Who Deserves to be Happy?
Why happiness ought to be rare.
If you search the internet for “how to be happy,” Google responds with around five and a half billion linked pages. But in none of those recipes for acquiring happiness will you likely find any notice of the deeper question of whether everyone deserves to seek happiness.
The presumption is that everyone deserves to be happy by default, so that if you’re searching for the secret techniques, you’re automatically justified in doing so. We presume we deserve to be happy just because we’re human or because we’re alive.
Yet some paradoxes await those intrepid few who stop to ponder this complacency.
The Alleged Right to be Happy
The emphasis on mastering the means of achieving happiness relies on you satisfying the material conditions or succeeding in the conventional sense by:
- Earning a decent living.
- Finding romantic love and raising children.
- Treating yourself to a rich assortment of pleasures.
- Pursuing hobbies, and traveling the world.
But whether these actually lead to happiness ignores the question at issue. Do you deserve to be happy?
Can you satisfy all of those conditions and yet not deserve a happy outcome?
The parameters of the naturalistic fallacy would indicate that as long as the conditions are morally neutral, having to do with tasks that even a monster could theoretically perform, the rewards for completing them needn’t be considered earned.
The result of happiness would just happen as a matter of causality, leaving the question open as to whether anything good had transpired. The fallacy, then, would be assuming that just because you’ve followed some steps and met certain conditions, you deserve the outcome that naturally follows.
It would be like assuming, as Aristotle did, that whatever tends to happen in nature ought to happen that way, because everything strives to be good. The ocean waves scatter seashells across the beach, and because of that sequence of cause and effect, the result is automatically treated as the achievement of a higher purpose.
That’s the naturalistic fallacy.
Science shows that we understand causality best when we leave out our preoccupation with values. This makes it possible to do everything you’re supposed to do to be happy without your efforts being in the right and without your pleasures being for the good. The moral and ethical questions are separate from the instrumental one of whether you’re actually able to follow certain procedures. If a monster or a supervillain could follow the same advice, the advice would evidently be amoral, like a tool that could be used for good or for ill.
In so far as happiness can be reliably produced, the fact that fortunate state occurs under certain conditions is only a sociological or psychological phenomenon and is therefore amoral.
Still, we’d like to think that the happiest folks necessarily deserve their contentment, because those who do wrong are troubled by their misdeeds so that their pangs of remorse will impede their enjoyment of their successes. In short, the tasks you have to perform to be happy aren’t just matters of causality but are infused with moral judgment.
For example, we assume that to be happy, you have to get along well with others and that that friendly engagement all by itself entitles you to some degree of happiness. Those who are antisocial will either end up in prison and will thus lose out on happiness, or will at least be burdened by their conscience, which will likewise rob them of the desired state.
Social Happiness and Higher Morality
Here we encounter a paradox. Once we introduce moral values into the means of acquiring a happy life, we discover that the individuals who most desire happiness, who satisfy the moral rather than just the material conditions are precisely the least likely even to attempt to achieve that contentment, let alone to find much joy.
Conversely, those who eagerly obey social expectations and find a world of pleasures opening up to them are the least deserving of the happy outcome because they’ve necessarily violated moral principles.
Morality is at odds with the social pursuit of happiness. In an immoral society, you forfeit your moral standing if you’re preoccupied with making yourself happy, that is, successful and content with your social status. Thus, even if you prove proficient in pursuing that goal, you can no longer be said to deserve the rewards. The rewards must be drained of their moral worth to accommodate the departure from morality that’s entailed by the self-interested search for happiness.
If you prove inept in pleasing yourself, if your life is a shambles not just by chance but because you’re preoccupied with morality, with what ought to be happening, you must be both among the least happy creatures and the most deserving of what you can never obtain.
Notice that I assume the society in question is immoral. But not every society is equally so. Consider a dystopia such as Nazi Germany or the Kim dynasty’s North Korea. Pursuing personal contentment by following the egregious social conventions that prevail in those nightmare worlds would compel you to violate universal moral standards. You might have to join the Nazi party, cheer on genocide, or please a tyrannical dictator.
You could train yourself to overlook the wrongness of that society as a whole, to enjoy the ill-gotten fruits of your labor. But again, that would be only a psychological or a sociological achievement, a matter of causality that would have no moral implications as such. Applying moral standards vitiates not just those achievements or that “upstanding” individual’s life, but the appalling society that’s dehumanized its population.
But what of the free societies that even orient their political constitutions around the right to pursue happiness? As flawed as they may be, they’re hardly the most abominable places that could be established. Any conflict between morality and the society’s governing norms, however, threatens to taint the successes that are obtained under those conditions.
