The taboo of happiness.
Every time I introduce the word happiness in some post, I notice that the reactions are extremely intense, and this happens in two cases. The first is that you are insulting a common sensitivity, the second is that you have touched on a taboo subject. When you insult a sensitivity, you know very well who you have touched: if I say that the best Christians I know are Satanists, for example, non-Satanist Christians react (who are usually more evil than Satanists). When I touch economic taboos, however , the reaction is widespread and equally angry.
First, I need to specify what I mean by “touching an economic taboo”.
A speech touches an economic taboo when it contradicts some of the economic dogmas of current society. By “economic dogma” I mean a pillar of the economy. Let's try to develop such a discussion.
Let's describe how the economy works, at least on the organized labor side. In the past, slaves worked. They were forced by force, therefore. After all, even books like the Bible describe work as a punishment (for eating an apple), similar to childbirth. Initially, therefore, work is a curse and the truly privileged people are those who laze around.
Then comes the feudal system, where you work to pay a tax to the owner of the land where you live. You are no longer forced to do a given job on time (except where serfdom, brought by the Mongols, is in force) but you are simply forced to work if you want to live in the civilized world. If, however, you want to remain a pagan, and can survive by harvesting the fruits of the earth, you can also work much less. But you are defined as a pagan, a Roman person to indicate someone who lives outside of civilization.
With the industrial revolution people are moved to the cities, and if you live in the city there is little to do, you have to find a job and above all, you have to work TO enrich someone who takes your money not because it's the government or it's a noble, but because he invested.
When modern civilization arrives, the problem becomes: how the hell do we convince people to work so much, when according to "enemy ideology" no one should work more than eight hours a day? Good question.
If we can't force people, we can convince. And here we return to the discussion of the West.
The Western economy is based on people working MUCH more than they should, because they have been convinced that working too hard will lead to success, and success will lead to happiness. You work under the illusion of happiness, which comes when you are successful enough, demonstrated by the fact that you own enough expensive things.
When in the last post I said that this "contract" is being broken, and the promise not kept, I clearly touched on the basic taboo, that is, the idea that people today are not happy, even if they are asked to work as crazy people. This touched on the basic idea of economics, that is, the equation success = happiness.
Without this equation, this society could NEVER convince everyone of the need to work like crazy to consume like crazy. The whole push comes from the gap between happiness and unhappiness, or between having economic success and not having it. Between being rich and owning things, and being poor and not being able to afford them.
It is therefore a society of unhappy slaves, who realize too late that all that working and consuming will NOT make them happier. Maybe, at times, more satisfied, but happiness is a different thing.
Being satisfied means "today I feel good", being happy means "today I couldn't feel better".
This makes us understand how the concept of happiness is mainly an economic taboo.
It's true that Catholic Christianity puts its own spin on it, and has put its own spin on it, to the point of imbuing the culture with the concept that asking for happiness is asking too much, and even if you get it, they will be single events that don't last long, so better to savor it. This has pros and cons: on the one hand you teach people to enjoy it, but on the other you convince the masses that it will be a sporadic thing. It doesn't last.
So let's try to say the absolute blasphemy:
Happiness is a fundamental human right
If you write something like that, they will tell you that you are asking too much. Defining it as a fundamental human right, that is, as a MINIMUM condition, undermines the entire dialectic of happiness that is not of this world, and of happiness that in any case does not last long in this world.
But let's ask ourselves: why not?
Because I can state that I have the fundamental human right to say what I want, or to personal security, or to legal personality, to a fair trial, to marry and start a family (I'm reading the universal declaration of human rights), but can't I state that I have the right to happiness, which could also depend a lot on the material possibility of doing these things? Why am I entitled to all these things, if not for the fact that without these things I wouldn't be happy?
Not only can I write that happiness is a fundamental human right, but I can also say that all other rights serve to prevent me from being unhappy. Because if I lack other rights, the conditions for unhappiness exist.
What, precisely, is the specific problem in defining happiness as a fundamental human right?
I digress for those who tell me that the American Constitution defines the right to happiness. No it does not. It defines the right to seek happiness as a right. But not happiness itself. And this is a big difference, because if I have to guarantee you happiness I cannot torment you, while if the search for happiness is enough, while I torment you you can always search for happiness by begging me to stop.
However, now the practical part remains unanswered. I don't want to become a stoic philosopher and talk about cognitive desire, but how was it possible that EVERYONE fell into the same trap? The truth is that we have poorly stated the economic constitution of the current system.
