On happiness

“In psychoanalysis, the betrayal of desire has a precise name: happiness. When, exactly, can people be said to be happy? In a country like Czechoslovakia in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, people actually were in a way happy: three fundamental conditions of happiness were fulfilled there.

1. Their material needs were basically satisfied- not too well satisfied, since the excess of consumption can in itself generate unhappiness. It is good to experience a brief shortage of some good in the market from time to time (no coffee for a couple of days, then no beef, then no TV sets)…

2. A second- extremely important- feature: there was the Other (the Party) to be blamed for everything that went wrong, so that one did not feel truly responsible- if there was a temporary shortage of some goods, even if a storm caused great damage, it was ‘their’ fault.

3. And- last, but not least- there was an Other Place (the consumerist West) which one was allowed to dream about, and even visit sometimes- this place was just at the right distance: not too far away, not too near.

This fragile balance was disturbed- by what? By desire, precisely. Desire was the force which compelled the people to go further- and end up in a system in which the vast majority are definitely less happy.

Happiness is thus- to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms- not a category of truth, but a category of Being, and , as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent…

In a strict Lacanian sense of the term, we should thus posit that ‘happiness’ relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness fully to confront the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we ‘officially’ desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the hapiness of dreaming about things we do not really want…

Conservatives are therefore fully justified in legitimizing their opposition to radical knowledge in terms of happiness: knowledge ultimately makes us unhappy.Contrary to the notion that curiosity is innate to humans…Jacques Lacan claims that the spontaneous attitude of human being is that of ‘I don’t want to know about it’- a fundamental resistance against knowing too much. Every true progress in knowledge has to be bought by a painful struggle against our spontaneous propensities…”

“Happiness after 11 September”, Welcome to the Desert of the Real by Slavoj Zizek (2002)