Part One. Some Facts About Switzerland
1. The Swiss rank high on the HI. They rank higher than their neighbors, the French and the Italians. They are more reserved, less volatile. Less volatility always contributes to more happiness.
2. Some words used to describe the Swiss: Punctual, efficient, wealthy, clean, humorless, laconic, circumspect, civil, clean (some of the cleanest toilets in the world), austere. Taciturn (quiet), reticent (reserved), demure (shy), insouciant (doing something difficult without a fuss with a nonchalant flair). This is called the quality of insouciance.
3. One cause of Swiss happiness: They quell the impulse for envy. This means there are rules: No bragging, especially about how much money you make. Flashing your money in Switzerland is a sign of poverty. One trait is frowned upon in Swiss culture: braggadocio, the compulsion for self-aggrandizement, flapping your wings like the alpha condor and letting the world know you're the Apex Predator. That's an American trait.
4. The Swiss are even keeled. Eric Weiner calls this boredom. But research supports the Swiss: Better to live in the middle range than to have highs and lows. Volatility does not lead to happiness. Having a steely reserve is far better in the long-run.
5. In the seventeenth century in Basel, there was a prohibition against public laughter. Now there is no need for such a law because the people have internalized the desire to repress their emotions and this has led to increased happiness. Again, this is very un-American. Americans are for huge emotional displays to the point of exhibitionism of their emotional dramas on reality TV shows.
6. For the Swiss, joy comes from nature, the Pastoral, the Alps. For Americans, joy comes from gadgets.
7. Slovenly hedonists would prefer Denmark; anal-retentive prudes would prefer Switzerland. I know which country I would prefer. I would feel more comfortable living in a culture that helps me impede my indulgent behavior. That would be Switzerland.
8. The Swiss are fond of rules: For example, it’s illegal to flush your toilet after 10 P.M.
9. Switzerland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. One possible reason: Being around happy people makes our own unhappiness even more unbearable.
10. The Swiss have a high degree of trust for one another.
11. The Swiss have a lot of patience. And they are affluent.
12. The Swiss consume high quantities of high-quality chocolate and there is a connection between chocolate and happy brain chemicals.
Part Two. What is envy and why is it dangerous?
Envy is the resentment and bitterness we have when we perceive that others have a better situation than ours.
The causes of envy are a sense of entitlement, the Darwinian competition gene, narcissism, immaturity, and an empty life, which compels us to gawk at the lives of others. Also some cultures breed envy more than others. A culture, like the United States’, that encourages bragging, ostentation, and bling will stir envy. A culture like Switzerland’s, that encourages modesty and privacy will discourage envy.
The effects of envy are obsession, all-consuming bitterness, self-pity, and in extreme cases criminality. “I’m gonna get mine.”
Part Three. Twelve Common Fallacies or Misguided Notions About Happiness
1. Happiness Quest Fallacy: Happiness can be attained by searching for it. In fact, the search for happiness is usually a self-centered, selfish enterprise and is therefore doomed to create even more unhappiness. Most people who seek gurus, psychotherapists, life coaches, self-help books will inevitably find their lives in more ruin and despair than before.
2. Dominance Fallacy: Happiness can be achieved through Darwinian dominance over others, such as making yourself better looking than others and accruing “better” things, will make you happy. In fact, exercising your impulse for Darwinian dominance, focusing on self-aggrandizement and ostentation, and turning your life into one big boasting session, and animating all your talk with “look-what-I-got” braggadocio makes you obnoxious and therefore lonely and loneliness is a clear indicator for unhappiness.
3. Chimera Fallacy: Most of your cravings and longings are for what you believe will make you happy are not focused on reality at all but on a chimera, an idealized phantasmagoric representation of life that entices and tantalizes you, but at the same time always eludes your acquisition. In other words, you are often in love with the idea of life more than life itself. You are more in love with the idea of certain car, or the idea of marriage, the idea of home ownership, or the “perfect” body than the realities, which in comparison are always banal, corrupt, grotesque version of the ideal that animates your imagination. Related to the Chimera Fallacy is the Pulchritudinous Fallacy, which states you can not be happy and worthy of love until your body is stunning, beautiful, perfect and embodies the word pulchritude.
