In Search of

Happiness
James Houston

A LION BOOK
Oxford Batavia Sydney
 Contents
Introduction 9
1.How are you happy? 11
2.The Pursuit of Happiness in the Street 31
3.Happiness and Peace of Mind 55
4.Happiness, Imagination and Childhood 77
5.The Politics of Happiness 101
6.Happiness in the Post Modern World 119
7.Is the Universe a Happy Place? 137
8.Happy Families 165
9.Truly Human 189
10.The Truly Happy Life 213
11.Desiring God 237
12.Delighting in God 261
For Further Reading 277
Index 279
 In memory of my friend and colleague
Klaus Bockmuehl
And in tribute and gratitude to
Regent Alumni
who have taught me so much of the experience
of happiness
 Introduction
'Writing a book on happiness? You must be joking!' Such
was the response of a friend who knows me well. You see, I
am not one of those bouncy types, nor would many ever see
me as an extrovert. For those who define happiness as 'hav-
ing fun', and who seem to have ginger ale instead of a blood
circulation, I am definitely not their type. Thrill, novelty, ro-
mance, speed and games are not on my agenda. I have never
measured myself for my Happiness Quotient with a
Euphorimeter.
In fact, my wife has stated rather bluntly that for her,
happiness means having a husband who is not writing a
book on happiness! My children, who have now grown into
friends of mine, have found me to be rather too serious
about the matter of living and relating. So it is rather a fam-
ily joke that in my old age I should be writing about happi-
ness. So why am I doing it?
This book is partly written because I have not been happy
in many phases of my life. No one is born happy, though we
may all achieve a measure of happiness. When the fruits of
happiness begin to enter our lives, it is a time for rejoicing,
and we want to share it with our fellow-sufferers. This book
is also written with a passionate concern for the quest for in-
tegrity in personal well-being. My motive is also partly auto
biographical. Writing it has reminded me of where I don't

7
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

want to go wrong again, in turning down blind alleys and getting

lost in life.
This book is also an expression of gratitude for the stu-dents that I
have encountered, first as an Oxford don, and then for the past
twenty years in the pioneering environment of Regent College, Van-
couver. Here, many wonderful young men and women have blessed
my life by their sacrifices and their quest for God. I discovered, as
you will, through the stories of my friends in this book, how rich the
shared tapestry of life can be. Our lives truly open up when we give,
relate and share each others' stories, instead of possessing, control-
ling and manipulating others for our selfinterest.
Happiness is no laughing matter. It is the serious business of hu-
manity. It is made all the more serious in our drug cul-ture and with
the threat of global extinction, if we do not find the right prescrip-
tion for the well-being of the human race. Fortunately, this is the era
of glasnost, and of a more human, personal approach in business
and industry. All of us need a new honesty, to recognize that the
world-views and mind-sets of our past are no longer adequate to
cope with the issues of our times. Only by taking on this honesty
can we provide a habitable, happy future for the generations after
us.
The main argument of this book is that happiness is not a product,
nor even a personal achievement. It is this commodity mentality
that underlies the drug culture as well as the consumerism that
threatens to destroy our world. The commodity mentality breeds
self-interest, turning us against each other in suspicion and selfish-
ness. Instead, happiness is the fruit of a gifted life, of goodness re-
ceived from others, and love given and shared. Happiness can only
come our way when we have a strong life in relationship with oth-
ers.
If God is love, then he is the ultimate source of all friendship. It is
therefore worthwhile overcoming any religious prejudices we have,
to find out how we can become truer per-sons, more real with our-
selves and with other people. We

8
 INTRODUCTION

need a religious glasnost to transform the unhappiness of our lives.

I am especially indebted to the sacrificial love of my wife, my com-
panion of thirty eight years of married happiness, for her willing-
ness to spare me as I have been closeted in writing. Many of my
students at Regent College have contributed their stories to illustrate
aspects of this book, and I am grateful for their permission to have
their stories recorded. For confidentiality, their names have been
changed. Friends and family enrich my own life with happiness, so
I thank them for their loving support to write as I have done.
However, no one but I can alone be responsible for any errors or
weaknesses of this book. I am deeply grateful for the generous help
of my friends Miss Jean Nordlun and Mrs Elizabeth Buckmuchl
who have helped with the index and correcting the proofs. My edi-
tor, Robin Keeley, has been consistently encouraging and helpful in
getting this work published.

Jim Houston
Advent 1989

9
 How are you
Happy?

Do not go outside yourself, but turn back within; truth dwells

in the inner man; and if you find your nature given to frequent
change, go beyond your-self. Move on, then, to that source
where the light of reason itself receives its light.
When you enter your room, you enter your heart. Happy those
who delight to enter their hearts and find no evil there.
Augustine

Happiness does not fall into our lap by chance or accident. It

is the fruit of a particular way of life that includes discipline,
self-reflection, influence upon others, personal contentment,
security and inner peace. So happiness is not just a fad, nor is
it a god, although in our society it is often pursued as if it
were one or the other. Nor is it a destination, but a journey
still unfinished. Happiness is certainly not the absence of
pain, or otherwise it would be confused with pleasure-as is
often the case in our culture. So what is happiness? Happi-
ness is everything that gives well-being to one's self; harmo-
ny and assurance to others; depth and perspectives to the
spiritual realities around and above us.

11
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

However, happiness can be deceptive. It can be a temporary state

of affairs, or longer lasting. Happiness can be true or false. Of all
the emotions, happiness is perhaps the easiest to identify, the most
elusive to find, and the most difficult to de-fine. It means so many
things to different people, and the conditions for happiness can
even be different for the same person at differing phases of their
life.
In our culture, happiness tends to be identified with personal secu-
rity, such as having enough money in the bank, or having a secure
job, or a well mapped-out career. It means to have significance
given to us by our standing with other people, especially with
those close to us, whom we love. It means having the confidence
to share with a soul friend, who really understands us and whom
we can trust in spite of our weaknesses. Happiness, too, reflects
our sense of assured identity. It is touched off by little things such
as the smile of our boss, in something well done, or the approval
of a satisfied customer. On another level, environmental influ-
ences can help us to be happy, such as awakening from a good
night's rest, the glorious technicolor of a rising dawn, living in a
place of beauty, or enjoying the music we love best.
All these are examples of moments of happiness. However, they
need more permanence and substance actually to make us 'happy
people', especially if others are going to re-cognize this in us.
Over the years, at least some of us learn to look into the faces of
others and discern the drawn tensions and deadpan masks of those
who have pain and unhappiness in their lives, even if they try to
cover it with laughter. In contrast, we can also recognize people
whose contented and serene expressions show us that they have a
deep inner peace and joy. People like this stand in marked contrast
to those who are frankly bored, who are exhausted emotionally,
who are opaque to others, or who are plainly sad and tragic.

12
 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

The motive for this book

'How happy are you?' This question is probably the most serious
question we can ask, or be asked. The question takes us to the
roots of ourselves. It searches out our values, the way we have
chosen to live, the quality of our faith, the depth and character of
our relationships with others, the inner feelings we have about
ourselves, and the impact or lack of it in the lives of those closest
to us.
In the modern world, the question is trivialized a million times
each day. People ask each other 'how are you?', expecting an in-
stant summary of the other's feelings before they hop out of the el-
evator at the next floor. We barely allow each other enough time
for a polite response, let alone an honest one. The goal-oriented
person, living and working in a culture which worships success,
will probably hate this question, because he or she has already de-
stroyed much of the possibility they might have for being happy.
On the other hand, those who have been robbed of child-hood,
through cruelty, neglect or poverty, may find the subject of happi-
ness quite alien. As far as they are concerned, happiness belongs
to another planet. Either we talk of happiness in superficial or
even false ways, or else it probes us too painfully to allow us to
expose our wounds to it.
The widely-felt sense of alienation in our culture has come about
because we settle for cheap generalizations about each other. We
are not truly prepared to get to know each other, because handling
our own pains and burdens may be more than enough. We have
been trained to believe that our emotional life is too messy to
spend time on. So we naturally divert our attention, and the atten-
tion of others, away from it. This is why we are suspicious of this
question: 'how happy are you?' It gets us too involved in our-
selves, and adds complication to our lives. We feel we should sim-
ply stick to being practical people, and get on with the business of
living.

