Or, why most people are miserable and deserve to be so
What is happiness? Does anyone deserve to be happy? Can happiness be bought? What's the difference between happiness and misery? Does anyone deserve to be miserable?
No one fully understands the life of another. No one can, merely on the basis of external appearance, judge whether another is truly happy or not. What is happiness? Is it found in external circumstance? For example, are the fabulously wealthy happy? Does the ability to buy whatever you want, whenever you want it, bring you happiness?
Let's consider the life of the latest cause celebre, Anna Nicole. She seduced a man sixty years her senior. She spent a decade fighting his family through the courts for access to the (estimated) 550 million fortune of this jaded, geriatric pervert. A battle she eventually won. Her son, whom she apparently adored, died at age 20, a consequence of the interaction of methadone with a variety of other drugs. What is there in this bare narration of the major features of her life to indicate that she was happy? Or to indicate that she was not happy?
She lived a life of scandal, notoriety; she is reputed to have battled with herself to slim her weight to the point where she would not attract the condemnation of those who equate fat with evil - and to some extent succeeded, though at the time of her death she was nothing less than zoftig, a condition that is on the borderline between the contempt of the weight-Nazis and the adulation of the sycophantic, sexually repressed masses who use the lives of celebrities as a vicarious compensation for their inadequacies and failures.
Her life was, in a peculiarly American sense, a success. She was wealthy. She was famous (mostly for being famous, a condition hitherto unknown in the world, and one associated exclusively with the excesses of American culture). She was, depending on your taste in women, beautiful. Beauty, fame, wealth. The Holy Trinity of American culture. What did she achieve, other than marriage to a fabulously wealthy pervert whom she would not have deigned to look at twice, had it not been for his money?
Nothing. Nothing whatever. In brutally honest terms she was a whore who happened to find a john who, in return for an otherwise impossible sexual gratification, bequeathed her a fabulous fortune. She added nothing to the world but a few hundred pages in the scandal sheets; she took nothing with her to her grave but controversy, and the greed of the vultures who surrounded her corpse as she died. She was, in fact, the perfect heroine of the endless, repulsive, degraded and degrading soap-opera that constitutes American popular culture; which is why her life can, in American terms, be judged an outstanding success. I've no doubt at all that millions of Americans ardently wish to emulate her.
Happiness for most is an emotion. And emotions are nothing if not changeable. Happiness as an emotion is constantly subject to the circumstances in which one finds oneself. It is this changeability that is at the root of the contention of most Christian Pastors that God is the source of the only real happiness in the world. Why? Because God, they say, is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God is not changeable, mutable, or contradictory. Happiness, for the Christian Pastor, is not in human love, nor in whatever is presently defined as 'success', nor in wealth, nor in fame, nor in physical beauty - because all these things are subject to change and decay. Happiness is in the certainty of unchanging, immutable, eternal, steadfastness.
To which I say: nonsense. This is to make happiness the subject of the predicate sameness - and to be the same yesterday, today and tomorrow is, essentially, to be dead. Not only is this so, but to be the subject of an unchanging predicate is to make yourself as essentially unchanging, as essentially dead, as the predicate itself. And as we all know, life is about nothing at all if it is not about change.
Take my own life as an example. I have been, at various times and by my own convinced avowal, an atheist, a born-again Christian believer, a heterosexual, a homosexual, a Liberal 'New Man', a Sadist, a postmodern bundle of conflicting tendencies united by nothing more than the will that I should be a whole rather than a conflicting and conflicted bundle of antagonistic tendencies. I have been a faithful believer in something I now regard as unmitigated nonsense; I have been a Thelemite; I have been, to some degree, a Chaote. And not one of the elements in this endless variety of psychological and material positions has brought me lasting happiness.
What is happiness? Happiness is stupidity. Happiness is being unaware. Happiness is taking things at face-value and never doubting that this 'value' is universally true. No one who thinks can be happy. No one who wants, or longs, or yearns, or desires, can be happy. Retards are happy. Morons are happy. The educationally subnormal are happy. Animals are happy. Because they don't have the mental ammunition with which to consider and evaluate their condition.
What guarantees happiness is the condition of being unknowing, because those who know are faced with an endless succession of choices while being deprived of any criterion of certainty in those choices. Except, of course, the criterion of the popular culture of the day. You cannot be happy if you think. Because thinking inevitably challenges the standards by which most live their lives, and to challenge those standards is to step outside the confines of the world which the majority of us think of as normality.
It is, in essence, to be alone. And humanity, it seems to me, is constitutionally allergic to being alone. We seek each other out, we unite into communities, we create codes, and laws, and systems of morality, that are all, in the end, designed to make the majority of us feel at home with each other, and to penalize the minority that, for whatever reason, cannot accomodate themselves to the perversions of reality, which we create in our communities, that substitute for an independent and critical consciousness.
Happiness, such as it is, is in the end nothing more than an uncritical acceptance of the lowest common denominator in relation to social and individual behavior. To my mind, the happiness of the majority is the misery of the individual. And equally, viewed for what it is, the misery of the majority is the happiness of the thinking individual.
Therefore I say that Anna Nicole was happy, and deserved to be happy, because her life conformed to the standards of the unthinking mass of American society that predicates happiness upon beauty, fame and wealth. I say also that her life was unhappy to the degree that she chose to challenge those expectations, and that she suffered misery in the degree to which she was a thinking individual who lived her own life, apart from those expectations. The one aspect of her life cannot be divorced from the other. She was, as we all are, both miserable and happy in the same instant.
Most human beings, I believe, cannot deal with that contradiction, cannot cope with the tension between these two intertwined facets of human life. I was asked, once, if I was happy. I replied "Yes I am. No I'm not." To the degree that answer is incomprehensible to you, you deserve the misery you suffer.
Why?
Because to the degree that you cannot reconcile the inevitable and unavoidable tension of being human you are, in absolute terms, a failure. And as we all know, failure is intolerable. If you cannot tolerate the intolerable you have failed to recognise what it is to be human, to be flawed and imperfect. And to the degree that you fail to recognise your own imperfection, you are bound to be miserable.
What is it to be happy? To recognise that unhappiness is the condition of being human. What is it to be unhappy? To suppose that there is a condition called 'happiness'.
Or, to be rather more succinct: life's a bitch. And then you die.