Happiness is Not Important, Apparently.

One thing that everybody can agree on is that quality of life can be measured in happiness. It’s the only thing one could ask for, they say. Ones ability to enjoy their life, and separate themselves from the hang-wringing mentalities that infect so many of us, is something that should be admired. Not so, says an increasing number of left-wing commentators and adherents.

It’s an argument that I’ve started to notice, and most recently a caller into the John Moore show on CFRB reminded me of it. Then this morning, I had a discussion with somebody at a local coffee shop here in Toronto’s Bloor West Village, where I received the same attitude.

“Do you know what really bothers me?” he says, “all of these middle-class people making $40,000 a year, living out in the suburbs thinking their lives are so great. They actually think because they have a house and two cars in the driveway, that they are living on the up and up”.

“Are you aware that you are evil?” I asked him. He responded only with a blank stare.

“You resent that people have found relative happiness in their lives. You would seek to convince them that they should be depressed,” I said to him straightly.

He then announced his theory that the only reason they were happy, is because the bourgeois and corporations had brainwashed them into thinking that they were happy, when they really are not.

I’ve only recently started to pay attention to this mindset among left-wingers, but now that I’m really looking at it, I realize just how evil and shallow some people are. How can you resent somebody for finding happiness on a modest income? What the hell is wrong with these people? Is their head so far up their ass that they can’t realize that exactly what they are attacking is what makes this country one of the best places in the world to live?

These people will only accept the happiness of others if it’s happiness in the context of what they deem to be an appropriate way of living. The fact that Joe Anybody doesn’t complain about working 8-hour days, 5-days a week, and enjoys his weekend doing home improvements and going out to dinner with his family, bothers these people deeply. They don’t want these people to be happy. They want to remind them that they live a meager lifestyle, and they are slaves to capitalism, and that they should be resentful of our society. I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty evil way of thinking, in my mind; they want to take away your happiness.

The philosophical leader of this syndacalist way of thinking, Noam Chomsky, is equally evil. These people have no solutions for the problems they criticize. They seek only to lower the spirits and bring grief of the average person, in order to satisfy their own personal insecurities.