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The Progressive Politics of Happiness
The following is adapted from a speech John de Graaf delivered to the annual gala of the Northwest Progressive Institute on Mercer Island, Washington, June 9, 2010.
You may have noticed that the subject of happiness is hot right now. In the past year and a half, more than 27,000 books and articles have been written on the subject. But the interest in happiness is not entirely new.
Once upon a time, in a far-off land of green valleys and soaring mountains, a boy of 16 was crowned King—and began in a quiet way to change the world. The year was 1972—not so long ago. The faraway land was a tiny Himalayan Kingdom called Bhutan, thought of by many as the model for Shangri-La. And the 16-year-old king was Jigme Wangchuck, who, when asked what he would do to increase Bhutan’s Gross National Product, replied that, as far as he was concerned, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.” And Gross National Happiness would be the goal of his reign.
Now if any leader, young or old, had made those remarks here in the United States, he or she would have received a few polite chuckles perhaps, then a collective yawn, and an exhortation to get real and get back to making money. But the people of Bhutan take their kings very seriously, and slowly over the next 38 years, they began to put a little meat on the concept of Gross National Happiness. They wanted to figure out how to measure it, how to enhance it through government and social policies, and how to educate themselves about the behaviors that lead to greater joy. So they invited leading “happiness scientists” to their once isolated land—psychologists and economists and ecologists and philosophers and sociologists and experts in health and in the creation of scientific surveys.
In time, they began to measure nine domains that affect happiness:
Psychological well-being or mental health
Physical health
Time or Work-life balance
Education
Cultural vitality and expression
Social connection and relationships
Environmental quality and access to nature
Quality of governance…
And finally…finally…
Material well-being.
It’s telling that “material well-being” (translation: stuff), the near-obsessive goal of American economics, is only one of the dimensions Bhutan uses to analyze economic decisions. That’s because research has shown that stuff only makes us happier up to a point.
For poor nations, happiness tends to rise quickly as purchasing power and standard of living increases. But past a certain level of income, the curve of increased satisfaction flattens and eventually becomes a straight line. It may even begin to decline. So, for instance, in the United States, surveys of self-reported life satisfaction show a slight downward trend over the past half century, despite a near-tripling of average incomes.
It is true that in virtually all societies, rich people are happier than poor people, a phenomenon that reflects status and power differences and the psychological fact that we tend to judge our success, and therefore, rate our satisfaction, in comparison to others. But as an entire society’s income rises past a minimum of modest comfort, overall levels of happiness do not rise with it.
This finding leads former Harvard University president Derek Bok, author of the new book, THE POLITICS OF HAPPINESS, to a sensible observation:
If it turns out to be true that rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier, as much of the recent research suggests, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?
What is the point, indeed?
But what, you might ask, has this to do with progressive politics?
Well, some of the world’s leading happiness experts created surveys for Bhutan to use in measuring its people’s life satisfaction. And policy makers in Bhutan are using the results to guide its economic, social and environmental policies. They’ve even used it to decide NOT to join the WTO!
In the past decade, Bhutan has taken its message of happiness to the world. In fact, Bhutan’s Secretary of Happiness was in the United States recently. He spoke at the first Gross National Happiness Conference in Burlington, Vermont, and then traveled to Seattle to address the Green Festival, the Environmental Protection Agency, and members of the Seattle City Council.
The happiness surveys developed for Bhutan have been used in Brazil and Canada and other countries—in cities, in universities and even in corporations. In the city of Victoria, BC, civic organizations formed a Happiness Partnership and conducted a scientific sampling of the nine domains of happiness in their city. You can take the survey yourself: http://survey.
We are now hoping to create a similar partnership in Seattle. In fact, it seems we may have a little friendly “happiness” competition among Northwest cities—Victoria, Vancouver, Bellingham, Seattle, Olympia and Portland. You may want to think about it in your own town. Imagine taking seriously what Thomas Jefferson wrote about governments being instituted to promote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He didn’t say “property,” or “maximum incomes” or the “grossest national product”; he said “happiness.” Imagine asking a simple question: What’s our economy for, anyway?, and then concluding, with Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the Forest Service, that its purpose is “the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run.” In other words, Gross National Happiness with justice and sustainability. How might this affect our politics? Well, interestingly, only 6% of Victoria residents said they thought they’d be happier if they had more possessions. Ranking their material satisfaction, they gave it a score of 92 on a scale of 100. You can find the results here. They were far less happy with their environmental quality, giving it a score of only 63, and even unhappier with their financial security, scoring it 53. But the lowest score of all was for “time balance”—a score of only 46 out of 100. According to the Victoria survey, “Stress and problems of time-balance were the most important factors in limiting well-being across the regional population.” I suspect that our surveys in Seattle and other American cities will produce similar results, but with scores for time balance and economic security even lower than in Victoria. And I would suggest that this has some implications for our politics that progressives have not taken seriously. For example, in a recent article in the Huffington Post, Roger Hickey, the organizer of the America’s Future Now conference held this week in Washington D.C., wrote: “Every progressive completely agrees that we must restore the kind of supercharged economic growth we had in the 1950s and 1960s if we are to end unemployment and reduce the deficit.” Whoa! Now I don’t know about you, but every progressive I know completely agrees that such a development would be ecological suicide. Our ecological footprint is already five times what is sustainable. If everyone in the world consumed as we do, we’d need five planets. We’d look back at the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis as a picnic. What we need now is not supercharged economic growth, but an economy that is less consumptive, kinder to the earth, more local and with less of our time committed to the market, so that we have more time for our communities, for our families, for our health and to be good environmental stewards. That’s the kind of economy Juliet Schor advocates in her new book, PLENITUDE. Green, alternative technologies can help us to transition there, but they can never perpetuate a consumer lifestyle that knows no limits on a planet already stretched to the limit. Mr. Hickey needs to seriously rethink this. Progressives need to re-think this. And if we do, it will