The Bliss of Delusion

It is a common theme in novels depicting dystopian societies to portray people of the future as people who lack awareness and control of their lives and their world, especially when these dystopias have evolved from countries in the post-industrial western world. It is not a thing difficult to imagine. In Fahrenheit 451 there is a ban on books, individual thoughts and philosophies, and especially on thinking too deeply about much of anything on the grounds that it makes people antisocial and unhappy. In Brave New World the ignorance is deeper and more ubiquitous; any real emotions, personal attachments, art, literature, or time spent alone long enough to contemplate such things—all are viewed with horror as signs of demented, antisocial, and corrupt minds. In 1984 the ignorance is a survival mechanism because if people were to become too aware of the corruption, the lies and the cognitive dissonance they suffer daily, they would be tortured and/or erased. All of this is to maintain stability, peace, and—with the exception of 1984—the happiness and prosperity of the people. It is the pursuit of happiness that makes us numb, unaware, and more distantly connected to our own lives.

America, more so perhaps than any other nation in the world, is obsessed with happiness. Ever since the Constitution was drafted, the “pursuit of happiness” has been on Americans’ minds, but following the end of World War II it has become an utter fixation; yet, what’s so great about happiness? Almost all of the greatest (and admittedly some of the worst) leaders, artists, and geniuses in history were not happy. In fact, many of them suffered spells of depression: Abraham Lincoln, Einstein, Voltaire, Van Gogh, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Beethoven. It is a lack of satisfaction that leads to the greatest works man has ever created, because it forces people to be aware. Necessity is the mother of invention, but if you are unaware of a problem because you are happy with the world as it is, then no inventions or innovations will come forth. Happiness is just another way of intoxicating oneself and not having to cope with problems. It is a means to avoid thinking, which seems to be a common goal amongst most members of the human race. There is not a single society on earth that completely disallows the ability to cease being aware, to bliss out, to find happiness. The Puritans had religious ecstasy and fervor, Buddhist monks have enlightenment, primitive tribal societies gather local herbs for “consciousness-expanding” uses, and every nation in the world seems to have its own spin on alcohol. Humanity is obsessed with not thinking, and thanks to that little clause in our Constitution, Americans have the god-given right to that obsession.

The “God-given” right to the pursuit of happiness leads to a further problem amongst Americans: the arrogant assumption of entitlement. The generations born after World War II were a strange new cultural creed, and the children in such large numbers became isolated from the adult world. No longer would adults be a sufficient force to control, mold, and/or fully educate these children. In my opinion it was the baby boom which led to the views western society has on adolescents. In many other cultures, there is not even a word for “adolescent” in the way that the western world uses it to describe teenagers. Children in such societies skip the awkward and angst-ridden adolescence so commonly depicted in America, and simply become adults. I am a firm believer in the recent evidence (which I ran across in Scientific American: Mind’s article “The Myth of the Teen Brain”) that suggests “teenage angst” is a fiction created by western society and its expansion of childhood until even twenty-year-olds are often called “kids” or at least denied the title of “adult.” Childhood is time spent in school, and/or feeding off of one’s parents. When one is a child, one can easily ignore the world and waste time on mind-numbing practices like television, video games, Youtube, and other time wasters. Childhood has been infused with such longing and nostalgia by modern society as to have been completely distorted; children are not meant to work, to feel sad, to be hurt, to have to worry, and/or to be denied what they want, because these are the best years of their lives while they are cute and innocent and must be sheltered from all the badness of the world. No wonder immaturity is on the rise, because if childishness is associated with such blissful lack of awareness of the world and careless lack of awareness of life experiences, then who would not want to return to it or even to simply linger someplace nearby? Lack of awareness, or as it is more commonly referred to, “ignorance”––is bliss.

Ignorance, blissful thing that it is, becomes addictive from a very early age. Everything that makes people happy (or "blissful") has the potential to become an addiction. Within the last few decades the advances in research and understanding of the human brain have allowed scientists to see what parts of the brain light up when people feel happy. When a cocaine addict is made to be happy by taking a hit of cocaine, a burst of dopamine and other happy-making chemicals are released in the brain, causing bits of it to light up. A surprisingly high number of these same bits, associated with memory of powerful emotions and primitive urges, also light up when a person looks at a photograph of the person they are in love with. Love is one of the most commonly accepted means by which to achieve happiness, and it works on the human brain like addiction. It is not a stretch to deduce that the bliss people feel/associate with love is similar to the bliss that westerners associate with childhood. When they act out a habit they picked up as a child, their brain on some level sees it as a good thing associated with the happiness of childhood, thus making the habit (even if it is harmful) as hard to break as any other little addiction. Every time a human brain thinks the same thought, deduces an answer with the same logic, or causes the body to perform the same action, the neurons involved in each repetition become less and less likely to stop connecting with the same neurons, and the more and more that path of neuronal activity is solidified against changing; thus, the more a person does something, the more likely they are to do it again. Interestingly, this coincides with the first definition of insanity: “performing the same action over and over again and expecting a different result.” If a person’s habit is to enjoy not thinking, it is very unlikely that they will pursue “vital experience” in their lives if the other option is to watch the dreamy images of distant lives that dance across their television screens. Don't you just love modern culture?

