Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

It's sad, but I'm sure there's a certain kind of person who's gloating over this. As in "Haha, those assholes wanted happiness, but my awesome capitalism wins everytime!1!! Join us at the bottom, suckers!!1!"

Personally, I kinda feel like people probably have perverse psychological impulses that cause us to make ourselves unhappy and discontented unless there's certain specific external constraints to control those impulses. Modern technology, in its quest to remove all constraint, eagerly removed the necessary ones.

It's sort of like fitness: way back, there was no such activity as "exercise," because everyone got enough as a matter of course (e.g. by farming, hunting, walking everywhere). Now no one has to do any of that, "exercise" is a new chore that requires willpower, so we're all getting fat.

Any chance you were raised Catholic?

No. I'm not Catholic and I wasn't raised as one either.

Imagine a Star Trek existence where any meal imaginable was just a replicator away and a holodeck could enable one to be anybody, have anybody, and do anything - any time and for seemingly no or next to no cost.

Many people seem to think this would be a utopia, but I suspect on reality there'd be a mass epidemic of suicide, drug abuse, and so on.

It's not about having external constraints, but about having a purpose in life. Of course one could create a purpose but endless hedonism is far more tempting. The history of ancient emperor's, who could have or do essentially anything, and how they approached life is a clear example of both sides of the coin. The only difference between Aurelius and Calligula is one created an artificial purpose for himself, and the other simply indulged in the pleasures of life as an end in itself.

Maybe the "free stuff" is not there. My country has a free healthcare, but every month I have to pay hundreds on mandatory insurance. I do not even have a GP or dentist, non are taking on new patients!

The availability of experience does not cause directly the perception of vacuity, nor does it hinder internal solidity - they are independent.

    There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

However Keynes goes on to say the "only" option is to hitch our wagon to these psychopathic criminals, regardless of where their rocket toboggan is going, without consideration of alternatives, nor of Regulations (such as mentioned by Adam Smith) or even holding higher standards of conduct to the Mammon-addled, in order to better blunt some of their more charming aspects.

I always use hard drugs like heroin as an example of this.

If the gov made it all legal tomorrow, are you going to run out and buy some?

Probably not, right?

How do you know that people in Buthan were actually happy?

FTA:

> Every five years, surveyors fan out across Bhutan measuring the nation's happiness. The results are analyzed and factored into public policy.

Or are you asking whether the results of the survey can be trusted?

Star Trek had Starfleet.

Whether they can be trusted. And how they compare to other nations.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm generally pro-legalization. Particularly of consumption, which when criminalized, makes things worse for everyone.

That being said, heroin is one of those things that are genuinely dangerous to try. It's so easy to become addicted to the stuff, and the costs to society are so high to get an addict clean, that one has to at least consider the pros and cons of prohibition. In an ideal world, all consenting adults should have the free choice to ruin their life if they wish, and perhaps in a post-scarcity society this is what we should allow everyone to do. But while resources are still limited, heroin addicts (and by extension opiates) create a lot of negative externalities. Personal freedom is all good, but where does it end? Should a person be free to ruin the lives of others when they cannot get their fix other than to rob people? And when someone is getting withdrawal symptoms, they have no more free will, they'll do anything to avoid that suffering.

It's tricky to say what would be the marginal increase in heroin users if it was easily available. I agree with you that rational people with well balanced lives and a strong safety net in terms of family and finances are unlikely to go out and buy heroin. People who are bored, in a bad spot, depressed, etc... might just go out and do it if all it takes is a short walk to the nearest shop.

I went to Bhutan and looked up the surveys. The consensus seems to be they are happier than most countries at their (low) gdp per capita but probably not doing as well as the leading rich countries like Denmark etc.

I think the Bhutanese are a bit cynical about 'gross national happiness' which was invented on the fly by one of the kings.

I can't edit my comment now, but I think it's totally uncalled for that the GP comment is now grayed-out from down-votes. There was nothing wrong with the question!

Keynes was a great economist but I think he was a bit off on human nature there with:

"The love of money" .... "semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease".

People like making money. Not just weirdos but most people. My gran used to sell things at a stall and give the money to a Donkey charity, Keynes himself made money in the markets and used it to build a theater in Cambridge. It's a normal thing and not usually pathological.

Getting close to Mother Theresa reasoning there in my opinion.

Replicators a la Star Trek tech and availability would save a lot of lives and bring happiness to billions of people.

I don't think pursing happiness in itself is a noble goal, especially for a society at large. The article talks about some sort of happiness metric which is based on the standard of living and such. It just seems like Bhutan is sticking to a traditional bhuddist agrarian society, and not pursing some metric of happiness directly.

IDK about capitalism, but people seem to like it because it creates a dynamic society with internal competition, which is the kind of society young people want to immigrate to.

Young people don't want to live in a "utopia" where everything has been solved for them. That's the problem described in the article.

I remember reading someone who classified activities like exercise "surrogate actions" or something, but their point was that it was bad only because they aren't useful in modern society but that the impulse to pursue challenge like this is natural.

> How do you know that people in Buthan were actually happy?

Honestly, that's kind of irrelevant to my comment. My points were to 1) decry a kind of obnoxious schadenfreude and 2) posit that our society is likely to lead to unhappiness because of it's focus on individual choice and technology to make various things "easier."

I do respect Bhutan for trying to take a different path, and I suspect they erred by not excluding enough (e.g. allowing the cancer of social media).