Introduction The Two Cultures

Whoever is happy will make others happy too … How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

–– Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

There is a wind of change in our society. People are talking about feelings. Even men are doing it. Quite recently Prince William and Prince Harry talked for the first time about their mother’s death and how it affected their own mental health. There is a new undercurrent of concern with our own inner life and with how other people feel. Despite appearances, a new gentler culture is emerging.

By contrast, the older culture, which still dominates, is altogether harsher. It is more focused on externals. It encourages people to aim above all at personal success: good grades, a good job, a good income and a desirable partner. This culture of striving has brought many blessings, and life today is probably as good as it has ever been in human history. But that culture also involves a lot of stress, and people wonder why – if we are now so much richer than previous generations – we are not a lot happier?

The answer is surely the ultra-competitive nature of the dominant culture. The objective it offers is success compared with other people. But, if I succeed, someone else has to fail. So we have set ourselves up for a zero-sum game: however hard we all try to succeed, there can be no increase in overall happiness. An alternative, gentler culture offers a different aim, which can lead to a win–win outcome. It says that we should of course take care of ourselves, but we should get as much happiness as possible from contributing to the happiness of others.

Competition, it argues, is valuable in the right context – and that context is competition between organizations. This has been a major engine of progress. But what we need between individuals is mostly cooperation, not competition.1 We want people who will act for the greater good – at work, at home and in the community. This produces better results for everyone. But, above all, it makes life more enjoyable. For people long to relate well to each other – as an end in itself and not just as a means to something else.

So the basic proposal in this book is that we should each of us, in all our choices, aim to produce the greatest happiness that we can – and especially the least misery. This noble vision does not go against basic human nature. For all of us have two inherited traits – one selfish and one altruistic. The selfish side believes that I am the centre of the universe and my needs come first. This trait was important for our survival as a race, and we should indeed take good care of ourselves and of our own inner equilibrium.

But the altruistic side enables us to feel what others feel and to strive for their good. This is vital for a happy society. It is a fallacy to think that reputation is a sufficient motivation for good behaviour. We need people with an inner desire to live good lives, even without reward. A happy society requires a lot of altruism, and so it needs a culture which supports our altruistic side.2

This gentler culture has always been around, in some form or other. It is there in all the great religions. Yet for many people these religions have lost their ability to convince. As religious belief has declined, a void has been created and into that void has rushed egotism, by default. We have told our young people that their chief duty is to themselves – to get on. What a terrible responsibility. No wonder that anxiety and depression are rising amongst the young.3 Instead, people need to get out of themselves – to escape the misery of self-absorption. So there has to be a new, secular ethic, based on human need and not divine command.

The political crisis

A secular ethic is also vital if our democracies are to thrive. There is massive discontent with the world’s elite, and with the atomistic neo-liberalism which it often espouses. According to that philosophy, all will go well if individuals are free to negotiate their own way through life; selfishness is not a problem provided people can choose their own friends and trading partners. But this ignores one key fact – that we would all be better off if the pool of possible friends and traders were nicer and more honest. For all of us the attitude of other people is crucial.

For this reason there is now a strong push back against extreme liberalism. People are calling for a society based on ‘reciprocal obligation’.4 In this view, we do not enter this world as independent, fully fledged adults, but as people highly dependent on support from our family, our government and the whole of our society. In return for this, we should ourselves feel bound to help others when we can. We want a free society, but one where people feel a duty to help.

But help in what way? There needs to be a clear content to our obligation to others. I think this is best expressed in terms of happiness: our obligation is to create the most happiness that we can in the society around us. This is the ideology we need for the twenty-first century. It is the vision of society that politicians should champion, and it is the principle that should guide their priorities in government. It is also, as we shall see, the principle that will get them re-elected. So the aim of politicians, as of private individuals, should be to create as much happiness in the world as possible and as little misery.

The happiness revolution

This new secular ethics is the basic principle for the happiness revolution – for both individuals and governments. But to implement it we have to know what makes people happy – both other people and ourselves. Two major developments now make this more possible. One is the new ‘science of happiness’ which gives policy-makers new knowledge about how to improve happiness and reduce misery. And the other is the new psychology of ‘mind-training’ which enables us all to get a better control over our own inner mental life. So, as Figure 0.1 shows, there are altogether three elements behind the amazing change that is now under way in our society.

Figure 0.1
Forces behind the happiness revolution

Let us look briefly at each of these elements. The basic secular ethics goes back to the eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, which proposed a radically new goal for society. The goal, it said, should be the happiness of the people. That Happiness Principle was, I believe, the most important idea of the modern age, with powerful implications for how we should live and how our policy-makers should act on our behalf.

According to this principle, each of us should aim to create the most happiness in the world that we can and the least misery. And policy-makers and governments likewise should aim at the greatest happiness of the people and the least misery. This principle inspired many of the great social reforms of the nineteenth century, but it was soon challenged by philosophies that glorified struggle. Such dreadful philosophies contributed to two world wars and to the ultra-competitive features of today’s dominant culture.