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 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

However, we know that this approach will not do. We know that
an unexamined life is not really worth living. This book is intend-
ed to help us understand what happiness is, why it has declined in
our culture, and how we can rediscover happiness for ourselves.
The central purpose of the book is to find the true source of happi-
ness, and to ask who it is that we can praise for our happiness. The
contralto singer, Kathleen Ferrier, was holidaying in the Swiss
Alps when she was dying of cancer. Marvelling at the beauty and
grandeur of the Matterhorn, she reflected sadly that she had no
one to thank for the happiness this beauty gave her. This shows
that happiness can only be complete when it is given to others.
This is one of the great keys to understanding happiness. It can
never be grasped selfishly for our own sake, but must be shared.
We simply cannot hold on to happiness. We have to give it away
before we, and others, can truly enjoy it.
This is an ideal that many of us do not experience. We live in a
crazy world, where unhappiness is the norm. Our century has
probably seen more unhappiness than any previous century. As we
look beyond the year 2000, we can pray that it will be a turning
point for the human race; turning from darkness to light. So many
people long for the world to be-come a happier place.Perhaps we
need to reflect on how we could begin by making our world hap-
pier if we ourselves learnt to be happy within our own hearts first.

What makes you happy?

Attempts are made by sociologists and others to measure how
happy we are. Yet it is obvious that we tend to have a wide spec-
trum of attitudes, motives and events that make us happy. A young
couple fall in love and seem very happy. Then disillusion sets in,
followed by loss of confidence in each other, and much mutual
unhappiness. A business-woman enjoys a highly-successful career.
But then a break down occurs in her marriage relationship,

14
 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

and she loses the sense of well-being she had in her job, and even
in her whole career. Events such as this reveal the instability in
what we thought originally might give us happiness. This is why
we need to shift our focus from asking ourselves, 'how happy are
you?' to asking, 'how are you happy?' This is a fundamental ques-
tion, and our answers to it will reflect the type of personality we
each have.
We speak loosely of having 'a temperament', behaving
'temperamentally', being a certain 'personality' type, and of hav-
ing 'character'. We need to examine what we mean in greater de-
tail. The ancient categories of human temperament were formu-
lated in the fifth century BC by Hippocrates, who has been called
'the founder of medicine'. He saw four temperamental types: the
melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric. Today, there are
many other ways in which human personality is understood.
Personality expresses inter-personal relationships, showing how
we have learned to respond and to relate to others with their very
different temperaments to our own. Character speaks of our indi-
vidual traits that have become stabilized, giving us firmness, con-
sistency, and moral strengths that are freed from addictive or
compulsive behaviour. How-ever, the sober truth is that we are
dominated not by a freed self, but by a compulsive self. For this
reason, our personality is more accurately defined by our compul-
sions than by our strengths and abilities.
We can escape from facing these inner weaknesses by relating to
objects rather than to people. Since the world of objects does not
engage us relationally as people, we can happily continue to ig-
nore our addictive behaviour. So an artist can go on painting, or a
gardener happily engage his temperament with plants, or a busi-
ness person or a scholar can pursue their career and express their
temperamental strengths. However, we also live in a world of
other people. It is in our relational conflicts with each other that
we come into conflict with ourselves,
15
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

as our addictions cross the contrary addictions of others. This is

where we are likely to experience most unhappiness.
If we major upon our strengths and abilities, as many personality
tests do, we may become blind to the fact that our defects cause our
own types of unhappiness. This is why it is helpful to look at those
areas of our personality where we act compulsively, and where our
way of behaving tends to be unbalanced. It can also be helpful in
dealing with other people to learn about their compulsions. We will
then be able to understand them better, make excuses for them in
kindness, or show them true compassion. How much human misery
we might alleviate if we understood each other more wisely and
sympathetically. Then we could begin to discern how we too affect
other people, in unhappy conflicts.
If, for example, a young man appears distant and suspicious of older
men, even when they treat him kindly, then I should suspect that he
has a negative image of his own father. Or if a girl has trouble relat-
ing comfortably with older women, I may wonder how she gets on
with her own mother. This shows how our relationships can be
soured by parental factors quite outside the relationship itself. We
all tend to over-react to other people who consciously or uncon-
sciously remind us of people who have hurt and offended us. We
can also violently over-react to people because they un-wittingly
touch the deeper wounds of our past, not yet healed.
This is why ignorance of other people's personalities can be a dan-
gerous thing. Ignorance of others tends to exaggerate the negative in
our relationships. When we say we do not like or trust other people,
it is often not because they have offended us or let us down, but be-
cause they are not 'our type', or because we are ignorant of how they
'tick'.
Awareness of our own personality type awakens us to the situations
we set up for ourselves that produce both happiness and unhappi-
ness. This self-understanding can help us

16
 HOW ARE YOUHAPPY?

to live more wisely-and more humbly. It will make us more sensi-

tive to the negative impact we make on other people. None of us
can afford to be complacent in our relationships, when we live with
so many hurting people all around us. Nor can we remain ignorant
about ourselves, if we are seriously searching for more happiness
and contentment in our lives.
We will now look at nine types of personality. You may be able to
identify yourself immediately; or you may feel that you are a com-
bination of more than one type. Each type high-lights compulsive
aspects of our personalities.

1:The perfectionist
This type of person seeks to avoid anger, to be a good little boy or
girl, and to live as the most reasonable and self-righteous person
possible. Later in their life, they discover a great deal of anger with-
in them. They may suffer from depression and feel terribly let down
by other people, though they may get glimpses of themselves as be-
ing the real problem. All their life they have done 'the right thing'. If
only other people had been the sweetness and light that they have
been! Bothered by seeing so much that is wrong with other people,
they become like a smoldering underground fire, even though they
will not admit it is they themselves who cause their own unhappi-
ness.
The irony of perfectionists is that while they believe in the values
which can make them truly happy, they can also destroy themselves
if they allow resentment, nostalgia for the past or bitterness with the
status quo to get the upper hand. The perfectionist will recognize
that the following statements about happiness are what rings true for
him or her:

 Being happy means living up to my ideals.

 Happiness is not what I want most consciously. I prefer to do
what is right than to be preoccupied with what is pleasurable.

17
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

 I get frustrated when other people do not do things properly. This

makes me unhappy.
 I do not know when I am angry. I believe that my emotions are on
a level keel.
 I am critical of others. Other people rarely reach the standard of
performance that would give me happiness.
 As a child it was very painful for me to be criticized by others. I
now see that my own sense of happiness really lies in being more
forgiving of others.
 I admit that I tend to get attracted by worthy causes, and throw
myself into them to gain happiness. At first I thought I was being
selfless in doing this.

2:The giver

This type of person avoids acknowledging his or her needs, while

yearning to be accepted and approved by others. Givers find it hard
to admit that in helping others they are really seeking happiness in
being appreciated. Givers are really trying to buy love or win it.
They need to be needed. This can lead to constant disappointment
when others, who they want to help, do not respond in the ways
they would like to dictate.
Givers can be very popular socially, if they learn to suppress their
more manipulative tendencies. Happiness for the giver means tak-
ing on the identity of being 'the power behind the throne', or some-
one who works 'behind the scenes'. Givers will identify themselves
in the following statements:
 Being happy is being with and helping other people.

 Unhappiness is often caused by never seeming to have long-

established friendships. My relationships are intense while they

last,but theytend to be short-lived.

18
 HOW ARE YOUHAPPY?

 I suppose I feel happiest when I am being nurtured by the affec-

tion of others. I love to be loved.
 I do not feel that I have many needs. I would much rather be use-
ful to others.
 Flattery is a vice I have to guard against because I do tend to put
myself in the limelight.
 As a child, I believe I was much loved. But I also learnt to per-
form, to make sure I was loved even more.
 Seeking love, I can act manipulatively, so my motives for being a
helper need to be checked and challenged by those I trust.