This is why the American’s boasts about the greatness of her society ring hollow, when we reflect on the atrocities committed by Americans throughout their history, including the genocide of Native Americans; the enslavement of an African workforce; the financial and military support for dictators around the world who crushed their citizens’ democratic aspirations; and the leadership in the capitalistic despoliation of the earth.
To be sure, the Enlightenment principles of rationality and liberty have empowered the United States. But you begin to fabricate a mere evasive sales pitch when you equate superpower status with moral excellence; just because a country is powerful enough to enable its citizens to do what they please doesn’t mean those citizens are blameless according to universal (trans-American), moral, spiritual or existential ideals.
This isn’t to say no one deserves to be happy in a liberal society. But any such comfort must almost be accidental to overcome the paradox. If our society expects us to excel in profane terms and to ignore or trample our higher ideals, so that the most successful persons even in these “enlightened” parts of the world are disproportionately sociopathic, our creature comforts ought to repulse us.
Imagine a saintly character that would languish in any realistic social arrangement, assuming she’s left to her devices. She wouldn’t sell out, wouldn’t buckle under offensive social expectations, wouldn’t intentionally degrade herself, shirk her ethical responsibilities, or surrender her intellectual integrity. Now suppose she wins the lottery or otherwise comes by success by a stroke of luck. Perhaps she’s born with prized genes so that she can model for a living or she has artistic talent or brilliant scientific insights that usher her to the front of the line.
At best, such a person would be happy in spite of her inner identity and her life’s major choices. She’s condemned to marginalize herself, because her ideals lead her to stand in opposition to the grotesque norms that prevail in any civilized setting, especially in the most powerful stations and the failed states. She can’t make herself happy under those conditions, but in rare, random occasions the world might please her. Once again, though, no natural event as such is morally praiseworthy. A saint could be exactly as proud of her pleasures and successes as a lottery-winner who wins but doesn’t earn the fortune.
Progress and Honourable Melancholy
In the climax of the film “Unforgiven,” Gene Hackman’s character, Little Bill, tells Clint Eastwood’s character, William Munny, he doesn’t deserve to die, with Munny standing over him, pointing a rifle in his face and about to shoot him for having his friend killed who had been engaged in a quixotic misadventure of killing some men for money.
Munny sneers and says:
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
The message is that the myths of heroism and moral clarity in the Wild West only obscured the grimness of that reality. The more nature has its way, the less reason there is to speak of an outcome’s rightness. What happens in that setting just happens without being directed towards a greater good.
But we late-modernists are proud of our advances from a state of natural squalor. We occupy a largely unnatural civilization, one that’s meant to operate according to progressive human principles. We follow social laws that are often anti-natural in encouraging us to abandon our animal rights to perfect freedom.
We assume, then, that when we work towards some end in that refuge from the godless wilderness, we can feel proud of our accomplishment, since we’ll have participated in that noble protest against nature’s indifference to our collective vision of how the world should have been.
Indeed, this is the point of a moral standard. What ought to happen isn’t just what tends to happen as a result of natural forces. The just or benevolent outcome has to be chosen by an autonomous brain that’s at least partially liberated from the flow of baser causality, so that this person can select an intelligent course of action, thus realizing to some extent an unnatural ideal.
Civilized progress is normative in that sense. But here again we meet with a paradox:
Enlightened, secular progress is only superficially about achieving our happiness. In reality, this progressive development away from nature and towards a humanized, artificial alternative amounts to a war we’re tragically doomed to lose.
Participating in this civilization, struggling on this battlefront affords us honor, not any expectation of contentment. This is because, along with the luxuries and pleasures sustained by scientific, technological, and political advances, there’s the burden of being honour-bound to recognize the existential stakes of this progress.
We “progress” by becoming anomalous, unnatural, and thus alienated creatures with too much consciousness and intelligence to feel content in our shaky position — unless we shirk our existential duty, ignore what’s really going on, and submerge ourselves in a torrent of cheap distractions.
What’s really happening along with the material signs of our humanistic “progress” is that we thereby presume:
- The universe is godless.
- Justice and morality are illusions or fragile human creations.
- There’s no deus ex machina or uplifting universal purpose served by being or by life’s evolution.
- Death’s finality proves our ultimate thingness and mere objectivity, whereas we prefer to think of ourselves as immaterial spirits who deserve to live forever and to rule the universe.
Our social and technological progress is a victory over the natural state of things; we progress by setting ourselves at odds with the heart of our being. The madness of this progress is matched only by the underlying world’s rampant absurdity.
Honourable, good-faith participation in the progressive, enlightened civilization fosters not happiness but anxiety, depression, awe, horror, pity, and disgust.
If you’re attempting to be happy with your membership in this enterprise, you’re missing the point.
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