manufacturing happiness 1

[quarrel]

“Minazuki” is the Japanese name for the month of June. It’s also the name of a traditional Japanese confection made and eaten on the 30th of June to celebrate making it halfway through the year and bring luck for the second half. It’s cut into triangles and glazed to resemble the large chunks of ice that are pulled from underground storage that day for the Emperor — the only person allowed to have ice in the summer back then. Common folk can’t have real ice, so they make a candy that resembles ice and enjoy that instead.

Dan Gilbert is a psychologist with a theory that people have a natural, reliable, and mostly unconscious ability to manufacture a sense of satisfaction with, and a positive attitude toward, whatever life circumstances they find themselves in. Thus all humans attain unintuitively similar levels of happiness despite even drastic differences in fortune or social status.

Given that discovery, what’s the real reason it’s wrong to oppress people or abuse power? There are rights, sure. But to the best of my knowledge — and I am glossing over centuries of deep philosophical thought here — rights are axioms. Saying “it violates their rights” is scarcely better than “it’s just wrong”. What other reasons are there? Retribution? The fact that that person and/or his allies can physically resist you or exact revenge after the fact? Sure, that’s quite a practical reason. But the oppressed don’t always have that power. (In fact, they rarely do, which is how they ended up oppressed.) It’s cruel? Well, besides being as academic as “it violates their rights”, this needs to contend with Prof. Gilbert’s “they’ll get over it” theory. The peasants are perfectly capable of fabricating surrogate ice, and they’ll like it just as much. Go ahead and take the real stuff.