Complaining

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain.

— Julian Baggini

Complaining is my hobby.

Sure, I could quit my hobby, but only by replacing it with an equally engrossing one.

Woodworking comes to mind.

But then I'd have to invest in a lot of fancy lumber and tools and find a place in the house to build a workshop, whereas I'm already fully equipped to complain.

Unlike woodworking, complaining also has the advantage of being a portable hobby.

I can complain any time, anywhere, about any subject you can imagine.

Despite all the possible subjects, I tend to limit my complaints to a finite set.

You could call me a specialist.

My perennial subjects are other drivers, bureaucrats, banks, phone trees, blister packaging, and auto-fill.

When it comes to complaining, many people have a much wider range than mine.

Their complaints are panoramic.

They will complain about summer days, newborn kittens, gourmet meals, world heritage sites, and virtuoso performances. 

When the market goes up, they'll complain that it was down.

When the movie was fabulous, they'll complain that it was too long.

When the line is short, they'll complain that it's moving slowly.

For these people, complaining is less a hobby than an occupation.

We call them pains in the ass.

Complaining as an art form has a spotty reputation among thinkers.

Aristotle called it "wailing" and said it was a disagreeable habit of women, servants, and "soft" men.

Seneca said it was pointless—like trying to evade taxes.

Kant thought complaining was undignified and unworthy of a gentleman. "No true man will importune a friend with his troubles," he said.

Eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison thought that complaining signaled a character defect. "It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect," he said.

But complaining has its defenders, too—especially among contemporary thinkers.

"Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be," Julian Baggini has said.

When it's not simple whining, Baggini points out, complaining can take the form of protest, often the basis of important social and political reforms.

Complaining can also relieve common miseries.  

As social creatures, according to Kathryn Norlock, we need to complain, if for no other reason than to "make the unchangeable easier for complainers to bear."

This "cathartic" variant of complaining not only provides us a much-needed psychic safety valve, but underpins many of the greatest passages of world literature, as Emily Shortslef has observed.

Through an "array of rhetorical modes and literary forms of complaint," Shortslef says, writers through the centuries have elevated complaining from mere kvetching to tragedy, giving readers the chance to contemplate the "inherent vulnerability of humans to loss and injury."

Just imagine if Job, Hamlet, Ahab, Yossarian, or Portnoy had been told never to complain.

Our Ingrained Responsibility to Stay Informed

Most people do not really want freedom,
because freedom involves responsibility.

— Sigmund Freud

It has become quaint in American to believe in responsibility.

You can avoid taxes, dodge military service, abandon your children, snub your neighbors and rob retailers—all while shirking any responsibility.

You can cheat your employer, scam customers, rip off investors and fleece donors—all while shirking any responsibility.

You can even become president and shirk any—and all—responsibility.

But as Americans, I believe, we do have one ingrained responsibility, a responsibility that we cannot shirk: to stay informed.

It's a civic and a moral responsibility, no matter how we eventually might use it, to gather and digest accurate information.

To do any less—to remain content with a litany of lies, inanities, and propaganda—is to remain a chump, a sucker, an idiot, and an ignoramus.

We have far too many of these sorts of nincompoops—the so-called "low information citizens"—for our nation's wellbeing.

I for one am disgusted with them.

They're like spoiled little kids, afraid they'll be frightened or saddened by fairy tales that haven't already been read to them a hundred times or more. 

Jack Nicholson-style, they can't handle the truth—and are willing to forego freedom, rather than acquire and accept information when it runs counter to their fantasies.

Unable to discern fact from fiction, they're allowing their lives—and, worse, the lives of their fellow Americans—to be ruled by profit-seeking charlatans.

And even worse yet, these dunces are blind—oblivious to the real-world consequences of their willful ignorance. 

By supporting charlatans, they're unwittingly accelerating the erosion of human rights and civil liberties—rights and liberties our forebears struggled to gain for us. That blindness represents the very apotheosis of irresponsibility and poor citizenship; and an assured dead end for our democracy.

But asking these dimwits to "connect the dots" between their ignorance and its outcomes—to accept blame for the suspension of our personal freedoms—is a waste of time and energy. 

I'd sooner ask my cat to solve a quadratic equation.

Above: Battle Flag by Andrew Wyeth. Tempera on wood. 30 x 22 inches.

What the Frock?

I have little respect for Southern Baptist pastors.