3:The performer

Modern life approves of performers,because they are desperate to

achieve. Failure is sin to them. They try to avoid failure by whatev-
er means are open to them. Performers have been described as cha-
meleons, because they will fit into whatever environment will ena-
ble them to succeed, even at the cost of their integrity. Their self-
worth is highly dependent upon what they do, and so their perfor-
mance, or lack of it, rates very highly indeed.
For the performer, happiness lies in being an activist, and love is ex-
pressed through action. Jobs have to 'succeed', marriages have to
'work', and all relationships are really functional. The following
statements ring true for the performer:

 Being happy means being busy.

 Happiness means getting into the right job or profession where I
can generally run my own show.
 I fear failure. Having put so much effort into what I do, I cannot
imagine what it would mean to fail.
 I don't think too much about myself. I just get on with the job. In-
trospective people complicate things too much.

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 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

 I am a great talker, and I live enthusiastically. I do keep myself on

the go. These things do give me happiness.
 As a child, I was often praised for the things I did, and for good
grades at school. I remember best my teenage years when I really
began to see how important it was to do well in all I had to do, or
enjoyed doing.
 First impressions count for a lot, so personal happiness is helped

4:The romantic

Some people feel particularly the need to be 'special', per-haps be-

cause of emotional deprivation in childhood. They avoid being
'ordinary' at all costs, for their sense of self-worth is bound up with
an awareness of personal tragedy. The romantic may frequently feel
depressed. However, the strong sense of a melancholic past is bal-
anced by the anticipation of a romantic future. This fills the lives of
romantics with a deep desire for an exciting, even extraordinary, fu-
ture. The romantic is familiar with the following statements:
 I cannot be truly happy until my past has been completely healed.

 I am most happy when my dreams come true.

 Depth of feeling really means more to me than 'mere happiness'.

 I have a deep desire to be authentic and real.

 I am impatient with the flatness of ordinary living. I need to do

dramatic things, to heighten my imagination with intensified feel-

ings, and to fantasize about situations I will never experience in
reality.
 As a child I felt abandoned. Because of this, I expect people to

come into my life and then leave me. I become angry with the
people who constantly let me down. I do not have much respect
for authority.

20
 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

 I readily fall into fits of depression. Sometimes these de-pressions

seriously affect me, leaving me paralysed.Hap-piness is not my
normal state. Happiness is too elusive for me to say that I am a
happy person.

5:The observer

Independently-minded, the observer stands back from life. Observ-

ers are happiest living in a castle, high above the town, from which
they can view all that is going on in the world around them. Aloof
from interactions with others, they prefer not to get involved, but
observe others from the window of their lives.
Observers can live quite simply. They do not expend great amounts
of emotional energy and are not attached to others. Instead, they are
attracted to systems and to abstractions generally. They make good
engineers or computer experts. The following statements reflect on
their outlook on life:
 Happiness is to avoid emptiness in my life.

 Being happy is having a correct judgment of what is observed. In

that way, I am never ignorant.

 I am suspicious of emotions. They may have a place, but they are

always secondary to correct thinking.

 Life is best handled by putting things into separate compartments.

I am most happy when I can sort things out and handle them sep-
arately.
 It is true that I am often lonely, but I try not to think about myself.

I am happiest when I am figuring out some problem. I love puz-

zles, and enjoy doing crosswords and other word games.
 As a child, I loved solitude. I would creep off to be by myself in

my own hiding place. Sometimes I was afraid of being in a

crowd, or even of getting pinned down in a conversation in front
of others.

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 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

 Privacy means a lot to my sense of well-being, so I struggle to

have happiness in intimate relationships.

6:The responsible

The responsible are dutiful people. They have lost faith in authori-
ties, and feel that they need to uphold the world like Atlas himself.
It is important to them not to make mistakes, so they are often inde-
cisive, certainly cautious, and not risk-takers. The responsible prefer
to repeat a winning formula rather than to experiment with an un-
tried one. They would rather deal with the familiar, in which they
can excel, than take a new initiative. The responsible are actually
afraid to change. Because of this, they live careful lives. They seek
safety in guidelines, in loyalty, and in hiding behind institutional
and professional roles. The responsible express them-selves in the
following statements:

 Happiness lies in being a middle-of-the-road person.

 Being happy is knowing the limits in which I can operate.
 I am suspicious of authority. I have often seen it abused by others,
and know how untrustworthy other people can be.
 Life is best handled by taking time to see all the options, and then
acting carefully, responsibly and dutifully.
 I am very aware of the pitfalls and dangers of life. For this rea-
son, I have to live cautiously, and I do not tend to take initiatives.
I much prefer having secure guidelines.
 As a child, I suffered much abuse from my parents. This meant
that I felt powerless as a child, and grew up afraid of getting hurt.
I became uncertain because of the unpredictability of my seniors.

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 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

 Prudence is a very important virtue for me. Happiness lies within

emotional safeguards all the time. I hate any form of deviance.

7:The fun-lover

The childhood fear of pain leads the fun-lover to appear sunny, fun-
loving and lighthearted. This type of person acts like Peter Pan, the
eternal youth, or like Narcissus, engaged in self-absorption. The de-
sire to 'feel good' makes the fun-lover playful, bubbling, talkative
and excitable. Work is un-attractive unless it can be made 'fun' to
do. Duty is tedious to the fun-lover, who can often appear unreliable
and fickle.
For the fun-lover, happiness is very much in the mind. They tend to
assume that there are very few things in life you cannot enjoy if you
only have the right attitude. The fun-lover will agree with most of
the following statements:
 Happiness is what you can expect out of life, if you only put your

mind to it.
 Being happy is getting excited about things.

 You can always talk your way out of a situation if you have your

wits.
 Life is best handled by always being nice, and seeing the good

things in other people. I always try to look on the bright side of

life.
 I like other people to think of me as a happy person, because I re-
ally am. I have to admit that I do like being adored. I am very en-
thusiastic about the present and I feel even more optimistic about
the future.
 As a child, I have the happiest of memories. I have no memories

of fear at all. I have always had positive memories.

 I may be a glutton for novelty, but I am very sober about making

good choices in my life. I prefer to brainstorm than to take up the

drudgery of daily tasks.

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 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

8: The strong boss

The avoidance of any evidence of weakness makes this type of per-

son watchful, tough and aggressive. The strong boss likes to 'have it
out' with others, to set things straight. They hate to be taken ad-
vantage of, or to let others see any sign of weakness. Life may be a
struggle, but strong bosses are determined that they are going to win
through whatever the cost.

This means that strong bosses have a tendency to pull down others
who are on a pedestal. They can be cruel, and can take revenge if
they feel the need. Their motive for living is self-preservation,
which they exert forcefully. If they have strong moral or religious
convictions, they can become crusaders. As a child, the strong boss
had a tough upbringing. Their world was dominated by a strong fa-
ther, and by bullies who had to be faced and beaten if need be. The
following statements frame their mind-set:

 Happiness lies in looking after yourself, and not becoming a

doormat to anyone. I believe in justice and see when there is in-
justice very clearly.
 Being happy is also in protecting others under me, so that they
get a fair deal. I enjoy serving others.
 I am not afraid to confront other people. In fact, I rather like the
challenge when it comes.
 I think of myself as an 'earthy' type of person, because I value re-
alism. I have very little patience for those who have their heads in
the clouds.
 I admit I can be ruthless towards people who intrude on my terri-
tory.
 As a child, I had to struggle against unfair odds. I took pride in
not showing my feelings when I was unfairly treated. I was only
respected when I appeared strong.

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 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

Truth and innocence are important virtues for me. I seek the truth in
a fair fight to get at what is right. Getting mad really does clear the
air, and if the innocent are treated unfairly, then a fight for them is
also well justified. After all, there is nothing wrong with getting an-
gry.

9:The mediator

The mediator works hard to avoid any kind of conflict, and to live
in an atmosphere of harmony. Mediators lack emotional energy,
which leads them to identify with other people's interests and to
keep the peace at any price. Because of this, they are available to
others. Mediators enjoy routine, do not get excited about things, and
can be lazy. They have a poor sense of distinguishing the important
from the unimportant, although once a value is established they can
be very stubborn in holding on to it. As a child, the mediator felt
overlooked, ignored and found him or her-self in the middle of ten-
sion on many occasions. He or she learnt to cope with this by with-
drawing and emotionally going to sleep. The mediator will tend to
agree with the following statements:

 Happiness lies in avoiding conflict.

