Economic insentives have led to govenrment and industry to conflate pleasure with happiness

• Many doctrines expound ideas which require a degree of trust and insist upon our faith in them
• We’re told that things will make us happy, but they don’t. We’re told we should be ecstatic, but we’re not. Because what we’re told is based on a faulty premise—that pleasure and happiness are one and the same. A premise ingrained in the American psyche, and indeed throughout Western civilization. Industry and government call it economic progress, but it is they who have subverted the meanings of these two emotions—reward versus contentment, pleasure versus happiness—for their own purposes. And we bought the subversion, both figuratively and literally. It’s the bedrock on which our economy is built. This confusion continues to be stoked by industry and government in order to preserve and sustain persistent economic growth at the expense of the populace.

---

References

• Lustig, H., Robert. (2017). The Hacking of the American Mind Chapter 11. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? (Location 2090). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.

Metadata

Type: Tags: Status:⛅️