suggest a different strategy—a strategy centered on time instead of growth. Here of some examples of the kind of policies we should promote: Paid family leave. Only the United States, Swaziland, Liberia and Papua New Guinea don’t guarantee at least paid maternity leave. Most wealthy countries also offer paid leave for fathers. Paid sick days. Only a handful of desperately poor countries and the United States, don’t guaranteed paid leave when you’re sick. 86 percent of food service workers get no paid sick days and they come to work sick and get you sick—they can be fired if they don’t. Paid vacation time. Only the United States, Guyana, Suriname, Nepal and Burma don’t guarantee at least some paid vacation time. Every European gets at least four weeks off with pay a year. We should support the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, sponsored in Congress by a true progressive, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida. It’s a very modest proposal, but a step in the right direction. Here’s another idea: the choice of shorter work-time. In the Netherlands and some other European countries, workers have a legal right to reduce their hours without losing their jobs. They keep the same hourly pay, pro-rated benefits and full health care. This is an enormous expansion of personal freedom—the right to choose time over money, to select shorter hours of work without losing one’s livelihood. Each of these policy reforms is essential to good health. Indeed, our lack of these rights is part of the reason Americans have the worst health in the industrial world, despite paying twice as much as everyone else does for healthcare. We are almost twice as likely to suffer chronic illness in old age as Europeans are, for example. Workplace stress in America is a killer, the “new tobacco” in the words of one cardiologist. Such ideas should have been part of the health care debate. Progressives should have insisted that they be part of the health care debate. If we enact these policies, we can become healthier and ultimately, at far less cost. Right now, Americans work 200 to 400 hours more each year than Europeans do. We need to work less so all can work. We can reduce unemployment by sharing the work, as progressive economist Dean Baker has pointed out clearly. Most Americans don’t need more stuff in their lives. But they desperately need more time, and more opportunity to work and work reasonable hours. Such changes will make our families and communities stronger. And they will reduce our impact on the environment. With more time, people walk more, bicycle more, and use public transit more frequently. With longer working hours, they choose the fastest, most energy-intensive, form of transport. This is not rocket science and many studies confirm it. A politics of time is also a politics of happiness. Gallup does an annual poll, measuring levels of well-being in 140 countries. Even Forbes magazine confirmed that the United States in nowhere in the top ten. The four happiest countries are Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Forbes explained what they have in common. They are among the world’s most egalitarian nations and they pay the greatest attention to work-life balance. Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett added one more commonality they share. They pay among the highest taxes in the world. Obviously, they get something for their money. A politics of happiness and of time balance has profoundly progressive implications. If we don’t understand this, leading conservatives do, and they want to nip this in the bud. Their think tanks and scholars are already at work to hijack happiness. Consider two new books by Arthur Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute. One is called GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS. The other is called THE BATTLE, and is endorsed by Carl Rove and Dick Cheney as a “must read for conservatives who want our movement to dominate the intellectual and policy debates of America’s coming vital decades.” These books are to the science of happiness what the shills for BP are to the science of climate change. Contrary to what virtually every happiness study has found, Brooks contends that the happiest countries are those with the least government and lowest taxes. Happiness researchers have found pretty much the opposite. To the Danes, Swedes, Finns and Dutch, Brooks’ findings must read like a joke book. Brooks does agree that after a certain point more money doesn’t make people happier. Then he uses it to argue that, therefore, in America, inequality doesn’t matter. And he even argues that reducing American working hours would make workers unhappier. Brooks says that Americans don’t work long hours because they have to; they do it because they love to work so much. Vacations would make them completely miserable! Well, I’ve got news for Mr. Brooks. Gallup’s daily survey finds that Americans are 20 percent happier on weekends than on workdays—what a surprise! They are 30 to 40 percent happier on holidays. And when they rank the happiness their daily activities bring, working ends up second from the bottom, more pleasurable only than that mother of all downers, the morning commute. By contrast, socializing after work ranks second from the top! Now, I’m not knocking work. A good job with a living wage that contributes to society and provides for one’s family is central to a happy life. We need to be sure that every American has the opportunity to have such a job. But more is not always better and 50 hours a week is not better than 40 or 32, especially when we are sacrificing our health and social connection. Arthur Brooks’ conclusions may be laughable to happiness researchers. But the fact that the President of the American Enterprise Institute devotes not one, but two, books to the politics of happiness, tells us just how dangerous he feels this subject is for the Right and just how necessary he—and the big conservative money that feeds him—feel it is to reframe and hijack this dialogue before it begins. We can’t let them do that. And we can’t let this moment pass without action. The politics of happiness are progressive at their core. They call for policies that go deeper than economic growth, to the core values of family and community, health and stewardship, a balanced life on a sustainable planet. And they are part of our progressive tradition. Nearly a hundred years ago, when thousands of women left the dismal textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to demand a better life, they carried banners which read: WE WANT BREAD AND ROSES TOO. Bread and roses were the twin goals of the old labor movement; higher wages to buy the bread; shorter working hours to smell the roses. Somehow we’ve come to focus solely on the bread and we’ve left the roses to wither. It’s time to water them again.
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84 Comments so far
Show AllUntil public financing of political campaigns replaces the best US Congress money can buy, the US Government will continue to operate its reverse Robin Hood syndicate, taking more and more from the workers and poor, and giving more and more to the wealthiest 1%.
Reverse Robin Hood is a formula for happiness only for the top 1%.
Bring America Back !!!!......!!!...YES, that's why I'm not Happy !
Them that gots, gets ........
Bring America Back !!!!
****de Graaf has a very valid piece and I just realized it would be theraputic to put down why I'm not Happy !
**I think the rich are happier, and I just cannot hit the
Lotto big enough to get a share of some bucks.
**I see my beloved sea creatures suffering and dying from crude oil pollution in the Gulf. Sad, sad A familiar usual suspect--Halliburton Corp--was on that Rig and nobody seems to be asking what the hell Halliburton was doing there ?
