[note: this column was previously published in 2018, though I hesitate to call it a “re-run” as it was not really noticed at the time. This and other “encore performances” published here will appear only when their content has not lost its relevance.]
For those unfamiliar with it, the 1996 film Brain Candy is a scathing, audience-polarizing satire on neuropharmaceuticals from the Kids In The Hall comedy troupe. In one memorable sequence, a parodic ‘grunge rock’ star named Grivo (Bruce McCulloch) addresses his fans from the stage with a sneering denunciation that accurately captures the banal spirit of ‘90s-era slacker cynicism: “I just heard about this new drug that makes people happy…I just wanna say [long pause]…FUCK happy!” Like most effective comedy, it succeeds on providing such absurd yet believable variations on conventional wisdom of its time: in this case, the era’s gnawing suspicion that happiness is a deception whose attainment is little more than an act of “kicking the can down the road” while objective reality becomes more intense and frightening.
It seems strange that, in an era where a disproportionate number of Amazon bestsellers are self-help books geared towards increasing or maximizing happiness, a broad swathe of predominantly happy individuals are still seen as being untrustworthy, inauthentic, or delusional. Ours is a society that seems to value and encourage the pursuit of happiness, but also casts a skeptical eye upon those who have actually attained it. Consider: where the social sciences are concerned, studies that deal with the alleviation of suffering are seen as being much more worthy than studies aimed at increasing an existing state of happiness (as Jacolyn Norris and Dianne Vella-Brodrick suggest, this may have something to do with the industry-wide canonization of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”, in which survival level concerns are to be addressed ahead of concerns like self-actualization and self-esteem).[i]
Of course, distrust towards joy and expressions thereof is not totally unwarranted, particularly given the number of ways that the media and marketing industries have demanded a kind of happiness ‘on the spot’ rather than letting it organically develop: the mercifully declining phenomenon of pre-recorded “laugh tracks” on television is just one of the more degrading examples of using a “principle of likeability” to make viewers feel out of place for not emotionally reacting in the same way as the “canned” audience. Elsewhere, Harvey Ball’s “smiley face” design, the original emoji, is globally known for its condensation of happiness into an instantly recognizable icon, with this global reach making it all the more useful as a metonym for distrust of illusory happiness. Those who know its history are somewhat justified in approaching it cynically: it was, after all, designed by Ball as a counter to fears of Mutual Life Insurance employees that they might lose their jobs during an upcoming merger. Meanwhile, Maire Jaanus has argued,
The smiley face is a mask, although much less expressive than were the tragic and comic masks of Greek theatre […] The icon is not about the maximization of pleasure - the greatest good for the greatest number - that inspired the utilitarians, nor about ardent desire. Desire would be too disturbing […] we’re all okay as long as we keep smiling and are nice. The verbal equivalent of the image is the mantra “Have a nice day”. Smiley promotes a kind of delusional sense of collective okayness, cheerfulness, and good will toward everyone that we can produce with our smiles.[ii]
Unsurprisingly, then, the smiley face has become one of the defining symbols of consumer culture, both for those who are repelled by it and those who embrace it as the best of all possible worlds. Even in its re-appropriation by the MDMA-fueled rave subculture of the 1990s and beyond, it still seems to carry with it a strong suggestion that happiness is contingent on consumption - the rave culture just shifts its consumption priorities away from status symbols and towards a hedonism fueled by mind-altering drugs. Whatever the case, critics of the smiley face see it not as a symbol of the “genuine” happiness that comes from realizing moments of beauty and exuberance in spite of those painful experiences that frame them, but rather as an indicator of a smugness that can exist independently of those experiences: since “the genuinely happy person is one who cares for things…he is exposed to pain and disappointment,” then the smug person is one who “lacks awareness of what is difficult and problematic in life, his concern for other people does not go deep.”[iii] In other words, widespread distrust of happiness stems from the assumption that people experiencing it do so precisely because their contented existence limits their potentiality to “become what they are” and, presumably, to uplift and enlighten others.
Who, then, are the prime movers in the battle against this model of contentment, the avant-garde whose advanced resilience in the face of “pain and disappointment” gives them a paradoxically richer understanding of happiness? The pursuit of happiness, when we examine it more closely, is always going to be elusive for those who seek it out directly: as Ilham Dilman suggests, “it is not something over and above the different things in which men find happiness…the moment any of them is made into a means to happiness, it can no longer bring happiness”.[iv] All this begs the question: are the happiest people those who forego the pursuit of happiness? Are they, in fact, people who we associate with behaviors that generally stop short of promising happiness as a reward for continual engagement? Is the restless fanatic hell-bent on martyrdom, or the realization of utopia, a better model for the “happy” man than the perpetually contented individual?
