Are
you happy? Your
answer could and would vary from hour to hour not to mention
longer periods of time. It could be your lucky moment or not. It
could be your boss praised your work today or not. It could be you
are in peace with yourself because you ‘slept over’ some
yesterdays conflict or not. It could be that your love was
answered or not. But, why the question?
Happiness
studies are booming in the social sciences, and some governments are
moving toward a policy based on quantitative measures of a
nation's overall well-being, meant to supplement traditional
measures of wealth and productivity. That’s a twilight
territory. Obviously, you have to be sufficiently relieved of
suffering, physical and mental, for happiness to be even possible.
While it's true that money can't buy happiness, it can buy many
necessary pre-conditions of happiness: food, shelter, medicine,
security. Your work, as a profession and source of income, must be
fulfilling both individually and socially. There’s danger of
making pleasure the central focus of a happy life. Another danger
is to confuse happiness and coping with unhappiness. And the
happiness of human love to other individual and possibly all
humankind ascends the happiness on the level with supreme moral
and religious values.
So,
do you have a right to be happy? The idea that happiness can be a
human right is queer. A right to happiness is simply unwork- able:
no society can, nor should it try to, enforce that right.. Some
commentators reach for the famous lines in the second section of
the United States Declaration of Independence,
"We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalien-
able Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit
of Happiness",
which
was primarily drafted by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the
Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. So,
the unalienable 'Right to Life', the unalienable 'Right to
Liberty', but the unalienable 'Right to the pursuit of Happiness'.
Let's be clear. That is not the 'Right to Happiness'. No society
can prevent people feeling disappointment, sorrow, bereavement or
disenchantment from time to time. But all societies should sustain
social and economic structures where individuals develop their
full potential, in short, where people are at liberty to pursue
happiness. |
THE
ICE PLANT OF GR, MAY 2, 2013 |