But now the Happiness Principle is making a comeback. There are many reasons for this. One is disillusion with the dominant culture and the stress which people experience at every level of society. But the other reasons are hugely positive. Now, for the first time, we have a science of happiness, which gives us real evidence on how to create a happier society. This is relevant to all of us, but it also gives policy-makers new insights into the main causes of misery – and a new understanding of deprivation and how to address it.

At the same time there are new techniques of mind-training that enable each of us to improve our own inner mental state. The story began in the 1970s with breakthroughs in the psychological treatment of mental distress, based on scientifically controlled trials. Following on from that has come positive psychology, with evidence-based ways in which all of us can become happier. And, finally, more and more people now use age-old Eastern meditation to achieve greater contentment and calm of mind.

In Chapters 1–3 of the book we discuss each of the three strands in our diagram (see Figure 0.1). They all have one common element – they focus on the inner life as the ultimate reality for every human being. And they offer the prospect of a society where we take care, more than ever, of our own inner contentment and, especially, the happiness of others.

But does this new culture have any chance of replacing the dominant culture? For many people it has already done so. For them this new way of thinking is already fully established: they are members of a growing world happiness movement. These people include:

This movement is affecting people in all walks of life – from rich to poor and from the happiest to those in despair.

Here are some graphs which illustrate the change (see Figure 0.2). The first two are from the media. If we look at The Guardian newspaper, the percentage of articles including ‘happiness’ has doubled since 2010 and the percentage including ‘mental health’ has risen by a factor of five. There is also a huge increase in the amount of published peer-reviewed research on happiness. From virtually nothing in 2000, this has reached nearly 2,000 articles a year. Even in economics journals there are already 200 articles a year on the subject.

And finally there are the changes in lifestyle. In the USA 14 per cent of all adults report that they have meditated in the past twelve months, and 17 per cent have been to a yoga class.5 Nearly 50 per cent live in households where someone has visited a mental-health professional in the last year.6 All these activities are growing rapidly and the final graph shows the hugely increased interest in both meditation and yoga. I am often amazed when talking to a cabinet minister, top official or top businessman to find they have been meditating for years – in secret, of course.

But let’s be honest. Even though interest in it has blossomed, this is still a minority culture and in the final chapter of Part One I will discuss the cross-winds that are blowing in the opposite direction. To overcome these cross-winds will require huge effort and clarity of purpose from all of us.

What can each of us do?

So how can we each become more effective as creators of happiness, both as citizens and in our own occupation, whatever that is? These are the issues we address in Part Two of the book:

Figure 0.2
(top) Articles in The Guardian newspaper mentioning happiness and mental health
(bottom left) Articles on happiness in academic journals
(bottom right) Google searches for meditation and yoga

To answer these questions I draw on the vast mass of evidence now emerging on what works best for happiness. Wherever possible, the evidence I present comes from properly controlled experiments. The experimental method has been well established in medicine for over a century, but more recently it has spread into social science.7 And happiness is increasingly included as a measured outcome – in my opinion it is the most important one. So this book reports cutting-edge science, directed at human happiness.

This is an extraordinarily exciting time. Cultural change can be quite rapid if the right idea arises at the right time.8 The Happiness Principle is an idea whose time has come. Most people now realize that economic growth, however desirable, will not solve all our problems. Instead we need a philosophy and a science which encompasses a much fuller range of human experience.

The growing influence of women in society is helping this revolution. Research suggests that most women care more about inner feelings than men do, while typically men focus more on external issues.9 Moreover, women are typically more altruistic than men, and more concerned with how others feel, and so their increasing power and influence will help to ensure that the happiness movement succeeds.10

For all these reasons, I am confident that this surging, subterranean movement will eventually become mainstream and displace the dominant culture of today.

My own involvement

We all have our part to play in this happiness revolution. But how, you might ask, did I, as an economist of all things, become involved in it? It is actually not surprising. Economics was originally founded in order to discover which institutions would produce the greatest happiness for the people. As soon as I discovered this, I switched to economics. As I explain in my thanks at the end of the book, I was by that time in my thirties. However, I was quickly shocked by the narrow view economists had about what actually causes happiness. Essentially they thought it was about purchasing power, plus a few other bits and pieces.

The fallacy of this assumption was already apparent by 1974 when Richard Easterlin showed that US citizens were getting no happier despite the country’s rapid economic growth. I thought then of writing a book about happiness, but instead I wrote an article.11 For at that time there was little research evidence on what makes people happy. But by 1998 there was much more, and we invited Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Economics, over to London to lecture on the new science of happiness. Soon after that I decided to write my own book on Happiness. I rang Kahneman for advice and he replied, ‘First read the collected essays on Wellbeing that I’ve just published and then come to Princeton.’ I did, and it was one of the most exciting times of my life. I also visited the founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and the laboratory of Richard Davidson, where he carried out his ground-breaking work on the neuroscience of happiness.