Tarot card readers have better credentials.

But when they preach the kind of abject hate Pastor Dillon Awes preached last Sunday, my disrespect turns into contempt.

Marking the start of Pride Month, Awes told his flock that every single gay "should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head."

Hitler-like, he called the mass executions "the solution for the homosexual in 2022."

Realizing his solution might sound a tad harsh, Awes deferred to Scripture.

"That’s what God teaches," he said. "That’s what the Bible says. You don’t like it? You don’t like God’s Word."

I never realized the Ancient Israelites had guns, or shot sinners in the back of the head. 

You learn something every day.

Awe's boss, Pastor Jonathan Shelley, backed his underling's bloodthirsty solution, insisting, "This is not murder but capital punishment."

In case you're wondering, Pastor Awes' Stedfast Baptist Church occupies a strip mall in Watauga, Texas, a suburb of Forth Worth. 

The pastor, of course, doth protest too much.

His obsession is no doubt an instance of reaction formation. 

We'll soon hear, in the manner of so many clergymen, that Awes has been arrested on charges of pedophilia, a crime that, in Texas, earns you a 99-year sentence. 

Fine with me.

As Hunter S. Thompson said, "Anybody who wanders around the world saying, 'Hell yes, I'm from Texas,' deserves whatever happens to him."

Pastor Jonathan Shelley further justified Ames' venomous sermon by claiming all gays molest children.

"It is our duty," he said, "to warn families of a real threat that exists in our society."

Therein lies my concern. 

Were these two morons not influential, they'd be irrelevant—nothing more than two out-of-touch Texas snake charmers.

But they are influential.  

My fear is that scapegoating gays for all of society's problems will become a core GOP tenet; and Pastor Ames' "solution," a GOP policy.

Womb with a View

Claiming to be a victim is not a sign of virtue.
It's a strategy for narcissists.

— Adam Grant

The day after the news broke that the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, Stephen Colbert quipped, "Congratulations, ladies, your decisions are being made by four dudes and a woman who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is a rom-com."

That pretty much sums things up.

In this week's edition of Crisis Magazine, walking womb and resident wacko Samantha Stephenson argues that the two of three Americans who want the Court to uphold Roe, by disagreeing with the Court's decision, are "persecuting" pro-life Catholics. 

Poppycock.

Pro-life Catholics are not the victims of persecution; they're narcissists claiming to be so. If they want dominion over women, they should move to Afghanistan.

Not content with martyrdom, Stephenson further argues that Roe is "deeply damaging to women," because the right to an abortion is damaging.

"Abortion is not an equalizer," she says, "but an assault."

Again, poppycock.

Has any female patient ever said she felt assaulted by an abortionist?

Stephenson grounds her arguments on an essentialist claim: women are by definition child-bearers. 

Given this, any law that suggests otherwise must be "oppressive" and "coercive."

Roe not only sanctions abortion, Stephenson says, but makes it "increasingly difficult to opt out of its use." 

The law's real purpose, she claims, is to compel women to have abortions and "forgo childbearing."

"Instead of fighting for the freedom of women to be women—whose fertility and desire for motherhood are integral parts of their identity—abortion advocates insist that our liberty can only be found by muting our fertility and forcing our healthy bodies to mimic those of men," Stephenson says.

And there you have it: essentialism at its finest.

Women are by definition mothers. 

Roe compels them to be otherwise.

Therefore, Roe is wrong.

Essentialism has a long history of abuse by narcissists like Samantha Stephenson.

In fact, two and a half millennia of abuse.

Essentialism has been used to defend religious wars, slave-trafficking, colonialism, pogroms, and segregation. 

Now it's defending the overturn of Roe.    

Essentialism holds that everything has an essence—a set of attributes that make it what it is.

In other words, for any kind of thing, there exists a set of attributes all of which the thing must have to be correctly called by its name.

A man, for example, by definition walks on two legs, not four; uses tools and language; and is born, grows old, and dies. 

Those attributes define a man—and, by extension, every man. Every man shares in common what we call "human nature."

Ethical essentialism insists there are "essential rules" (absolutes) by which we live. 

The moral absolutism Samantha Stephenson favors claims that a law like Roe is wrong absolutely, because it contradicts a natural law and victimizes a whole class of citizens.

I don't buy that.

Women—non-Catholic ones, anyway—aren't just walking, talking wombs.

They're citizens. 

