order to be happy.

Translated by Mitchell Cowen Verter

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