Aside from the glorification and extension of immaturity via western society’s chronic childhood nostalgia, the recent advances of entertainment, and the development of cities and suburbs also cause a propensity for Americans to lack awareness of their world and control over their own lives. Entertainment is almost always blamed for intellectual depreciation, but often in an improper manner. Often it is stated that videogames rot minds, but in truth as technology moves forward the joystick is becoming an important tool in surgery, military missions, and even space exploration. The problem is television, but not necessarily because the material on television is corrupting the youth and desensitizing them to violence. It is rotting their minds because they do not have to do anything to watch television. Video games have been proven to actually improve the brain in some ways because it engages the mind and forces it to be active. Television requires looking, listening, and waiting mindlessly for commercials to pass. People do not absorb much more information from this than they might from watching the movements of melted wax floating about in a lava lamp. It is merely mesmerization, not really intake. When people are truly engaged in television is when the quality of material really matters. Why do people become obsessed with melodrama, with celebrities, with American Idol? Because they are lonely, because they live in a big city where all things are impersonal and no one is trustworthy, or because they live in the suburbs and they are afraid that their neighbor might be a serial killer or something. The people on television are safe to get attached to, safe to love or hate, and lonely people who watch them and feel so many emotions from it that they cannot get in the real world outside become obsessed with the most meaningless of dreams whilst during the day they trudge back to the work machine and their little cubicles where they seem to work and work like hamsters running in wheels, and they go nowhere. Their lives are out of control because awareness is too painful, and they drown that possible pain in dreams and forgetfulness.

I do not believe the possibility that America will become George Orwell’s 1984 world of fear, constant war feeding internal peace, lack of privacy, and the constant presence of Big Brother ready to snap people up and brainwash them in order to make sure that they can properly distort their reality in order to fit the constantly changing histories the government creates. I also do not believe that Bradbury’s Fahernheit 451 impersonal world without real emotion and full of carelessness will enslave America any more than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World of drug-ridden society with baby decanters, rigid social caste based on intelligence, brainwashed children, constant orgies, and emotionless and impersonal lifestyle. All three dystopias show the realistic ability of ignorance to enslave the human mind, to destroy the “vital experience” that is what makes human life human, but they all fail to see quite why. It is not that fear will induce it as Orwell suggest, or intellectual purging as Bradbury stresses. Huxley strikes closest in Brave New World’s consumption- and happiness-based society, but he misses the reason that happiness enslaves people. Happiness is how people forget they are not alone, and often the first place people find happiness is with other people. The connection between one human and another is vital, and strikes at the emotional core of our brain and our nervous systems. Without such connection, people cannot be given enough drugs and encouragement toward promiscuity to avoid inevitable depression, listlessness and even degeneration of physical health as well as mental. Hell may be other people, but after millions of years of evolution we as humans cannot be anything but social without serious damage to our brains or disorders like autism and schizophrenia, which are not helpful to making people functional in society. The problem arises from the fact that just because people are social, does not mean they are good. People hurt other people, even when they try not to; it is another part of human nature that we are helpless to fight. Pain is inevitable, and thus happiness is a logical goal; it helps us cope with pain, it makes sure that we do not spiral down into self-destructive depression, and it numbs us against painful experiences.

Obsession with happiness, and thus love of ignorance and constant quest to avoid awareness, is part of American culture. It is why people love reality shows. It is why people find it so easy not to think. It is why people often cannot make the mental leap from ignorant childhood to become responsible adults. It is how people cope with life that is as Shakespeare described, “a tale told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is why people live in boxes and persuade their doctors to prescribe them antidepressants even when often they do not need them, but think the magic pills with help them take the edge off and be happier. Happy is normal. Happy is good. Right? No. Life is not a happy form of existence, and to be happy with it is to be truly strange and possibly even demented. Happiness is what blinds us to the suffering of others and of ourselves. No wonder today’s Americans are arrogant, no wonder they feel entitled to have their problems taken care of by others, no wonder they cannot appreciate what they have! We have no experience, and each generation is more sheltered from it than the last. The World Wars are distant, blurry history, the Cold War even blurrier as textbooks tiptoe around "potentially offensive" facts, and instead of the media teaching us of things so much of the world hides, the television flashes us images of the Playboy mansion. Riches, mansions, MTV cribs: that is the happiness we think we want, but only after we’ve watched the next episode of American Idol. Surely it will wait, because work doesn’t sound very fun just now, and we are entitled, after all, to happiness. It’s the American way, right?

Right?