The philosophical and political aim of increasing the happiness of the population is not new; Aristotle wrote about it over 2000 years ago and the pursuit of happiness was enshrined in the constitutions of both post-independence America and post-revolutionary France in the 18th Century. However, what is more novel is the development of specific policies and government sponsored institutions geared towards achieving this aim.
It was under Tony Blair’s premiership that a happiness Tsar was first appointed in the UK, and programmes such as the ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning Programme’ were rolled out in schools. On the face of it this seems very laudable but perhaps eyebrows should have started to rise when well-being was the central theme of the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos where motivation is usually economic rather than philanthropic. Mental illness is after all hugely economically damaging, costing the UK between £75 and £100 billion each year (1). It is no coincidence that the UK’s first happiness Tsar was also a professor from the London School of Economics.
Clearly it makes economic sense to improve the mental health of the nation and so Blair’s government poured money into improving access to psychological therapies to end this un-economic mental ill-health.
Under David Cameron’s Conservative government the drive to steer people into making ‘the right choices’ about their health and well-being became even more direct. Cameron created a ‘nudge unit’ based on the ideas put forward by Thaler and Sunstein in their book Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness (2). Thaler and Sunstein describe themselves as ‘liberal paternalists’ who favour subtle and gentle means of influencing behaviour rather than mandates and punishment.
A trivial example of this is the painting of a fake fly onto the urinals in men’s toilets. By giving men something to aim at this has been shown to reduce spray and spill significantly. A more morally loaded application of these ideas was the American programme of paying teenage girls a dollar for every day on which they didn’t fall pregnant in order to reduce teen pregnancy rates (3).
There is something troubling in the attitude of a government that believes its citizens are passive participants in economic gameplay and whose behaviour is to be manipulated in a manner more commonly seen in psychological experiments involving animals (3).
This ‘nudge’ psychology, which aims to create circumstances and frameworks within which people unconsciously make the decisions that the government wishes them to make, harks back to a tradition of ‘behaviourism’. The chief proponent of behaviourism was B. F. Skinner who is best known for experiments in which he ran rats through mazes. Through his research Skinner came to reject the very idea of human free will. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity he put forward the theory that human behaviour, both good and bad, was the result of environmental conditions and an instinct to avoid aversive stimuli. In essence humans are little different, albeit more complex, than the rats in his experiments trying to earn treats and trying to avoid electric shocks.
Skinner is widely hailed as a brilliant and influential psychologist whose ideas have been transformational to our understanding of human behaviour, but his absolute rejection of the idea of free will is without doubt disturbing. Perhaps no less disturbing is the thought that modern governments are seeking to apply these ideas to guide our behaviour according to their own policy agenda.
Whilst it may instinctively feel like progress that influential institutions now appear to be prioritising psychological well-being, if the motivation for this shift in focus is increased economic output, will there come a point when people will be blamed for their un-economic unhappiness (4)? If an individual’s negative emotions such as anxiety and sadness are deemed to be damaging for wider society where do we draw the line that determines what degree or duration of negative emotion is socially acceptable?
For example, how long do we allow grief following a bereavement to interfere with economic productivity? Is there a target level of contentment to which we all should aspire? If our proxy measure for happiness is economic output then does a sad but productive person warrant less attention than someone who is happily idle?
The idea of well-being is also of enormous commercial significance. Type the word well-being into an Amazon book search and it will return around 14,000 titles all of which purport to be able to improve well-being.
Self-help books to improve mental well-being range from scholarly, scientific tomes to the frankly crackpot. It is clearly a complex issue and for any individual the causes of their stress, and therefore the likely solutions to their problems, will vary. Never-the-less, if a problem has nearly 14,000 published solutions, and yet remains a widespread problem, it suggests that none of these solutions is particularly effective.
In his book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, William Davies, a London based sociologist, argued that, when confronted with a painful problem, you can either reduce the size of the problem or learn to ignore the pain (4). For all the laudable intentions of government funded well-being programmes, resilience training, and psychological therapies, they are all directed at teaching us to ignore the pain of life as we have come to live it.
Against a rising tide of population scale unhappiness we continue to plough on with the status quo, picking those up who have been hurt, patching them up as best we can, and throwing them back into the fray. Perhaps it is time that we stop trying to ignore the pain and begin to address the size if the problem.
References
1. Davies, S.C. (2013). Chief Medical Officer’s summary. In: N. Metha (ed.), Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer 2013, Public Mental Health Priorities: Investing in the Evidence [online]. London: Department of Health, pp.11-19.
2. Thaler R, Sunstein CR. Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. London: Penguin, 2009
3. Fitzpatrick M. The politics of behaviour. British Journal of General Practice. 2010;60(575):461.
4. William Davies (2015). The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso