For thousands of years, people have been writing about happiness. The
ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus concluded that happiness lies in
the pursuit of external pleasure. Others, from Antisthenes to Buddha,
have stressed that looking inwards and leading an ascetic life based on
virtue, simplicity and inner peace is the route to happiness. And then
there are those like Schopenhauer who seem to think that we can only be
occasionally happy in what is essentially a miserable world: life only
oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.
Happiness is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a state
of well-being and contentment: a pleasurable or satisfying experience.”
For some, happiness runs much deeper than merely being content.
Aristotle held that being virtuous was only one aspect of happiness. In
the absence of say wealth and intelligence, virtue could only bring
about a form of contentment.
But sometimes that’s not enough. Certain people strive to achieve an
ongoing state of bliss, of feeling at one with the universe and
everything in it. Through years of meditation, self-reflective practice
or consciousness development, they can learn to transcend the illusion
of existence and live life on a higher reality. A case of ignoring
reality while striving to live out an illusion?
However, let’s not get too caught up in cynicism here. Illusion is
all around us – both on a personal level and on a wider political level.
The type of society we live in has a huge bearing on happiness or
well-being.
From Bernays to Albright: ‘their’ happiness, our misery
Virtually every government in the world creates an illusion for its
people. Take economic policy. Government policies might hurt us in the
short term, but we are all on a one way route to the ‘promised land’ of
happiness, or so we are told by the politicians, the corporate media and
spokespersons for the ones who make us suffer to ensure they never have
to – the privileged elite, the ruling class.
Western governments set out to con ordinary working folk by bringing
us war in the name of peace, austerity in order to achieve prosperity
and suffering to eventually make us happy. Is there any room for
truth? Politicians never like to tell the public the truth. The feel-bad
factor is never a vote winner. Best to keep the public in the dark and
rely on positive spin. If people knew the truth, they just wouldn’t be
happy.
And selling the feel-good factor is all pervasive. In this age of
irretrievable materialism, the route to happiness is more goods, better
goods, newer goods. A never-ending smorgasbord of commodities to be
craved for. In league with private corporations, governments have learned
to play on our desires to create a one-dimensional type of happiness
based on consumerism.
In part, Edward Bernays is responsible for this. The father of modern
public relations and propaganda, he was expert in manipulating human
perceptions of pain and pleasure, misery and happiness. Tap into or
shape people’s desires in a certain way, and you can sell virtually any
notion of happiness (or reality), regardless of how bogus it may be.
Whether it was whipping up mass fear in the US about the bogeyman of
communism or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming
goods, Bernays and the advertising industry, which took its cue from
him, were able to marry misery and happiness together – if you do not
buy into consumer capitalism, the alternative will be misery; if you do
not buy this or that product, life will be terrible; if you do not join
in the celebration of capitalism, those awful Soviets will take over and
impose a fundamentally unhappy system of equality on each and every one
of us.
Under US capitalism, the lie was that everyone would all live happily
ever after because of, not in spite of, gross inequality, massive
privileges and disadvantages and exploitation of labour, which all went
under the notion of meritocracy and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s
pay.
Bernays’ propaganda techniques set the stage for con-trick of ‘liberal democracy’.
The US government quickly learned that angels and demons could be
manufactured out of thin air and, from Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam to
Iraq wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies – lies
about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the impending
misery they would inflict on the US and on far away countries and lies
about the government delivering us from impending doom.
Of course, it is best to arm ourselves to the teeth with nuclear
weapons to ensure no one imposes their miserable regimes or awful ways
of life on us. And to prevent us all shuddering with the fear of the
threat of nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, it’s a case of don’t
worry, be happy, forget about it and watch TV. Even the very real danger
of near-instant annihilation of the species is shoved to one side for
the sake of a feel-good culture.
And the best way to instill that feeling is to have us endlessly
treading around a wheel in a cage. Millions are locked into the pursuit
of the Bernay’s model of happiness. They are locked into addiction.
Addicted to the pursuit of acquisition, of hedonism, of chasing the
dream. Addicted to the belief that there is a point to it all, where
happiness is achieved by acquisitive materialism.