Roe protects their rights; it doesn't restrict them.

People like Stephenson who cry victimhood simply feel entitled.

In her case, she feels entitled to have children—three so far.

That's fine.

But she wants a trophy for it.

Narcissism engenders her feeling of entitlement. 

And narcissism makes Stephenson an aggressor and predator.

Not quite a wolf in sheep's clothing—more like a psycho in sackcloth.

What an insult to women's dignity.

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking is typical of children up to five,
after which reality begins to predominate.

— American Psychological Association Dictionary

Every day I encounter magical thinking.

It makes me cringe.

Here are three examples I encountered in only the past 24 hours:

• An executive coach told a young realtor, "If you just go to networking events, you'll be a millionaire." That's malarkey. 
  
  
• A keynote speaker at a conference told businesspeople, "When followers love what you love to do, the money will follow." That's also bull.
  
  
• A woman angry about last week's Supreme Court decision Tweeted, "Since women have no contractual rights, I need no longer pay my student loans." That's foolishness.

Our society is hip deep in magical thinking—the kind that ruins people's lives (remember when Trump said household bleach could cure you of Covid?).

We've always been surrounded by magical thinking—witness the 1990s' Beanie Babies Investment Craze—but things seem to have worsened of recent.

Magical thinking—the belief that your thoughts, words, or actions can shape events—assumes a causal link between the subjective and objective.

Of course, sometimes your words and actions do shape events. (Just tell your boss his hair plugs are obvious; or cross the street without looking.)

But most of the time events have a mind of their own.

Since the advent of science in the 16th century, we've tended to associate magical thinking with infants, religions, and "primitive" cultures. 

But magical thinking pervades popular culture, too.

Freud blamed magical thinking on the Id, which seeks favorable outcomes without regard to the "reality principle."

Reality aside, maybe magical thinking isn't magic at all, but only an instance of wishful thinking—the error in judgement known to philosophers as the "ought-is fallacy."

The ought-is fallacy assumes that the way you want things to be is the way they are, no matter the evidence.

Examples of the ought-is fallacy include the belief in angels and the healing power of crystals; the belief that trickle-down economics works; the belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election; the belief that hard work pays off; and the belief that no one is evil.

The next time you're confronted by someone's wishful thinking, ask him, do you believe in magic?

Then He Goes Stage Right

There's an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing.

— Ricky Roma in "Glengarry Glen Ross"

Perhaps because I've spent so much of my life selling and working with salesmen, I've long thought that David Mamet's 1984 play "Glengarry Glen Ross" is one of the the greatest American plays of the 20th century, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

"Glengarry Glen Ross" depicts the dark side of capitalism, where scrappy salesmen use wile and cunning and ride the backs of hapless suckers.

Though in the minority, I've seen salespeople who are like that. They earn the profession a bad name.

For its realism, “Glengarry Glen Ross" is a masterpiece.

 

But what's up with Mamet?

As reported by The New York Times, the playwright has gone loco, becoming an ardent backer of the conman extraordinaire: Donald Trump.

Now, a playwright backing libertarian causes is questionable enough.

But backing the conman Trump?

It's loathsome.

America's greatest 20th-century playwrights—O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—were all unequivocally liberal.

Mamet is the odd man out.

And odd he is—or has become.

Appearing on Fox News and HBO recently, Mamet has been mouthing absurd, right-wing theories, the kind you'd expect from an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He claims, for example, that all schoolteachers are pedophiles, keen to "groom" young children for sex; that ruthless Democrats "staged" the outbreak of Covid-19; that the media is "statist" and was planning to foment an armed rebellion had Biden had lost the election; and that Broadway has "canceled" him—even though a revival of Mamet's 1975 play "American Buffalo" opened on Broadway a week ago.

Mamet also claims Trump did a "great job" in the White House, and only lost a second term because the election was "questionable."

Mamet first mouthed many of these theories in magazine essays which he's collected under the title Recessional, a book The Wall Street Journal called an exercise in "paranoid didacticism."

The once-liberal Mamet's volte-face isn't new. 

It dates to 2008, when he announced in The Village Voice that he was "no longer a brain-dead liberal." 

In that essay, Mamet defined liberals as "idealists;" conservatives as "tragedians."

Liberals, he said, are "perfectionists" who want to achieve absolute morality; conservatives are realists who just want to "get along with others."

