Whatever Happened to Happiness?

This is a question which has been asked with some desperation over the last fifty years, with good reason.  As one looks about the society, one sees fewer and fewer instances of people genuinely happy about their lives.  Far more frequently, one finds the miserable office-worker who finds his job a drudge, his home life tedious and his overall life pointless. 

In today's society, a life all-too-often goes this way:  A child grows up with parents who argue frequently, fall out of love, often cheat on each other, and frequently divorce before the child is grown.  Parents also drink, often to excess, and often take drugs as well, either legally or "recreationally." 

While all this is going on at home, it's certainly no better for the child at school.  Due to the badly-decayed state of education, the child is not learning, despite his or her education being heavily enforced and oftentimes legally drugged.  And it becomes quickly obvious that there is nowhere he or she can turn to for help, as the teachers, many desperate to help their failing students, are yet operating in a faulty system and can find no solutions themselves .  The teachers send the child to a school psychologist whom, the child quickly learns, has even fewer answers except prescribed drugs for learning "disorders". 

Children and their peers often turn to illegal drugs to escape the misery that their lives have soon become.  Thanks to portrayals of drug users and drug dealers as heroes in films and television, music that continually extols the virtues of drugs, and peer pressure as well, this is an all-too-easy route to take.  And why not?  Life seems pretty meaningless, anyway.  Then, some die before they're grown.  Some become hopelessly addicted and turn to criminality or prostitution to support their habits.  Yet others manage to cope, and a lucky few manage to stay away from drugs altogether.

As a child hits puberty, he or she is overwhelmed by wildly new emotions and sensations.  They are told by psychologists that these emotions are totally natural, and engaging in them is even more natural.  They are surrounded by a media practically screaming at them to be promiscuous, in magazines, music, television and films.  They have witnessed adults, perhaps even their own parents, with sloppy sexual values.  Their peers (many times lying) are bragging of plentiful sexual conquests.  The pressure to engage in sexual activity is overwhelming, and most give into it, even when, despite all posturing and boasting to the contrary, many of them are secretly quite frightened.

For other children the discovery of sex, disgustingly, will be at the hands of their own siblings and parents.  This gives them further motivation to take drugs, engage in promiscuous sex (as they're already degraded, what does it matter), or completely withdraw from sex and never be able to take pleasure in it at all.

From this decaying platform, our child then launches into adulthood, confused, dismayed, and entering a world that seems to have little hope and seems to be gathering its last dying breath. 

Overall, on a planet-wide scale, the above daily occurrences result in rising criminality, the spread of disease, mental illness, political unrest, war, and the host of other problems currently plaguing humanity.  And last but certainly not least, they result in the farthest thing from happiness possible.

What happened?

For those of us a generation ahead of the current one, we can remember many of our parents and grandparents talking about "how it used to be."  Marriages lasted longer.  Families stayed together.  Drug use was by a few desperate souls who you only heard about, never saw, and many people never even heard about it.  Criminality, although present, was certainly not frequent.  Sexual perversion was infrequent enough that, when it reared its ugly head, it was truly a shock. 

Also, if you were ever able to talk to someone who was genuinely from "the good old days", you would find out something very interesting:  Happiness was actually a known commodity sixty or so years back.   Somewhere along the line, it all seemed to disappear. 

As one examines the society, it can easily be seen, as easily as the lack of happiness, the lack of morality.  The concepts of right and wrong seem to have all but disappeared and been painted a very interesting shade of gray (or, more appropriately, black).  Could it be the two -- the lack of happiness and the lack of morality -- are connected?

Before we completely answer that question, let's see if we can find out what happened to morality. 

First, you must realize (or hypothesize with us, if you will) that nothing ever happens by itself.  Someone causes everything that happens.  Given that, someone must have seen to the disappearance of morals.  Could this be?

The first appearance of the vilification of morals is in 1867 with the publication of Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, the source of modern Communism.  In this work, Marx bitterly railed against morality, claiming that morality was false and only existed to serve the classes that wielded it.  His reasoning for this has been debated at length;  Perhaps he was putting forth that man is natively immoral and therefore morals are simply an unnecessary addition to his "native state", or he may have been simply attempting to make it possible for Communist revolutionaries to proceed in an amoral fashion and therefore expediently.  In any case, adherents to pure Communism were the first to claim that morals were evil and stood in the way of humanity's progress.

