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Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

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271 points nradov | 2 comments | 18 Nov 24 13:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.438s | source
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tivert ◴[18 Nov 24 14:35 UTC] No.42172599[source]▶
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.

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1. tolciho ◴[18 Nov 24 15:09 UTC] No.42172988[source]▶

    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.

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2. tim333 ◴[18 Nov 24 18:16 UTC] No.42175203[source]▶
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.