James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 26, 2011
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A WRITER WRITES:
Jim, The definition you formulated for "happiness" suits very well another concept, "God".
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REFERENCE:
I didn’t answer but wrote to a friend, “This says a lot about the writer, I'm sure you would agree."
This was then posted to my readers.
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A WRITER FROM GERMANY WRITES:
Jim,
Is "God" always "happiness”? - Just read the bible!
Manfred
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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
I hope you have arrived safely back in Germany after visiting your children and grandchildren here in the United States during the Easter Season. I also hope they are all well and that your grandchildren already miss their grandparents.
I have been remiss in sending you my missives during your visit. I say this because I sense that you have not had a chance to read what I've already written in an abbreviated form on my prelude to a longer piece planned on happiness.
You see, Manfred, I don't look at "happiness" in the syrupy, romantic way it is popularly presented. It is for this reason that I've pledged myself to write a piece on the concept of happiness as I appreciate it. There is a plethora of books currently out on happiness, which I find strangely pusillanimous and superfluous in terms of my take on happiness.
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The writer who makes reference to God is responding to what I have said thus far on happiness. I must admit he is correct in that my definition of happiness might be a definition of "God" for him, as my thesis is that happiness is only engagement, or a state, not something that can be defined or grasp by social characterization. Happiness, in my view, is not conditional on what may or may not be perceived by others, but is internally directed.
We have erroneously attempted to define happiness as a group norm, when it is only an individual construct. Again, "God," or whatever "God" means to us, individually, fits this test.
We have reached the crossroads between social character and society where society ensures a certain degree of conformity from the individual.
We in the West have described this in democratic terms, which we see being embraced in collisions in Northern Africa and the Middle East. My sense is that it has been triggered by the disparity in income made apparent by the arrival of a new revolution, the Electronic Age.
But again, if they think happiness is part of the modality, or that seeking this embrace happiness is likely to be found, they have failed to study our history. The West has never found "happiness" in the conventional sense as the West has been in turmoil over the last four hundred years.
This is not to say they don’t have a right to freedom or justice. I'm only implying that no place is more schizophrenic than the West, if you believe those who study such trends. I don’t see happiness as schizophrenic.
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We in the West have had a "mode of conformity" as the interchangeable expression with social character. I don't mean to bore you with history, but the happiness that is often defined as "optimism" or "going with the flow" fits this definition but contradicts the trend over the last four or five hundred years.
We have been engaged in revolution since the Middle Ages in terms of social conformity and social character, which has seriously disrupted core family values and cohesiveness on the one hand, and the clan-oriented culture and tradition of society on the other.
We in the West have gone through the revolution of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the Political Revolutions of the 17th, 18th and 19th century, and now the Cultural Revolution and the Electronic Revolution as the world continues to change decisively, and we as individuals are left pretty much to fend for ourselves in these transitions and transformations.
I didn't mean to write so much early this morning but I have just a couple more thoughts, which tangentially relate to happiness as engagement.
Demographically, we in the West are changing. The population in the United States over the past ten years grew by 27 million; of that amount 15 million were Hispanic. We are moving from a white-English-speaking nation to something else.
Society is always behind the curve adjusting to these implications, and it seems that the society will not let us down again in that sense.
Society will continue to enforce its conformity model of social character through society dependence on traditional direction. It does this by having us internalize a set of goals sensitive to the expectations and preferences of others. There is value in this but it fails to have a winning calculus when it comes to happiness, which is not a collective of buzz words, or an other directed phenomenon, but an inner directed tendency that is experienced only through engagement.
We have been moving to inner directedness all my life despite corpocracy, which are the secular version of the church and the religion of finance of civil society. Corpocracy remains dominant although I find it anachronistic, and corporate moguls and their minions atavistic.
The books to which I refer to in my piece address us in corporate speak to the letter without apparently realizing they do. Scholarship has been reduced to a book contract.
I perhaps don't know the bible as well as you do, but I agree God in the bible is not always a happy camper. In fact His psychological gyroscope often indicates it should be returned to the shop for repair. This instrument is not always rational, but what is?
The psychological gyroscope, which I refer to in my writing as having a moral center, does delineate a balance between life aspirations and the buffeting world of life demands. It will never be off its fulcrum if we are engaged in work or some activity that is spiritually enhancing despite the madness around us.
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My thesis, and it is consistent in all my writings, is that as much as we are a product of society and controlled by its constructs, we can only find happiness by engaging in some kind of activity or work that is love made visible. Happiness is not a thing, but a state, and the state demands some type of involvement of ourselves in that state however many nervous breakdowns the world and society and those around us may experience.
God doesn't have anything to do with scarcity psychology or abundance psychology, or even waste. Like Nature, He simply is.
We don’t have that comfort. We have to make choices. It is my thesis as well that the degree to which we have or lack happiness is determined where we are, now!
It is also part of my thesis that ninety-nine percent of us are precisely where we expected to be, or chose to be by either forcing circumstances or drifting to that precise location.
We cannot blame happiness or our lack of happiness on fate or destiny or bad luck. Ultimately, those unhappy have never made the effort to be happy. They believed it was a thing, a large income, winning the lottery, being famous, and having scores of friends, or a great career, when it is none of these “things,” because it is not a thing.
When we are engaged, no matter our state of health, wealth, celebrity, brilliance, success, or the lack of same, we are in a state of happiness, and in that sense I can see where my reader sees this a definition of God.
Be always well, and thank you for writing.
Jim
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