**Unhappiness is not finding a trace of the 911 truth movement brcause the Neocon lies still prevail. "W: Bush comes out last week to announce he would do the same to Iraq all over again, if he could ! Our present leader does not have the gumption to take "W" to task for a War he campaigned to end !!
**Meg Ryan does not answer my e-mails==sad indeed, before that Brook Shields ignores like Im a potted plant !
**In our local community Repubbies outregister Demmys at the polls, so Demmy candidates don't even bother to run for office any more. Unopposed politics not a happy thing !
**Katrina politics has Obama rushing over to the Gulf as each tar ball rolls up on the beaches. As He danced at his inaugural balls, Israel was slaughtering 1500 humans at GAZA, including 4oo innocent dead children==not ever one word of remorse, criticism from the Obama Administration.
Obama's silence implies consent at the Zion Genocides, and again last week as Flotilla peace activists were assassinated. I'm now not happy I voted for Obama.
**Not happy can't find the old friends anymore, who have
scattered to the four winds of the earth! My cat is okay but she plays no tennis, drinks no beers.
**Not at all pleased I'm still working full time to get along in life, many others have retired and gone fishin'.
Whatever happened to the good ol American Dream ?
**Anyway thanks to Tom Jefferson for keeping Happiness as an element to be pursued, but I'd just like to catch some of it once in a while !!!
This is easily one of the most vulgar, repulsive, disgusting articles I've seen in some time- and that's saying something as I read in volumes.
This vapid chatter allows, the flight into a domain that feels 'profounder than politics', has to no small extent contributed to the demise of a genuinely socialist political culture in the United States.
It is the "Don't Think" school of Politics - sort of the New Age version of Christian Fundamentalism. More self=help gibberish in this horrid piece.
The self-help movement comports quite nicely with capitalism in at least two ways.
One is that it shifts the focus upon the individual leaving any analysis of the larger injustices and/or systemic failures in the shadows as folks flail about to improve upon some "personal failing" in attempt to "self-actualize their full potentiality" or divert their attentions to some breathing technique or positive imagery or in this case "Getting Happy."
The second is that there is a shitload of money to be made by fleecing the masses with the message that all they have to do is "look within" when what they should be doing is building social revolutionary movements.
This stuff is insidious.
Maybe because traditional culture doesn't make much room for it or the fact that they have a king... or because the king is the one in charge of the people making the list, the list didn't include such things as political change/making a difference, etc. I'm not sure what to call it. One's calling? I remember the chorus from a Charlie King song, "our life is more than our work and our work is more than our job". It's touched on by several of the points on the list but without the factor of agency. It seems important to me, but maybe that's just because I live in a society that couldn't conceive of having a Gross Happiness Quotient, and has thus destroyed not only the natural basis for its existence but that of others across the planet.
One thing I do know is that if a substantial part of the citizenry of the US and the world were really fulfilled and happy, instead of allowing themselves to be made to feel inadequate and powerless by corporations that want to sell them things and governments that want to control them, then war, crime, tyranny, torture, unconstitutionality, climate cataclysm and ecological destruction would be nearly ended in a few years.
I don't think you read the article. He talks at length about policies of countries where people are happier and specific government policies here in the U.S. which could enhance happiness. It is decidedly not about self-help.
I have to disagree with you here. I think this article is completely in line with the goals of socialism. If we are to develop some sort of democratic socialism, I think work would look something like what deGraff discusses. I agree with you insofar as this article does not look at structural problems.
Nevertheless, I think that any real socialist movement needs to consider non-economic values. Workers must have good pay to meet their needs and time to smell the roses. A movement that forgets what capitalism steals from the human spirit will quickly turn into a soulless state socialism. I'd certainly prefer Northern European Social Democracy to such state socialism and certainly wouldn't fight capitalism to replace it with an equally soulless bureaucracy.
You say the New Ageists say people just have to look within, whereas you would like people ot build social revolutionary movements. I want revolution too, but the person incapable of inwardness, the person who does not develop his or her own humanity can quickly become demonic in his moral certainty.
If a Mr. Moneybags were forced to live with an aboriginal tribe for one year he would rather die than return to his former 'privileged' way of life.
We can't remember Eden. The angel guarding the gate is nothing but the lies we tell each other.
At the devil's booth are all things sold
Each ounce of dross costs it's ounce of gold
For a cap and bells our lives we pay
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking
It is heaven alone that is given away
God himself may be had for the asking
No price is set on the lavish summer
June may be had by the poorest comer.-----James Russell Lowell
I suggest a society in which food, shelter, medical care, and stipend of $20,000 be given each person. If he wishes to make more money he may work as hard as he wishes.
Nobody NEED work more than three hours a day.
"Nobody NEED work more than three hours a day."
With the exception of planting and harvesting time, and maybe only 4 or 5 hours on some days in between, but certainly not 10-12 hours, day in and day out. Krishnamurti said once such laboring equated to living in great sorrow. He said man is responsible for creating so much, unnecessary, sorrow. Though this seems obvious, few personally detect their contribution to it in their day to day lives, which they (and we) must do in order to change it.
Again, it depends what you mean by 'self-help.' I totally agree if you mean Dr. Phil style or that of the pop-psychology variety. Does authentic self-help exist? Each much answer that question himself through trial and error. Be careful, though, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And contempt for what you call 'new-age' will not get you very far either. Perhaps you are a closet atheist who worships human logic and reason, while disparaging everything that points to something other than that. If so, please come out from hiding and simply say it. I daresay the secular humanists would not do any better were they to be in charge, though many have that illusion.
de Graaf: "Right now, Americans work 200 to 400 hours more each year than Europeans do." No we don't. We show up for work, but we don't actually work all those hours. There's a level of burnout, after which you're just showing up. If you've ever watched 'The Office', they show a lot of the 'busy work' people engage in, to appear busy to their bosses while they're watching the clock. I'm not saying Europeans don't also do this, but they are less likely to be burnt out while at work.