 I am most happy when I am not having to face challenges and
choices, but am secure in my familiar routine.
 Getting upset is not worth it. Some people think that I am too
easygoing. I don't get too enthusiastic, but then I hate to waste en-
ergy on anything. Why let anything bother you too much?
 I think of myself as a stable character. I keep a low profile and
have no great ambition to stand out in anything.
 I get 'stuck' sometimes, and then I need outside help to get me on
the road again.

25
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

 As a child, I realized that it was 'damned if you do, and damned if

you don't', so I found the best way was to lie low, and keep out of
sight. After all, I was the middle child, so I let my elder and
younger siblings face the firing line in-stead.
 I admit that I am laid back, but I can also be a completely loyal
friend. For me, happiness is to love another person with all my
being.

The passions that confront each of these personality types are

based on the seven deadly sins that medieval Christianity struggled
to overcome. Two other categories have been added: the deceit of
the performer, and the fear of the responsible. The sequence of pas-
sions that fit each personality type is as follows:
1. anger; 2. pride; 3. deceit; 4. envy; 5. greed; 6.fear;7.glut-tony; 8.
lust; 9. sloth.
The emotional traps that lead to an addictive way of life are in the
same sequence:
1.perfection; 2. activism or service; 3. efficiency or success; 4. ro-
manticism; 5. knowledge; 6. self-security that hides fear;7. idealism
that leads to gluttony or over-indulgence; 8.lust that is arrogance; 9.
sloth or laziness.
These passions seduce us into drawing up our own lop-sided terms
for personal happiness. Later in this chapter we will look at the bal-
ancing virtues which can help to trans-form our experiences of hap-
piness.

Dynamics of personal happiness

The quest for well-being and happiness is clearly very different for
each type of person. We can distinguish three major types of re-
sponse to the outside world in the personality types. The first re-
sponse is aggression. The perfectionist, the performer and the strong
boss are aggressive types who seek happiness in moving out against
other people.

26
 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

The aggression of the perfectionist is expressed in seeing what is

wrong and putting it right. The performer is also aggressive, but the
aggression is in appearing to be a success in the eyes of other peo-
ple. Performers are happy when they have achieved a positive im-
age, and look good. The strong boss tries to control people and situ-
ations, and it is the use of power that makes such people happy.
Strength is the secret of their happiness. Their fallacy is to assume
that they are bigger than the world, and that they can handle things
on their own. All three forms of aggression reveal that there is a gap
between what each of these personalities prescribe for their happi-
ness, and the reality outside their own emotions.
A second type of response is in acceptance of the outside world.
This is characteristic of the giver, the responsible, and the fun-lover.
All three types have to adjust to the out-side world to gain their hap-
piness. They move towards other people, and seek their happiness
in the approval of others. The giver takes the initiative with others,
by caring for them, to the point of needing to be needed by others.
Givers seek happiness in the appreciation of other people. The re-
sponsible achieve happiness by carrying out the demands placed up-
on them. However, their happiness is tempered by apprehension and
a subdued fear of failure, so that happiness is very much a mixed
emotion. Fun lovers feel that the world is too big or too much for
them to handle. They can only hope to live cheerfully in it, and then
they will be happy. They attempt to view life optimistically by
screening out all that is unpleasant and painful.
A third type of response is to withdraw from the world. The world is
too big or too complex to handle, so defense is the only appropriate
response. This is expressed in the romantic, the observer, and the
mediator. Romantics feel that they have already missed the bus, so
they wait for another opportunity to get on board. As they wait, their
happiness lies in anticipation. They believe that their own unique-
ness will somehow make their future 'special'.

27
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

Such personalities tend to see themselves in unrealistic ways. The

observer enjoys tidiness, as if the mind were a filing cabinet and
every-thing was studied and sorted out accordingly. Observers react
defensively when others intrude into their mind-set, upsetting it all
with another way of looking at life. The mediator seeks harmony ra-
ther than correctness, and is prepared for peace at any price. They
realize that others think their view of happiness is rather dull and
unattractive, but they have concluded that it is the best deal they can
achieve for themselves. Happiness for them is a rather detached af-
fair.
Carried to excess, all these types of personality can lead to an im-
balance in our attitudes and relationships with others. For the ag-
gressive types, the more aggressive we become, then the deeper the
presumptions grow. This in turn intensifies false hopes and their ac-
companying illusions. When aggressive types move from aggres-
sion towards presumption, then their withdrawal from others will
eventually lead them into black despair.
There is a similar trap for the second category of dependent types.
They begin to sense that they are living with false hopes. This can
force them to move towards a more aggressive form of relating, on-
ly to discover that presumption has now compounded their prob-
lems and left them with unsubstantiated self-confidence.
The third category of withdrawing types also compound their prob-
lems when they try to overcome their despair by moving towards
greater dependence on others. However, false hope leaves them in a
worse condition than before.
Our childhood origins give rise to our fundamental motivations,
then, and these in turn only provide us with partial pictures of what
human happiness is fully intended to be, in all its wholeness. Our
sense of self is always limited by our own impaired experiences and
perceptions of our in-adequate relationships with others. The big
question about happiness is therefore:

28
 HOW ARE YOU HAPPY?

how can we break out from the straitjacket of our own personality
type to find the fullness of true happiness? We will pursue this later
in the book, but first we need to examine some of the influences of
our culture, and its historical roots, which still have an abiding im-
pact upon our perceptions of what it means to be happy.

29
 2
The Pursuit of
Happiness in the Street

Of all the different purposes set before mankind, the most dis-
astrous is surely 'the Pursuit of Happiness', slipped into the
American Declaration of Independence, along with 'Life and
Liberty' as an unalienable right, almost accidentally, at the
last moment. Happiness is like a young deer, fleet and beauti-
ful. Hunt him, and he becomes a poor frantic quarry; after the
kill, a piece of stinking flesh.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Conversion: A Spiritual Journey

Singing is one of the most spontaneous expressions of human

emotion. People sing in the shower, whistle while they work,
and tune in to the music they love best while they jog. Mod-
ern popular music, such as jazz, pop and rock 'n' roll have
helped us to understand the pulse beat of the street, revealing
the values and quests of our society. If we begin our pursuit
of happiness in the contemporary world, then the lyrics of the
street have a lot to tell us.

The lyrics of the street

In a mass culture, people may no longer make up their own
songs, but their popular choices reveal the general attitudes

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 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

of society as a whole. Love, which is easily the dominant theme of

most pop songs, is held up as the solution to our problems. Howev-
er, pop songs also communicate a number of unintentional messag-
es about our culture: the exploitation of sex and women, for exam-
ple, or the way in which people spend most of their lives chasing
rainbows.

Romantic music creates its own distorting illusions, leading to what

has been called 'IFD disease'. This is made up of the Idealization
that makes impossible demands on life, which leads to Frustration
(since the demands can never be met) and which then results in De-
moralization or Despair. So we enter the street through its lyrics in
pursuit of happiness. We will see that it is a self-defeating game.
Rock singer Bruce Springsteen is one of today's most popular ex-
pressions of the belief that ordinary people can find real things for
themselves. Although he is a superstar, Springsteen appears as our
friend, someone who is 'on our side'. He has the persona of a nervy,
gauche youth exploring life for the first time. For many people he
represents 'authenticity', standing for the core values that they crave
to have. He is critical of the effects of capitalism in our un-happy
world, and he celebrates the 'ordinary' rather than the special. He
sings about the commonplace and the dreariness of living in the de-
serts of ordinary existence.
Talking about his hard-working, poor parents, Springsteen once said
that they wanted him 'to get a little something for myself; what they
did not understand was that I wanted everything.' That comment
captures today's mood: not just a piece of the pie, but all of it for
myself.
The prevailing experience in the pursuit of happiness in the street is
that at first freedom and love seem to be quite compatible. But then
reality strikes. If my girl also has freedom and love, then her quest
for freedom may enable her to fly away, leaving me without free-
dom or love. As Springsteen's albums progress, the disillusionment
deepens. First he saw what had happened to his father, and

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 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE STREET

hated it. 'He had been so disappointed, had so much stuff knocked
out of him, that he couldn't accept the idea that I had a dream and I
had possibilities. The thing I wanted, he thought was just foolish.'