We live in a divided America, Mamet said: "one where everything is magically wrong and must be immediately corrected; and the other made up of people reasonably trying to maximize their comfort."

"I realized," Mamet concluded, "that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace."

Fair enough. Some of us thrive in a marketplace. And none of us likes fussy moralists—unless we're ourselves fussy moralists.

I myself don't prize equitability or diversity over justice and liberty. 

But Mamet's recent rants tell me he has gone off the rails. 

Totally.

And that's a shame.

He's given America many literary gifts.

But in the third act he's ruining his reputation.

Duty and Disgust

The pain of others creates a reason for me to help them.

— John Searle

Please give now to Save the Children's Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund.

You have a duty as a human being to do so and it's a positive way to express personal disgust with Putin.

I said only yesterday that the proper response to the war news was to affirm your love for another.

I forgot for a moment there are Ukrainians suffering at Putin's hands—and that we can do something concrete about it.

Your gift to Save the Children's Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund represents real altruism, an act that is dutiful and grounded on both reason and empathy.

So please give—you can pat yourself on the back for your reason and empathy.

There's not a shred of those in the unhinged KGB agent.

Not a shred.

Above: A child enroute to the Slovak Republic two days ago. Photo by Daniel Leal.

Note: Friends ask, with so many charities requesting my money, which should I pick? Save the Children has a proven track record of financial probity, spending 86 cents of every dollar on services to kids.

Freedom

I am my liberty.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Surrounded 24/7 by unapologetic victims, it's easy for us to forget that freedom is everyone's birthright.

For celebrants, Christmas is the season of charity and compassion—or ought to be.

But both virtues assume victims require our philanthropic gestures, when, in fact, they're free: free to resist injustice; free to work for change; free to run away; free to cheat, rob and steal, if need be; free to rebel; free to displace you, or me, or whoever oppresses them.

Journalists, priests and fundraisers prey upon our compassion at Christmas, just as retailers prey upon our guilt and greed.

They can't help themselves.

But no one preys upon our connate freedom.

It takes an Existentialist to do that; to remind us we're born free and remain free every moment of our lives; to remind us no one is born a victim—or even becomes one unwillingly. 

We choose the mantles we wear.

"Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings," the guru Ram Dass said.

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you," the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said.

Remember compassion this Christmas; but remember freedom, too.  

Apologies

We are so busy winning we can't concede our mistakes.

— Aaron Lazare

To err is human.

But to apologize—?

“Never apologize, mister" John Wayne said. "It’s a sign of weakness.”

That seems to be the code of most men. (Women, on the other hand, "live lives of continual apology," as Germane Greer said.)

An apology, according to psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, is really a reparation: you've wronged someone, and you owe them your admission of guilt.

Apology is a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek apologia, literally "sprung from divine speech" (apo + logia). An apology was the pronouncement of a god, channeled through an oracle. 

To the Ancient Greeks, an apology wasn't just manly; an apology was godly.  

The English word apology first meant a "defense" or "self-excuse." Samuel Johnson defined it as such in his dictionary, adding "Apology generally signifies excuse rather than vindication, and tends to extenuate the fault, rather than prove innocence."

It gradually came to mean an "an admission of error." In other words, a guilty plea.

Like John Wayne, a lot of Americans feel no urge to apologize.

And they're sick of other Americans apologizing: apologizing for genocide and slavery and imperialism; for witch trials and lynch mobs and McCarthyism; for redlining and segregation and the caging of immigrant children; for strip-mining and gas-guzzlers and deforestation.

Apologies aren't manly.

Apologies are for losers.

But one form of apology worth considering is the apologetic.

An apologetic was an early Christian's defense of his faith.

Apologetics—short essays—were published at a time when the Romans would execute a Christian merely for refusing to worship the pagan gods (a lot were executed, and often in grisly ways).

Of the hundreds of written apologetics, On the Testimony of the Soul, penned in 198 AD by Quintus Septimius Tertullian, stands out as an especially persuasive one (Tertullian was a lawyer).

In the apologetic, he argues that there's little difference between Christians and pagans, when you consider that both believe in God, demons and souls.

Both, Tertullian says, admit expressions like "God help us," "God bless you," and "God wills it." 

Both, moreover, admit that souls can become corrupt—that demons exist who can capture and bend souls to their will.

And both admit, finally, that souls experience an afterlife; some a pleasant one; some an unpleasant one.

