Imagine that you are stuck in your office cubicle at 3am. You are the only person there because you are building a computer model for a client of yours who needs it the next day. After the latest batch of fixes, you run the model again. Previously, it has taken a few seconds to run, but this time it never stops. You realise that by accident you have programmed in a circular argument. The program will run forever in a circle; the memory bank that records the number of iterations will accumulate into the millions, and then into the billions. You have to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and force the program to quit. Then, you can look at the source code and try to find your mistake.
If we believe a political ideology because it is an irrefutable thought, but the reason for that irrefutability is that it is based on feedback loop, then how can we press Ctrl-Alt-Delete? The source code in this case is a set of beliefs. The belief in capitalism does not exist in a single place, but in the heads of about half the world’s population. If the belief system derives from circular causality, is there an equivalent of the infinitely accumulating memory bank? Sure there is! People eat until they are obese; they buy things and get bored of them before they have used them; they pay the GDP of a hungry city in Africa to go on tourist trips into space; and they can’t go to the supermarket to buy their daily overdose of calories without three tons of metal to transport them there.
It has all gone completely bonkers!
To escape this lunacy, we could take two separate approaches. Firstly, each of us can look to what we can do as individuals. This is about true self-interest, which involves escaping our own illusion of self-interest. Secondly, we can work to address the mechanisms that make these illusions become mass-phenomena. Neither approach is sufficient on its own.
CTRL-ALT-DELETE FOR INDIVIDUALS
At this stage, it should be clear that happiness is a lot more complicated than it first appeared. If it is possible that your belief that you are happy is completely manufactured, should you care? The risk is that something will happen that will trigger a “Road to Damascus” moment, when you see through the mist of thought-fluff and your whole world comes crashing down; your life suddenly loses meaning.
The distinction between ‘happiness: the emotional state’ and ‘happiness: the belief’ is generally invisible, which is why an emotion can be invented without the believer having any perception of this. It is entirely possible that happiness only exists as a belief state. We can’t be completely sure, but we should be suspicious given that we can’t find an evolutionary origin for it. However, if we can identify certain causes of our happiness belief, we can start to question whether they really serve our interest.
I can start with a simple observation about happiness. There are only two strategies for achieving it: one is to obtain more of what you want; and the other is to want it less. Western capitalism throws a spanner in the works here, because it is based around making people want more – principally through the advertising industry. But is it possible to achieve happiness by wanting less?
Wanting less is a more secure route to happiness – where both cause and effect exist in your head and have limited dependence on the outside world. The reverse ideology has become dominant in countries that practice every major religion except Buddhism. A central teaching of Buddhism is that suffering comes from the various forms of desire. Capitalism and Buddhism are ideologically incompatible because one promotes needs and the other seeks to minimise them. Capitalism is a form of a C/D ideology and Buddhism is a form of an A/B ideology. So, one way to achieve happiness by wanting less might be to become a Buddhist.
The writer Eric Weiner travelled the world in a subjective search for its happiest places.223 In his opinion Thailand and Bhutan are somewhere up there – and both are almost entirely Buddhist. The King of Bhutan has even announced that he would consider the Gross National Happiness as the true measure of the country’s progress.224 Weiner’s criterion for happiness is biased – though no more than that which economist researchers rely upon – because he asks people themselves whether they are happy. I have travelled in Thailand, but not Bhutan. Thailand certainly registered highly on my smileometer. However, the happiest place that I have visited is Tibet – also Buddhist. My smileometer gives the Buddhists of Tibet the highest score that I have recorded – and this is despite the Chinese invasion of their country in 1949 and their systematic attempts to destroy the culture. This is a book about the effects of tactical deception in human behaviour, and it is possible that the Tibetans are faking their smiles. They might be faking them to piss off the Chinese; in which case it’s working! However, when I see smiling of such intensity that it has become permanently creased into someone’s face, and that person lives in a remote village where he isn’t fooling anybody, I tend to assume that his expression is genuine.