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but pain, Now he
walks these empty rooms, Looking for something to
blame. You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames; Adam
raised Cain.

The answer is to get out into the street. Walking the side-walks and
driving away in a powerful car are the symbols of escape to free-
dom. Certainly the back seat of the car, on a lonely lane, symbolized
for many in the sixties the beginning of sexual freedom.

You can hide 'Neath your covers,

And study your pain;
Make crosses from your loves,
Throw roses in the rain.
Waste your summer praying in vain,
For a savior to rise from these streets.
Well now, I'm no hero,
That's understood.
All the redemption I can offer a girl,
Is 'Neath the dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow;
Hey what else can we do now?
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels,
Climb in back,
Heaven's waiting down the track

But the excitement of racing the Camaro, the easy catch that's easily
lost, when 'all her pretty dreams are torn' and 'she

33
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

stares into the night', leads into greater risks of desperation. 'Born to
run', sings Springsteen, 'in the day we sweat it outing the streets of a
runaway American dream, at night we ride through mansions of
glory in suicide machines.' But 'The highway's jammed with broken
heroes on a last chance power drive'. For 'You spend your life wait-
ing for a moment that just doesn't come. Well, don't waste your time
waiting. 'Individuals can make decisions that influence the course of
their lives, but they must also take responsibility for them as well:

You make up your mind, you choose the chance you

take.
You can't walk away from the price you pay.

The impressions deepen in Springsteen's later albums that ordinary

people have little to live for. Yet they hang on mysteriously in the
belief that somehow, somewhere, there is something to believe in.
In the end, violence, crime, jail and broken lives become the domi-
nant themes in his songs. High hopes are now crushed in the face of
oppressive forces of life, and dreams are pushed aside by the an-
guish of mere survival.

The message becomes clearer. First sexuality is interpreted as

the expression of personal freedom. Then the eagerness for sex be-
comes addictive, utterly without commitment. That leads in turn to
the irresistible demands of the flesh. This turns out to be bondage,
not freedom after all. So helplessness and despair are then the vul-
nerable condition of a drug-hungry world.

The indictment of a drug-hungry society

Dependence has become one of the major social problems of our

times, while drug abuse has become a massive health

34
 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE STREET

hazard. Yet much confusion covers this whole realm of ad-diction

and its treatment. We cannot begin to talk seriously about the quest
for happiness without trying to understand the issue of drugs. De-
spite its central place in the issue of happiness, it is remarkable that
so few churches are concerned about drug abuse and addiction. The
same can be said of colleges and universities. Philosophy, which has
traditionally focused its attention on the meaning of happiness and
its importance in human life, is also strangely silent about the drug
crisis of our times. Such silences reveal where the real problems of
addiction lie: in our refusal to face up to the human condition, with
all of its needs and fears.

We tend to think of drug addiction as a modern phenomenon, popu-

larized first in the sixties by such campus leaders as Timothy
O'Leary, and then more massively impacted by American troops in
Vietnam. But the truth is that human-kind has always experimented
with drugs. In the ancient Near East, heroin is referred to in Sumeri-
an tablets of3,000-4,000 years ago. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod,
in the eighth century BC, mentions the town of Necome, near Cor-
inth, which means 'the town of the poppy'. Herodotus and Hippocra-
tes speak of the therapeutic use of opium in the fourth century BC.
Paracelsus, the Swiss physician, pre-pared laudanum as a medical
opiate in the sixteenth century.
Opium smoking dates at least from the seventeenth century, and the
Opium War of 1840-42 was over China's ban of this import, lucra-
tive as the trade was for England at the time. Freud became a strong
advocate of the use of cocaine (known to the Incas at least since its
widespread usage in the Andes after AD1230). Peyote has long been
known to the American Indians, while cannabis spread from China
into India in the early centuries of the Christian era. The use of
these and of other hallucinatory drugs is ancient.
What is modern is the sheer scale of drug-trading and ad-diction.
Tragically, there are millions of addicts in the world

35
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

today, and the figure continues to rise with new methods of produc-
tion and crime. Previous civilizations used drugs within their reli-
gious rites, but secular, western civilization (the first attempt to
build a civilization without religion, as the French novelist André
Malraux pointed out) uses drugs for their own sake. So while de-
pendence upon drugs is not new, the modern world is filled with the
most drug-conscious of all cultures in history.

A child of the wider culture

Much of the confusion about drugs today stems from

the way in which we suppress our emotions in our cold, calculating,
technological society. We use opiates in the widest sense of the
word: tea and coffee drinking, tobacco smoking, alcohol, sexual ad-
diction, and the more serious forms of drug ad-diction. We have al-
so become a pain-suppressant society, assuming it is our right not to
suffer, to have health, and to have the further right to enjoy pleas-
ure. It has become socially acceptable to be seen as dependent on a
whole range of activities: doing the crossword puzzle, watching or
performing sports, television viewing, gambling, taking pain-killers
and alcohol, using amphetamines, and taking more dangerous risks
with hallucinogens and narcotics.
Seeking pleasure is one of the fundamental motiva-
tors of human behaviour, and this is entirely normal. The search for
pleasure helps us in the fight against boredom, lethargy, and in dif-
ference. However, when pleasure is cultivated intensely as part of
our everyday behaviour, then it can distort human emotions. Like
everything else, pleasure has its price. If we assume it is a right,
then it can readily become an abuse.
Why do drug addicts enter the drug
scene in the first place? The main reasons given by addicts is that
they do it for 'kicks' and enjoyment, or out of curiosity, or because
their friends do it. Other factors are rarely mentioned at

36
 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE STREET

first, but once the misery and damage caused by addiction be-come
apparent, all the misery of life pours out: personal loneliness and al-
ienation; the crumbling of family support; deep distrust of other hu-
man beings. This is only the beginning of the agony. Addicts face
the many problems of being forced to enter into a career of crime to
pay for their habit, and as time goes by the pleasures of the drug ex-
perience fade. Finally the addict has to face severe emotional side-
effects, and the mounting nightmare of withdrawal.
What is not usually understood by the addict is the original person-
ality disorder which triggered off such intense pleasure seeking. We
all tend naturally to 'normalize' our home backgrounds, not realizing
the full impact of being unloved, the lack of intimacy with parents,
the absence of emotional shelter and security, and much else. Nor
do we realize how profoundly television and the mass media gener-
ally bombard us with an overload of stimuli.

The drug culture is a direct response to the wider culture. We have

learned to accept uncritically the idea of 'doing your own thing', ex-
perimenting with life and developing our own private world. These
ideas lead directly from the general, amoral culture in which most
people live to the entrapped culture of drugs.

We hunger for contact with what is 'real'; we thirst after an expand-

ed sense of consciousness; we insist on greater freedom; we become
impatient in our 'instant society'; we assume that there is deeper po-
tential in our own selves. All these aspirations contribute to the
making of the modern drug culture.

Responding to the drug culture

There is no simple explanation for drug addiction. There is no sin-

gle cause. Nor can there be some single measure to pre-vent drug
abuse. In fact, the louder the alarm is sounded, the

37
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

greater the problem becomes. Even the research and literature used
to try to prevent drug abuse may inadvertently in-crease the obses-
sion in our society.
We may even have to admit that the modern faith in techniques to
solve our problems gives rise to another faith that drugs can solve
anything too. We believe that, given the tools, we can all as individ-
uals 'fix' our own needs and desires. This in turn implies that every
individual has the right to do their own thing, to solve all that is
necessary. Just as we have the fundamental conviction that we can
change everything with the 'right techniques', so the promise is of-
fered that drugs too will change things. When this world is viewed
as impossibly demanding and painful, then the prospect of another
world, chemically induced, is an attractive alternative.
If the drug culture has been spawned by the wider culture, then the
wider culture must change before we see a diminishing of drug de-
pendence. The whole climate of commercial advertising, television,
and political propaganda must be called into question if we are to
see a resolution to the drug scene. For drug addiction is clearly an
indictment of the whole of western life and thought. It is also an in-
dictment against a worldly and superficial religious life.

