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Is the Pursuit of Happiness Antisocial?

11/8/2013

3 Comments

 
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In the latest issue of The Nation, historian Jackson Lears takes the “happiness industry” to task for believing, with Margaret Thatcher, that there is no such thing as society. Lears disdains the notion of happiness and the array of self-help books out there aiming to help you pursue it. The focus on individual well-being, he thinks, distracts us from more worthwhile goals like reducing the unnecessary suffering of others. But is pursuing your own happiness really antisocial?

Lears criticizes both the cultural individualism of the left and the economic individualism of the right for sharing “a common asocial (or antisocial) vision worthy of Thatcher herself.” The common enemy, according to him, is individualism, which has found its perfect expression in manuals telling you how to be happy.

But individualism, and the cultural and economic freedom it thrives on, is not antisocial. A few individuals might cut themselves off from society, but as the very happiness industry he derides takes pains to demonstrate, friendships and other social interactions are a big part of what really makes most people happy. What individualists like me actually believe is that the greater the level of individual freedom, the better the society. People living in a free society—a society in which as many aspects of life as possible are left in the hands of individuals and voluntary associations—will be wealthier, healthier, and happier, and will experience less suffering. It is neither right nor practical to try to organize society from the top down. Government coercion of individuals through taxation and regulation (both of which the modern world has in spades, despite equivocation from Lears and many others) interferes with the spontaneous order of the market and tends to make people worse off.

While I’m not a fan of everything Thatcher did, it’s clear from the context in which she denied the existence of society that, broadly speaking, she was advocating the kind of individualism sketched above. In other words, the belief that leaving individuals free to pursue their own happiness leads to a better society. If positive psychology self-help books can make that pursuit more successful, all the better.
3 Comments
Larry Deck
11/10/2013 10:34:16 pm

You're right that Thatcher's line is only ever taken out of context. In the very next sentence she says "There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689
Individual men and women *and families*: that's not individualism, it's straight-up conservativism. The idea that Thatcher was some kind of philosophical egoist is ignorant nonsense.
As for the "happiness industry," sophism has always been with us and ever will remain, but it's not a reason to be glum.

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Bradley Doucet
11/10/2013 11:55:04 pm

If we're talking government support of families, then sure, that qualifies as conservatism, and I do think Thatcher was a conservative in this and other ways. But the quotation itself also alludes to personal responsibility and voluntary assistance, which are individualist values.

And I'll concede that the happiness industry is a mixed bag, but I think there's some real wisdom in there along with the sophistries.

Reply
Larry Deck
11/11/2013 01:17:28 am

Yes indeed. She was, here and elsewhere, arguing for voluntary *civil* society against the "society" that putatively decides to do things and does them through the state. It's still conservativism, and would have been better without the militarism that sadly went along with it in Thatcher's case and so many others.


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    Who Writes This

    Bradley Doucet is a Montreal writer and the English Editor of Le Québécois Libre.

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