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Tuesday, July 13, 2004
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THE QUESTION OF HAPPINESS:
AMERICA’S LARGEST SOURCE OF BOGUS SCIENCE After careful review of the results of the latest multidisciplinary studies on the question of human happiness, UD can now announce that the individual optimally configured for personal happiness is a post-surgical inpatient looking at lobelias while humping. What the ever-credulous New York Times Magazine [see UD, 1/27/04] calls the “burgeoning new science of happiness” has produced spectacular results, culminating most recently in the result voted most popular among psychiatrists: Happiness should be classified as a psychiatric disorder. America already has just about the highest happiness ratings in the world, for all the obvious reasons, but, happily, there's still plenty of money around to fund studies aimed at making us happier. As these studies are more and more widely disseminated, and as we become as a result more and more self-conscious about our levels of happiness, the helping professions bring up the rear, pathologizing happiness and thereby completing the profitability cycle: You make money by raising up happiness, and you make money by tearing it down. Regular readers of UD know that university professors speet on happiness because only stupid people who don’t know anything are happy [see UD, 1/30/04]. But studies now reveal that happy people are evil as well as insipid. Burdened with an “everything is fine” attitude that “reduces the motivations for analytical thought,” happy people “fall back on stereotypes - including malicious ones.” Let me be upfront: UD has struggled with her own happiness for decades. Having been born intelligent, sane, and loved in the richest country in the world, UD has been plagued from infancy with the bigotry, self-delusion [“There is consistent evidence” warns one psychologist, “that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.”], and generalized sense of well-being that observers classify as “happiness.” In light of these newest studies, UD will include a disclaimer to this effect on future syllabi. |