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Does being happy prove you're right?

Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby deadwhitemale » March 2nd, 2009, 3:37 am

Does being happy mean you're right, and does being unhappy prove you're wrong? Let me refine that further: does being relatively happier prove you're relatively righter, or vice versa?

I vote no. I get tired of people claiming most or more people on their side are happy or happier, therefore they must be the right side. Let's take Rush Limbaugh, for instance. I am probably more conservative than he is on a lot of things. But one thing he keeps saying (which may really represent a certain strand of "conservative" thought) that bugs me -- and I just heard him say it on TV a few minutes ago -- is "Conservatives are naturally happy. It's their nature."

Wait, I think I've got the exact quote:

"Conservatives are naturally happy. We seek happiness. We pursue it. It's part of who we are. So what can you do? Live your life."

According to this strain of thought, most often expressed by Limbaugh, conservatism is happy, peppy, perky, eternally optimistic, cheerful and positive-thinking, with an unshakeable can-do attitude permeating everything they do. :??: :thinking: o/` Don't worry, be happy. o/` o/`Happy,happy, joy-joy o/`

Holy cow, I'm worried a lot, and I can't rmember being happy since maybe 1966. I'd call Tolkien a conservative in some sense, and that doesn't sound much like his "long defeat" idea.

Limbaugh seems to think liberals are all gloomy and fearful and pessimistic and negative and so on. I seldom get that. In general they -- or at least the well-off ones -- seem to be having most of the fun. :brood: Well, I admit that they tend to crash lower after flashing higher, where we conservative types tend to plod or slog along on a fairly even and predictable keel, usually, except in especially "interesting times," such as now. I expect many of us to find ourselves outlaws and fugitives soon enough, or maybe just raggedy hobos.

I don't think believe humn beings are deterministic mechanisms -- "clockwork oranges" or that someone's political ideology is determined by or is a function of his or her basic personality type or temperament. I know there have been "studies" that purported to show that, but I think they're bogus, junk science. In one in particular, they defined "conservative" in such a way as to support the results they clearly wanted to find, to support a circular argument.

I don't even think you can tell which religion is true or truer by how relatively happy its adherents are (in this world anyway). There was some famous quote of C.S. Lewis about just that issue.

For that matter, I don't think someone's record collection or taste in records tells you much of anything about their politics, temperament, social class, sexual preference, or intelligence. I don't even own a record player now, and you could have always measured my intelligence as well with a dip stick as by what records I owned, or what radio station I had my car radio tuned to at any given moment.

Frankly, music never occupied the place of significance in my thinking that it seems to for many or most people. I never looked to music to mold and shape my world view. If you were trying "to dissect me with some blunt little instrument," you'd do better to look at what books (including comic books) were on my shelves, and what movies I was especially devoted to.

DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby JRosemary » March 2nd, 2009, 9:34 pm

Last edited by JRosemary on March 2nd, 2009, 9:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby john » March 2nd, 2009, 9:44 pm

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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby JRosemary » March 2nd, 2009, 9:46 pm

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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby archenland_knight » March 2nd, 2009, 10:03 pm

Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby deadwhitemale » March 3rd, 2009, 4:57 am

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby Robert » March 3rd, 2009, 4:44 pm

Well I have always found that gauging Happiness is much harder than it looks as well. For I don't think that one can rightly measure happiness by merely some temporal catalog. If we are eternal beings, I would think that Happiness must be measured by not only in which time span is being gauged as well as in whom it is placed.

Clearly, Happiness is a good thing. Perhaps it is the flower from which the roots and stems of joy-as Lewis spoke so eloquently on-blossom from. And I think it not the insignificant thing we may think it is. Anymore than the petals of the rose to the plant are. However, one can not look upon the thorn ridden plant and state that it is no flower. Petals come and go, but definitions are foever. It is 'knowing' and 'hoping' and having 'faith' that gives us the joy that will ultimately bring forht the pleasantries of Happiness. At least this is my view on the matter. Whether one is conservative, Liberal or even Fascist (which I feel I am closer to than the former two).
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby Leslie » March 4th, 2009, 1:03 am

I'm going to give an answer to the question without reference to the discussion about Rush Limbaugh, since I've never heard him speak, and all I know about him is that he is conservative (which seems to be putting it mildly).

I think we just have to look around to see that happiness has little or nothing to do with being "right" in one's ideology and beliefs (and it could be argued, although I won't do it here, that "right" and "wrong" have little meaning when applied to ideology). We have happy atheists and happy Christians. Unhappy conservatives and unhappy liberals. I don't think happiness is some sort of reward for thinking the right answer to big questions. Happiness derives chiefly from one's physical and mental health. Having emotional or mental problems does not mean that one is wrong, any more than having the flu means that one is wrong--it just means that one is not well, and needs healing.

True, one's mental health can be affected by one's worldview. Take for example a person who witnesses exploitative child labour in the factory of a 19th century "classical liberal", and who wants to bring about change so that the exploitation may end. This person may feel anguish over the plight of the children and be made unhappy by that. So one could say that this person's "modern liberal" or progressive worldview, which wants government to make laws banning the exploitation of children, has made him unhappy, whereas the "classical liberal" factory owner sees only the "right" working of the free market and the profit made by it, and is happy.
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby deadwhitemale » March 4th, 2009, 3:52 am

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby Leslie » March 4th, 2009, 11:42 pm

"What are you laughing at?"
"At myself. My little puny self," said Phillipa.
--Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby Coyote Goodfellow » March 5th, 2009, 3:08 am

This conversation actually reminds me of Perelandra--where the Green Lady says

"Every Joy surpasses all others. The fruit you are eating is always the best fruit of all."

And it always struck me that part of being happy is attaining the innocence, being able to enjoy eating a peach without having to decide if it is better than an apple or not. It's sort of like where Francis of Assissi says that perfect joy consists in knocking at a door to ask for hospitality on a snowy night, and being told that there is no room and you must wait and freeze in the snow. I think part of happiness means not having to evaluate and compare what you have to what others have, or even yourself at one moment to yourself at a different moment.

Of course there is another side of happiness: feeling superior to others: economically, socially, or morally--which may be the type of happiness Rush is talking about.

I think if you can achieve Francis of Assisi perfect Joy in all situations you have tapped into something. If you achieve the happiness of smug superiority, you are probably right about something (if you're successful economically you must have figured some system out) but I think you're missing out on something else.

And the thing I'm realizing as some one who used to be more liberal--is that being unhappy about other people's suffering does not in itself make them any better off. If it motivates you to become involved in specific ways so that you understand people's experience in context rather than merely as statistics--that's good. But I don't think being unhappy about the lives of people you've never met accomplishes much more than making you unhappy.

The other thing is that our bipolar ideas about liberal and conservative in some ways come out of the French Revolution and everybody sitting either on the left or the right side of the chamber. When the US Constitution was written, people thought the primary divides would be geographic: large state small state, North and South. Most real political thought is much more complex than can be shown on a single axis. Rush Limbaugh is one style of conservative--but I was just reading an article by John Derbyshire, talking about how he's trying to conserve a different set of things. And the type of Conservatism envisioned for instance by David Cameron in England sounds very different from the Republicans in the US.
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby Stanley Anderson » March 5th, 2009, 3:25 pm

…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby Leslie » March 6th, 2009, 3:56 am

"What are you laughing at?"
"At myself. My little puny self," said Phillipa.
--Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby archenland_knight » March 6th, 2009, 10:34 pm

Romans 5:8 "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
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Re: Does being happy prove you're right?

Postby deadwhitemale » March 7th, 2009, 3:36 am

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)
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