tubaguy9 wrote:It'd be impossible to watch every person and keep them happy at the same time.
The keeping them happy part is the impossible bit. Watching them is much easier.
But happiness is up to each person. History abounds with examples of people who were happy in desperate conditions, and with people who are miserable in the face of abundance. But history is also replete with those who manage to be happy even when rich, and other who are poor and miserable. The only conclusion one can draw is that happiness is ultimately unrelated to wealth.
This is a popular point for those who want to increase what is taken from those who are rich (by whatever means). They insist that those riches are not the key to happiness, and therefore not a right of those who have attained them. I've heard a number of stories on NPR lately emphasizing this point. But then they prove just how much they disbelieve that argument by giving those riches to the poor, some of whom were happy without it and some who will still be miserable with it. They declare that some minimum standard of wealth is necessary to free a person to pursue happiness, but in fact they keep raising that standard higher and higher, again demonstrating that they don't really believe their own thesis that happiness and wealth are unrelated. When people they define as too poverty-stricken to be able to pursue happiness have stomachs full to overflowing, cars, color televisions, cell phones, clean running water, sewer service, air conditioning, and the sorts of luxuries that would be considered obscene wealth in many parts of the world, one has to suspect that their motive is different than what they say it is.
Accomplishment brings a sense of satisfaction that is a common characteristic among happy people. People are happier when they feel as though their life makes a difference, and unhappy when they feel disempowered to make a difference. (It should be noted that this is true whether they actually want to make a difference or not, leading to the inescapable conclusion that many people just
want to be unhappy.) Taking wealth from some and giving it to others tells the former group that their accomplishment has no value and tells the latter than the wealth they are about to receive requires no accomplishment. This undermines the motivation and sense of accomplishment of both groups. If there is one thing that emerges from the communist experiments of the last 100 years, it is that "from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs" is a recipe for misery and poverty (enforced by totalitarian statism).
The only conclusion I can draw is that people are responsible for their own happiness. As anyone who has been in a mismatched relationship can tell you, you can't make someone else happy. The more you try, the more it doesn't work and the more likely both will end up unhappy. Government tries hard to make people happy, instead of empowering them to pursue their own happiness and then leaving them alone. This was where the founders truly understood the human condition. They believed that government's role was to get out of the way and let people attain happiness according to their own definition--or not--as they chose.
As soon as we try to make other people happy, the first thing that happens is that we are defining their happiness for them, according to our own definition. And given that happiness defies definition based on circumstances, and given that circumstances are the only thing we can change, we are doomed to fail ultimately. But that failure can take other things down with it, including our ability and drive (perhaps based on necessity) to create more wealth. The people we are trying to make happy end up still unhappy, and the rich people we expected to pay for it merely ended up less rich and less motivated to continue funding our program.
Imposing art on the unartistic is one example. Many people find that art, both as creators and as receivers, is a key part of their own happiness formula. Some of those people believe that because it works for them, it will work for everyone, so they seek to impose mechanisms by which art becomes institutionalized and forced onto the masses. This is a form of paternalism that is actually quite arrogant, based as it is on the notion that the "cultured" who demand it believe that culture causes culture, rather than culture being the outgrowth of wealth, general education, and the pursuit of happiness. Not even Joshua Bell can make people like a violin performance of Bach, let alone force them to stop to listen to it when they are in the middle of fulfilling other responsibilities. Using that as an excuse to demean those people as unable to appreciate beauty is another example of that paternalistic arrogance.
Rick "end of rant" Denney