We have written:
The Western economy is based on people working MUCH more than they should, because they have been convinced that working too hard will lead to success, and success will lead to happiness. You work under the illusion of happiness, which comes when you are successful enough, demonstrated by the fact that you own enough expensive things.
So we defined the mechanism as a promise. I promise you happiness, I convince you, and for this you work like crazy. But even in this way, and even being very convincing, it is difficult for it to really work. However, we can reverse this.
Instead of promising happiness, let's turn the promise into a THREAT, and say I'm not promising you happiness if you work like a slave: I'm THREATENING you to lose happiness and wealth if you DON'T.
It's not a promise, but a THREAT.
We're stuck with carrots and sticks. The modern economy promises you happiness if you work like a lout. But in case you are already happy with your own business, I threaten you: if you don't work like a lout, I will find a way to take away your economic success and happiness.
Regulation therefore occurs by measuring happiness and unhappiness. If I defined happiness as a fundamental right, I could oppose unhappiness, and it would no longer work.
The West is therefore not only a promise, but also a threat . Not only if you follow certain principles we will make sure that you have happiness' success, but if you don't follow them we will make sure you have unhappiness' failure.
Having said this, in terms of unhappiness, we have that the economic system stops working if it fails to pay those who commit, and if it fails to punish those who don't. In the sense that if you punish too many, you risk demonstrating that it doesn't work.
Here we get into the other big reason why talking about happiness or unhappiness violates a taboo. That is, it violates the taboo of psychiatry.
Let's take the word "depression" for example. Surely today we will be able to recite a description and diagnosis of this disease using scientific terms, but… what exactly are we describing?
Modern psychiatry knows well that depression is a pathological state of the nervous system. What she has never managed to demonstrate is that the CAUSES are internal to the nervous system.
Once upon a time, before modern psychiatry, a depressed person would have been said to be “extremely unhappy”. Today depression is diagnosed and explained using the chemical state of the nervous system.
The difference is that if we say that someone is extremely unhappy, we think of causes external to their brain. If we say someone is depressed, let's think about their brain chemistry. The surrounding society has nothing to do with it.
Once upon a time, if a woman had been depressed after a bereavement, they would have said "she is extremely unhappy because she lost her husband and son in the war". This did not change the chemical state of his brain at all: it is not incompatible to say that his brain is in a pathological chemical state, and at the same time that the cause is his exterminated family.
On the contrary, if we talk about unhappiness only as depression, we stop believing that the problem could have been that shitty ruler who started a useless war: it's all a chemical problem of the brain. And we start from there.
We are willing to accept a revolution that is explained as "the people were extremely unhappy and rebelled", but would we be willing to think that the French Revolution was born because the French were depressed?
The answer is “no”, clearly. Because when we say that the revolution solved the problem of unhappiness, or at least improved things, it seems to make sense. While if we say that the revolution has improved depression, we turn up our noses: that's what pills are needed for.
If modern psychiatry had existed at the end of the 18th century, there would have been no revolution: the French would have filled themselves with pills.
Burnout, depression, stress, are all words that mean “your job makes you unhappy”. ADHD, Asperger's, Anorexia, they are all words that mean "that boy is unhappy because he lives in a shitty world".
“Your daughter is unhappy because she's a neurotic slut and her husband is a space dick,” is actually much harder to say to the family of an anorexic girl.
And in the same way, in diagnosing burnout, it's difficult to say “you're unhappy because you have a job that sucks for a slave-owning company, your manager is an idiot and your colleagues are dickheads”. Better to say “burnout”. “Nervous exhaustion” was once used, but to prevent someone from wondering “but who or what exhausted you? ” Burnout is preferred.
And someone in the world of pharmacology is trying to say that the fact that burnout always occurs in certain companies is not proof that the cause is the company, but the fact that it is normal for those who work in the company. At most they will give you the pills as a benefit.
The main work of modern psychiatry, in this economic system, is to find many synonyms for the word "unhappiness", while ensuring that no one goes looking for external causes in the economy and society.
And as you can understand, if you go back to talking about happiness, then you are also putting this mechanism into crisis.
For this reason, talking about happiness and rejecting all its psychiatric and legal synonyms becomes subversive. Because we are going to touch on the economic pillars of the Western labor economy and of society.
In general, that is, happiness seems to be an idiosyncratic concept, to the extent that it forces us to think, and forces us to think that we live, work and live in situations of extreme unhappiness.
It is probably one of the last remaining taboos.
Uriel Fanelli
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