But, to paraphrase a sentiment from Buddhism: someone, somewhere, may
well be suffering on our behalf for this happiness, this hedonism.
There is no ‘may be’ about it.
So much blood has been spilled by those unfortunate enough to have
been born in certain parts of the world on behalf of people in other
parts of the world who deem the need to possess resources to be more
worthy than the lives destroyed in order to grab them. Recall Madelaine
Albright saying the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price worth
paying for furthering the geo-political interests of US corporations.
And yes, a drone attack here, some ‘collateral damage’ there, and those
boys in the US control centres are happy with a hard days killing.
In the US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom and happiness (or the
pursuit of it) is central, albeit built on the misery of others.
‘Life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’ have become debased. Fed to the
masses, happiness has been confused with excessive individualism and the
never-ending pursuit of material goods. It became hijacked by the likes
of Bernays. With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was
his uncle), he knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get
people hooked on indulging in certain behaviour, even if ultimately
they don’t really want or need those consumer products, those ‘false
needs’, they strive to acquire. Getting them hooked is what really
counts.
You have no time to think about the disillusionment because you are
all too busy buying the next quick-fix for happiness product. It’s
called retail ‘therapy’ for good reason. A therapy that has no long-term
benefit. It’s a feel-bad, feel-good then feel bad again spiral.
But who needs this form of ‘happiness’, this type of ‘liberty’,
ultimately underpinned by an Albright-esque view of life and death? No
one. Yet the masses are encouraged to swallow the lies.
The propaganda
is pervasive.
Look no further than all those feel-good Hollywood trash films,
passed off as ‘blockbusters’, that gloss over or usually ignore all the
mundane, miserable aspects of life in working class ‘America’. Little
wonder half the world seems to want to live in the US. The need to
portray a bogus notion of happiness has served to kick reality into
touch. The Hollywood propaganda machine has seen to that.
The ‘wealth creators’ and their crimes against humanity
The great ‘American Dream’ was built on craving and propaganda. It
was built on stripping the environment bare, on the unsustainable raping
of nature to fuel profits, perpetual war and misery and suffering. The
sociologist C.Wright Mills noted the existence of a post-war power elite
in the US back in 1956. An integrated power elite of big corporations,
the military and the political establishment. Fast forward 57 years and
it is responsible for a body count of
ten million dead
and counting, a statistic, a dirty secret that Hollywood will never
tell. Ten million slaughtered in US-backed wars and by death squads,
covert ops and destabilisations (see
this).
Drug-running and the exporting of terror and murder, glorified by
countless Hollywood icons, commentators and politicians under the banner
of championing freedom and democracy.
The system in place exists to benefit not the majority, but small a
minority of just 6,000 to 7,000 people, according to David Rothkopf.
These are the extremely wealthy of the world who have cemented their
position on the back of their ancestors and hundreds of years of
capitalism. These are the people setting the globalisation and war
agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. They are from
the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations.
These billionaires, this transnational capitalist class, dictate global
economic policies and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars
are fought and inflicted on which people. Although they are having a bit
of difficulty in kick-starting it right now, with their see-through
lies and hypocrisy, Syria is a case in point.
Their crimes against humanity are never mentioned as such. Instead,
these people are called ‘wealth creators’. They are the self-anointed
role models and captains of industry. The high flyers who have stolen
ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens, who
have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and greed
and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating
destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent from
them, or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic
neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.
Little wonder then that attempts to redress the balance, to snatch
control away from this criminal class, have been brutally suppressed
over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations to any
government pursuing a socialist alternative, this class has used
intelligence agencies or military might to attempt to subvert or
annihilate any opposition.
From El Salvador and Chile to Egypt and India’s tribal belt, ordinary
folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have
resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off
by politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must
be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed at best or spied
upon, tortured and killed at worst in order to prevent the truth from
emerging. And that truth is that many of us know what ‘happiness’ really
is, the type of society necessary to establish it – based on
communality and economic equality – and that the immensely wealthy
people who stand in its way do all things necessary to prevent us from
having it.
