That little ditty in the title, from 1988, came to mind after reading this The New York Times > Magazine >New York Times Magazine article about the pitfalls of happiness.
Sad people are nice. Angry people are nasty. And, oddly enough, happy people tend to be nasty, too.…The happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments -- like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he's a member of a minority group. Why? Nobody's sure. One interesting hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an ''everything is fine'' attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So they fall back on stereotypes -- including malicious ones.
The news that a little evil lurks inside happiness is disquieting. After all, we live in a nation whose founding document holds the pursuit of happiness to be a God-given right. True to that principle, the United States consistently ranks near the top in international surveys of happiness.
…As to the consequences of being happy, they are widely presumed to be positive. Happiness is held to lengthen life, buffer stress and make people more productive on the job. Some of these notions appear to be justified. A Dutch study in the 1980's, for example, found that a happy 70-year-old man can expect to live 20 months longer than his less happy counterpart. But an earlier American study found that children who are cheerful and optimistic end up having shorter life spans (perhaps because they take more risky chances).
…Some have worried that happy people tend to be apathetic and easily manipulated by political leaders -- contented cows, so to speak. In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, ''Brave New World,'' the working classes are kept in docile submission by a diet of drugs that render them universally happy. In the real world, however, there is little evidence that happiness creates complacent citizens; in fact, studies show that happy people are more likely than alienated people to get politically involved, not less.
There is one bit of the world that happy people do see in an irrationally rosy light: themselves. As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, ''There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.'' Indeed, Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.
I want to comment on it, but I haven't yet been able to put my thoughts together in a way that makes sense even to me. Still I offer it here, to hear what others have to say about it. Meanwhile I can't get that damn Bobby McFerrin tune out of my head now.
Update: Now it comes to me. Reading this post from Wonkette, concerning a letter from a former Washington Post editor who was somewhat confused by the paper's effusive coverage of all things Reagan not long ago. It was that article that reminded me of the Bobby McFerrin song from 1988, that took me back to the 1980s.
As I fought the urge to hum the song that was now permanently running through my mind, I remembered some of the thing that were said about Reagan as we said goodbye to his corpse—"his unyielding optimism," "he made us feel good about ourselves," "he made America proud again," ad nauseum. And I do remember a sort…contagion of giddiness that swept the country for much of the 1980s. I don't remember taking part in it, mostly because I was in the process of coming out, and the conservatism of the Reagan years made it pretty clear that whatever everyone else was celebrating, I wasn't invited to the party. People were happy during the Reagan years, or at least they seemed that way, though I could never quite figure out why. It occurs to me now, that happiness—that sense of self-satisfaction had to be liberating in some ways.
But back to the article, and something that jumped out at me.
One interesting hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an ''everything is fine'' attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So they fall back on stereotypes -- including malicious ones.
Everything is fine. Whether spoken aloud or not, that seems to have been the mantra of the Reagan years. Everything is fine. We don't need to change anything, because everything is fine. Everything is fine, and if the way things are isn't working for you, well then there's something wrong with you. That's your problem. Don't ruin it for us.
From the letter posted by Wonkette:
Reagan nurtured the strong and punished the weak. He fostered the great regressive shift in economic rewards that continues to this day, while ignoring a visible deterioration in the middle class and manufacturing.…A disturbing meanness lurked at the core of Reagan's political agenda and was quite tangible at the time, though evidently forgotten now.
There's another 1980s moment that comes to mind, that for me somehow ties in the phenomenon mentioned in the New York Times article in with the mindset of the Reagan years, and even the McFerrin tune mentioned in th title of this post. It was at the Grammy Awards. The same year that McFerrin had his runaway hit with "Don't Worry, Be Happy" a newcoming, Tracy Chapman, burst upon the scene with her single "Fast Car" (the other huge single that was everywhere that year) and her self-titled debut album that contained songs about a wide range of social issues, and people in dire and desperate circumstances—people and circumstances that weren't often addressed during the Reagan years, except to blame those people in dire straits for their circumstances. After all, everything was fine. So there had to be something wrong with them, and not with the way things were.
Both McFerrin and Chapman were nominated for the Song of the Year, for their respective singles. Chapman was, at least as far as I knew, the hands down favorite to win. Just before the presentation of the award, Chapman performed her song, alone on a bare stage, with just her guitar. It was, at least from where I was sitting watching it on television, one of those rare moments when an artist makes a tangible connection with her audience. I remember that the room seemed entirely silent, except for sound of audience members joining their voices with hers on the chorus, "And I had a feeling that I belonged; I had a feeling I could be someone." I was pretty amazed at that. I figured a room full of music business professionals would have a certain level of cynicism in it, but they sang with her. Chapman, pardon the cliché, held that audience in the palm of her hand.
Cut to commercial, return, and it's time for the Song of the Year award to be presented. The nominees are read off, cut to Chapman in the wings with her guitar. The envelope is opened, and the winner is announced: "Don't Worry, Be Happy," Bobby McFerrin. I don't remember all the content of McFerrin's (who, by the way, I happen to think is an excellent musician and as deserving of a Grammy as any other) acceptance speech, but I remember thinking at the moment that he seemed almost apologetic, as if he also believed that the moment should have belonged to Chapman and her song about a woman and a car that wasn't fast enough to catch up to the American dream to "buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs."
Instead, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" won the day, much as the same mindset had during the Reagan era. Don't worry about AIDS. Don't worry about the deficit. Don't worry about the squeeze on the middle class. Don't worry about how little seems to trickle down. Don't worry about the environment. Don't worry about pollution. (It's caused by trees, y'know.) Don't worry. Be happy.
''There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.''
It seems as though a lot of Americans are still "Reagan-happy," or at least clinging to the dogged optimism of that time, the belief that "everything is fine" with them and with America, and that there's nothing we need to change about our much vaunted way of life or our approach to dealing with the rest of the world; even after the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, and blundering into a war that doesn't seem to have been based on anything remotely founded in truth. There seemed, in the days after 9/11 and even up to today, to be a deep-seeded need to believe that America was doing, and had always done the right thing; that our leaders were honest and honorable, even when evidence suggested otherwise, and an even deeper and more intense need to believe that others held the same beliefs. In that regard, the attacks on any degree of dissent—up to and including the Attorney General's assertion that anyone who critized the president and his administration was giving "aid an comfort" to the enemy—can be seen simply as fervent attempt to preserve the "happiness" or "self-satisfaction" that has always been founded in a certain level of denial. In a crisis, Americans held more tightly to their rose-colored glasses.
Maybe "happiness" and "optimism" are founded in denial, in lying to ourselves to some degree, about the world we live in and our part in it. We have to tell ourselves "they hate our freedom" or "they envy our prposperity" rather than considering that what we consider our prosperity may exact a price from people on the other side of the world, who rather resent that price? Or that our actions and policies might not be seen by everyone else in the world as absolutely right? I remember what I was taught about lying when I was growing up: that telling one lie means eventualy having to tell a bigger one, and a still bigger one after that, until the whole web of lies eventually fell apart. So, then, a happines that is built upon lies is bound to crumble eventually. I just wonder when it will happen here, and what the outcome will be.
In the meantime, perhaps I should just not worry.
Very interesting!
As a depressed person, I have always felt that I was more in touch with reality than happy people. I also think that there's a positive correlation between dysthymia and what one might call a highly sensitive conscience, but of course that's just my theory, for which I have not a shred of evidence. :P
Posted by: shaded-lily | June 22, 2004 at 09:19 AM