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religion / volume 11 number 6, June 2009 The Missionary Position on Happiness In our Declaration of Independence we read that all of us have the "inalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and "to secure these rights…the people" may form a "new government…most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." Although our founding fathers placed a high value on happiness, we today are primarily concerned about the rights of life, liberty, and safety. No one in leadership today seems to take happiness seriously. It might be because our country's agenda has been driven by fundamentalists whom I'd define as overweening moralists who irrationally fear that someone, somewhere, somehow is having fun. One country that is concerned about happiness is the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. In 1972 their king initiated a novel program to focus on increasing Bhutan's Gross National Happiness. The four main aspects of the happiness program are: 1) good governance, 2) balanced economic development, 3) environmental preservation, and 4) preserving/promoting Bhutan's national culture. They have since written a great constitution and the present king will soon step down in favor of a democracy. Their balanced economy now provides free universal medical care and education, all funded by the sale of hydroelectricity to India. They preserve their high mountain environment by constructing all their hydroelectric plants underground and have tapped only two percent of that energy source to date. Culturally, they do not strive for military or economic power, are not materialistic, honor equity and justice, and seek a balance between man and nature, which they see as part of themselves. (Bhutan—Taking the Middle Road to Happiness, PBS TV, 4/28/09) Such a different perspective from our American fundamentalists who cannot accept the fact of, or the growing avalanche of DNA evidence proving, the evolutionary interconnectedness of all life on this planet. Unfortunately, the enlightened progress in Bhutan has encountered a stumbling block—western values and influence in the form of advertising, television, and the Internet. As recently as 2006, a survey by the University of Leicester found Bhutan to be the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest in the world. Today it doesn't make the top ten, according to a new study just reported on in Forbes Magazine (May 2009). This study, just released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, lists the following ten countries as the happiest of the 140 evaluated: Denmark (first), Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, Norway, and Belgium (tenth). Notice anything? The world's happiest countries are socialist democracies! In the US we are taught to conflate socialism with communism and cite the examples of Stalin and other totalitarian dictators to prove our point that socialism is evil. What we fail to understand is that the trickle-down socialism under communism is just as malignant as the trickle-down capitalism of Ronald Reagan. It's the trickle-down part that is wrong. Wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few makes for more unhappiness for the rest of us. We're supposed to just work, buy, consume, and die. Socialism can make a population happy and true democracy can make socialism happen. What makes us individually happy? HAVING ENOUGH (and a little bit more*). Having life—including enough to eat, a place to live, clean water and air, clothing, health care, etc.—and having liberty are sufficient to make and keep us happy. Eliminating those things that generate misery for ourselves and others may be the real meaning of "the pursuit of happiness": happiness for ourselves and others. I came to this understanding through living a somewhat erratic life. My early educational years were by the American cultural book. Go to college if you're capable, graduate school too, then get a job. My job brought me to work in the Alaska wilderness during the field season and in an office in Anchorage during the winter. I've always been a night owl and functioned well under our midnight sun but I absolutely hated getting up early each weekday to go to work in the dark of winter. After a few years of this, and after experiencing a taste of the simple Bush lifestyle, I prepared for my escape and then quit my job to seek a better, happier, life in the Bush. With some complications, and a brief return to civilization, I was able to stay out of the rat race and in the Bush for the next three decades. Always having enough to survive, and after marrying Lisa, to be completely happy. Then, in 1994, we thanked God for socialized Medicaid when we had to sell our homestead and move to Fairbanks for medical reasons. Today our small home is just far enough out of town to be in a birch forest complete with wildlife, both large and small. So we still live an abbreviated kind of Bush lifestyle and still consider firewood a form of wealth. We have enough to sustain us and a little bit more. We have access to a fine socialistic library system and public swimming pool, and, after having gone without medical insurance for four decades, I am now covered by socialist security and Medicare. Lisa and I do not have to pursue happiness, we have found it. May you also. ................................................................... *I think the "little bit more" should be between 10 and 25 percent of what is "enough" and should be the same percentage as we normally tip. Having enough does not mean having so much that others don't/can't have enough too. This means our fellow countrymen, all humans, and all species. We have a long way to go. A good motto to help us get started might be: Everyone has more right to one than anyone has to two.
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