Communism did not really take hold in a broad way until the Russian Revolution of 1917.  The first Communist nation did much to advance what was never labeled as a political ideology but what probably should have been:  Psychiatry.  There were a number of U.S. psychiatrists who studied in Russia after the formation of the Communist state and brought Russian psychiatry to the U.S., where it was then taught and spread.

Did psychiatry then carry Communist ideology into Democratic society?  It sounds like a paranoid question.  But the facts speak for themselves.

On October 29, 1945, a few months after the conclusion of World War II, an address was given in Washington, D.C. to a gathering of psychiatrists by G. Brock Chisholm, Canadian psychiatrist.  Chisholm was a top leader in the field, who later went on to found the precursor to the World Health Organization and later presided over the World Federation for Mental Health.  When he spoke, people in his field listened, to say the least.  And in this case, it later became very evident that they were listening and listening well.

Chisholm's lecture began innocuously enough, lamenting the tragedy of war and pointing out that mankind could not seem to keep from having wars.  That was true enough.  He then went into a definition of "maturity", and claimed that most of humanity was not capable of such maturity.  This definition was probably correct -- in part, it was "a quality of personality that is made up of a number of elements.  It is stick-to-it-iveness, the ability to stick to a job, to work on it, and to struggle through until it is finished, or until one has given all one has in the endeavor." 

But then Chisholm's speech took a shocking turn as he detailed what he considered to be at the root of humankind's warring nature and the sole block to its lack of "maturity."   At this point, it is best to quote Dr. Chisholm directly:

"What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything?  It must be a force which discourages the ability to see and acknowledge patent facts, which prevents the rational use of intelligence, which teaches or encourages the ability to dissociate and to believe contrary to and in spite of clear evidence, which produces inferiority, guilt and fear, which makes controlling other peoples' personal behavior emotionally necessary, which encourages prejudice and the inability to see, understand and sympathize with other peoples' points of view.  Is there any force so potent and so persuasive that it can do all these things in all civilizations?  There is -- just one.  The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations and the only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong, the poison long ago described and warned against as 'the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of knowledge of good and evil.'"

He went on to expand on these concepts, but the above is sufficient enough to impart to the reader the brutality with which Chisholm was attacking morality and morals, the very thing which had held civilized man together for some five thousand years, had given him what happiness he had been able to find, and had kept his hope alive. 

Were Chisholm's concepts taken to heart and followed?  History provides the answer.

The new decade of the fifties brought psychiatry to an all-time high.  Psychoanalysis became a fad amongst the affluent and amongst prominent artists, a number of which were even institutionalized.  It began reaching all levels of society.  It was promoted, even jocularly, through all forms of media.

What happened then?  Morality began to falter.  Drug use began to rise.  The American films Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle, both released midway through the decade, show the abject confusion and resulting delinquency and alcoholism becoming prevalent in society, due largely to the moral questions being asked by youth -- and not answered. 

Then came the sixties.  In 1964, a new drug called Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, better known as LSD, began leaking into youth culture.  The drug had been developed as a mind-control tool by psychiatry, and there is evidence it was psychiatry itself who pushed it broadly out into the world.  For example, one of LSD's most vocal and public proponents, Dr. Timothy Leary, was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist.  Another psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, who had been heavily involved with CIA mind-control drug experiments, was, at the height of the "Hippie" movement in 1967, right at the core of it at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco experimenting on the local populous with LSD and even more insidious drugs. 

It can certainly be said that the spread of heavy drug-use, especially LSD, helped give morality the final push over the cliff it experienced by the close of the sixties.

From that point, morality never recovered.  The seventies brought the Disco Era with whole new classes of wide-spread drug use and promiscuity and one-night stands being the order of the day.  This continued into the eighties.  The late eighties and early nineties brought on "raves", taking sexuality and drug use to even greater heights.  And it has all continued to get worse, not better.

Yes, the evidence is overwhelmingly obvious that the decline in morality is directly linked to the decline in happiness.  
Back to top of page

What Can We Do?

If the society has been caved in from the destruction of moral values, it stands to reason that it can be restored, in a large part, by the restoration of at least some of those values. 

This restoration would have to be on a personal level, as no one can enforce a moral code.  This has been seen time after bloody time throughout this planet's history.

These values would also have to be such that they are attainable, otherwise they would just serve to overwhelm and make someone trying to adhere to them feel worse than they already do.  They would have to be non-religious and non-political in nature so as to have the broadest and most basic applicability possible. 

Back to top of page