There may also be a relationship between Americas long work hours, and her manifest drug problem. Alcohol and drug use make the most out of a short down-time, with addiction being an eventual downside.
Finally, divorce rates may have an important statistical thing to say about overall 'happiness'. I read somewhere that, among Europeans, divorce rates fall as religiosity rises (where you measure religion by how many people go to church on Sunday). However, Americans are much more religious than Europeans, yet our divorce rates are sky high. This may be because Americans have so little down-time.
I worked at a firm where all the secretaries were supposed to "multitask" ..talk about Alzheimers! Between the antidepressants everyone was taking and the complete lack of concentrated attention - because that was not allowed - we were spending alot of time doing damage control. The whole office had Attention Defecit Disorder and we all were expected to work long hours or volunteer by comeing into work early and on weekends (when we could actually think), so everyone was tired all the time. I hate to see what FaceBook has done to that office!
Want to know why we have no Left in this country? Why the destructive juggernaut of free market capitalism and white privilege seems impossible to stop? Look no further.
If a person wants to self-actualize and think beautiful thoughts - treating life as though it were their personal garden - so be it. But to contrast that to real politics, as though it were a legitimate let alone preferable alternative - that I resent. To hold it up as a model of superiority and wisdom - that I resent.
Too bad that those starving peasants in Europe through all of those centuries had such "filthy toilets" - how could they expect to be happy? We need to scrub, scrub, scrub those filthy toilets 'til they are nice and white and shiny and antiseptic. That will solve all of the world's problems, one filthy toilet at a time. Scrub, scrub, scrub until all of the brown is gone. Then flush, flush, flush, until anything that might disturb our neat and tidy and clean and white and cold and sterile and shiny personal space.
All of that New Age crap is an attempt to mend the tattered shreds of our abused souls – to ease the pain, to patch us back up to get back into the fray and doing the work of our overlords – denying the truth and breaking up any signs of rebellion among the house Negroes and reinforcing each other's prejudices about the field Negroes. “When I am all stressed out from a hard day selling out my brothers and sisters and twisting my mind into knots to hide the truth, and kissing the boss's ass while denying that I am, the nine domains that affect happiness helps me meditate and get centered and balanced.”
It is simply delusional to think this "happiness" bullshit has any worth. This is only a pie-in-the-sky meandering that obscures the material reality that the chains are not ever and have never been removed by an "individual" simply by removing them, "getting happy". You show me one case of that and I'll show you thousands where the slave was whipped the moment he even touched the chains without permission from the master.
What's necessary is a large scale mass revolt working in hand with mass refusal to participate in the economic system. To that end as the New-Agers participate most feverishly in this system they are terribly complicit and involved in buttressing the slave system.
Does this "Happiness" solution include the 1 billion that are on the brink of starvation?
Maybe if the children of Iraq would only "nine domains that affect happiness" they could overcome the dysentery or the women in Iraq could somehow "rise above" being raped. Explain that away. Do these women just need to have the "right attitude?" Please explain.
More new age psycho-babble of "being the change you wish to see" like the justifications of karma. More blaming the victim. Denial of real human suffering and struggle.
This is more of the same bullshit where victims are blamed. This is the very language of the oppressor. It disgusts me more than you can know.
I think you miss a chance to make a universal political statement that De Graf might agree with, as would working people. We need to control our own lives.
This article accepts the corporate system and looks for less work hours within it, but it also makes an attack on the right, as though the left were the only ones who cared about what is happening and as though the people mentioned are "the right" anymore than Obama is the left. They are corporate figureheads.
Conservative people - all people - would like very much not to work as they have been working, but not in the way described here. They would like to still own their farms, to still have their small town businesses, to have their rights to create things - all taken from them by this government. The article focused on time so it isn't fair to judge it on health issues (which were part of the list)
People want to set their own hours and own their own lives, not be enslaved to this system as wage laborers.
People want to have control over their communities and freedom to work to make it better and to be original in doing so. Most of that is shut down by so many regulations at so many levels, one can't breathe. Children can't apprentice in a garage because of insurance issues, people in need can't be offered places to stay in offices that are otherwise empty at night because they are not zoned for it, grandparents can't do as they do in Japan - sell things from home - because zoning freezes that out, young people can't make home made food and sell at markets (to begin their own businesses) now because the health department has deemed that dangerous, farmers can't sell products their neighbors ask from them because the government (working for corporations) calls it unhealthy, etc.
The life is being crushed out of ways to work that people actually like and can run themselves.
People need to work less, yes, but work in this article is defined as work controlled by others. People need to control their work and be able to generate the kinds they want, not have their businesses ruined by Walmart and be forced to work for them, or their farms destroyed by Tysons and be left to work for them- or left with no work at all.
Funny how those New Agers are always peddling something for others to buy. They're also pretty popular in corporate seminars. Just picture a self-professed guru of the New Age strain giving a presentation to eager management executives on how to tap into the power of "being the change you wish to see" at Goldman Sachs or BP. It's probably happened more than a few times. They along with so many other useless items of consumption should be on the receiving end of concerted consumer boycotts.
No, it's very evident how much it disgusts you, and it disgusts me in equal measure. I can't even read this article. I've read and heard this kind of claptrap for 30 years, anything at all to keep people beaten senseless by a brutal, uncaring system into personalizing all their problems so they never revolt. I know someone with a "Be the Change You Wish to See" bumper sticker, and he's as apolitical as anyone I've ever met. College educated and can't discuss real political or economic issues coherently for 10 seconds. Is that the "change" we've seen from the Obamabots? Wander around in a daze of personal preoccupations, never pay a minute's attention to what's going on outside your own little cocooned life, and pretend you're the Dalai Lama around anyone pissed off about the plague of injustices and insults to the human race, the planet and the universe delivered by this obscene corporatocracy.
