On the pursuit of happiness
So, therefore, there are two models before us. One is the biological model, borne out before us by our lived experience when we truly feel happy watching other people's happiness, and the other is a cultural one, which equates happiness with what we have and promote a certain idea who should be considered happy. At the individual level, we balance the two by increasingly drawing narrower circles around us, trying to draw that happiness feeling from making happy the members of our family, at once producing the Oxytocin that we need to survive as well as not succumbing to the cultural stereotype of do-gooding foolishness.
In reality, therefore, the pursuit of happiness is really a pursuit of selfishness, the search for a biologically awkward mode of living. And, it is economically necessary, as only by convincing them of this particular idea of happiness, one can truly limit the agency of small people. That humans have no other power than to withdraw their two inalienable attributes - their labours and their desires - was well understood by the people who stood up to the powerful, people like Jesus or Gandhi; but they can't even contemplate their own agency as long as they remain locked in to this unfulfilling pursuit of fulfilment. The wrong idea of happiness that we live by, as it turns out, is an essential ingredient of our misery.
But the limits to power, one hopes, comes from within. The circle of selfishness is self-corrupting, as it helps to pass on to succeeding generations the opposite set of values other than are needed even to pursue happiness. The urge to look after the well-being of our offspring makes each succeeding generation a little too entitled, a little too idle, until their sloth and idleness undo the very chain of command and control. It is the Rome problem, which was destroyed not by the immigrants as we try to read it, but by prosperity, its own version of the pursuit of happiness.