The Hacking of the American Mind Chapter 11. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
Author: Robert H. Lustig Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2022-5-3 Status:📚
Annotations
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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.
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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.
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And we bought the subversion, both figuratively and literally. It’s the bedrock on which our economy is built. We spend money on hedonic pleasures, trying to make ourselves happy, and in the process we drive dopamine, reduce dopamine receptors, increase cortisol, and reduce serotonin, to ever further distance ourselves from our goal.
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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.
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Some would argue that a strong stock market and an increasing GDP must mean that we’re on the right track. Yet, even before the 2016 election, three-quarters of the country thought we were on the wrong track.1
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last clause of the Declaration, “the pursuit of happiness,” has a very checkered history. It was mentioned twice in print in 1776, and then it disappeared, never to be written again. In its place, the U.S. Constitution replaced the word “happiness” with “property.” The acquisition of the tangible quickly superseded the quest for inner contentment.
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Aristotle argued “the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain is a first principle; for it is for the sake of this that we do all that we do.”