Sunday, January 27, 2019

Be very careful what you wish for................


      In 1776 the Founding Fathers of the United States established the right to the pursuit of happiness as one of the three unalienable human rights, alongside the right to life and the right to liberty.  It is important to note, however, that the American Declaration of Independence guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness itself.  Crucially, Thomas Jefferson did not make the state responsible for its citizens' happiness.  Rather, he sought only to limit the power of the state.  The idea was to reserve for individuals a private sphere of choice, free from state supervision. . . . 
      Yet over the last few decades the tables have turned, and Bentham's vision* has been taken far more seriously.   People increasingly believe that the immense systems established more than a century ago to strengthen the nation should actually serve the happiness and well-being of individual citizens.  We are not here to serve the state — it is here to serve us.   The right to the pursuit of happiness, originally envisaged as a restraint on state power, has imperceptibly morphed into the right to happiness — as if human beings have a natural right to be happy, and anything which makes us dissatisfied is a violation of our basic human rights, so the state should do something about it.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Homo Deus:  A Brief History of Tomorrow


*"the supreme good 'is the greatest happiness of the greatest number'"

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