However, instead of the radical change that is needed, western cul-

ture responds to the problem of drugs in a typical way it looks for
the 'right tools' to do the job. Governments naturally opt for political
solutions, and the most obvious way is to target the sources of drug
production and distribution. This happened in Turkey in the sixties,
the 'Golden Triangle' of south-east Asia in the seventies, and in Co-
lombia, Peru and Bolivia in the eighties. Other agencies spot-light
the breakdown of families, and the role of the family in society.
Others attack the more difficult task of attempting to change atti-
tudes towards smoking, diet and health in general.

However, none of these methods get to grips with the root cause of
addiction. They fail to face up to the basic problems

38
 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE STREET

that urbanization, technological power and our competitive greedi-

ness inflict upon us all. As long as the pursuit of plea-sure, the be-
lief in narcissistic freedom, and the loss of concern for the under-
privileged continue, so the addictions of our society will intensify.

Taking the brakes off

Perhaps one of the deadliest elements of our contemporary plight is

permissiveness, compounded by loneliness and the absence of love.
This poisonous mixture is the direct cause of today's drug culture.
Permissiveness means that 'any-thing goes', and the feeling of being
a cosmic orphan in an in-human world can lead to intense despera-
tion. All the boundaries that mark out normal human conduct begin
to disappear.

The first to go are the boundaries of personal conduct; they crumble

away with each new impulse to sin and sin again. Then the bounda-
ries of what gives basis for meaningful discussion melt away leav-
ing us unconnected, floating around with the sense of weightless-
ness, like astronauts be-yond the pull of gravity. Then the bounda-
ries of personality come under attack. We experience a separation of
body, mind and spirit as if we are truly 'spaced out'. Our rational un-
derstanding becomes disconnected, and we feel out of touch with
our own emotions. Other people begin to seem pseudo-real, and
their commitments appear hollow. Gloria experienced exactly this
profound sense of becoming a stranger to herself and all around her:
I am bewildered by the state of my own self. I am
bewildered by myself. Conflict between who?
Self and self. Two separate identities. How can I ex
plain that? Which self is really me? There is constant
conversing, debating, struggling for power between
these two. One will suggest

39
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

one thing, the other will try and stop it. One is
obviously 'good', the other is not. The most
irritating thing is that although it is all inside me,
concerning me, I am without significant control. How then
can I achieve unity of self? How can I cope with two duel
ling minds in one body?

Then the pain of my utter worthlessness comes over me in

floods. My tears exhaust me, and I despise my tears.
People deserve so much more than I can give
them. Sometimes I want so much to do something worth
while, to be something great, that I ache with longing. At
other times I wonder why I am so introspective, when the
sun is shining and the day is great. Then once more I
plunge into those moods of inexpressible gnawing feelings
of restlessness, dissatisfaction, humiliation and
displacement, that cause me to feel hopelessly inadequate,
helplessly imperfect, like a blundering invader into human
existence. For I can do nothing right.

Even the most precious experiences of love turn to ashes,

and intimacy becomes a violation. I'm so frustrated with
my struggle between a goal of righteousness and
purity, and the temptation of the pleasures of evil. Why
must I remain chained to imperfection?

For most people, thoughts like these are never articulated so clearly,
nor are they entered into a journal. Instead they are contained with-
in, without even being thought, in states of confusion, anger, long-
ing and despair. All the time they smile, perform, and act as if these
feelings were not their own. They play games with other people, of-
ten in the awareness that others are doing the same thing with them.
Occasionally, the mask cracks, and a new one is put on to replace it.

40
 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE STREET

The quest for absolute pleasure

In the sixties, the new mask was absolute love. The sixties sprayed
love around like a deodorant. There were 'love is 'in an orgy of sex,
or there was the tribal love of extended 'families' and communal ar-
rangements. Alongside love was absolute liberty: 'doing what you
want, when you want, where you want, with whom you want'. With
absolute love and liberty came absolute indolence, breaking off con-
tact with the clock, sleeping when you wanted, nibbling when you
felt like it. Following all three came the experience of absolute des-
titution, the return to nature, to nudity, to survival beyond the safety
net of Daddy's American Express Card.
This demolition of boundaries opened up the gates to the quest for
absolute pleasure. Education was abandoned, morality dried up, and
the new powers of sensation were wondrously opened a paradise of
pleasure, by the 'miracle of chemistry'. This drug-induced 'miracle'
led to the discovery of the 'sixth sense', so that normal conscious-
ness was now viewed as blindness in comparison.

It was as if another Copernican revolution had taken place; another

Columbian discovery of a new world. The revolution was termed
the 'expansion of consciousness'. What many drug addicts did not
realize, as many tragically still do not, is that this is really a dis-
placement of consciousness, rather than a true expansion, which
eventually leads to atrophy and death. It is destruction through ex-
cess.
Kevin entered this path into the drug culture, not with the excesses
of the hippies just described, but much more moderately. In Sunday
School he had heard about Jesus Christ, and as a child of twelve he
had a conversion experience. However, the model of Christianity he
was given let him down. He followed a dull, middle-class lifestyle
that was shallow, unreflective, and organized by his 'betters'. It was
too superficial to bear inspection.
As a result, Kevin started to explore other religions. They

41
 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

certainly seemed to have greater depth than what he had been

served up in church and home. He immersed himself in existential
literature. Hermann Hesse's book, Siddharta, led his curiosity into
Buddhism. He left his secure job as an engineer and went east. In
Afghanistan he became part of the drug culture, and then spent time
in a Hindu ashram, learning yoga and meditation. What did drugs
do for him?
They opened up to me a world of psychic reality that
before had been closed. Many fellow travelers at that
time were seeking a spiritual meaning to life that was
so lacking in my background. I remember being
surprised to see brilliant young minds, absorbing
'spiritual truths' sitting at the feet of gurus, hearing
stories like those of the Bhagavad Gita which were
fantastic and prescientific, thus hardly credible, while
totally rejecting the Bible as sheer myth.

This inconsistency alerted Kevin to realize that there were bounda-

ries he would not cross. He added, 'Others who lacked those limits
are not alive today.'
Through LSD, Kevin had spiritual experiences, God-consciousness',
that became a common theme among many of his friends. Yet even
then, 'I was aware that perhaps it was a counterfeit key, one that
should not be used. Either the person was not ready to receive such
experiences, or not prepared spiritually to enter that inner world.'
Later still, Kevin began to see that the transition from the use to the
abuse of drugs was itself a shift from being a door of perception to
an escape from reality. Through wise friends, already committed to
a deep walk with God, he learned that the pilgrimage to God was a
far more reliable journey through true friendships in ordinary life,
than by the chemical journey with all its perils of self-abuse. When
he was re-stored to the Christian life, Kevin had certainly gained a
new level of sensitivity, a deepened realism of life, and a

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 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IN THE STREET

greater integrity to his faith. He was one of the few who emerged
safely from the other side of the drug experience.

Happiness and the human body

The delusion of Kevin's adventure with drugs is that truth can be

discovered by poisoning the brain! It is a mark of our utter confu-
sion if we say that truth can only be uncovered through a chemical
delusion. Yet there is a connection be-tween the exercise of the
mind, the involvement of the emotions, and the experience of happi-
ness. The ingredient that all unhappy people lack is involvement.
We receive happiness in a relationship, or from an experience, when
we are emotionally involved. The more we pay out in emotional in-
volvement, the more we will get back. The less emotionally in-
volved we are, the less satisfied we will be. If we withdraw from
our family, or our work, or our other activities, we will become un-
happy. No wonder that the detached, technocratic spirit leads to
deep unhappiness.