Coyote & Moore
I agree wholeheartedly with both of you - this is just more of the ubiquitous Mc'Murkin Rodney King Happy Meal: "can't we all just get along?" nonsense.
As long a vampire Capitalism rules the day, society will always be in shackels and the overlords will always see to it that the dispised drones are at each others throats instead of thier owners.
Around 1910 the average work week for Americans was 60 hours a week. Pay was less than two dollars a day. In today's money that is about the same as a minimum wage job. There were only a few holidays celebrated every year: Christmas, New Years, Easter, the Fourth. Then we got the 48 hour week, then the 40 hour week (really the law says you have to pay overtime if you work more than 40 hours). Then, we stopped. In America, we stopped seeking shorter work time. It was about global competitiveness--we Americans work harder than anyone and that is why we are so rich: so the argument went. That is what we were told, but, of course, it was just a lie. Capitalists ride workers like donkeys, telling us the Chinese or the Russians would outcompete us if we didn't make sacrifices. Really, they just wanted to pocket the gains from increases in productivity.
The jobs went to China anyway; the Chinese work absurd hours for peanuts. And, you know, they are getting tired of it. And we are. Everyone is. It is time to tell these bastards that we are not going to toil longer so they can enjoy another house, another automobile, or another yacht. It is criminal to be rich and it is time to let them know it. Don't defer to them in social situations. Confront them. Let them live on their gated islands in the fantasy sea that surrounds them. When they come out (if they do), we cannot let them forget the misery they have inflicted on us all.
drosera said "Then we got the 48 hour week, then the 40 hour week"
We didn't "get" the 48 hour week. Workers, organized in unions, fought for it. The semantics of this difference is the difference between empowerment and passivity.
This article isn't new age crap it's more like ecological economics. Its saying we can use something besides money as a measure for making policy. The socialist focus on only being rewarded monetarily is its dark, capitalist supporting side.
Agreed.
What's missing from the detractors' stance is the fact that other countries have modeled their societies on just these points - this "New Age crap" - and are miles ahead of us in terms of physical and emotional well-being. Yet, here, we have the prisoners screaming, "Please, don't be kind to us - beat us harder and lock the door behind you!" Of course, they are screaming to themselves because they are their own jailers. They don't fool me.
It's quite pathetic, especially since it is those very people who need freedom the most.
This article is one of the most salient, necessary, and sane pieces that have appeared on Common Dreams in many a year. It's so different from most of the rest because it doesn't wallow in the filth of defeatism and self-loathing. It shows what is possible when people allow themselves the freedom to live.
Hell, even a 16 year-old Butthanese kid knows that!
Agreed.
Joe
Actually, it's mcoyote who illustrates one of the problems the Left has -- an attitude of aggression, overseriousness, and anger. That won't attract any following at all.
Nonsense.
You obviously aren't speaking about a political program when you refer to "attracting followers." Sounds like you have powers to assume one's "attitude", as if attitude was the issue here. You sound like the high school principal or far too many self-help pariahs who just want the restless to "get a better attitude."
I think you denigrate as uncompassionate the just outrage which all decent human beings must share in the face of what is happening. In doing so you trivialize the real meaning of compassion, which must include moral outrage if it is to remain truly compassionate. The open expression of anger is not in itself a violation of compassion - it is often compassion's shield. Our anger assists our struggle for justice - it is not a contradiction of it. Our interconnectedness with our fellow human beings causes anger in us when we see what we love threatened by injustice.
"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Thomas Aquinas.
History clearly demonstrates that such righteous anger is the principal driving force of political change. Without legitimate outrage, no change is possible - the two are indissolubly linked. There are not two prophetic styles, but only one, the one that grieves at the outrages of injustice and seeks to remedy them. This rage leads not to despair, but to righteous action.
By invoking the psychotherapeutic experience, this obscene article confounds changing individuals with changing social systems. The implicit assumption is that "society is nothing but a great scatter of individuals and that, accordingly, if we know all about these 'atoms' we can in some way add up the information and thus know about society. It is not a fruitful assumption." - C. Wright Mills.
Indeed it is not - changing societies requires much different tools than changing individuals one at a time, as vital and important as that work is. What such critics don't understand is that "prophetic outrage" and "genuine compassion" are not a mixture, but the same thing - one cannot exist without the other.
My how tolerant of tyranny we've become.
Well, doesn't the left have a lot to be angry about?
It's hard to see the rape of the planet and the poor without getting angry? And I'm not ready to deny that the planet and the people are being raped by the greedy, rich and powerful. It is what it is. We have to make a change, but I don't think making a change within the system is an option. I would say we have to act with hope and belief that a better--and yes happier world is possible even imminent. But the greatest mistake the left could make would be to underestimate human suffering.
"Contrary to what virtually every happiness study has found, Brooks contends that the happiest countries are those with the least government and lowest taxes."
It's among the most profound issues, and yet USans will demonstrate a incapacity to recognize the truth about it, and quickly abandon the issue as unresolved and crawl back into their jail cells, a.k.a Ranger Rovers, Lexus SUVs, etc.
I do not think this article is new age crap, which will heretofore be referred to as NAC. NAC requires an individual changing his or her attitude, putting on a happy face and developing habits of success - always ignoring the material conditions of life that are so unequally distributed. For some reason, PBS TV devotes a lot of time to this stuff. Barbara Ehrenreich did a good send up of NAC in the workplace and in healthcare in "Bright Sided".
The article is saying that average per capita income is not a sufficient measure of a nation's health. (Averages, in and of themselves, disguise reality when there are vast disparities.) Physical health, Time or Work-life balance, Education, Cultural vitality and expression, Social connection and relationships, Environmental quality and access to nature should be part of the equation. All require that a substantial amount of social wealth stays in the service of the public, that the public gets to control what it produces. Several of them require a work week that is short enough to leave some juice in the worker for socializing and creativity, and that is profitable enough to pay the bills. Paying the rent should not be an all-consuming task and it would not be if housing were for use and not for speculation. Paying for education and health should not be prohibitive. Most of the criteria are incompatible with militarism, both in the way it sucks up our money and also in the fearful and aggressive mindset it produces. Most of the criteria are in short supply for vast numbers of people in our wealthy country.
