A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, April 20, 2018
Cambridge Analytica and Popular Happiness Industry
Truth and happiness don’t go together – truth hurts, it brings instability, it ruins the smooth flow of our daily lives. The choice is ours: do we want to be happily manipulated or expose ourselves to the risks of authentic creativity?
( April 18, 2018, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Now
that our media is full of reports and comments on Cambridge Analytica, a
key feature of the affair is, as a rule, ignored: the context of
Cambridge Analytica makes it clear how cold manipulation and the care
for love and human welfare are two sides of the same coin. Tamsin Shaw
recently pointed out the central role played by researchers into
happiness, like “The World Well-Being Project, a group at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center that specialises in the
use of big data to measure health and happiness in order to improve
well-being,” then there is “Aleksandr Kogan, who also works in the field
of positive psychology and has written papers on happiness, kindness,
and love (according to his résumé, an early paper was called ‘Down the
Rabbit Hole: A Unified Theory of Love’).”
Why does such research on authentic happiness and well-being draw so
much interest from intelligence agencies and defence contractors? This
link is not externally imposed on the behavioural sciences by “bad”
political manipulators but is implied by their immanent orientation:
their aim is to discover “means by which we can be ‘nudged’ in the
direction of our true well-being as positive psychologists understand
it.” This “nudging” does not make individuals overcome their
“irrationalities”: contemporary behavioural sciences “aim to exploit our
irrationalities” since they view us “as manipulable subjects rather
than rational agents.”
All this is extensively covered by our media, and we are getting a
terrifying image of the new forms of social control which make the good
old 20th-century “totalitarianism” a rather primitive and clumsy
machine. To grasp the full scope of this control, we should move beyond
the link between private corporations and political parties to the
interpenetration of data processing companies like Google or Facebook
and state security agencies. The biggest achievement of the new
cognitive-military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no
longer necessary: individuals are much better controlled and “nudged” in
the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as
free and autonomous agents of their own life.
But all these are well-known facts, and we have to go a step further. It
is not enough to demystify the innocent-sounding research into
happiness and to bring out a hidden gigantic complex of social control
and manipulation that uses it. What is urgently needed is also the
opposite move: we should focus on the form itself. Is the topic of
scientific research of human welfare and happiness (at least the way it
is practised today) really so innocent, or is it already in itself
permeated by the stance of control and manipulation? What if sciences
are here not just misused, what if they find here precisely their proper
use? We should question the recent rise of a new discipline: “happiness
studies.”
As is often the case, Bhutan, a developing Third World country, naively
spelled out the absurd socio-political consequences of this notion of
happiness: two decades ago, the kingdom of Bhutan decided to focus on
Gross National Happiness (GNH) rather than Gross National Product (GNP);
the idea was the brainchild of ex-king Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who
sought to steer Bhutan into the modern world, while preserving its
unique identity. The Oxford-educated new king, 27-year-old Jigme Khesar
Namgyel Wangchuck, ordered a state agency to calculate how happy the
kingdom’s 670,000 people are. The main concerns were identified as
psychological well-being, health, education, good governance, living
standards, community vitality and ecological diversity: this is cultural
imperialism, if there ever was one. No wonder that, two decades ago,
ethnic cleansing was conducted since it was “discovered” that the
presence of a strong non-Buddhist minority is an obstacle to the
happiness of the Buddhist majority.
We should date to take an even further step and enquire into the hidden
side of the notion of happiness itself – when, exactly, can a people be
said to be happy? In a country like Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s and
1980s, people in a way effectively were happy: three fundamental
conditions of happiness were fulfilled there. Firstly, their material
needs were basically satisfied – not too satisfied, since the excess of
consumption can in itself generate unhappiness. It is good to experience
a brief shortage of some goods on the market from time to time (no
coffee for a couple of days, then no beef, then no TV sets): these brief
periods of shortage functioned as exceptions which reminded people that
they should be glad that the goods were generally available. Life thus
went on in a regular and predictable way, without any great efforts or
shocks, one was allowed to withdraw into one’s private niche.
Secondly, the Communist Party was conveniently blamed for everything
that went wrong, so that one did not feel really responsible – if there
was a temporary shortage of some goods, even if there a stormy weather
caused great damage, it was their guilt.
Thirdly, last but not least, there was an Other Place (the consumerist
West) about which one was allowed to dream, and even visit sometimes –
this place was just at the right distance, not too far, not too close.
This fragile balance was disturbed – by what? By desire, precisely.
Desire was the force which compelled the people to move beyond – and end
up in a system in which the large majority is definitely less happy.
Happiness is something confused and inconsistent – recall the proverbial
answer of a German immigrant to the US who, when asked “Are you
happy?”, answered: “Yes, yes, I am very happy, aber gluecklich bin ich
nicht…” It is a pagan category: for pagans, the goal of life is to live a
happy life – no wonder Dalai Lama himself is having such a success
recently preaching around the world the gospel of happiness, and no
wonder he is finding the greatest response precisely in the US, this
ultimate empire of the (pursuit of) happiness. In our daily lives, we
(pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that,
ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we
officially desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the
happiness of dreaming about things we really do not want.
Do we not encounter a similar gesture in much of leftist politics? In
the UK, many leftists privately admit that the near-victory of the
Labour Party in the last elections was the best thing it could have
happened, much better than the insecurity of what might have happened in
the Labour government would have tried to implement its programme.
The same holds for the prospect of Bernie Sanders’ eventual victory:
what would have been his chances against the onslaught of the big
capital? The mother of all such gestures is the Soviet intervention in
Czechoslovakia which crushed the Prague Spring and its hope of
democratic socialism. Without this intervention, the “reformist”
government would have to confront the fact that there was no real
possibility of a democratic Socialism at that historical moment, so it
would have to choose between reasserting the party control and allowing
Czechoslovakia to become one of the Western liberal-democratic
capitalism.
The Soviet intervention saved the Prague Spring as a dream, as a hope
that, without the intervention, a new form of democratic Socialism might
have emerged. And did not something similar occur in Greece when the
Syriza government organised the referendum against Brussels’ pressure to
accept the austerity politics? The government was secretly hoping to
lose the referendum, in which case it would have to step down and leave
it to others to perform the dirty job of austerity. Since they won, this
task fell to themselves, and the result was the self-destruction of the
radical Left in Greece. Without any doubt, Syriza would have been much
happier if it lost the referendum.
So, back to our starting point, not only are we controlled and
manipulated, “happy” people secretly and hypocritically demand even to
be manipulated for their own good. Truth and happiness don’t go together
– truth hurts, it brings instability, it ruins the smooth flow of our
daily lives. The choice is ours: do we want to be happily manipulated or
expose ourselves to the risks of authentic creativity?