Quote:
Originally Posted by schola  No, no a thousand times no!
From a personal development perspective, government mandated "happiness" for all completely contradicts the ideals of individual growth and personal achievement. It operates on an internal level. Anything the government could do happens on an external level.
How could the government be responsible for something as personal as your own happiness? Are you really so helpless that you are willing to give up responsibility for your own internal state?
How could they measure it? As a psychology student, I will be the first to tell you that psychologists don't have a clue as to what happiness is or how it should even be defined.
One of our gifts is the wide range of emotions we can feel. Even suffering has its own lessons and meaning.
What you are proposing is that we take away people's freedom to experience emotion. |
I'm not saying the government should say "happiness or else..." but should merely take steps to promote happiness. Whether we like it or not the policies of our governments impact us and our internal state. For example this
psychological study shows the link between a countries economic well-being and subjective well-being (happiness) levels. So if, for example, a country was to be going through a recession (hint hint) the happiness levels of that countries citizens would be expected to fall in accordance with the poor economic performance. So poor economic policies promote depression (depression being the opposite of happiness). Why not promote a little happiness too?
In fact there was
a study done recently to rank every country by their happiness levels. (Denmark came first, US came 23rd)
And you can measure happiness, you should take a look at positive psychology (its a rather new field of psychology so I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it, I know they don't have any classes on it at my university) and in particular the work of Dr. Seligman if you're interested in the psychology behind happiness. If you want to see a few tests designed by Dr. Seligman to measure an individual's happiness levels you can check out
my post here, and if you want to see some of the research on happiness there is actually an entire journal devoted to the study of happiness called the Journal of Happiness Studies. You can probably get access to it through your school.