The analysis in this article implicitly links happiness and quality of life with economic justice and with democratic rights. Clearly you cannot have environmental quality and access to nature while greedy corporations are free to do anything they want and the rest of us are free only to endure the wreckage. The Gulf is Exhibit A. India is a perfect example where small farming was wrecked by policies of "free trade" and people's traditional lives, poor but stable and rich in culture, were turned upside down with no fallback. Mexico too. Captitalism or the type of "socialism" that drives workers to suicide in response to being overworked and underpaid would not be acceptable either even if the billions of the owner averaged in with the pittances of the workers made the per capita look fairly impressive.
The article also implicitly criticizes any system that wrecks the ecosystem of whole regions in a drive to duplicate the type of production we see under capitalism. The pollution of Eastern Europe and Siberia in the name of production was an error that should have been stopped and re-designed in a more sustainable way. China developing transportation systems that are heavily reliant on private ownership automobiles is another false conflation of privately held money and happiness. People become slaves to owning an automobile for every family member, and cities become choked with gridlock and emissions.
So here we have a duel between the two songs "Money Can't Buy You Love" and "I Need Money, That's What I Want". Both are actually valid.
Joe
J CLIENTELLE: That was marvelous (spoken in the voice of Billy Crystal on Saturday Night Live). I much appreciate your capacity to connect plenty of dots to arrive at a cogent valuable thesis.
Thanks - and the feeling is mutual.
Joe
"We are not here to become happy. We are here to become conscious." Eckhardt Tolle
(I know. But I still think it's a good quote.)
Here, in the most materialistic country in the world, we are neither.
Go figure.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so
placid and self-contain'd,
I'd stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania
of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
-- Walt Whitman
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
--Bertrand Russell, 25 July 1956, age 84
Trylon
Sioux Rose
TRYLON: Wonderful post. This one is a keeper! Thank you.
A little known novel by Jack London, entitled, "The Star Rover" has a chapter that is sheer poetry. It defines mortal existence in terms of ONE male searching for his ONE beloved. It's pure magic.
Roughly ten years ago, researchers in scientific psychology tried to open up happiness as a legitimate area of study. One of the main leaders was Martin Seligman, who was already very famous and influential for his "learned helplessness" model of depression. Seligman thought that in order to really understand depression, we also need to understand the opposite state, and so he began a parallel research program on happiness featuring the idea of "learned hopefulness".
For obvious reasons, virtually all academic psychologists agreed that the scientific study of emotions such as happiness and depression is of critical importance to understanding (and improving) human nature. Still, the happiness research has remained somewhat contained within the fields of clinical psychology and social psychology, in part because some scientists still tend to link it to the earlier pop-psychology approaches, which are generally considered flaky.
What's important to understand is that this scientific approach has little if anything to do with earlier "poppsychology" efforts. There was a great deal interest in the 60's in self-transcendence type approaches and later in the New Age stuff. None of these theories had much effect within scientific psychology. They were subjected to scientific methods, and when their predictions were not confirmed, they were rejected (Maslow's "self-actualization" model would be one example).
But still, people like to write and read pop-psychology, and so today we are seeing another flood of wishful, speculative, and often inaccurate writing.
It's extremely important not to confuse scientific approaches and pop psychology approaches to happiness. The present article does this to some extent, though I would still recommend it as being fairly objective and well-intentioned. A recent article by Barbara Ehrenreich does the opposite, completely conflating different approaches to happiness, while taking cheap, misinformed shots at the more scientific approaches.
In any event, be sure to distinguish between legitimate scientific research and misleading speculation. Failure to make this distinction will lead to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And to argue that human happiness is not a legitimate topic for science is simply absurd.
Good to hear. I recognized mcoyote's complaints: there's a validity to them. However, if 'money doesn't buy happiness', then clearly the class-struggle is not about happiness, its about power. In that context, fighting for a European-style vacation schedule should be seen as a struggle for power, not happiness. As mcoyote implies, the Europeans almost certainly cast it in that light themselves. I'm fine with that. Happiness is still a perfectly legitimate subject for psychology (and ever elusive, I'm sure).
That said, here are two modern songs, sung by their original artists, both titled 'Happy'. One of them is genuinely happy, and the other is actually sad. We should recognize the need to be sad is legitimate, too. Anyway, I hope they make someone happy, or sad, or whatever (feel something, dammit):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TswYSWWHo8g&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kse8mlsROsA&feature=related
One of the complications that comes out of the happiness research is that there are many different kinds. For example, some models suggest that happiness results from things that satisfy basic human needs. So achievement needs can result in success (joy) or failure (disappointment) belongingness needs can result in acceptance (relatedness) or rejection (depression), intellectual needs can give rise to understanding (intellectual pleasure) or confusion (meaninglessness), and so on. These emotions are complex and difficult to label, but the main point is that happiness comes in different flavors depending on the psychological domain (achievement, status, morality, belongingness, intellectual closure, and so on. This suggests that different people are going to be happy in many different ways, and any political applications are going to be complex. If we really wanted everyone to be as happy as possible, then my guess would be to concentrate on enhancing "successfulness", which can be seen from the above examples to promote happiness in all domains (achievement, belongingness, etc.), which might be promoted through education.
