Unforeseen consequences of happiness

December 31st, 2023

I learned a lot this year. I read a lot of books, I digested a lot of ideas and had time to think and analyze and create (more or less) coherent train of thought. It might be fitting that on the last day of the year, I found something interesting that could throw all that in disarray and now keeps my mind working in overdrive. It was a passage in this book by Stanislaw Lem about happiness that made me think and reconsider the idea of my values. Paraphrasing — it is not enough for people to be happy, we also need other people to be unhappy to make our happiness meaningful. What is more — the unhappiness of others needs to be easily explainable and that explanation pushed down the throats of those unhappy ones. We cannot be truly happy when everyone around us is happy as well — what is then the point of our happiness when it cannot be of any distinguishing value from the happiness of others? In the same dichotomous way, humankind and various individuals within our human race devoted their lives to bringing happiness to all — even at gunpoint with brute strength or by the refined violence of ostracism and ridicule. Is happiness the true end goal for our society and something worth striving for in our society? Isn’t it the driving idea of our current state of political and social discourse and consciousness? If I am happy, then I will have to make everybody else just as happy as me, by any means necessary and without any dissent or allowance for difference in opinions. If I am unhappy, then to be happy I will have to make everybody else happy, by any means necessary and without any dissent or allowance for differences in opinions. The idea of happiness, which might seem so innocent and worthy, might be the underlying fundamental problem of all time when extended to the idea of universal happiness. I am not yet ready to admit that the objective of universal happiness is a totalitarian and fascist idea — mostly because that would have to mean revaluing my idea of good and its place within my morality.

I like the challenge of it though.