On the pursuit of happiness, nationhood and a new politics

Apparently only ten percent of our happiness is entirely out of our control:

According to research studies, demographic factors such as age, race, gender, education, marital status, and income explain about ten percent of our happiness. For example, if we're married, we're a little happier than single people, if our income is middle-class, we're happier than lower-income earners, and if we're female, we're about as happy as males but experience both our positive and negative emotions more intensely. So ten percent of our happiness is due to these deomgraphic differences.

About 50 percent of our happiness comes from our genes, according to a well-designed study of twins by Tellegen and colleagues. But interestingly, Bruce Lipton, a cellular biologist, and many others have shown that our environment can control the expression of our DNA. That means our environment, not our genetics, control who we are. When we change our environment, we can control the 50 percent of our happiness that is related to our genes.

The remaining 40 percent of our happiness is totally in our control. We can introduce activities, people, things, mindsets, and beliefs that make us either happy or sad. It's up to us.

In conclusion, there's only ten percent of our happiness that we can't really control. We have an opportunity to significantly increase our happiness.

More here on this subject - as might be expected - from the American Happiness Association.

In the current climate, I do wonder, however, if it is so easy to influence our levels of the aforementioned state. I was at a Labour Party meeting the other day where one of the people who spoke said - quite accurately - that at the moment everyone was just making everyone else depressed. And by everyone, he meant the whole country - not just the Party.

This then led me to wonder: are there unhappy countries? Is there such a thing as a clinically depressed nation? Are there places which, by their very nature, their very being, manage to weather the storms of life's miseries better than others? Are there places where, whatever the circumstances, whatever happens, their peoples can only really focus on the downsides of life?

If happiness depends so much on environment - if even the genetic side of things is channelled by the surroundings we find ourselves in - can a country, its leaders, its followers and its inhabitants make each other irremediably sad?

I do feel that perhaps this is what is now happening to our country.

Is there any chance we can do something to change the matter? Is there any possibility that we may have to see part of the economic health of a nation in terms of its overall mental health?

Is it all likely that a nation may, itself, need to be diagnosed in terms not of the sum of its parts but, rather, as a whole which stands as an indivisible soul? And do we now need to attend to the needs of that soul?

When astonishing leaders like Kennedy and Obama and Blair manage to energise a whole population are they not responding to our mental needs just as much as our economic? And are these needs not communal, collective and shared rather than individual and discrete? Should we not now factor in the mental wellbeing of that body, that state, which we form a part of? A nation, in a way, like the theory of Gaia, is a closed system that surely responds internally in entirely predictable ways. To emphasise the economic to such a degree - as modern politics, of both the left and the right, clearly does - is surely to paint only half the picture of this strange creature we call nationhood.

We need to look beyond our current horizons. To define ourselves only in terms of those factors we are generally oppressed by is to create and replicate the very unhappiness that will guarantee our continued oppression.

Freedom depends on our own will to make things happen in the face of injustice just as much as it depends on getting the money you need to do the job right. If we determine that only money, only the economy, can make us well, we will never be well.

We will never be happy.

I want something else of this new politics we should surely aim to create. I want something more than simply a painful slo-mo replay of the old ground rules. I worry that a Marxist analysis of why I am suffering ties me down and limits my freedoms just as clearly as does capitalism - especially in their monolithic and fearsome oppositions. Just as an atheist is defined by an opposition to an entity he or she fails to entirely outwit, so a Marxist - to me, anyhow - seems not to go far enough. We should go beyond what the ruling classes say is important in life; not abjectly take on board the underlying assumptions and work on the basis that their assumptions - not mine - are there to be tussled with.

And we should aim to do precisely that - outwit, not simply oppose.

I don't want my future to be defined in terms of my economics. I want it to be defined in terms of my humanity.

I'm a human being, not a unit of production. But I'm not looking to own my own productive resource because production is not what I want to do with my life. I don't want to look to the future or dwell in the past. I want to live with friends and their moments and my wellbeing.

I want to be happy, not abused.

And that's what I want this new politics to support.

Everything else would be just so out of shape and wrong - as out of shape and wrong, indeed, as capitalism has clearly proved itself to be.