In Defense Of Happiness

Against Misery Merchants Populating The Online Right

One of the apparently more peculiar positions I hold is that happiness is a healthy and desirable outcome to experience.

This is stark contrast to the popular mantra floating around that, "Happiness is a fleeting, temporary positive mood and if you chase it, you are girly and not accepting the hardness of this world."

I view this statement as immature, spoken from the mouths of people who haven't done any sort of work in philosophy beyond maybe some token stoicism that young men get into for a few months when they're going through college. This is 4chan level thinking and it is a demagogic bigotry masquerading as some kind of bro advice.

To these merchants of immature misery, happiness has to be defined as a mood and then you can fault others for chasing a mood - since a mood is, after all, temporary by nature and not a principle you can live by. Oh look, a cynical merchant gets to morally club his audience.

This clever bit of anti-happiness mantra borrows from the current era of "hard times created by soft men" that the Boomers burdened us all with: voting in massive amounts of welfare, warfare, immigration, and offshoring while not paying the appropriate amount of taxes on all that spending. Since there is popular resentment to borrow from, happiness must be eschewed on account of more martial virtues necessary to make the "strong men" that will make for good times. Happiness gets done dirty as libertinism.

Basically, happiness is getting roped in due to no fault of its own.

Were the Boomers happy? No, they were hedonists and libertines. Deriving positive, temporary feelings of pleasure from misbehavior is not happiness. It is carnality.

Happiness is the outcome of living your values, if your values accord with universal principles. Happiness is for the rare few people who have deFOO’ed, engage in RTRing, and understand and abide UPB. So it is not a surprise that it is popularly misunderstood and its critics appear the Big Thinker when they attack it.

Don’t listen to Freedomain? Okay, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.

People who are critical of happiness are generally just critical people. Misery loves company. If these misery merchants can turn you against happiness, which is an experience that leads to your independent creativity, they can make you dependent on them and make money off of you. Attacks upon happiness are also the prettier cousin of attacks upon innocence. They are similar in that both make you more self-conscious if you do not have the ability to push back philosophically. They establish the critic above your own voice of happiness and innocence, in your internal monologue, and give this surface-level, plausible justification that well, soft men create hard times, don't be overly feminine, blah blah blah.

Happiness is not a fundamentally feminine trait. It is a philosophical universal that all people, regardless of their background, can experience.

Were ocean-faring men, from which I descend, being "girly" or "soft" when they were singing their sea shanties?

Were men of all folkloric stripes engaged in Boomer hedonism when they were engaged in their folk dances at the end of a harvest?

Does the man in the midst of his righteous triumph over a thoroughly wrong opponent come across to you as self-indulgent? Is he living at the expense of the future?

The answer to all of these is a resounding "no".

We live in an era of such heavy cynicism. All of our sports, all of our competitions, are touched by corruption. Nothing operates free and clear in a free market. Everything is touched by subsidy, feminism, and this pyramidical Babylonian tech goofball cornball hegemony that is emergent.

You have to be a visionary, like me, to get past that.

You cannot be a reactionary and lay full claim to universality.

Hard times are not cause for you to sin against universals by acting the cynic and the misery merchant.

The evils of the world are fair game. Go ahead and fight your fight. Happiness and innocence are not fair game.

And when someone smirks to themselves like they've got one up on happiness, they don't. They have nothing. They are simply telling you about their childhoods and with a bit of self-knowledge, it is easy to see through their ruse. You don't have to join them in their delusions.

We have to let go of these gynocentric definitions of timeless universals.

Happiness prevails!

Stand apart from the cynicism. Live for timeless universals!