{"id":1340,"date":"2017-11-03T09:35:20","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T06:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2018-11-18T11:39:34","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T08:39:34","slug":"pascal-bruckner-for-the-first-time-in-history-man-feels-obliged-to-be-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/1340\/pascal-bruckner-for-the-first-time-in-history-man-feels-obliged-to-be-happy\/","title":{"rendered":"Pascal Bruckner, For the first time in history man feels obliged to be happy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from an article by Pascal Bruckner<\/a>; cf. by the same author, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The eighteenth century saw the rise of new techniques that improved agricultural production; it also saw new medicines\u2014in particular, alkaloids and salicylic acid, an ancestor of aspirin whose curative and analgesic properties worked wonders. <\/p>\n

Suddenly, this world was no longer condemned to be a vale of tears; man now had the power to reduce hunger, ameliorate illness, and better master his future. People stopped listening to those who justified suffering as the will of God. If I could relieve pain simply by ingesting some substance, there was no need to have recourse to prayer to feel better.<\/p>\n

The new conception of happiness was captured in a phrase of Voltaire<\/a>\u2019s in 1736: \u201cEarthly paradise is here where I am.\u201d … If paradise is here where I am, then happiness is here and now, not yesterday, in an age for which I might be nostalgic, and even less in some hypothetical future. <\/p>\n

In this upheaval of temporal perspectives, poverty and distress lose all legitimacy, and the whole work of enlightened nations becomes eliminating them through education and reason, and eventually science and industry. …<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, two major shifts transformed the right to happiness into the duty of happiness. The first was a shift in the nature of capitalism, which had long revolved around production and the deferral of gratification, but now focused on making us all good consumers. Working no longer sufficed; buying was also necessary for the industrial machine to run at full capacity. <\/p>\n

To make this shift possible, an ingenious invention had appeared not long before, first in America in the 1930s and then in Europe in the 1950s: credit… <\/p>\n

We would live well in the present and pay back later. Today, we\u2019re all aware of the excesses that resulted from this system, since the financial meltdown in the United States was the direct consequence of too many people living on credit, to the point of borrowing hundreds of times the real value of their possessions.<\/p>\n

The second shift was the rise of individualism. Since nothing opposed our fulfillment any longer\u2014neither church nor party nor social class\u2014we became solely responsible for what happened to us. <\/p>\n

It proved an awesome burden: if I don\u2019t feel happy, I can blame no one but myself. So it was no surprise that a vast number of fulfillment industries arose, ranging from cosmetic surgery to diet pills to innumerable styles of therapy, all promising reconciliation with ourselves and full realization of our potential. \u201cBecome your own best friend, learn self-esteem, think positive, dare to live in harmony,\u201d we were told by so many self-help books, though their very number suggested that these were not such easy tasks. …<\/p>\n

Happiness is no longer a matter of chance or a heavenly gift, an amazing grace that blesses our monotonous days. We now owe it to ourselves to be happy, and we are expected to display our happiness far and wide. <\/p>\n

Thus happiness becomes not only the biggest industry of the age but also a new moral order. We now find ourselves guilty of not being well, a failing for which we must answer to everyone and to our own consciences. Consider the poll, conducted by a French newspaper, in which 90 percent of people questioned reported being happy. Who would dare admit that he is sometimes miserable and expose himself to social opprobrium? …<\/p>\n

To enjoy was once forbidden; from now on, it\u2019s obligatory. Whatever method is chosen, whether psychic, somatic, chemical, spiritual, or computer-based, we find the same assumption everywhere: beatitude is within your grasp, and you have only to take advantage of \u201cpositive conditioning\u201d (in the Dalai Lama\u2019s words) in order to attain it. <\/p>\n

We have come to believe that the will can readily establish its power over mental states, regulate moods, and make contentment the fruit of a personal decision.<\/p>\n

This belief in our ability to will ourselves happy also lies behind the contemporary obsession with health. What is health, correctly understood, but a kind of permission we receive to live in peace with our bodies and to let ourselves be carefree? These days, though, we are required to resist our mortality as far as possible. …<\/p>\n

Duration\u2014holding on as long as possible\u2014becomes an authoritative value, even if it must be achieved at the cost of terrible restrictions, depriving oneself of some of the best the world has to offer. <\/p>\n

From this point of view, the hunting down of smokers, now expelled from almost all public places, looks something like a collective exorcism, as if a whole society wished to absolve itself of having once found pleasure in cigarettes. In France, photos of Jean-Paul Sartre and the young Jacques Chirac holding cigarettes have been retouched to eliminate the offending objects\u2014just as the Soviet empire used to do with banished leaders.<\/p>\n

Yet by trying to remove every anomaly, every failing, we end up denying what is in fact the main benefit of health: indifference to oneself, what a great surgeon once called \u201cthe silence of the organs.\u201d <\/p>\n

Everyone must today be saved from something\u2014from hypertension, from imperfect digestion, from a tendency to gain weight. One is never thin enough, fit enough, strong enough. Health has its martyrs, its pioneers, its heroes and saints. Sickness and health become harder to distinguish, to the point that we risk creating a society of hypochondriacs. …<\/p>\n

However well behaved we are, our bodies continue to betray us. Age leaves its mark, illness finds us one way or another, and pleasures have their way with us, following a rhythm that has nothing to do with our vigilance or our resolution. <\/p>\n

What is needed is a renewed humility. We are not the masters of the sources of happiness; they ever elude the appointments we make with them, springing up when we least expect them and fleeing when we would hold them close. …<\/p>\n

The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. <\/p>\n

It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy.<\/p>\n

Cf. Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Excerpts from an article by Pascal Bruckner; cf. by the same author, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy. The eighteenth century saw the rise of new techniques that improved agricultural production; it also saw new medicines\u2014in particular, alkaloids and salicylic acid, an ancestor of aspirin whose curative and analgesic properties worked wonders. Suddenly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[3260,3264,3267,3265,2717,3262,3259,2165,3261,3263,3266],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","tag-america-in-the-1930s","tag-earthly-paradise","tag-eighteenth-century","tag-gratification","tag-happiness","tag-new-medicines","tag-pascal-bruckner","tag-pleasure","tag-temporal-perspectives","tag-vale-of-tears","tag-voltaire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}