Given these common beliefs, Tertullian says, it's easy to see that Christians and pagans are bound by their humanity, and that their differing faiths are inborn and don't derive from religious discourse, but from the "testimony of the soul."

"Every race has its own discourse, but the content is universal," Tertullian says.

"God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God's judgment is everywhere. The awareness of death is everywhere and the testimony of the soul is everywhere."

The testimony of the soul provides the evidence clinching Tertullian's case: pagans shouldn't execute Christians; for, in doing so, they only snuff themselves.

We'd be wise to remember with Tertullian that we're all one people, united by the fact that we all have a soul; and that, sometimes, apologies are due.

"When you forgive, you free your soul," says the writer Donald Hicks. "But when you say 'I’m sorry,' you free two souls."

Monsters

If he is indeed a monster, we have created him.

— John D. MacDonald

A Santa Barbara surfing instructor drove his young son and infant daughter to a ranch in Baja California earlier this month and murdered both of them with a spearfishing gun. 

The children

He was arrested at the US border on the way home.

A QAnon follower, the surfing instructor told police he killed his kids because they were infected with serpent DNA inherited from his wife and would grow up to become "monsters." 

He had to save the world from them.

Friends and associates described the surfing instructor as a "loving family man," although he "believed some weird stuff."

There's no need to ask, who's the real monster?

But who's the monster's maker?

I'm reading John D. MacDonald's 1960 novel The End of the Night, a chilling tale of a crime spree that Stephen King once called "one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century."

Part-way in, one of the narrators (there are several) ponders the reasons why an otherwise admirable man can kill in cold blood, often without a rational motive.

It's too easy to say he's a "monster."

"A monster?" the narrator asks. "If he is indeed a monster, we have created him.

"He is our son. We have been told by our educators and psychologists to be permissive with him, to let him express himself freely. If he throws all of the sand out of the nursery-school sandbox, he is releasing hidden tensions. We deprived him of the security of knowing know right and wrong. We debauched him with the half-chewed morsels of Freud, in whose teachings there is no right and wrong—only error and understanding. We let sleek men in high places go unpunished for amoral behavior, and the boy heard us snicker. We labeled the pursuit of pleasure a valid goal, and insisted that his teachers turn schooling into fun. We preached group adjustment, security rather than challenge, protection rather than effort. We discarded the social and sexual taboos of centuries, and mislabeled the result freedom rather than license. Finally, we poisoned his bone marrow with Strontium 90, told him to live it up while he had the chance, and sat back in ludicrous confidence expecting him to suddenly become a man. Why are we so shocked and horrified to find a child's emotions in a man's body—savage, selfish, cruel, compulsive and shallow?"

MacDonald wrote that 61 years ago, but could have done so yesterday.

The surfing instructor is currently being held without bond. 

A GoFundMe page asks for donations for his wife.

Atonement

Slavery is the next thing to hell.

— Harriet Tubman

My teachers, the Jesuits, have vowed to raise $100 million to benefit descendants of the slaves they once owned, according to The New York Times.

The pledge represents the largest effort by the Catholic Church to atone for buying, selling and enslaving Blacks, church historians told The Times.

Jesuits in America relied on slave labor for more than three centuries to sustain themselves, and sold slaves to finance the operation of schools, including Georgetown University, the nation’s first Catholic college.

“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said the Rev. Timothy Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. 

“Our shameful history of Jesuit slaveholding in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back.”

The Jesuits have already contributed $15 million toward the $100 million pledge, and have hired professionals fundraisers to bring in the $85 million balance during the next five years.

The money will be disbursed in the form of scholarships, cash payouts to the old and infirm, and grants to organizations devoted to racial reconciliation.

In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the Jesuits believed slaves, though humans, were valuable assets. Buying and selling them was considered moral.

But some Jesuits objected.

Fr. Antonio Viera, for example, argued that anyone who enslaved others "enslaved his own soul," and that anyone who sold slaves "sold his own soul.

"The price for which they are sold is sin," Viera said.

One Man's Meat

Cows are delighted.

University of Tokyo researchers have grown beef in a lab, reports Nature.

While only a tiny morsel, the steak-like object paves the way to large-scale, lab-grown beef production.

Scientists' past efforts to grow beef in a lab have produced only a mince no discerning consumer would eat.

But the Tokyo University team has matched the real thing, growing cow cells in long strands that resemble muscle fibers.

