Happiness and its definition, philosophy, meaning, causes, keys and tips. Happiness and Western culture and non Western culture including Islam

Western Culture Knowledge Center:
What is Western Culture? • Reason • Individualism • Happiness • Rights • Capitalism

Contents
Introduction and Definition
Harmony of Happiness
Saved from Dead End
Conflict Cleared
Non-western Culture and Happiness Incompatible
Fool's Creed

Western culture holds that the attainment of one's own worldly happiness should be the focus of each person's life.

Put differently, Western culture holds that worldly happiness is, in the words of Aristotle, “the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing... the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”^[1]

Happiness is a fundamental and lasting sense of joy and serenity that results from achieving personally meaningful and rational values. Happiness is an indication that one is living successfully, a life proper to a human being, while suffering (as a way of life) is a sign that one is not.^[2]

Harmony of Happiness
To pursuit one’s own happiness is to pursue one’s own interests, one's own success and one's own well-being—as opposed to engaging in self-sacrifice and self-denial. Happiness, then, is selfish.

As a result of this fact, the seeking of one’s own happiness is often viewed as a threat to others since selfishness is traditionally associated with the sacrifice of others to oneself. This viewpoint has some validity in non-Western culture where, to a far-reaching extent, people cheat, steal, brutalize, enslave and kill others in an attempt to sustain or advance their own well-being.

The ideals and values of Western culture, however, encourage people to pursue and attain happiness in a way that is in harmony—not conflict—with others’ well-being and happiness. For example:

Reason allows people to deal with one another by discussion and persuasion, not force or fraud.
Individualism holds that each person can support one’s own life and achieve one’s own happiness by one’s own effort—not as a parasite, living at the expense of others.
Rights protect individuals from being forcibly sacrificed for the benefit of another or others.
Capitalism demonstrates that respecting rights is in the rational self-interests of all people.

Western culture, therefore, fosters a benevolent or rational selfishness, in which people neither sacrifice themselves to others—nor others to themselves.^[3]

Saved from Dead End
Western ideals and values, as we have seen, discourage traditional selfishness—that is, pursuing one's own well-being at the expense of others. By doing so, the ideals and values, in effect, discourage a person from heading down a self-defeating path.

This is because a person virtually cannot attain his or her happiness or proper self-interest by lying, cheating, stealing, assaulting, enslaving, murdering or by engaging in any other heinous act traditionally associated with selfishness.

Such actions, by their nature, put the perpetrator in profound conflict with others and their well-being. As a result, even if a person acts selfish in the traditional sense only every so often, such a person will, at least to some degree, live an anxiety-ridden and dangerous life that teeters on disaster.

Liars, cheaters, thieves, murderers and the like must be intensely concerned with getting caught, spending time in jail and/or, perhaps more seriously, forever labeled untrustworthy and cast out as pariahs—losing at least some of the benefits of living in society as a result. And for many such individuals, a simple knock at the door, bump in the night or countless other normally non-threatening occurrences become terror since they may represent the police or, perhaps worse, their victims seeking revenge.

Slave owners, such as those in non-Western culture, also must live with fear. They must always be concerned with revolt, no matter how well their slaves are treated, and the gruesome things their slaves might do to them out of resentment.

And the more able a person is in sacrificing others to himself, such as in the case of a dictator, the more enemies he makes and the greater the hatred for him. It is no wonder that Hitler and Stalin, for example, both ended up paranoid psychotics given that they had made millions of mortal enemies.

Trying to attain happiness through traditional selfishness is clearly not practical. Any benefit gained is equaled or outweighed by the cost or risk involved, usually by a wide margin. And its impracticality is even more evident when viewed in light of the alternative.

Conflict Cleared
The alternative is the ethical code of conduct that Western ideals and values encourage: rational selfishness. It demands that one deal with others through trade—through voluntary exchange for mutual benefit—not by force or fraud. Through trade, there are no sacrifices given or collected and no victims or victimizers. There are only victors since both parties gain.

As a result, trade virtually eliminates human conflict and leads to genuine goodwill, peace, decency, kindness and benevolence among rational people. Far from making enemies, a person often makes enthusiastic supporters and even friends among those with whom he or she trades because their lives are benefited from the exchange.^[4]

Consequently, individuals of enduring success around the world, including the richest people, are essentially not thugs and swindlers, but traders. Bill Gates, for example, made virtually all of his fortune by dealing with others voluntarily for mutual benefit, not by victimizing people.

Only a person who is rationally selfish—that is, only a person who, at least implicitly, embraces Western ideals and values—is truly capable of achieving his or her happiness and self-interest.

Non-Western Culture and Happiness Incompatible
Non-Western culture sometimes, reluctantly, gives lip service to the importance of worldly happiness. The fact, however, that suffering is the normal state of life in non-Western culture proves that it does not take such happiness seriously.

Non-Western culture is incompatible with happiness because it holds that the individual must sacrifice his for the well-being of the group (such as the state, society, the class, the tribe). But since the group is, in fact, nothing more than a sum of individuals, its happiness or well-being cannot logically be achieved in this way. If all must sacrifice for all, only universal misery can be attained.

And non-Western culture does not take worldly happiness seriously because it often does not take this life seriously. Islamic culture, especially, regards this life on earth to be, not an end in itself, but merely a test for or precursor to a life after this one—a life that promises happiness. According to this view, the more a person denies his or her own worldly well-being, that is, the more he or she suffers in this life in the service of God, the more prepared and worthy he or she is to achieve happiness in the next life.

Fool’s Creed
A major reason why non-Western culture tends to strongly emphasize happiness in the next life, as opposed to this one, stems from its devaluing of reason. To not emphasize reason is to not emphasize reality, facts and knowledge. For example, in addition to being mostly illiterate, many people of Arab and North African nations are ignorant of such basic facts as man's landing on the moon.

“Knowledge is power,” said Francis Bacon, and it includes the power to be happy. The more one knows about the world, the more one is able to deal with it successfully and the less likely one is to be frustrated. Knowledge of grammar, math, logic, natural science, economics, history and philosophy—to name just a few areas—is enormously practical in helping one to live confidently, successfully and, therefore, happily. By contrast, without knowledge one is, by definition, ignorant and thus virtually powerless to achieve success and happiness.

Since they choose to devalue reason and, therefore, knowledge, it is no surprise that people in non-Western culture believe that this life on earth is hell on earth. As a result, they seek happiness where they believe it may exist for them: beyond this life. Consequently, death is their primary concern, not living life on earth. Or, as Osama bin Laden simply puts it, in speaking for at least a significant part of the Islamic world: “We love death.”^[5]

This belief that one must die to find happiness is a Fool’s Creed. The ideals and values of Western culture, especially reason, make possible an unlimited potential for happiness in this life on this earth. In fact, one could say that Western culture and the joy it offers make death the departing of Paradise, not the entering of it.

Go to Rights

[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
[2] Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness; “The Objectivist Ethics” (New York, Signet, 1982) p. 27 paperback.
[3] Ayn Rand first identified and developed the theory of rational egoism and selfishness. See her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, (New York, Signet, 1982).
[4] For more on the harmony of individuals’ self-interest, see capitalism.
[5] Osama bin Laden, as quoted to a visiting reporter for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, and as quoted in Newsweek, “Gunning for Bin Laden” November, 26 2001.