Happiness Quotes of the Day
“Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”
- H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
“Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence.”
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to his daughter, Martha Jefferson.
Discussion:
Which famously bigoted hero of liberty knows happiness? Not Mencken!
H.L.’s flare-up of Nietzschean misogyny gets it flat wrong. Marriage has a bigger positive effect on happiness for men than for women. Married men are much happier than single men, and, it seems, even a skoche happier than married women. The feeling of security and well-being, are surely components of happiness. But what these have to do with the following sentence are a mystery lost to time.
Of course, I’m talking about the cramped, mundane happiness of the bourgeouis here, not the wild, expansive happiness of the overflowing soul and indomitable will. As Nietzshe said, “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”
Jefferson, very much the Englishman, nails it. Unemployment is VERY bad for you. Pace economists, it ain’t experienced as “leisure.” Among the most important things for happiness are a sense of self-efficacy and self-control, and this sense slips when we’re not productively engaged. We begin to feel adrift in the world, tossed by malign external forces we are impotent to resist.
So score one for TJ, who suggests a get-up-and-at-’em slogan for t-shirts and public school bulletin boards everywhere: “Indolence: the canker that corrodes with a baneful tooth!”
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I think (hope?) Menken was joking about marriage.
He was right that happiness often comes from the sense of accomplishment of a difficult goal (Jefferson would agree). I think his joke was that the difficult goal for women was to get married and for men was to avoid it. Also, the feeling of security and well-being was more obviously associated with married women than men.
“Self-efficacy, and self-control, productive engagement” are one thing. Employment sadly is quite another. If you’ve only had jobs that truly gave you all of those things then count yourself lucky (as I believe you do).
The problem with employment is that too many people get the feeling that they are efficacious, in control, and productive from the fact that they are employed. But the way this tends to happen is that people need money, so they accept employment and adopt psychological defense mechanisms so that they can feel happy in the face of what is usually a pretty unsatisfying set of relationships. (”I do what you want. You pay me. If you don’t like what I’m doing tell me and I’ll do otherwise… cause you pay me. I better do my job better than him if I want a promotion. Etc.)
The things that libertarians praise about civil society (voluntary associations, cooperation, and the like), on the other hand, are hardly instanciated in most employment relations. This is one of the most irritating things about libertarian dogmatics.
As for being “tossed by…external forces we are impotent to resist”, any person who is sufficiently aware of their broader environment will feel this way (justifiedly) to the extent that they cannot understand and strive to control that environment (together with and with the help of those around them). Employment-fetishism certainly does not encourage us to be aware of our wider environment or to attempt to control it. Rather it tends to inspire the posture: “I’m just doing this cause its my job. What do I care as long as they are paying me? Who are you accept for my co-worker and perhaps competitor?”
Of course, reading the Becker-Posner blog this week, one might get the impression that unemployment is a central cause of terrorism. And blowing one’s self up almost certainly reduces one’s happiness (not to mention others’) so maybe we do need to keep everybody workin for a living.
Well, he’s being funny, being Mencken and all. But he’s only sort of joking. You’re right! That’s the joke!
Well put, Bill. Jefferson was always active, but I bet if he had to pull 10 hour shifts at WalMart, he would come home after work and veg in front of the TV until bedtime, too.
As for “libertarian dogmatics,” what could be a more indolent belief than libertarianism? Government bad, private sector good is the mantra of the intellectually unemployed…
Yes, there are different kinds of employment at least some of which do not involve being hired at all. And its possible to be hired and still exercise a satisfying amount of discretion in one’s works. It’s just that these are quite uncommon forms of employment.
Well, there is a good case to be made that the fact that self-employment and self-directed labor are uncommon– that there are not more small businessmen, freelancers, consultants, artisans, etc– is largely due to corporatist state intervention, not to the operation of the market. So complaining about the existing structure of employment relations doesn’t actually get you anywhere anti-libertarian.
