The obvious conclusion to draw is that people see unhappiness in no uncertain terms as a negative emotion, and lasting happiness as the ultimate goal. It is here that Ronald Dworkin makes his most salient, and most commonsensical points: that eternal, lasting happiness is not, and never has or will be attainable, and that unhappiness is essential to progress and growth in our lives. “The universal goal in life is lasting happiness, yet it is impossible to find lasting happiness,” he writes, “Such happiness might be attainable if everyone cooperated, but everyone is too busy looking for their own happiness to do so.” 37 Dworkin continues: “A person’s relation to the world changes naturally, gradually and imperceptibly – this is what passing through the stages of a life cycle means…unhappiness drives this progression in consciousness; although painful, it is an essential part of the life cycle.” Dworkin mentions Alexis de Tocqueville’s phrase the “perfectibility of man” as something that Westerners (Americans in particular) increasingly accept and believe in. Such a faith that graft and determination can lead to a perfect existence, easier life easier and endless opportunities fits neatly with the Selfish Capitalist agenda, and the socio-political ethos of a capitalist, individual-centric society. Happiness is, after all, everyone’s birthright, and a goal to be reached at any cost, and in the easiest possible way. Never mind that the cost of such happiness may be life in a kind of purgatory; poised between sleep and wakefulness, real joy and the ever-extant problems that bite at our heels waiting to strike us down. If we embrace these problems, choose to meet them head on, rather than bury our heads in the sand of Artificial Happiness we may, in fact, come closer to knowing that real, lasting happiness we have pursued so vigorously.38

These four books are, in reality, a very random selection from a pool of literature that argues vociferously for changes in the ways we think about our lives and how they should be lived. If I hadn’t chosen Artificial Happiness, I could have chosen Born to Buy by Juliet Schorr, if I hadn’t read The Paradox of Choice I could have picked up The Home We Built Together by Jonathan Sacks and in each case found myself a part of very much the same kind of thinking.

In our own ways we try to answer the question “how should one live?” It may even be more essential that we find within ourselves a way to answer the more searching question “how should we live?” The problems we face as a society (I am referring to the West as a society, defined, in part and to varying degrees, as it is by the problems discussed in this piece) are problems that require large, system-level change. Barry Schwartz articulates such change when he writes: “Our social and economic system is based in part on an unequal distribution of scarce and highly desirable commodities, that inherently propels people into lives of perpetual social comparison and dissatisfaction, so that reforming people without paying attention to the system won’t work.”39 It is not enough to change just ourselves, we must go about reforming the institutions that shape and reinforce our cultural, and social identities. Ronald Dworkin suggests we all spend a month reading the scriptures of the world’s major religions thereby “discovering all the answers about how to live that humanity has ever known.”40

Even as I began to imagine this article, knowing the tone of the books I was about to read, I foresaw a conclusion that would suggest that these are complicated times we live in that require complicated solutions to complicated problems. I now think I was far off the mark; these are complicated times we live in, but perhaps the answers are simple and such problems have been faced and overcome many times before by our parents, grandparents, and by every member of the human family that has walked before us. How are we to live? With ourselves: warts and all, in sickness and health, good times and bad; but together and with purpose, rejecting the notion of the perfectibility of man and accepting that our strength comes from recognising our weaknesses and embracing them.

Bibliography

1 Kasser, Tim. The High Price of Materialism. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002. ix.
2 James, Oliver. The Selfish Capitalist. Vermilion, 2008. 135.
3 Ibid, 150
4 Ibid, 2
5 Kasser, xi
6 Ibid, 49
7 James, 121
8 Ibid, 22
9 Kasser, 24
10 Ibid, 61
11 Ibid, xi
12 Kasser, 88
13 Ibid, 89
14 James, 50
15 Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. 15.
16 Ibid, 15
17 Ibid, 141
18 Ibid, 100
19 Ibid, 34
20 Ibid, 32-33
21 Ibid, 32
22 Ibid, 107
23 Ibid, 107
24 Ibid, 111
25 Lane, R.E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 108.
26 Schwartz, 210
27 Ibid, 211
28 Ibid, 221
29 Cohen, Elizabeth. “CDC: Antidepressants Most Prescribed Drugs in U.S.” CNN Health. 9 July 2007. 30 Apr. 2008 <http://edition.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/07/09/antidepressants/index.html>.
30 Stagnitti,M. (2005) Antidepressant Use in the US Civilian Non-Insitutionalised Population, 2002. Statistical Brief #77. Rockville,MD: Medical Expenditure Panel, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
31 Dworkin, Ronald W. Artificial Happiness: the Dark Side of the New Happy Class. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006. 50.
32 Ibid, 53
33 Ibid, 55
34 Ibid, 3
35 Ibid, 13
36 Ibid, 241
37 Ibid, 287
38 I should note that Ronald Dworkin does not dismiss the modes of Artificial Happiness absolutely; he readily admits there are cases where such treatment is hugely beneficial to the patient, and where failure to medicate in such ways would most certainly cause further damage.
39 Schwartz, 191-192
40 Dworkin, 293

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