Worse still, society teaches that the pursuit of happiness isn’t really a pursuit at all. It’s a commodity. Look at any
Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.
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re using a Gradient Boosting Tree Classifier with all the features and a numerical cleaning strategy based on the median value. The learning rate of the model is 0.1 and the number of estimators is 125. This is the result of AutoML.At the same time, there was all this stuff about my life that I desperately wanted to change, and had I been able to bulldoze through my holier-than-thouism, I could have really used some help around here.”
After World War II, human beings learned a great lesson. Germany, driven to poverty by war reparations, had turned to fascism. Finally, a set of great minds made the link. Poverty. Ruin. Extremism. Fundamentalism. Fascism. Authoritarianism. War. All the gravest ills we know of, all the diseases of the body politic, are caused by poverty, which is the deprivation of possibility. And they understood, too, that poverty isn’t just financial — but it can also be a deprivation, for example, of social bonds, of opportunities, of meaning, of status, of purpose. There are many kinds of poverty, and money is just one.
And, like Sincero, I could have really used the help that self-help books provide. I’m glad she opened up about her skepticism early in her book. It made her writing more accessible to me because I could relate to her journey.
It was endless war. Societies had to compete for land, for “resources,” which mostly meant new slaves and peasants. But why? Because the vast majority of people, being poor, couldn’t create much. They couldn’t, for example, build great hospitals, discover antiobiotics, and then pioneer healthcare systems. They were just peasants. And when the peasants grew angry, the nobles had two choices. Revolution — or war. And usually, war was easier than fighting off a revolution. So: centuries of endless, bitter war. While the world went precisely nowhere, in terms of how well people lived, until the industrial revolution.
(So these great minds set about rebuilding a world — yes, a whole world — which would be free of poverty. The explicit goal was to end war forever. Utopian? Sure. We’ve forgotten that today — they don’t teach it to us. Have you ever wondered why? It’s because today’s “wise men” are cynics, and cynics are fools. But I digress. A world without poverty, and thus a world without war. Were they successful? The world has in fact made long strides to eliminating extreme poverty. And that’s a result of the institutions these great minds created. The World Bank. The UN. And so on. A limited, but meaningful success. The point of these institutions was to invest in poor countries — and break the vicious cycle of violence which had come to rule the world.)
Below are quotes from twelve of my favorite self-help books about how to be happy. I’ll share why I find these books — and these particular quotes — so helpful. I hope you find them helpful too.
What was happening in America at the same time? It was still a segregated country. Europeans were building great public institutions — NHSes and BBCs and pensions systems, for everyone. America was building drinking fountains for “colored people.” How could it build a modern society? So while the world was becoming modern, eliminating inequality, poverty, injustice — America wasn’t. It was stuck in the past — and that is where it remains. Segregation might be gone — but America never really became a modern society in the way that we discussed earlier. It’s more like a failed modern state, a state that failed at being modern. It started late, and even then, took too few strides, too hesitantly — and is now collapsing before it reached the goal. Are these things linked, somehow?
I’m with Sincero on both points. I used to think self-help was for desperate people. And I had no idea it had anything to do with God. By the time I was thirty, I’d graduated from seminary with an M.A. in Religion and no desire to serve the church.
I know that this message is flawed, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Because I live in an “instant gratification” culture, I’ve been trained to doubt myself if it takes me any time at all to achieve my goals. For example, if I want to get rich, society sells plenty of “get rich quick” ideas.
“What little I knew about the self-help/spiritual world I found to be unforgivably cheesy: it reeked of desperation, rah-rah churchiness and unwanted hugs from unappealing strangers. And don’t even get me started on how grouchy I used to be about God.
Europe took a special lead, though. After the war — quickly — it redesigned its societies to be places of equality, opportunity, and fairness. It understood that poverty had caused its ruin, opening the Pandora’s box of extremism, racism, hate, fascism. And so it quickly gave all its people — at least richer European countries — exactly all those things you thought of when I asked you “what do you think of when you think of a modern place?” Public healthcare, transport, media, finance, housing, safety nets, and so on. The time, money, and freedom to live with dignity. As a simple example, Britain’s NHS was one of the world’s first public healthcare system — created in 1948. Europe was trying to create a place where everyone had the bare minimum of a decent life — so war would never again recur. This was the birth of a truly modern society. It was a European creation — though in a way, I suppose, America lent military might. But the ideas, the will, the innovations — all these were European.
Of the many mantras Kaiser puts forth in her book, I chose this one because it speaks to my particular fear — that I am inadequate. I’ve been socialized by a patriarchal society that even if I “give it my best”, my best might not be good enough.
In the rest of You Are a Badass, Sincero writes about the concepts and practices that she’s gleaned from the self-help world and how they have really made a difference in her life. By the time I’d read the whole book, I found myself relating to the happy side of Sincero’s story. If she could find happiness, I thought, maybe I can too.