A Mirabilary Of The Passing Parade: Happiness
by Cynicus Americanus (December 2016)
A Mirabilary
Signs And Wonders of The Devolution Of Man And The Decline Of Western Civilization In The Time Of Obama In The Age Of the Gnostics In A Republic of Dunces, A Federation of Twits, An Accommodation Of DumbAsses.
And The Rise Of The Criminally Insane Class
The Passing Parade
As Observed by Cynicus Americanus
Wisdom
Happiness
or,
The Elusion Of Happiness
The pursuit of happiness appears not to have made the citizens happy.
Take it where you find it. If all there is, is a smidgen, devour the smidgen. Glean all you can. No opportunity is without recompense if you will only glom onto it. Up with Epicureanism!
Chasing Butterflies?
To hell with the revolutionists! I will take the blessing of the gods even if all are not so blessed as I would have them. I am easy when it comes to happiness.
What has the Good Book to say?
Yeah, in the long run. If not even then, then in the afterlife (more soon).
C S Lewis and Chesterton must have had something to add.
I kinda like that. But You have to be happy first… dead end.
From a Christian source, precisely which, does not matter:
And What Of The Zeitgeist? What Has It To Say About Happiness?
You finish the joke.
The economist regales us with poverty as a source of unhappiness. He puts the threshold in the vicinity of 15 grand (US $). He avers that wealth does not make for happiness, and is as likely to lead to hedonism, which in turn makes Jack unhappy. How long has the man in the street been unaware of that cliché? And where précisely do clichés come from if not the experiences of the men in the streets?
Mr Haidt’s field is far the most fertile. That peculiar study of man (psychiatry) that had sought to make something solid of his misery, now seeks to do as much for his happiness (psycho therapy). It’s called “positive psychology” and is, in a great many respects a breath of fresh nonsense. It may, at least, get your mother and father off the hook for your expensive neuroses.
H is your level of happiness to be determined by the factors:
The S factor alone makes the cynic’s follicles stand at attention. It suggests the head-shrinkers have it in mind to make cynicism a disorder on the order of a featured appearance in the DSMMD. Unsunny disposition dragging you down in life’s sprint? With just a few $250 dollar fifty minute sessions, a couple of nostrums, a pharmaceutical miracle, and their end of the kickback, you will see nothing but the sunny side of the street.
Am I being overly cynical? I believe not.
The function V, brings yet another self-evident point up front. Has it not been known for sometime by most all humans that volunteering makes for good internal vibrations. Who had not known it from an early age? Who had not known it even before the advent of Durkheim and social science. Had Blog the Neanderthal no notion of this?
Post-modern science is mostly a bust. Genome mapping promised more than the full extent of the territory could sustain. Now the neuromancers vow they will tap the brain and drain the human of hate, envy, racism, sexism, anti-conformity, and so on. They then will vigorously rub the nodes of happiness and voila! Happiness.
Feel Lucky Punk?
Which of the gods had calculated that I would be better off in America? Which others deigned to give me a cheery disposition (I swear to it, I have one). Which had blessed me with wonderful parents and siblings? Which of the three circumstances had led me to the greatest happiness? Might I lose it and be left to circling vultures to peck my dead flesh? Could the loss of love or a loved one prompt me to self-destructive despair?
A good deal of modern science is, signally, irrelevant. Not insignificant. It can do much harm. It can make of a human’s sojourn on earth a hellish one. Social scientists are particularly expert in this, but hard science daily makes an unvaluable contribution and may be considered a serious abettor.
Go ahead, make my day, make me happy. Convince my three pound three ounces brain I am handsome, and brave, and honest, devastatingly witty, and a good dancer even though I’m a porker, frightened by my shadow, would cheat young boys of their coins, am as dense as David Brooks, and dance like a three legged hippo. At least I’ll “feel” happy.
Cynicus Americanus Explains It All
All life is a tradeoff. This irks Gnostics, materialists, and that particular ilk of scientist, and very nearly every social scientist that ever drew undeserved breath.
Want to be happy? Choose! And then live with the choice. And don’t complain. Even though you’re not happy you can make others happy by shutting the hell up. More on that very soon.
A small part of a Scenario:
gods: You want to be happy? How happy?
Dexter: I want the happiness what comes of having a beautiful woman as a wife.
gods: You sure?
Dexter: Of course I’m sure. Why? Is there a problem?
gods: You realize of course you will be miserable.
Dexter: How so?
gods: Every moment will be given over to suspicion and the maintenance of your jealousy. Your only happy moments will be those devoted to imagining either her demise or your own.
Dexter: Is there no alternative?
gods: Of course.
Dexter: What?
gods: If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, make an ugly women your wife.
Dexter: That’s not fair!
gods (mockingly): That’s not fair, that’s not fair. Boo-hoo! Whiney little sniveler.
Dexter: Well it’s not. And….
gods: That’s it, you ungrateful poor excuse of a hominid sod. From here on you will find yourself a woman trapped in a man’s body.
Dexter: Will I be happy?
gods: You will be frisson personified.
Dexter: Is that good?
gods: It’s the best.
Dexter: I’ll take it.
Aside:
chorus: Zeus
The End
Every moment is its own discreet entity. Our moments are not etched in stone. Every moment has, forever, impetus. Every moment evinces, forever, an influence. All our moments in time never, ever, never-ever, constitute finality. Life is not a timetable where every moment that’s passed is drenched in amber, hardens, and preserves a fossil. Life is not so ruthlessly finite, nor so recklessly inefficient. It has not a script, it has not acts, there is no “The End.”
No part of our lives is not at the beck and call of another part. All parts are reciprocally associative. What percentage of the cells that make us as we are today, have not the inherent ability to replicate and make us tomorrow what we were not yesterday? The parts of our lives are more complex than the parts of our biology.
The Happy Moment (finally!)
The Plot Thickens
As things are, the facilitators happen to also to be the dead among the dead. When, in the moment of truth they could not tender a happy memory worthy of a production, they had not been processed and moved along, but became facilitators of the process for others after them. Each may yet have redemption should they recall a happy moment worthy of memorialization – on appeal.
During the gathering of the old man’s records, his Facilitator discovers, to his astonishment, that the old man’s wife was his own lovely betrothed when she was a young woman. He finds her records and discovers the young woman’s happiest moment. It was the moments of their promise of engagement, on the very same bench in the very same park that had provided the old man his happiness. Just as with the old man, it was another’s happiness that now provided the facilitator with his own long sought after moment of happiness.
The stories of the recently deceased are all wonderfully subtle. Moments, clearly not great in scope, become so big that the few of them of one poor soul’s existence become greater even than an epic. If you can be moved by a man sitting alone on a bench in a moment of sublime happiness you have all it takes to happily love this mortal coil and call yourself human.
He was not happy and considered himself a failure until he had learned he had once made someone very happy.
* * *
In the spirit of “Happiness” and the season, I wish all the staff at New English Review and the Iconoclast, and all its readers a very Happy Christmas.
____________________________________________
To comment on this article or to share on social media, please click here.
To help New English Review continue to publish original and thought provoking articles like this, please click here.
If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Cynicus Americanus, please click here.