What's so HAPPY about the MEDIUM?

How happy are you these days?

What goes into your answer?   Do you have some “why” and/or “why not” in mind as you consider your own level of happiness?  

Do you care about others’ happiness?   Does it matter to you whether people in your country or beyond are happy or not?   Does that affect your own level of happiness?

Perhaps you are aware of something called The World Happiness Report.  I recently learned this Report was sponsored by the small Asian nation of Bhutan, a rare carbon-neutral nation of predominately Buddhist people.  Using a Resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly back in 2011, the motivation was essentially improved global economic development.  This report encouraged national governments to “give more importance to happiness and well-being in determining how to achieve and measure social and economic development.”   

This annual report is published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and it contains results from this question posed to a sample size of 100,000 people in each of 140 different nations:   

“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

What steps are named in this so-called stepladder of happiness measure?   Things like social support, healthcare, freedom, positive emotions, perceptions of corruption, and even acts of generosity get measured by responses having to do with donations, volunteering, and helping a stranger.   Quite a well-thought out instrument, in my own opinion.

If you are curious, as I was, to find where different nations place within even a “top 100” listing, here’s a link you can follow:  https://data.worldhappiness.report/table?_gl=1*1tkve2h*_gcl_au*NjY1MjQ2NTMyLjE3NzAzOTc1MjQ.    Noting myself how the happiest nations this past decade plus seem located in the Scandinavian area of Europe led me to wonder if the polling was conducted more in the summer months with lots of daylight vs. the winter months with lots of darkness.   No.  All polling is spread across the 12 mos. calendar for every nation.   So it’s not weather-related, in case you were like me and assumed this of the northern Europeans happily answering questions while on holiday all of July at some beach along the North Sea.

Where my curiosity has then taken me has something to do with a social theory concocted by that late 18^th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fredriech Hegel.   He believed based on his studies of history that social movements were “dialectical” in that there were routinely 3 phases:  a thesis, an anti-thesis, and then a synthesis.   The latter produced a higher level or evolution of social functioning for our human species.  Now stay with me here a bit if you will, because I find myself using this theory to explain to myself why the Scandinavians perhaps have risen to a higher level of happiness than folks from most other nations.             

Modern social & cultural history has featured two great movements in the general category of political economics.    The first developed largely in the western nations and involved Capitalist Oligarchies.   Governments represented the titans of industry and promoted their free trade among global states.   Such avenues of trade emerged from the earlier development of colonial empires.   Our American history regards us as a colonial nation under the empire of Great Britain, where 18^th century Capitalist theory was perfected.    I’ll call this the modern Thesis borrowing from the Hegelian dialectical theory.  Capitalist Oligarchies. Those with the means of production own the government. 

As Anti-Thesis (borrowing now from the philosophy of Karl Marx, another German philosopher who followed a century after Hegel) I would note the more eastern movement of Communist Monopoly.    There the State removes the Capital from private Oligarchs and establishes a public monopoly aimed at eliminating free trade and promoting fair trade through their own form of colonial expansion.  The government owns the means of production.  This, again, is the Anti-Thesis.

These two great movements of modern history, western capitalism and eastern communism, led most analysts to assume a “third world” synthesis of under-developed nations who were somewhere below the radar and not really capitalists, not really communists, not really developed at all.   Just left to flounder until they were captured by one of the two great movements.   Wars were then fought such as ours in Vietnam to establish control by our western oligarchs (French followed by American) in opposition to those eastern communist monopolies (ignorant of how the communist Russians competed against the communist Chinese and even communist Vietnamese, forming what amounted far more to communist oligarchies than any real monopoly). 

Meanwhile, the truer form of synthesis had nothing to do with third world under-development at all but rather the northern Europeans whose hybrid social structure produced a high level of development now fairly labeled as democratic socialism.             

Unlike Capitalist Oligarchies, these Scandinavian governments refused to be owned by the means of production.   And unlike Communist Monopolies, er Oligarchies, they refused to own the means of production.   Rather, they offered a hybrid system of production and trade where the government acted for the common good of both private owners and private laborers to create a win/win.     By mixing some private ownership for profit with some public ownership as non-profit service for the common good, this hybrid model of civilization seems to have produced the Happy in the Happy Medium.    The private sector competes in the free global markets to reward global investors.   The public sector cooperates in the fair trade markets to secure human rights for all, such as a right to healthcare, to education, to housing, to food, to transportation, to personal safety, to productive work, and to freely vote in government elections.   Such a hybrid model, or synthesis between the originating thesis of Capitalism and anti-thesis of Communism forms Democratic Socialism for the sake of balance, a win/win means of providing the greatest good for the greatest number.

So what then happens to that greatest number?  

To me it makes sense that it translates into the highest ranking of happiness among the Scandinavian people.   The reality of a happy medium is hard to ignore.            

And once again, how happy are you these days?