Socialism is not a dirty word.
Various well-being surveys indicate that happier societies invest
heavily in health, welfare and education, are more equal and live within
the limits imposed by the environment. Many less wealthy countries (and
wealthy) do well in such surveys because cultural priority is placed on
family and friends, on social capital rather than financial capital, on
social equity rather than corporate power. It’s no coincidence that
people in places like Britain and the US appear to be
less happy than they were 40 years ago.
Karl Marx knew that self-actualisation was to be truly achieved in a
society that makes it possible for someone to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as he has a
mind. Being ‘happy’ is state of being, a state of worthwhile endeavour
freely chosen and not imposed. It is not achieved through the pursuit of
an ultimate unattainable elusive goal on a never ending treadmill of
drudgery, a never ending treadmill of control. Not a fixed end point to
be achieved by possessing a hundred latest, cutting edge consumer
gadgets and indulging in the individualised competition of conspicuous
consumption that proclaims ‘look at me, I’m better than you, I’m
elevated from the crowd’. And by elevating oneself in such a way, the
gregarious human animal is cut off from the wider group and may
ultimately become rather unhappy.
And yet it is ordinary working class men (and women) who sign up to
join the military and support this system on behalf of these immensely
wealthy people. Such people have however always been adept in
manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an
emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or
justify their exploitation.
In his book ‘
A People’s History of England’,
The Marxist academic AL Morton documented how ordinary people, over
many hundreds of years, set out to challenge these rulers and often paid
with their lives. Nothing ever came for free and ordinary working
people fought tooth and nail for any rights that they managed to obtain.
Such a travesty then, that today, ordinary people are denied economic
opportunities because this class has sold their jobs to the lowest
bidder in India, China or elsewhere. This class and its ‘think tanks’
were determined to shatter the post-war Keynesian consensus based on a
robust welfare state and government intervention in the economy to help
secure full employment. Any notions of ‘fairness’ and the benefits to be
derived from the welfare state were to be substituted for positive
notions about the free market and individual responsibility in order to
justify the real intention of shifting the balance of power towards
elite interests.
With workers’ wages having been depressed over a period of decades,
demand having thus been propped up by debt and bankers demanding to be
bailed out, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being used as a
battering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher did
in the 80s with their pro-big business, pro-privatisation, anti-union,
anti-welfare policies.
And we are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this? To vote for ‘their’
politicians, to join in a media circus to celebrate the birth of another
royal parasite, to support their killing in Syria, in Libya,
in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere?
Yes, we are supposed to back them and take in the poisonous lie that
‘we are all in it together’. And ordinary young men (and women) are
supposed to sign up to fight their wars.
The working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed
en masse on
the blood-soaked battlefields of countless other wars that have gone
before can now join up to fight again. For what? Austerity,
powerlessness, imperialism, propping up the US dollar. For whom?
Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan, Black Rock, Boeing and
the rest.
The US economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been
shipped abroad. For those who benefited, the US can go to hell in a hand basket, and it has. Meanwhile, for them, record profits ensue. It’s
the ability to maximize profit by shifting capital around the world that
matters to them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements
which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism
which merely tear them down.
In places like India, it cuts both ways. ‘Free’ trade and a state
enforced militarism that both result in countless deaths and the forced
removals of hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest folk from
their lands and villages for the benefit of powerful corporations and a
bogus notion of development. “I love my India” well-off ordinary urban
dwellers often say. Patriotism has always been a distraction, a tool to
be ignited by the oppressors at will among the masses.
As societies become hollowed out, with empty echoes of patriotism
ringing out, they increasingly resemble boxes. The only thing inside
however is a giant, brutal mechanical hand. There is nothing else apart
from it. And it’s only function is to pull the lid shut if anyone ever
dares to tear it open and shed light into the box. If successful, they
will see the immorality, the lies, the hypocrisies. The social control
based on the subversion of life, liberty and happiness.
Colin Todhunter is an extensively published independent writer and former social policy researcher based in the UK and India.
Source:
Counterpunch, 25 May 2015