Hehe, Nick. “Corporatist state intervention” is hardly the cause.
In the case of small businessmen disappearing, I think the main cause is the expansion of business chains across America. A Home Depot opened across town from me, and one by one, all the small hardware stores in town closed. There was no way they could compete.
Self-directed labor is fading because both replacements for anything that wears out are usually cheap, or in the case of non-disposable goods, it is impossible for regular people to fix them. My dad used to replace blown tubes in our TV sets(bought from the local hardware store) and do most of the repairs on our family vehicles. Good luck repairing your car these days when the CPU goes out…
Science has also surpassed the point where amateurs like Jefferson can make any real contributions. All the low hanging fruit that a backyard scientist could pick is gone and now we need billion dollar research outfits to advance science.
And TV has reduced the benefits for small town musicians, actors, etc. to learn those arts. Why go hear your neighborhood band when the best musicians in the world are a button press away? Jefferson truly enjoyed praticing and playing music for the locals…
It’s not government but technology and capitalism that have made people like Jefferson extinct in our times.
Monkyboy,
But technology, by itself, creates at least as many opportunities for independent work as it destroys; consider independent Web designers and consultants, for example. And if you’re an independent musician, you can reach a worldwide audience through the Internet more easily than ever before; in fact a good friend of mine does just that. Admittedly he’s an amateur, but so have most musicians been throughout history.
Moreover, the expansion of business chains did not take place in a laissez-faire environment. In many cases these chains blatantly and openly get special privileges from the state (eminent domain, tax holidays, etc) that their smaller competitors don’t. And regulations are always easier for larger, established businesses to deal with smoothly than for small startups.
Finally, you’re overstating the case. Small businesspeople have hardly “disappeared.” In 2000 (says the SBA) there were 16.5 million sole proprietorships in the US; that’s not a trivial number. It is true that there are fewer than there could be and ought to be– and this is, again, due largely to regulatory and tax policies and other sorts of state favoritism toward large enterprises.
I’m not a Luddite or a socialist, Nick. I appreciate the benefits technology and capitalism have brought.
I’m just saying people are less independant and less interesting because of it. People in the past had to be jack-of-all-trades to survive and were more diverse because of it. Now you can do one thing well and just buy whatever else you need…
Monkyboy,
Now you can do one thing well, and spend the rest of your time focusing on things that interest you, rather than be forced to deal with as many other things.
Sounds like progress to me.
Progress for individuals maybe, but a disaster for a democracy.
An uninformed citizenry voting for “leaders” with little experience outside their “one thing” leads to things like Iraq and massive defecits…
Nick: The way you support libertarianism (”the fact that self-employment and self-directed labor are uncommon…is largely due to corporatist state intervention, not to the operation of the market”) is strikingly similar to a Stalinist’s defense of his implelentation of Marxism.
–If there’s anything bad about the society I’m defending it’s because of the ideology I oppose. So just let me and my ideas rule and everything will be great. –
Yeah, right!
Bill,
Note I said “largely,” not “entirely.” I’m not claiming that in the absence of state intervention everyone would be a happy, rich freelancer. I’m pointing out the *fact* that present employment relations did not grow up in a laissez-faire environment, but in one of heavy state regulation; and I’m arguing that that regulation is one important factor (not the only one) in shaping those relations.
I’ve cited some concrete support for that argument in my previous response to monkyboy. As another datum in support, there’s the fact that the modern linkage of health insurance to employment– which has obvious and serious consequences for employment relations– was created by the preferential tax treatment given to employer-provided fringe benefits starting in WWII.
Do you have any concrete arguments in opposition, or will you content yourself with strawmen and sneers?
Nick, I love you. I’m not committed to any employer-based insurance. If you’ve got a plan to create a laissez-faire utopia where everybody is happier than today, then can I please get on the list to help you implement it. And we’re playing some hold’em tonight at 7 if you’re gnna be around.
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