You also made the important point that "we need to recognize that the need to be sad is legitimate". This is fundamental, even in the case of severe depressions (assuming not suicidal). Sadness and depression can create a unique form of cognition which can in many cases be very helpful (e.g., the person focuses on and tries to deal with their problems, they become more compassionate toward others, and generally more accurate in their thinking. A number of scientific studies have shown that depressed people "are sadder but wiser" in that they are fairly accurate in estimating their attractiveness, intelligence, athletic competence, grades, etc. It is actually the non-depressed, happier people who show the distorted thinking: They vastly overestimate their intelligence, their social skills, their likely grades and so on. Interestingly, these egotistic biases are stronger in western men than women, and weaker in eastern cultures such as the Japanese (who can be quite accurate).
I completely agree that sadness has it's value.
Yet I don't think this article is truly talking about the merits of happiness for the individual. Nor do I read it to say that governments should try and make people happy. What I do read it as saying is that in creating policy, society must start looking at conditions that give one the possibility of attaining happiness. These include factors above and beyond material considerations including time off, affordable health care, a clean environment, etc. These conditions are important not only to happiness per se, but to having the time and freedom to lead an "authentic life". If that means writing gloomy poetry or writing grim treatises on death then good for them. Even the brooding poet is in a sense "happier" than the wage slave.
.
DOUG: The most ancient system of behavior analysis, astrology, has a lot to say about happiness as well as pleasure. Genuine happiness is related to peace of mind, and if that peace of mind floats above the flotilla of misery being created on this planet, it's apt to be a false chemical style transitory bliss.
The mature soul cannot cut off empathy from others, and thus the massive suffering impacts his or her sense of satisfaction. The lower the evolution of the soul, the easier it is to stake out the claim of the ego's real estate, and define happiness through the artificial boundary of the separate body ensconced in its own small kingdom of purchased satisfactions.
We Are All Cyborgs Now empirePie June 10th, 2010
I heard a tune called ‘Free the Jack’
It had a Shrugged off Atlas sort of beat
a steady swinging state, toe tapping for the escape
to reflect on futures that slide on past the past
and pause to poke sensible digits to my neural net
or engage it’s prothesis ... likely the better bet
for the ego, well..... it’s been set,
gift wrapped in happy paper
Thank goodness we are all Cyborgs now
Media Cyborgs
surfing free born fantasies
to escape the joy
to queue up for the steady state
of what’s on my plate
EPIE: You're probably onto something. IF a massive die-out is now becoming inevitable (due to war/weapons proliferation/nature dying/water shortages/earth changes) then it makes sense that lots of young persons would increasingly invest in the nether world of MIND sans body. The virtual world, massive hours spent at computer terminals, contact through projection of consciousness (without much physical, direct contact) could well be the conditioning mechanism, a sort of preparation for being without bodies...
The Buddhist understands that IT IS ALL MIND.
Although there is some merit of using a GNHI, instead of a GNP, by which to measure the success of a society, there are some very important things omitted from the list of those elements, or "domains" of happiness, including:
1) The "Brave New World" possibility, wherein the citizens are drugged and/or brainwashed into their happiness;
2) The issue of fairness or justice. Notice that the author's list is phrased in such a way as to limit it to the individual, and even though it might be possible to insert other issues into the drawer of one of more of the named "domains," there is no acknowledged place for them;
3) Freedom is entirely missing. Freedom of expression, opinion, conscience and privacy are all vitally important to me, and to society as a whole. They deserve not to be lumped into some overall category of "psychological well-being;"
4) Peace. The author may well believe that you can't have the things on the list without this, but who knows? Again I think it deserves to be mentioned specifically.
In trying to understand this article, and giving it the benefit of the doubt, I can only come up with the idea that the author is hoping that by focusing on the idea of happiness, one that he thinks is less controversial, the people will come to learn the connections themselves and start working towards these other goals. But he forgets that there are serious impediments and divergent paths that can easily distract people from looking at these other issues entirely if they are not clearly a part of the objectives to begin with.
4the future: Interesting points. There have been other articles on CD about "Happiness Studies" at American universities. I'm sure Orwell could do this idea justice for it's all too telling that the more miserable conditions are being made for the masses in such items as:
1. Social Security about to get cut
2. Money squandered on war and banksters so that social services in many communities will be cut
3. Deregulation causing chemical exposures breaking down the immune systems of many, as seen in so many cancers spreading
4. Deregulation allowing contaminated food, GM "food," irradiated food, and other corn-sugar aberrations to turn once healthy kids into fat diabetics
5. Jobs shipped overseas leading to so many "Army Wants You" style "opportunities"
6. Decimation of home values
7. Banks paying paltry interest, Stocks a roller coaster ride
8. Nature being bled to death with a radical decline of species added to growing "dead" zones
9. Elections that are pure theater with results that don't mean shit to a tree
10. (Add your own)
...the more the IDEA of happiness as "norm" gets touted. Nor is it by accident, that anti-depressant drugs are selling so well.
I wrote an intended movie script back in l997 which features Mr. Theodore Hurtz, head of "Happy Chemical Corporation." As his secretary arrives with checks for him to sign, she relates (as one would the daily weather report) how well he's doing since depression makes for such big business.
Naomi Klein exposed Disaster Capitalism. My friends, it certainly owns a big pharma equivalent in the amazing world of how to become artificially happy in VERY depressing times! Rod Serling was onto something along these lines about 45 years ago.
I was once overseas, working 10 hrs a day. I would work for 10 days straight, and then take a single day off, then work another 10 days, etc. The night before my day off, by boss called me at 2am (it was 2pm his time) and told me that I had to stay within pager range (i.e. 'on call') the next day. This meant I had to stay in town, but I had planned to go hiking outside of town, and outside of pager range. We had an argument, in which I told him, in so many words, to kiss my *ss. I had the radical idea, that my time was my own. That, I should no more listen to my boss tell me how to spend my time off, then I should listen to him tell me how to spend my money.
Nevertheless, I killed my career that night.
Anyway, I learned that we don't just work for pay, we work for time. This was, for me, a radical revelation. Indeed, for me, given my particular priorities, 'time' is much more important than pay, and always has been.
