The pursuit of happiness (because you’re worth it)

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What is this happiness that we pursue so relentlessly and yet so fruitlessly in the western world?

Of course, there’s no single answer to that one and therein lies the beauty of the phrase. We are always led to believe that somehow implicit in that understanding is the idea that there are as many different kinds of happiness as there individuals. We’re not so sure. 
On a cynical reading, the pursuit of happiness is a shameless huxter’s trick;  it is the archetypal spring from which all ad copy has flowed. It could easily be argued therefore that the so-called pursuit of happiness in the western world has been bound up almost inextricably in the expression of consumer choice. What we have as result is a mass-produced Model T individualism (my ‘Made in China’ high-street brands are different to yours so I somehow have more validity as a result of my consumer choices).

But if one views happiness as being at the top of the Maslow food chain then it’s clear that much of western society has become stuck in a rut. The basic needs of most people are secure and consequently, in our society; understandings of poverty can be extremely elastic and relative.

One thing is almost certain however; the difference in quality of life that one could expect in the bottom-earning third of western society compared to that experienced by the same demographic in much of the former Soviet bloc or developing world is likely to be eye-watering.

Self-actualisation -- the top of the Maslow hierarchy -- however seems beyond the grasp of many in western society and most people remain fixated on self-esteem issues; largely because the products they spend their lives working to buy just don’t fill that spiritual hole at the centre of their being. It must be submitted that in a society such as the UK, with a total of 23% of the adult population being classified as clinically obese, it’s very clear that happiness isn’t pie-shaped.

We live in a society where people will pay to enrol on courses about the pursuit of happiness. Hell, we’ll even pay good money to join clubs where people just hug each other...how’s that for disconnected?

According to a new UK charity, Action for Happiness, if you take 10 minutes of daily mindfulness and meditation; write down the good things that happen to you and a letter expressing your gratitude and do one or more additional acts of kindness each day then you should have taken the off-ramp from despair and you’ll be on the road to happiness. (Nobody charged for that so who knows? There might be something in it.)


Happiness would appear therefore not to be an end in itself as we are led to believe in western society but rather it is a by-product of doing something constructive with one's life. No surprises there then.

Of course, we’re told every day that the world is going to hell in a handcart but apart from the occasional TV guilt-bombing of ‘starving-baby’ charity-porn, we find it so very hard to care about these people at whose expense our pampered lives are being lived.  And this isn’t some vague concept of guilt or nebulous liability; this is a clear and damning chain of demonstrable causation between our luxury and their poverty.

But then, we have also become conditioned in the western world to believe that famine and hunger are as inevitable as volcanoes or hurricanes. In large part, we have the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus to thank for such notions.

He thought that the dangers of population growth would preclude endless progress towards a utopian society:  "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". Utopia therefore being reserved only for the few.

Indeed, the good Reverend’s views were often cited as mid-19^th century British parliamentarians argued against the repeal of the Corn Laws because protection of UK corn markets was seen as preferable to feeding millions of starving Irish subjects through the cheap importation of cereals.

Maser, Malthus and Maslow.... 

The shameful evidence that Malthusian theory was a busted flush is clear in accounts that suggest that even at the height of the Great Hunger, food was still being exported from Ireland, sometimes under armed guard...(The Irish can't forget because the British can't remember.)

As applied to Ireland then and implicitly to the developing world now, the theory as per Malthus is “that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.” That’s not really what we want....right?

So, while one does feel some genuine sympathy for the increasingly emotionally bereft citizens of the west, one’s overriding sentiment must surely be; get off your fat, self-serving arses and give the rest of the world back its dignity; you just might feel better about yourselves.