HAPPINESS NOT WORTH PURSUING

Pursuit of happiness…

(Perhaps, I should have written “the pursuit of happiness,” but I hate to bring the noble and well-meaning Thomas Jefferson into this particular debate. But, come to think of it, I can’t help it.)

Pursuit of happiness…

Beautiful words, but purely declarative. No wonder they belong to Jefferson’s exalted and exhilarated Declaration. They cannot be a serious part of any Constitution, of course, because they are too vague for a legal document.

What is happiness? This is a purely philosophical question, and, as we know, philosophy is good at asking questions, but rather pathetic at answering them.

Give me a decent definition of happiness, and I will tell you my opinion on whether happiness, as such, is, or isn’t worth pursuing.

But that will be my personal opinion, I admit, as I am aware that there may be a few billion people living on this planet who will strongly disagree with me.

By the same token, I have an opinion on which particular types of individual happiness should socially not be allowed to be pursued. And I am not just talking about the types of criminal behavior “for pleasure” that society criminalizes anyway.

An example of personal happiness definitely not worth allowing to be pursued, in my opinion, is pornography, which goes beyond the boundaries of some little “private weakness,” producing a negative effect on the morality of the whole society, legitimizing the “business” of immorality and sexual exploitation, and undermining traditional cultural values. It is true that pornography, along with prostitution, is among the world’s oldest practices, but what makes the decisive difference here is whether such activity is socially stigmatized, as it certainly ought to be, or, shockingly, as good as glorified, and promoted as a manifestation of social freedom.

Here lies my basic objection to modern Western ideal of freedom and its broad definition of happiness. I do not subscribe to the cliché that by supporting freedoms we object to, we are protecting our own freedom. I believe that Western society does a lot of essentially irreparable harm to social morality not only by declaring certain freedoms legitimate in individual and collective pursuit of happiness, but in excessively focusing on these freedoms, and emphasizing their social acceptance above others, on the grounds that they have been historically stigmatized by societies of the past and therefore must be nailed into the head of societies of the present…

The broad definition of happiness in this case is harmful to free society, in my opinion.

Too bad that an open national or international debate in such cases has been banned or at least played down in the bastions of Western freedom. There are far too many taboos on freedom in free society. In fact, the so-called “political correctness” is one of the worst abusers of freedom in free society. The worst abuser is of course social indoctrination, commonly known as brainwashing. It deprives people of their greatest freedom: the freedom of thought.

Ironically, people in unfree societies have a much higher level of resistance to brainwashing -- through the mere knowledge that they are unfree -- than citizens of free societies, who tend to take their freedom for granted. Ergo, thought in oppressed societies, where the “instinct for freedom” is stronger, is usually freer than in free societies.

Figure that one out!