Dr. Zabel's Prescription for Happiness in the Modern World
Postulates
- Happiness consists in engaging in activities, not in
acquiring things.
- Things are sometimes necessary for engaging in activities
and so must be acquired for their sake.
- People have varying talents for and interests in engaging
in different kinds of activities.
- A person learns to engage in activities with some degree of
excellence through the guidance of other people.
- Over the course of your life-span, you will experience
periods of vulnerability and disability in which you must depend upon the care
of others for physical and psychological survival, and others will experience
similar periods of vulnerability and disability in which they must depend upon
your care.
- Because they have finite energy and capacity to
concentrate, people are not able to engage in activities continually, but must
periodically renew themselves through rest and recreation.
- Relations of reciprocal care, guidance, learning,
collaboration, recreation, and collective decision-making are characteristic
of community.
- It is very difficult or impossible to establish communal
relations between people characterized by deep material inequalities.
Theorems
Therefore, if you want to be happy (and take my word for it,
you do):
- Discover the activities for which you have interest and
aptitude, and pursue them with whatever degree of excellence you are capable
of.
- Seek out the people who can guide you in discovering those
activities and acquiring the skills necessary to engage in them with
excellence.
- Seek only as much money as is necessary for engaging in
such activities, for helping others do so as well, and for caring for them
when they experience periods of vulnerability and disability.
- Cultivate and repair those communal relationships involving
family. friends, neighbors, citizens, and human beings in general that play a
vital role in sustaining reciprocal care, guidance, learning, collaboration,
and recreation.
- Whenever possible, work with others in establishing those
practices of participatory decision-making and rough material equality without
which genuine communal relations are very difficult or impossible to achieve.
(I leave it to the reader as an exercise to justify the
postulates and derive the theorems from them. By the way, in doing the latter, you will
be deriving prescriptive statements from declarative ones, "ought" statements
from "is" statements. Following the eighteenth century Scottish
philosopher, David Hume, most modern philosophers have held this to
be impossible. But the exercise I've left to you, which is relatively easy to
execute, shows that they are wrong in this belief.)
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