To get happy isn’t the ultimate reality

A telltale feature of commercial culture is the signs on shops. With an eye to selling products, business enterprises hire public relation companies to come up with eye-catching ads — preferably, as brief as possible. The goal of PR firms is to remap the cognitive neurons in human brains. Experimental psychologists tell us that catchy advertising sells products. The end-goal is our pocketbook.

By decoding the subtle messages that are embedded in ads, social anthropologists claim that they can accurately interpret the cultural narrative of their time. In other words, the ads are a way to gauge the values and norms of our modern cultural system.

For example, on a recent walk down a busy street in my hometown in California, I noticed several signs in a car dealership that read, “Get Happy”. The catchy placards were sitting on top of shiny car roofs in the showroom like rosogoolas ready to be plucked from a syrupy vat.

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Salespersons claim that pitches are successful if and when an ad squares with a customer&’s fantasies about a product — in this case, a car. Such pitches, they say, increase the chance of sales. On my way home, as my mind began to decode the subtext of the message on the cars, I was immediately struck by the curious use of the transitive verb “get” as a modifier of “happy”. In English grammar, “get” is an active verb with several synonyms, including “acquire”, “obtain”, “procure” and “secure”. In short, the implication of the ad is unmistakable: buy the car, and you will arrive at the kingdom of bliss. What a promise!

In our mass culture, human identity arises outside our inner selves. That is, we assume that personal happiness will come from acquiring things. In sharp contrast to that consumerist ideology, Gautama Buddha, Swami Vivekananda, and Fakir Lalon Shah did not speak of happiness as the goal of life. Rather, all three contended that life&’s ultimate goal is to find freedom from suffering. On one occasion, Vivekananda even stated that “as long as we require someone else to make us happy, we are slaves”. If human freedom is a state of “being” rather than of “getting”, the question becomes: what prepares us for the road to freedom, instead of for the road to slavery?

To borrow the title from a book by Philip Wylie, how has a “generation of vampires” commodified humans’ essential nature? One of the significant cultural contradictions of capitalism has been its tendency to place the end-goal of individual self-realisation below the altar of material goods. Increasingly, we are being programmed to hand over our very beings to the pilots of public relations who regulate our philosophy of life from their global corporate cockpits.

Two drawbacks characterise the wholesale sacrifice of values to utilitarian means. First, from a social structural point of view, any system of capitalism can become a monetary god, since social authority is handed over to a select few. Corporate elites inherently suspect policymakers because they fear the latter will take away their power and profits.
Second, in cultural terms, communities that lack civitas — that is, civic norms of obligation and reciprocity — foster greed and selfishness, ultimately graduating into what Jean Jacque Rousseau called the “war against all”. Civitas is a social body of citizens united in a common public purpose. When cultural norms of reciprocity — give and take — break down, citizens become unwilling to sacrifice for the common good. 

Like moths in a treasure chest, selfish means slowly begin to eat away at normative rules of allocation that have been tested over centuries. Today, this kind of diminution of civility speaks volumes about the decay of modern society.

In a prescient essay on “Ends and Means — An Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for their Realisation”, Aldous Huxley noted how citizens were being manipulated to become consumers. Later, after spending the last quarter of his life practicing Vedanta in a southern California monastery, Huxley cautioned humanity against living in increasingly dystopian societies in which “everyone has his own patent medicine guaranteed to cure all the ills of humanity”. For Huxley, modern human beings must transcend the false premise that immediate cognition is “ultimate reality”.

— The writer is an emeritus professor of sociology. 

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