Is it possible to become happier by wanting less without becoming a Buddhist? Of course it is! Seek to live your life such that you minimise the intrusion of societal forces that fuel your desires. The best way to do this is to chuck out your TV. Smoking tobacco is an addictive habit that takes ten years off the end of your life; watching TV is an addictive habit that takes ten years out of the middle of it. Giving up smoking is one of the only ways that people in capitalist countries are encouraged to experience becoming happier by wanting something less. If you give up smoking, your friends will congratulate you, but give up your TV and they will think it odd.
It is difficult to measure the real cost to oneself of watching TV. For many of us, we can watch it for free, but by doing so we are placing ourselves in harm’s way. We are permitting ourselves to be caught up in the forces of advertising that fuel all the wants that we don’t need. This is what economists call the ‘aspirational treadmill’ – the never-ending cycle of want and dissatisfaction. Corporations spend billions of dollars working out exactly how much incremental sales they achieve from an advertising campaign. And that means that when you permit yourself to be subjected to the deception of advertising, you buy things without realising that you have been persuaded to make purchases that otherwise you wouldn’t have done. This costs you money, and the entertainment TV gives you in exchange constitutes a very cheap bribe.
Another way to check the validity of your happiness is to travel. When you visit a culture that is completely different from your own, you see people able to live without the things you consider essential. I have travelled quite extensively and it is clear that America and Western Europe have far more intrusive advertising than elsewhere. This escape from your own culture and media enables you to think about what is really necessary. Not only will you reassess material possessions, but also your beliefs; values; ways of doing things. This perspective empowers you to look at your values through the eyes of another, someone who does not have your manufactured beliefs. It gives you a glimpse into the workings of your own values to see what is real and what is not. And when you return home, you look at your fellow countrymen and realise that some of the things they do and want are ridiculous.
CTRL-ALT-DELETE FOR SOCIETY
Our belief in capitalism results from a dodgy maths assumption by economists and a blatantly deliberate behavioural tactical deception by the advertising industry – good-looking people pretending to be happy while consuming products. And gradually, we are all sucked into a creeping process where we all start acting out happiness at certain promptings. We do this to demonstrate our ideological compliance and, thereby, we manufacture the evidence of the truth of our belief.
I am not attacking capitalism as an ideology in comparison to some other ideology. I picked on capitalism for my ideology demolition because it is the world’s biggest ideology. I did it, as George Mallory said when asked why he wanted to conquer Mount Everest, “Because it’s there!” I am merely using it as an example to attack the idea (which again most of us believe) that a political process must be driven by an ideology of human wellbeing. The problem is not with capitalism per se, it is with the underlying assumption that we can define human wellbeing in terms of emotional wellbeing. In other words, we should not dump capitalism and replace it with another ideology. Instead, we need to look for a new way of driving politics.
The central problem is this: if it is indeed possible to re-engineer what people perceive as central to their happiness, then it must be theoretically possible to persuade people to adopt any political ideology. If happiness is a belief and not a feeling, is there not a risk that we can be engineered to believe that happiness can be caused by any social environment? Political leaders who acted on this hypothesis produced some of the worst aberrations in history, for example Nazism, or the bizarre ideology of North Korea that involves more smiley flag-waving than Americans at the Olympics.
It could be argued that the sole objective of political ideology is to keep people productive and docile. If this can be achieved, then who cares if the masses are actually having fun? China is a society where everyone is productive and docile. In that society, we tend to assume that the rulers do not care if the masses are happy; it is sufficient for them to be docile. But it is arguable that this is equally true of Western democracies. Western democratic politicians certainly spend a lot of time telling their citizens how much better off than everyone else they really are – a rather empty form of propaganda.
What I hope I have demonstrated is that no ideology is fundamentally correct, but they all seem so because they are tautologies from the perspective of their believers. The idea that ideologies can be defined by measures of emotional wellbeing is false because the ideology alters the perception of the emotion that is the measure of its truth.