4. Perfection Fallacy (perfection is a chimera, see above): The fallacy of perfection says you cannot be happy unless you have the perfect body, the perfect car, the perfect job, the perfect spouse, the perfect house, the perfect wardrobe, etc. No perfection can be obtained and the process of trying to attain this perfection makes your anal-retentive (or is it the other way around?) and therefore obnoxious and repellant. Further, this perfection quest makes you afraid to live because you fear subjecting your perfect things to real life will ruin them. Thus you cover your furniture in plastic and keep your cars garaged. Your house is more like a mausoleums or museum than it is a real house. Your life is a stage to others and yourself.
5. Pulchritudinous Fallacy: I won’t be happy unless people love me and no one will love me unless I am the embodiment of pulchritude, exquisite, rarified beauty. Please see Jon Hamm in episode of 30 Rock in which he plays someone of pulchritude and tell me if he’s happy.
6. Hedonistic Fallacy: The fallacy of hedonism states you cannot be happy unless you are always augmenting your pleasure. To live is to experience pleasure, or so says the hedonist, until he finds that his pleasure quest becomes an obsession and an addiction and that his numbness to stimulation compels him to inflate his hedonistic stimulators to greater and more dangerous levels. The final outcome of hedonism is always nihilism, the sense that life means nothing, addiction, emptiness, numbness, and boredom.
7. Effortless Fallacy. This fallacy says you cannot be happy unless your life is completely absent of conflict. You no longer have problems, conflicts or crises to deal with. Life with all its responsibilities can be such an inconvenience, after all, and therefore you cannot be happy until you relieve yourselves of these inconveniences. Of course, in doing so we retreat from life itself and regress back to the Womb, the state of Unconscious Slumber (through drugs, alcohol, TV?) and find that we have become spiritually dead.
8. Narcissistic Fallacy: You cannot be happy unless you persuade the whole world that you’re not only right about things but that your lifestyle (the way you eat, dress, your musical tastes, etc) is so superior to everyone else’s that the whole world should conform to your ways or at the very least aspire to be like you.
9. Spiteful Fallacy: You cannot be happy unless you have exacted revenge. Someone has wronged you and you cannot find satisfaction in your soul until you spite this offender. Your desire to spite the person is so obsessive that you’re willing to “bite your nose to spite their face.” Your spite will blacken your heart and eventually kill you.
10. Vindication Fallacy: You cannot be happy unless you prove to your ex boyfriend or ex girlfriend that you are “a winner” and “were the one” and that they “blew it” by dumping you. Or you must prove to a parent or an authority figure that they were egregiously mistaken to predict that you would fail in life. Your whole existence is centered around going back to your ex or your parent and rubbing their nose in your “success.” Of course, you’re acting like a petty egotist and petty egotism evidences woeful unhappiness.
11. Intellectual Fallacy: This chimera (see above) states that you cannot be happy until you’re worthy of others’ admiration and love through intellectual prowess. Through your extensive research, you become the “highest authority” on some subject or other or you are simply plain smart and you therefore deserve the admiration, love, and respect of others. You may feel that your happiness is contingent on a PhD or the publication of a book or a guest spot on CNN or some such nonsense. In fact, intellectual pride will only make you obnoxious, lonely, and therefore unhappy.
12. Melancholy Fallacy: You can’t be “deep” and “soulful” unless you’re sad, melancholy, constantly afflicted with Weltschmerz (sadness for the world). This fallacy speaks to a certain type of self-aggrandizement which compels you to take yourself too seriously and as such see yourself as “deeper” than others.
Part Four. Journal Entry
Write about 3 happiness fallacies you or someone you know has. We'll share them in class.
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