The Happiness Conspiracy by John F Schumaker

“Happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim,” said Einstein. “I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig. The ideals that have lighted my way are Kindness, Beauty and Truth.”

“If we’ve become pigs at the happiness trough, it’s understandable. As higher systems of meaning have withered, life purpose has dwindled to feeling good. Innocence, the lifeblood of happiness, is obsolete. We live on cultural soil perfectly suited for depression.”

“Our entire socio-economic system is designed to spew out citizens eternally in search of satisfaction.”

“The best consumers are itchy narcissists who hop, skip and jump from one fleeting desire to the next, never deeply satisfied, but always in the process of satisfying themselves. Our entire socio-economic system is designed to spew out this type of ‘ideal citizen’. Contentment is the single greatest threat to the economics of greed and consumer happiness.”

“A society’s dominant value system dictates how happiness is measured. The native Navajos in the southwest of the US saw happiness as the attainment of universal beauty, or what they called Hozho. Their counterpart of ‘Have a nice day’ was ‘May you walk in beauty’.”

“The small Himalayan nation of Ladakh is one of the best-documented examples of a ‘happy society’. As Helena Norberg-Hodge writes in Ancient Futures, Ladakhis were a remarkably joyous and vibrant people who lived in harmony with their harsh environment. Their culture generated mutual respect, community-mindedness, an eagerness to share, reverence for nature, thankfulness and love of life. Their value system bred tenderness, empathy, politeness, spiritual awareness and environmental conservation. Violence, discrimination, avarice and abuse of power were non-existent while depressed, burned-out people were nowhere to be found.”

“But in 1980 consumer capitalism came knocking with its usual bounty of raised hopes and social diseases. The following year, Ladakh’s freshly appointed Development Commissioner announced: ‘If Ladakh is ever going to be developed, we have to figure out how to make these people more greedy.’ The developers triumphed and a greed economy took root. The issues nowadays are declining mental health, family breakdown, crime, land degradation, unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, pollution and sprawl.”

“Visionaries tell us that the only happiness that makes sense at this perilous juncture in Earth’s history is ’sustainable happiness’. All worthwhile happiness is life-supporting. But so much of what makes us happy in the age of consumerism is dependent upon the destruction and over-exploitation of nature. A sustainable happiness implies that we take responsibility for the wider contexts in which we live and for the well-being of future generations.”

“Democracy itself is a problem when the majority itches for the wrong things.”

Read the full article at the New Internationalists

 

Keywords : happiness, man, life, values, ends, purpose, progress, capitalism, consumerism, waste, pollution, ecososial crisis, sustainability
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