When the researchers stimulated the cultured cells with electricity, the strands contracted, the way real muscles do.

“We have developed steak," lead researcher Shoji Takeuchi says.

Takeuchi's team plans next to introduce fat and blood into the morsel, "to make the meat more realistic."

No one has tried eating the product, because the University of Tokyo's bioethics committee has yet to approve that step.

Commander in Cheap

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

― Dashiell Hammett

As The New York Times reports, Donald Trump has been cashing in.

Sixty lobbyists, corporate men and foreign agents have put over $12 million in  Trump's pockets by buying memberships and booking events at his properties.

Trump has responded in kind, granting favors that can only be fulfilled by a sitting president.

If you pay Trump $250 thousand for a Mar-a-Lago membership, according to the Times, you get to meet him and ask a favor. It's likely he'll respond by summoning one of his stooges and directing them to take care of you.

Vice versa, if you see him outside the golf club and mention you want a favor, Trump will point out you'd better reup your Mar-a-Lago membership pronto.

Trump has proven he doesn't want to govern, only rob the Treasury.

But a penny-ante $12 million?

Trump claims he's worth billions but, instead of combating Covid-19 or joblessness, he spends his time making phone calls to dun members. 

What a cheap crook.

"He's corrupting the presidency for peanuts," writes Daily Kos. 

"The world at his fingertips, the man spends most of his time obsessing over how he can use the presidency to boost golf club memberships."

Klepto

Donald Trump has always put America first and
he has earned four more years as president.

— Nikki Haley

THANK GOD the four-day pageant of parasites known as the Republican National Convention is nearly over. I no longer have to shield my eyes.

I don't know about you, but I can't take another montage of lies, slurs, fantasies and fascist propaganda.

Trump's stooges have a vision of America, alright: it looks just like Putin's Russia. A kingdom of kleptocrats.

And Trump is the Klepto in Chief.

Trump's niece would have us believe Trump is a psycho, and he is. But he's also a klepto. Big time. Bigly. HUGE.

He needs four—better twelve—more years to amass America's greatest fortune.

Bezos, Gates and Buffett—the schmucks—had to work to acquire theirs. Trump, as president, can just steal his.

Trump's convention's over. Now his campaign begins.

Queue the violin.

NOTE: September 8 marks the 60th anniversary of the theatrical premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, movie history's Number 1 thriller according to the American Film Institute.

Christmas in July

We need a little Christmas, right this very minute,
candles in the window, carols at the spinet.

— Jerry Herman

Happiness among Americans has reached a 50-year low, according to a new survey by the University of Chicago.

Although the nation's prospects were bleak, by comparison we were happier when JFK was shot and when the Twin Towers fell.

We're abjectly unhappy now—and worried our children and our children's children will never be happy, as well.

But do Americans deserve happiness? I'm not sure many do. 

Its pursuit might be, as Jefferson believed, an "unalienable right;" but what have Americans done lately to earn happiness? Stockpiled more guns? Denied hungry families food stamps? Locked migrant children in cages?

And what is happiness, anyway?

The Enlightenment thinker Kant defined it as "getting what you wish for."

Simple enough.

But there's a problem: what do you wish for? A pink Cadillac? The Hope Diamond? A seat on the stock exchange? A guest spot on The Bachelor? A house at the beach? A mansion in St. Louis?

"While every human being wants to attain happiness," Kant said, "he can never say decisively and in a way that is harmonious with himself what he really wishes for."

You cannot know what to wish for—what would make you truly happy—because you cannot know what the future may bring. "Omniscience would be required for that,” the philosopher said.

Kant's advice: don't chase after happiness; instead, pursue virtue. 

Act morally—be of good will—and at least you'll become happiness-worthy. You'll find that you never treat other people as the means to happiness; you'll treat them, instead, as fellow human beings. And when you treat other people as fellow human beings, it ceases to matter whether what you do, or don't do, increases or decreases the supply of happiness in the world—yours or theirs. All that will matter is you've added to the world supply of good will—and perhaps made yourself a bit more worthy of being happy.

Acting morally is like pausing to buff a diamond you can never own. 

"A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, it is good in itself," Kant said. "Even if by utmost effort the good will accomplishes nothing, it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something that has full value in itself."

Done anything virtuous lately?

If not, maybe, like most Americans, you don't deserve happiness; don't deserve Christmas in July.