Gross National Happiness

In Eric Weiner's The Geography of Happiness he talks of the nation of Bhutan, its efforts to maintain its history and culture, but mostly of its policy of Gross National Happiness.

 

The first two words in that phrase should sound familiar enough.  Even if you don't know what  they mean, Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product should be phrases you've heard before.  Often, the terms are used to describe not just the wealth, but the overall health of a nation. Bhutan has a different take on this.  Instead of measuring their worth, their government's worth, and their national policies by measure of what they produce (and, of course, by association, what they consume) they've chosen to rate themselves on a policy of national happiness.

 

"But," you think to yourself,  "you can't measure happiness." 

 

"Why not?" says Weiner and a growing number of phsychologists, sociologists, magazine editors and jounalists.  In a recent Business Week survey, Bhutan was rated the eighth happiest nation in the world.  It made Weiner's list of places to check out because he had seen the survey and was familiar with the work of a psychologist from the Netherlands who spoke of it, and because he wanted to find a place that was relatively poor by most standards but still made everyone else's lists of happy places.

 

What intrigued me about Weiner's description of the place was the fact that the underlying idea behind Bhutan's otherwise VERY idiosyncratic methods of achieving Gross National Happiness was the idea that living within one's means virtually guarntees the policy's success. Before having a local explain this to him directly, Weiner notices a road sign on which the following is hand painted:

 

When the last tree is cut

When the last river is emptied

When the last fish is caught

Only then will Man realize that he can not eat money

 

Ok, ok, so they're all tree huggers?  Well, not really.  Some of their dedication to preservation, at least in the form of preventing littering, comes to them much more honestly... via superstition or faith, if you prefer.  Weiner relates the story of three hikers walking past a lake into which they've thrown their trash.  Without warning a dense fog enveloped the area and caused the hikers to get lost.  Only one of them was ever found.  Legend has it that the spirit of the lake took the other two hikers as punishment for their "sins."  Folks in Bhutan don't litter now.  And sure, they're not above animism, but it's not the ONLY reason they believe in sustainability.

 

When he finally manages to track down a government official who is initially "too busy" to be interviewed for the book, Weiner asks him why he has just seen graphic footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a presentation the official has just hosted.  The official's response sums up the policy:

 

"I truly believe that a country that is committed to happiness cannot be bellicose; if we don't pursue a sustainable way of life, we will be fighting for resources.  Not just for oil and not necessarily between nations.  It might be a fight for water between San Diego and Los Angeles."

 

While this official's answer doesn't exactly address the footage about which Weiner inquires, it does represent the essence of Bhutan's policy:  they're frickin nuts!

 

Just like every era-marking idea in the history of man.

 

Only when someone, somewhere, has the balls to say or think or try something totally nuts is history made.  Only when the common thinking is challenged in a way that allows a new idea, a new way of thinking, a completely different view of the world to gain some traction are problems we've never foreseen on the verge of being solved.

 

In the case of Bhutan, an entire nation has bought into this madness.  According to Weiner, they owe much of their current thinking to an ancestor who came along about 500 years ago named Drupka Kunley.  Natives sometimes call him the Divine Madman.  Weiner compares him to Woody Allen and Howard Stern.  He was a bit of a drunk, a womanizer, apparently had what some might call a flatulence problem, and he laid down the ideals for a nation that now places the happiness of its people above the wealth of its people.

 

The Bhutanese have done this in some strange ways, not all of which sound all that great, but doesn't every plan run into some roadblocks?  While they still keep a very strict limit on tourism, forgoing potential millions, they have added cable TV, hospitals, schools, and even a few "roads" if you use the term loosely.  Men are advised (but not forced) to meditate at some point in their lives for three years, three days and three months and not too long ago, the government ran power lines up into the Himalayas to provide a village just for this meditation.  There's no profit involved.  It doesn't cost anything to go and meditate there, and there's little financially to be derived from any phase of the ordeal, but that wasn't a consideration.

 

I'm leaving out many of the details, but you can read Weiner's book (it really is interesting and it looks at  a lot of other places in the world while doling out digestible chunks of data driven "happiness research" along the way) or you can just Wiki Bhutan for yourself.  My point, and I do have one, is that regardless of how nutty this particular nation of people may be, the fact that they still exist, and by most standards are doing just fine, seems to indicate that the time has come for their crazy idea to be recognized by others.

 

This means a shift in thinking.

 

Nietzche says something like this in Daybreak: 

 

"It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or elevate people to it.  That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that sounds like folly."

 

Plenty of smart people have told us for a long time that money can't buy happiness, that it's not a true measure of wealth or health.  That nations cannot be measured solely by it and yet, for the last twenty years of my life and long before, I suspect, every indication of where we are and where we are going as a nation has been in terms of the mighty dollar.

 

Weiner poses a riddle early on in his chapter on Bhutan.  It's as if he's having trouble wrapping his brain around the nation's crazy ideas even though he went there for the sole purpose of grasping them.  The riddle goes like this: 

 

What do the following have in common:  The War in Iraq, The Exxon Valdez, and the rise in the U.S. prison population?  The answer, of course, is that they all contribute to... favorably contribute to our Gross Domestic Product.  In pure economic terms, that makes all three of these items "good."

 

Now look, I'm not saying that Bhutan has all the answers, nor does Weiner.  In fact, he bemoans the lack of a good cup of coffee just about everywhere in the country and notes that many of the "cafes" his tour guide drops him in serve only instant... bad instant. And I'm not saying we could suddenly drop the economy that currently has our nation chugging along so briskly and wonderfully overnight.  But I am saying that the staying power of this idea is a sign that we're ready to evolve as a species into a higher form of managing ourselves and our world.

 

Though plenty of people WAY smarter than me have told us many times before that money isn't everything, we've never been seduced to any alternatives.  We've never been elevated to any new way of thinking about it.  Eric Weiner's book has thrown some sand under our wheels as they spin on the financial ice.  Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, Professor of Happiness Studies and his World Happiness Database in the Netherlands, Positive Psychology programs popping up at Clarmont University in California, and now Penn State, surveys by Business Week, and a whole lot of searching for a better way HAVE elevated us to this idea.

 

It is rarely enough to prove something.  We must be elevated to it.  It must be presented to us as folly, so we are forced to consider it over and over until something about it strikes us as real.

 

The Geography of Happiness speaks this truth as though it were pure folly.  It is entertaining in its most biographical purposes,  pleasantly enlightening  in its dissemination of research, but most importantly, it elevates us to an entire shift in thinking.  It introduces us to guests standing at our doorway who appear a little scary compared to the guests we're used to, but dammit, I think it's time we let them in, offer them something to drink, some good conversation, and just see if we can't enjoy what we have to learn from them for a while.

 

What have we got to lose?

By the way, while cleaning up the 'blog, I found an old post lying around in draft form, realized how overdue a new post was and though it's probably too late, I thought maybe this might remind us all, on the day after a historic inauguaration, that it is in fact time to move on... that and I'm pissed I never got around to posting it when the time was right (when Mary Tillman's book came out almost a YEAR ago!! ) so if you're like the three other regular readers of HorsePoup, and you're jonesing for something else to read while waiting for the paint to dry, click on May 2008 and check out another "new" post full of piss and vinegar over the different treatment of two grieving mothers who lost sons in OEF/OIF.

Luth,

Out