At least one significant theory of happiness - the “flow” theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - suggests that this may be the case. According to Csikszentmihalyi, optimal happiness arises from being involved in a consistently demanding challenge, and the “flow” results from “a clear sense of what needs to be done, an intense feeling of concentration, or absorption and a loss of sense of time”.[v] This, then, can be coupled with other recent finding, which suggest that greater levels of radicalism can be associated with greater levels of happiness: those who harbor “no doubts about the infallibility of their opinions”[vi] are all the more likely to find themselves fully immersed in whatever undertaking they apply themselves to, and may find themselves in a “flow” which provides a reassuring feeling of momentum even when forward progress is elusive. In their study on ideological orientation and its relation to life satisfaction, Curini et Al do not outright claim a causal relationship between radicalism and happiness, but they do not rule it out either: they acknowledge that citizens holding “ideologically extreme” positions may “report lower levels of happiness than moderates due to their feelings of persecution and alienation,” but also find it plausible that these same citizens would “report higher levels of happiness than moderates due to a stronger belief in the veracity of their views”.[vii]
Many religious doctrines, from Calvinism to the literally self-castrtaing skopsty of Russia, undoubtedly balanced these feelings of alienation and persecution with a very real ecstatic intensity, nurturing self-denial much in the same way that meditation involves rigorous focus upon the smallest quanta of information in order to reveal a more broadband understanding of existence. There seems, prima facie, to be little joy in these experiences of great striving towards perfection or a sort of “ultra-good” by which all others are to be judged. Yet it is not my place here to question whether or not the fanatically determined feel joy in the of their struggles, as (to provide just one notable example) St. Augustine did:
Augustine’s happiness was the absolute faith his desire searched for and finally found, despite the fact that it demanded so many sacrifices, for example, of his beloved mistress and of so many of the other passions of this most passionate of men, who even comes to ask whether it was a sin that he finally wept for his mother, having forbidden himself to do so at her funeral.[viii]
Such a religious level of fervor is not exclusive to those professing religious faith in a deity; and indeed plenty of those who deem religion the “opium of the masses” have aimed for something similar: more than a few Marxists have scoffed at happiness as being a false value distracting from the egalitarian ideal.
Here we come to the crux of the problem: idealism of this kind is not so much a denial of the importance of happiness, but it is the belief that happiness and virtue are interchangeable or identical. In this equation, other qualities that could be associated with happiness, such as good physical health, satisfying friendships, the appreciation of natural beauty etc., are secondary to the attainment of virtue (if they are valued at all). Once virtue begins to solidify into a system of morals worthy of being universally propagated, happiness is no longer associated with peace of mind or tranquility but instead with strife and confrontation in the service of that virtue. Whether we are talking of religious zealots or secular radicals engaged in armed struggle, their propensity for believing in universally applicable moral codes soon enough provides them carte blanche to humiliate and destroy any dissenters from their ideological purity. This leads, ironically, to societies in which the ostensible spread of happiness means increased suffering and hardship for all those not directly immersed in the “flow” of the civilizing mission. This violence does not limit itself to human subjects, either, as many strains of universalist idealism can see no need for the natural world other than its contribution to the happiness of humans.
It would not be a stretch to propose that the evangelicals and radicals leading the charge against the conceit of happiness are themselves quite happy: their “doubtlessness about the infallibility of their opinions” provides a certain inoculation from the misery that they may encounter during their campaigns, as well as a degree of immunity from feeling remorseful about compounding this misery. Their distrust of contentment as shallow, consumerist smugness has gradually seeped into the collective conscience, and may at least have provided some to seek more creative means of self-individuation. However, distrust of this contentment has also unfairly targeted those who have succeeded in living authentically peaceful lives: particularly those who have shunned the false comforts of consumerism and the abuses of idealism. Quests to destroy the “illusory” nature of happiness fail to realize, as the Taoist tradition did, that existence is itself a patchwork of illusions.
[i] Norrish, Jacolyn M., and Dianne A. Vella-Brodrick. “Is the Study of Happiness a Worthy Scientific Pursuit?” Social Indicators Research, vol. 87, no. 3, 2008, pp. 393–407.
[ii] Maire Jaanus. “Happiness and Madness.” Culture/Clinic, vol. 1, 2013, pp. 43–65.
[iii]Ibid.
[iv] Dilman, Ilham. “Happiness.” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 199–202. '
[v] Norrish, & Vella-Brodrick (2008).
[vi] Curini, Luigi, et al. “How Moderates and Extremists Find Happiness: Ideological Orientation, Citizen–Government Proximity, and Life Satisfaction.” International Political Science Review / Revue Internationale De Science Politique, vol. 35, no. 2, 2014, pp. 129–152. [vii]Ibid.[viii] Jaanus (2013).