Unhappiness is not the opposite of happiness. Unhappiness and hap-

piness are not the flip sides of the same emotion. Feelings of unhap-
piness and happiness can exist side by side, much as love and hate
live together. So if we avoid the things that make us unhappy, we
will not automatically become happy. We may well lessen our un-
happiness with-out achieving any increase of happiness.

Many people are born unhappy, and identical twins often

have closer levels of unhappiness than fraternal twins. This suggests
that there is a genetic component to happiness. However, no one is
born happy. Happiness is an acquired sense of wellbeing. It is more
closely related to social inter-action than to any other environmental
control. Our happiness or our unhappiness also seems to be self-
fulfilling. People who are in a good mood tend to socialize more, in-
creasing their level of happiness. In contrast, the unhappy

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 IN SEARCH OF HAPPINESS

tend to isolate themselves from others, deepening even further their

loss of well-being.
This leads us to a related question: is there a physiological basis for
happiness? Recent studies suggest that there is in-deed a chemical
basis for feelings of well-being within the human body. This lies in
endorphins, the body's own natural opiates, which are produced in
the pituitary gland and have a chemical structure similar to mor-
phine. The difference is that they can be up to one hundred times
more powerful.
Pain and exercise can trigger off the release of endorphins in the
body. This is why physical fitness (especially after strenuous exer-
cise) is associated with a mood of well-being. It explains the addic-
tion to exercise which some people cultivate. Creative thought can
also trigger off endorphin production. People who know what they
want out of life, and who have creative, positive attitudes, can enjoy
a deepening sense of well-being.
The nerves in the human body communicate both pain and
pleasure to the brain. There are no erogenous zones of pleasure, as
the sexual revolutionaries believed. Sexual satisfaction and pleasure
can only result from a combination of many factors, brought into
play by both partners. These factors include timing, an absence of
stress, and the emotional responses that are needed at the time. The
indirect access to the interior of the mid-brain, where pleasure is ex-
perienced, is chemically short-circuited by the use of drugs. But the
physiology of the human body was never constituted for us to have
direct access to this focus of pleasure. It is like cheating at golf by
going from the first hole directly to the last one. All the contributory
sensations, emotions, and feelings are short-circuited. Pleasure is
naturally a by-product of activity which is in harmony with the
physiological well-being of the whole individual.
When that sense of well-being has been
reached, an excess of the same stimulus will not generate further
sensations of pleasure. A hungry stomach finds the taste of food

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delicious, but when it is full it has no further need for taste. Ten ice
cream sundaes will never give ten times more pleasure than one!
Prolonged sexual activity decreases, rather than increases, in pleas-
ure. Over-consumption, in all its forms, does not increase happi-
ness, and the over-production of pleasure ends up by being plain
boring.
This is why drug addicts have to step up dosages of the drug to
maintain their levels of previous pleasure. This experience becomes
more and more physiologically damaging to the body and mind of
the addict. In C. S. Lewis's The Screw tape Letters, the arch devil
Screwtape advises his apprentice: 'an ever-increasing craving for an
ever-diminishing pleasure is the formula.'

The pursuit of happiness: self defeating?

All of this indicates that happiness is not an end in itself. In-stead, it

is a by-product of other human activities. Good things do not come
out of the blue, but as the result of conscious actions on our part. At-
titudes to life, emotional intensity and involvement, intimacy in re-
lationships with other people, bodily well-being, altruism in self-
forgetful-ness, intellectual satisfaction, worthwhile work and, above
all, a meaningful faith that overarches all our existence-these are
what enable us to become happy people.

It is often said that those who hit the highest highs also bottom out
with the lowest lows. Experiments have been carried out with rats
which have had electrodes inserted into the part of the brain that
stimulates pleasure. The rats are placed before three levers: if they
press the first, food is released; if they press the second, they get a
drink; if they press the third, they activate the electrodes to give
them a short sensation of pleasure. The rats quickly learn to distin-
guish be-tween the three levers. After trying them all, they eventual-
ly go on and on pressing the pleasure lever, until they die of

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starvation and thirst. The stimulus of pleasure has literally killed

them! Why should they respond to the pains of hunger or thirst,
when they had direct access to pleasure? This is the basic mistake
behind the direct pursuit of pleasure. To pursue pleasure single-
mindedly means to neglect the fullness of human personality.

To target solely upon pleasure is to miss out on so many other as-

pects of what it means to be truly human. In sexual neuroses, pa-
tients are thwarted from obtaining sexual pleasure precisely because
they seek to obtain it directly. Yet this is exactly what the modern
commercialization of sex does today. It cheats people of the glory of
their humanity. The pursuit of happiness for its own sake amounts
to a self-defeating exercise. It is a self-contradiction.
This self-contradiction is the great illusion of today's culture. We
believe that self fulfilment is a marketable product, something
which we can buy along with the 'right deodorant', the 'right career',
the 'right mate' and the 'right car'! However, all this does is to accel-
erate the vacuum experienced by Gloria earlier in this chapter. If we
concentrate on pursuing happiness, it will vanish before our eyes. It
is only as we withdraw ourselves from the tyranny of self-
preoccupation that we can truly become happy. Only then can we
have an authentic mode of existence.
Living for others appears a much more reliable recipe for happiness
than living for oneself. So where then did this myth about the neces-
sary pursuit of happiness come from?

The right to pursue happiness

Curiously enough, it was Thomas Jefferson who taught us that the

pursuit of happiness was our birthright. That was how it was written
into the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. In a letter,
Jefferson mentioned that this idea was not original to him. George
Mason in the Virginia

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Declaration of Rights had said something very similar. Further back

still, John Wise wrote that the main business of the state was to at-
tend to 'the happiness of the people'. So the 'right to pursue happi-
ness', was originally the responsibility of government, rather than of
the individual as the saying has been interpreted.

In 1774,John Wise argued that the whole purpose of the political

compact was 'to ensure and to increase the happiness of the gov-
erned. The consequence is that the happiness of society is the first
law of every government.' This led directly to the concept that de-
mocracy is 'government that advances the greatest happiness of the
greatest number'. This, in turn, was based upon other unspoken as-
sumptions which we need to examine.

The first assumption was that the world of the eighteenth century
was no longer medieval. No longer dominated by the church and the
state, people were free to think for themselves. They were free to
'dare to know', as the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it. This revo-
lution of thought fostered the new concept of 'the rights of man',
which the French Revolution was to spell out in terms of 'Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity'. In the vast spaces of America, the 'rights' were
spelled out in terms of happiness, freedom and property, with the
anchor being property. Everyone had the right to own land as a pio-
neering settler.

'Let these truths be indelibly impressed on our minds,' declared John

Dickinson in 1776, 'that we cannot be happy without being free-that
we cannot be free without being free in our property'. In the thought
of leaders such as John Locke, a man's property was the extension
of his personality. As a result, the condition of a man's property was
the index of his happiness. This popular belief is as strong as ever
today: what we possess is an index of our happiness. In the eight-
eenth century, happiness lay in owning property. Today it lies in
consuming material goods. Through both of

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these interpretations, the prevailing view of modern society is that

happiness is to be equated with material prosperity.
The second assumption was that everyone knew what 'happiness'
meant. In fact they didn't. Chancellor Kent, speaking in the New
York Constitutional Convention of 1821,argued that American pros-
perity was itself the mark of God's approval, sufficient in itself to
achieve happiness. He said:

Discontent in the midst of so much prosperity, and

with such abundant means of happiness, looks like
ingratitude, as if we were disposed to arraign the
goodness of Providence. Do we not expose ourselves
to the danger of being deprived of the blessings we
have enjoyed?

The moral was clearly to build bigger barns, live merrily, and in this
way show your gratitude to Providence who pro-vides with such
generosity. In fact, this way of thinking contradicted Jesus' teaching
in the parable of the Rich Fool. He too made himself comfortable
and settled down to enjoy his riches, only to be told by God:

You fool! This very night your life will be demanded

from you. Then who will get what you have prepared
for yourself?

Gradually then, throughout the nineteenth century, the pursuit of

happiness became an individual right, to be interpreted individually
as everyone thought fit. In the Middle Ages, rights had existed
alongside duties, but now rights and duties became detached from
one another. The problem is that if in democratic society everyone
is free to pursue happiness as he or she sees fit, then the state even-
tually becomes ungovernable. This is where democratic society is
now heading, towards a fragmentation of vested interests that often
confront each other in clashing contradictions.