This article is primarily acting to gain time for the working class, and should be seen as such. The 'tie-in' to happiness, treated with so much distain by many posters here, is probably just an attempt to justify time-off. As others have noted, this is actually pretty sad: we don't have to justify anything. We work, we should be paid, in time and in money. And we absolutely should not let that wage scale be set, unilaterally, by our employers. I told my boss that my time-off was mine to schedule, without justification, or appeals to my well-being, or happiness. And, writ large, neither should any of us.
We work. Pay us what we are owed.
"This article is primarily acting to gain time for the working class, and should be seen as such."
True, and time is the key as it's all any of us really has. Money is something we trade our time for, and the time we give is irretrievable - it's gone forever.
I am leading a study group on the 9 steps of Your Money or Your Life. It is one of the most powerful and enlightening programs I've done, as it shows each person who does it what they have traded their precious time for, and asks us to evaluate whether the byproducts of that time are in alignment with our values. It strips away all the mental crap that our culture heaps on us from cradle to grave about consumption. Only then can individuals see themselves through the lens of consumption and determine whether that consumption has brought them happiness, contentment, health, etc.
http://yourmoneyoryourlife.info/
Study after study shows that after a certain point of material acquisition, people are less contented, rather than more. This proves that the poverty of affluence is real and damaging, not only to ourselves, but to the planet.
So, no, this is not about changing the political structure first, it is about something harder: Changing ourselves first. I have come to understand that those who fight this concept, who rail about looking inward in an honest appraisal and then changing themselves, are afraid of that very thing. Their skeletons scare them so they lash out at those who are doing the hardest work of all.
Sioux Rose
TED & UBREW: I figured this one out when I was a teenager. Although most of my relatives opted for high-pressure/high-paying jobs to get the high status real estate, I decided to invest in living a life. So I seldom had a fancy address, but I always got to travel to exotic places, my time has always been my own (since I quit teaching after the birth of my 2nd daughtter back in l982), and it was always a miracle watching basic needs attain Deliverance. One of my daughters is a yuppie now. She was a star athlete (gymnast) and hung out with the rich privileged kids in high school and RESENTED that she, like them, did not get a brand new car the instant she turned 16. I counseled the mother of such a teen and she thanked me for relating that the item worked for is frequently the one most fervently well-regarded.
Back in l990 when Ted Turner sponsored a writing contest for visions of the future, I penned the idea of THE UNIVERSAL TIME BANK EXCHANGE. Its premise: that everyone's hour (of service, of whatever sort) is equal, or equivalent. In the POD (like communes) communities, "podulants" would log their hours of service and thereby make trades with others. Items to be used by the entire Pod called for collective pooling of time-bank hours, a sort of "tax."
This was a radical notion to put forth in l990. I've actually seen the concept gaining some tread now. Imagine what it would do to MDeity egos to realize their hour was of equivalent worth to that of the janitor? A healthy society requires the input of all sorts of persons and skills.
Sioux,
So you're responsible for the Time Bank idea! Well, thanks to you (and others), the one in my area is doing pretty well. I'm a member and have used it.
It's a hard sell, tho. We're so immersed in the system of monetary exchange and ego-enhancing careers that we don't see the fact that it's all just time that we're dealing with. And time represents people's lives. In that vein, a person who is a doctor is no more valuable than a person who is a mechanic or a person who is a retail clerk.
Kudos to you, also, for choosing the simpler path. The hardest thing about conscious living is that there is so much resistance from the mainstream. The good thing is that the worse the economy gets, the more people will see the wisdom of living closer to the bone. Not in poverty, but in sufficiency. Gee, almost sounds socialistic, without Big Brother.
TED: I can't say I am "responsible." I can say I have a copyright on publishing this idea that goes back to l990. It could be "The Hundredth Monkey" key operating.
I also circulated the idea (in pitches to agents) of a movie based on insects personifying the 12 rays/Zodiac signs before either Bug's Life or Antz came out. My sister believes that an agent exposed the idea of doing a film with insects, and the studios rode with it.
When one submits a script to Disney (they have a massive open contest every year), one signs over ALL rights because Disney claims it probably already has YOUR idea in the pipeline. If you sue and lose, you must cover Disney Corporation's legal fees.
Genuinely profound ideas belong to all of humanity. I have seen other ideas, like Mars rules, which I plant in this forum, also germinate like fertile seeds. IF I can contribute anything to improve the estate of mankind, even on a small scale, it will help justify this incarnation.
Ultimately, our lives are not that different from the ants. Ever watch how some build a bridge, sacrificing themselves so that the others can march across to the next destination? On a larger scale, we operate as those ants.
P.S. The whole advertising media (and let's face it, for those with TV on, it functions as a pervasive and influential, if subliminal voice in the room) is designed to make us feel dissatisfied with what we have and who we are. I tried to teach my children that there will always be someone who is better looking, smarter, and with more money and fancy objects. To race against this inevitability is a madness. Thus it's far more satisfying to like yourself and focus on enjoying your life. The mature ego realizes that to fulfill those objectives, work must be done (or projects produced) that is of ultimate benefit to others.
Ted says ~ "True, and time is the key as it's all any of us really has." ~
time is all we have because the other thing we're supposed to have, a living planet to sustain us in our wanderings, has been stolen, just as our time has been stolen...
time and land go hand in hand...
Take life back, take land back...September 22, 2012...
Honestly, does anyone know what authentic happiness is? Or is does it merely mean less superficial misery? Are wealthy soulless psychopaths 'happier' than the poor they despise? I for one would rather be poor than be like them.
"I for one would rather be poor than be like them."
I wouldn't. Poverty hurts and kills and creates misery. However, there are many forms of poverty, and poverty of the soul is as damaging as economic and material poverty.
The point is to avoid the extremes. The middle way is right and that is what this is all about. Too much and too little are symptoms of imbalance and dysfunction. Having enough is the healthy state.