The next thing was an email from a Buddhist monk in Nepal. Richard Davidson had written to his Buddhist friend Matthieu Ricard about this British economist who was working on happiness. In due course, Matthieu arrived at our house in his red and saffron robes, and I became aware of the wonderful Mind and Life group of Western scholars who meet regularly with the Dalai Lama to discuss the relation between Buddhist and Western psychology. Through this group I came to know the Dalai Lama, who has probably done more than any living person to advance the cause of happiness.

So I have met many inspiring people and had many unexpected experiences. Perhaps the strangest of all was organizing courses on mindfulness for British Members of Parliament. They lapped it up. Some MPs even said their lives had been changed forever.

After I had finished writing Happiness, I asked myself, What can I do next which will help to reduce misery? I concluded that the area of mental health was where I could do the most. But how? In 2003 I had become a Fellow of the British Academy and duly went to a very stiff inaugural tea party. I was standing next to a tall, good-looking chap and asked him what he did. He turned out to be David Clark, one of the world’s leading clinical psychologists. I have worked with him ever since.

In 2004 it was virtually impossible for people with depression or crippling anxiety disorders to get psychological therapy in Britain’s National Health Service. So David and I made the case for a completely new service. He provided the technical expertise; I provided the economic argument and the political connections. Tony Blair had made me a Labour Party member of the House of Lords, and so we were able to present our case to a seminar at 10 Downing Street. Eventually, after many more meetings, the case was accepted. Thanks to David’s leadership the service now treats over half a million sufferers a year, half of whom recover during a course of treatment. The service is so successful that it is now being copied in at least five other countries.

But happiness is more than mental health. If the Happiness Principle and all it implies is to become embedded in our culture, it needs an organization to promote it. Every successful culture has institutions that enshrine its principles. Religious cultures have churches, temples, synagogues or mosques. But where is the organization that is dedicated to the Greatest Happiness Principle, and where do its followers meet regularly to be inspired and supported in living good lives? That was the next challenge.

In 2006 I was in a TV debate with Anthony Seldon, the newly appointed head of a private secondary school called Wellington College. He had just introduced happiness lessons into the school, despite considerable scepticism from teachers and school governors. We had an immediate rapport and soon we got together with Geoff Mulgan, the former head of Tony Blair’s policy unit, and decided to launch a movement that could fill the organizational gap. Its aim is to inspire individuals to live good, happy lives – through its website and even more through face-to-face groups that meet regularly to inspire and to be inspired.

We called the movement Action for Happiness. It attracted good candidates for the post of director, including one who prior to the interview had Googled the question ‘What organizations have the word “happiness” in their titles?’ The search engine’s reply was ‘Your search for happiness has produced no results.’ That was 2011. Things have changed since then. Thanks to its great director, Mark Williamson, Action for Happiness now has over a million online followers and 150,000 members in 180 countries.

Finally, there is the global policy challenge: to persuade policy-makers to make happiness their goal. In 2004 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of rich countries, held the first of many conferences on the subject of ‘What is Progress?’ The next step was to get countries to measure the happiness of their people as part of their routine national gathering of statistics. Fortunately, Britain’s Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell was on side and in 2011 Britain became the first country to do that. At the same time, one of the world’s leading development economists, Jeffrey Sachs (who was also adviser to the UN Secretary General), became a strong advocate for happiness. Since then, he, John Helliwell and I have edited the annual World Happiness Report, and more and more governments are now moving towards happiness as the goal of policy.

This book

But, even so, many in the world today (including many of my own friends) are barely aware of the world happiness movement and the way it is challenging many of the worst features of the dominant individualistic culture. This book tries to remedy that ignorance – and then to lay out how members of the happiness movement can in practice transform the lives of those they touch.

This book has two parts. Part One describes the ideas, science and behaviours which are generating the happiness revolution and the world happiness movement. This section is mainly directed at people who are not yet on board and need to be persuaded. By contrast, Part Two is directed at people who are already on board and want a happier world. It offers scientific evidence to show how each of us, in our own sphere of life, can contribute to bringing that about.

The book cannot possibly cover everything that needs doing. It focuses mainly on those key areas that are at the top of the new happiness agenda.12 And it constantly stresses that this is not an expensive exercise. Most of the things that can be done are immensely cost-effective and, in many cases, pay for themselves. They are not luxury expenditures. They are critical for the happiness of billions, and they cost peanuts compared with much of what is spent to promote economic growth.

So let’s put people first and mean it. We have enough knowledge – let’s put it into action. The world happiness movement will surely go from strength to strength. What is counter-cultural today will in time become the mainstream. And the result will be a happier society.