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If we reflect on this modern emphasis upon 'my rights', we see that

no other society has ever attempted to live like this, with such in-
tense individualism or self-concern. The idea of 'human rights', as
now interpreted, is quite unintelligible to societies as diverse as Eu-
rope in the medieval era, the worlds of classical Greece or Rome, or
the Hebrew, Arabic, Hindu and Chinese cultures. This insistence on
rights, with a happiness that is left to each person to seek after, can
only lead to greater and greater confusion and chaos in the world to-
day.

The third assumption in the eighteenth century was that it was the
government who provided the people with happiness. However, this
arose only as the Age of Reason dis-placed God. Without God, there
is no ultimate purpose. The secular faiths which replaced God were
belief in progress or, in the nineteenth century, in evolution. This
had fateful consequences in this century, when totalitarian dictator-
ships interpreted their own futures as they saw fit. Hitler's Germany
and Stalin's Russia did exactly this, with appalling consequences for
the human race.

Meanwhile, in the capitalist world, if God is not allowed to rule,

then mammon quickly takes his place. Just as New-ton's law of
gravitation governs the motion of the planets, so the law of avarice
rules the market place. Human greed, we fear, may one day send the
world's markets crashing disastrously. If, however, every leader of
government is also in pursuit of happiness, defined as each thinks
fit, then is not democracy itself liable to extinction? Will we all end
up like the rats who eventually starved, because we too have be-
come addicted to pushing the pleasure lever all the time?

Happiness: beyond ourselves

We have seen that the pursuit of happiness is a dead-end. Happiness

is not like a commodity we can grasp and hold on

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to. It never becomes our property. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Ameri-

can author, likened happiness to a butterfly. It flits away when
chased, but it will come and alight on your hand if you only sit qui-
etly, occupied in doing something else. Happiness is not naturally a
permanent state; it is an exceptional gift. We have seen why this is
true, both in the way our bodies and emotions work. If we persist in
believing that happiness consists in having more and more, we will
only perpetuate the social climate of our drug-addicted culture.
There is a long historical tradition which shows us that luxury is the
death of society. This is how it was with the Roman Empire, and
how it will be with the modern West, if it persists in the folly of lux-
ury.
It is clear, then, that we have no right to happiness. In-stead, we
gain our sense of self-worth by looking outwards in relationships:
our obligations to others; the duties we per-form well; the responsi-
bilities we carry on behalf of others; the emotional involvement we
have in the well-being of others. It is precisely when young people
feel uncomfortable in their relationships that drugs become an at-
traction to alleviate the pain of alienation. Self-preoccupation only
intensifies the experience of loneliness, turning us into the lonely
person in the lonely crowd.
'Do your own thing' leads ultimately to despair, as we lose all grasp
of who the self is. This advice turns out to be as vague and aimless
as living perpetually in a nursery or in Bedlam. There, at least, there
is a keeper who keeps the door shut. But when you do your own
thing in a Porsche, with several mistresses and a fat bank balance,
then you can introduce madness indeed into society.
If the right to happiness turns out to be stealing someone else's wife,
or robbing the poor to luxuriate the rich, then the end in sight is
merely treachery, tyranny, and the violation of humanity. As C. S.
Lewis has pointed out:

A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must

always be in the long run a society adverse to women.

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Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may

say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous
than men; it is a biological necessity.
Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore
always be more often the victims than the culprits. Al
so, domestic happiness is more necessary to them
than to us. And the quality by which they most easily
hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after
they come to maturity. Thus in the ruthless war of
promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage.
They play for higher stakes and are more likely to
lose.
We can see that 'the right to happiness' is a dead-end street by look-
ing at the contemporary assumption that happiness lies in self-
actualization. This is probably the most import-ant contemporary
theory of the good life, but on examination it turns out to be ludi-
crous. On the one hand, modern advertising tells us that happiness
consists in being liked by others, and in the things we do, wear, and
have. At the same time, we are also told by how-to-do books that
we need to overcome shyness, remove guilt, deal with depression,
and generally re-tool our personality to become bouncy, a positive
thinker, and a popular leader. These two approaches are incompati-
ble. Advertising cons us that happiness is on the outside, in the
things we possess. But the books tell us that happiness lies inside, in
our psychological conditioning. As Erich Fromm puts it: 'Happiness
is an achievement brought about by man's inner productiveness, the
accompaniment of all productive activity, in thought, feeling, and
action.' Is it not likely that self-actualization is like happiness itself-
it comes about when we are not feverishly pursuing it?

Leaving the pleasure garden

What are the characteristics of the happiness that so many pursue in

the modern world? Contemporary happiness is

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debased, a shadow of all that true happiness is meant to be. Those

who embrace this version of happiness live provision-ally, from mo-
ment to moment, with little sense of loyalty or fidelity. Life be-
comes a chancy affair, with either good or bad luck always lurking
round the corner. They see them-selves as the plaything of forces
beyond their control, and gain a deep sense of the meaninglessness
of all life.

Gloria, who was quoted earlier, has described her feelings about
this:

Many times I have felt as if I'm trapped on a huge roller-

coaster that goes up and down, and round and round.
Sometimes I manage to escape and get off the mad ride,
world looks exciting, but too risky. I'm not sure that I
could survive, so the amusement park remains still the big
gest attraction. For everyone is being persuaded to stay
inside the gates of the amusement park and to get back on
to the roller coaster.

outside the park'. They are the ones who truly seek God
with all their heart, mind, soul and body, and are fully pre
pared to give it all up. They are the ones who live un-
compromising lives, who don't feel the grip of money, the
pressure of society, the weakened desire for goodness, the
punctured self-discipline, the crushing fear of the future,
the horror of death, the threat of injustice, the need of
security, the rule of self. They don't struggle for faith, hope
and love; they pour out from them, and through them. It is
these people who are totally free.

But how? I feel the grip of money. It controls so much. I

feel the pressure of society. I am not strong enough to
about what I believe. My desire for goodness is lost in

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waves of bitterness, deception, and guilt. My discipline is

worthless in its inconsistency. I am afraid sometimes of all
the things that could happen in the future. Death is
frightening and grim. I hate injustice but do not recognize
justice. I have little faith. My self inspires every action to
satisfy myself. But I am not happy. I wish I could live an
uncompromising life outside the amusement park. I wish
it, yet I fear it at the same time.

In her confusion, fear, and possessiveness, Gloria struggles with the

desire to leave the amusement park, and yet lacks the courage to
leave it. We shall see later how she is helped to turn away and es-
cape.

This is a flight we must all take to gain integrity. In Hermann

Hesse's famous novel Siddharta, the character Siddharta has a
dream. In his dream, his rare songbird, which sings every morning
without fail, becomes mute. To his horror he discovers it has died
and, like Malcolm Muggeridge's analogy of happiness pursued as a
stricken deer that is now 'only a piece of stinking flesh', Siddharta
now realizes that all that was good and valued has died with that lit-
tle bird.
Awakening from this dream, he was overwhelmed by a
feeling of great sadness. It seemed that he had spent his
life in a worthless and senseless manner; he retained
nothing vital, nothing in any way precious or worth-while.
He stood alone, like a shipwrecked man on the shore.

Sadly, Siddharta went to a pleasure garden that be-and felt

horror and death in his heart. He sat and felt himself
dying, withering, finishing. Gradually, he collected his
thoughts and mentally went through the whole of his
life, from the earliest days which he could remember.
When had he really been happy? When had he really

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experienced joy? How many long years had he spent

without any lofty goal, without any thirst, without any
exaltation, content with small pleasures and never really
and saw the stars, he thought: I am sitting in my pleasure
garden. He smiled a little. Was it necessary, was it right,
tree and a garden?

So Hermann Hesse depicts Siddharta shaking his head sadly, and

walking away from his pleasure garden for ever. 'He had finished
with that. That also died in him. That same night Siddharta left his
garden and the town and never returned.'

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