I apologize in advance for sniffing my own ass, but this is what term happiness always meant to me,
Then you just got it earlier than me! I've had that happen with lots of things, particularly where Christianity is concerned, that I just didn't get it when other people got it effortlessly. I didn't get the Garden of Eden's full significance as allegory, for example, until I read The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams (which reinterprets the story to make a point about animal cruelty). I didn't get the Book of Job until I learned the economic calculation problem and that big hurricane happened, and then I understood how this narrow lesson (that no man can understand the economy, and woe befall you were you to try to run it yourself) is just a small slice of a bigger moral truth (no man is in any position to tell God how the world should be).
I knew from a very young age the difference between happiness and pleasure,
Pretty much. Happiness being conflated in the wider culture with a specific emotion that... well, I don't know what else to call it but happiness, for it's more than pleasure, but you know exactly what I mean. Joy, enjoyment, the warmth inside that attends pleasure. Maybe it is just pleasure.
and I learned the hard way that they weren't always correlated... there were some moments I was in pure tears but I felt that greater sense of being and purity because I knew I had done the right thing, or it felt "real" or came at a time when i was just generally well calibrated. And of course the inverse is true, if you're in a bad mindset pleasure feels like coal. I'm not sure why this came to me so early, I'll chalk it up to being raised right and having a really good childhood with great parents who guided me properly.
My folks were pretty wise, but I think they struggled for the vocabulary for it. My Pa would often say, for example, that it's wrong to seek happiness but fine to seek
contentment. But then it turned out that his conception of contentment was basically the same as Epicurus' happiness, which is far from a hedonistic mindset.
I was in 12th grade before I realized that a lot of people don't care about that and only care about surface level pleasures. It was really disturbing the first time I had a conversation with a close friend and realized this about him. But it made a lot of things make sense.
You know the meme about people being hylics? It's an ugly idea, but one I'm often drawn to.
I don't think hylics are real in the sense that Gnostics believe in them, but I think they're real enough in that many people choose to live
like they're a hylic. We make ourselves into animals.
Any good books on this stuff?
Unfortunately, most of what I know about the era comes from bits and pieces in different places. I've read a lot about the Old South, including books, but it's hard much of the time to pin down a specific source, if one even exists. If I can think up some (I'll be honest, I'll totally forget this) I'll share.
For Jefferson specifically, some points I want to make about him are that he banned the Atlantic Slave Trade, banned slavery in the Northwest Territory (what becomes the Great Lakes states), put an anti-slavery rant in the Declaration of Independence that was later removed, and the obstacle to emancipation was his severe, inherited debt (you could inherit debt in those days against your will). On his deathbed they were supposed to raise money in a lottery (Monticello was the prize), but some fuckery happened that meant they never got the money they expected and his slaves were fucked over. Keep in mind, Jefferson has had this huge libtard smear campaign run on him for decades, so if the (in the retarded libtard worldview) Arch Prince of the Confederacy was a fairly good guy, what does that say about the others? But an interesting novel exploring the contradiction of the Revolutionary generation is
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings, about his hot
teen rape slave affair with Sally Hemmings.
Those are normal socialist opinions, alright. Just, what the fuck did 'socialist' mean before they had their Council of Nicea?
Whatever the fuck you wanted! He was a genuine socialist in that he believed, essentially, in the rule of some people by others, in artificial communities, for the purpose of saving them from evil capitalism. He was his own branch. Socialists cope and seethe all the time today about him not being a socialist because <words words words>, like they do with National Socialist Superstar Adolf Hitler.
Their Council of Nicaea would probably be the Second International? There's several big strands in the Western world. Utopian socialism was what got it started with Charles Fourier (also the guy who coins the word "feminist" and was a literal cuck fetishist). They're basically Victorian hippies. Then Marx starts his branch, "scientific socialism," Marxism. Meanwhile, anarchism and related retard ideologies were common, Bakunin being the big guy there. Finally, liberalism had its retarded movement and split into (in America) libertarianism and progressivism and (in Europe) classical liberalism and social liberalism/Fabianism/gradualist socialism.
So, you've got:
Utopians
Marxists
Anarchists
Christian socialists and distributists
Progressives/boring everyday "socialists"
And Fascism and its offshoots (Nazism, Arab socialism, etc.) were also genuinely branches of socialism too, but like a socialism that tried to build a bridge back to conservative/reactionary values.
