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11/15/2010

Deficit Happiness

A month ago it was 'Fairness'. November's 'Virtue of the Month' sees the Idiot Cameron  trying to find out what Happiness is, in order to 'measure' it.
Garbage. The object of society is not happiness. Happiness is just a bi-product of people working together and trusting each other, not trying to trample all over each other in pursuit of ever-receding material security and job-supremacy.
The reason so many people are unhappy to the point of mental illness is because our society is gladiatorially sick. Less a case of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' than Everyone is My Enemy.
People can never be happy with that deal. The millions of dead we just remembered on scraps of red paper did not die to make us all blissfully happy and content, they died, if anything, to bring us together. In the name of human brotherhood, not the Rat Race. Happiness is the result of the endorphins and dopamine released when we are most in communion with our innate Human natures. When we are in a state of natural empathy with other people. When we don't see them as threats or obstacles to our security and advancement.
As Orwell puts it (best):
 I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.
But what are the chances of Cameron even being able to read the words of a committed socialist without retching with pain?
'It Burns! It Burns!
Apologists for the destruction of the welfare state often point to Sweden, with its legendary high social provision and high suicide rates. The link is obvious. People who do not have to fight each other to survive kill themselves from boredom or frustration of some primeval, undeniable instinct. In fact, the high Swedish suicide rate is a total myth. But even if it weren't, there is a very reasonable explanation of why a 'happy' society might have the highest suicide rate. If people reach old age and feel they have fulfilled their lives, why wouldn't they feel, like Hancock in The Blood Donor, that they 'could go tomorrow.'?
The real Hancock had all the money anyone could spend, but was intensely frustrated, and ended it all because it could only get worse. People who think they have fulfilled their lives might end them for exactly the same reason.

In Twain's words:
"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
Red Dave Cameron has a real problem. If he is sincere in his belief that happiness is more important than prosperity, then he will have to abandon competition as the prime mover of the economy and put the brakes on Consumerism and ditch the entire tory dogma of total competition. In effect, he will have say goodbye to the Rat Race theory of society and surrender to socialism in one form or another.
If he is not sincere, then he is just another Tony Blair and should not be stoned to death, but should be laughed out of office.
The likely truth is that he is just a moron who hasn't got the faintest idea what society is, how it works, or who it's for.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:33 pm

    Actually, I think politicians have only one real job - and that is to ensure that the conditions exist in society for people to be happy. What we do with it is up to us. There will always be people who are only happy once they are miserable.

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  2. In theory, we have some control over the politicians. And their job, in theory, is to do what we tell them.
    But what is the job of the corporations? And who tells them where to get off? Can a single minute of McDonalds' existence be said to have made anyone's life a kitten happier?

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