Happy With Barack? I Am.
I watched two excellent speeches tonight. One given by the President of the United States, and the other given by a Harvard Psychologist at the TED Conference in 2004. I’m going to focus on the latter, at least initially.
The speech, given by Dan Gilbert, was on the synthesis of happiness; and you should probably spend the next twenty minutes watching it. Or don’t and just read my three sentence synopsis of the talk. Okay, cool. Essentially, what he finds is that human beings have a unique capacity to be happy with their situation, lotto winners being just as happy in aggregate as paraplegics, and this effect, that we often dismiss is delusion, is as psychologically legitimate as so called “genuine happiness.” We also have the capacity, derived from the structure of our prefrontal cortexes, to simulate situations before we experience them. This gives us the ability to incorrectly predict what will make us happy, by allowing us to greatly exaggerate our delta-happiness between two different situations. The experimental data used to prove this point, using amnesiac preferences, was stunning. The speech closed with the following quote from Adam Smith:
“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another… Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice. Wherever prudence does not direct, wherever justice does not permit, the attempt to change our situation, the man who does attempt it, plays at the most unequal of all games of hazard, and stakes every thing against scarce any thing.” - Adam Smith
Ideologues inherently overrate the difference between the ideology they hew to and that of their opposition. This is a natural tendency of the human mind; we see a scenario unfolding in our mind and allow the worst cases to instill fear into our decision making process. This leads to irrational decision making, or as Adam Smith would say, staking everything against scarce anything. The Republicans thrived on this tendency for fifteen years with their exploitation of wedge issues. Fear of the reprecussions of gay marriage and abortion led to an economic meltdown and two decade long wars. This is not unique to the right, as many on the left have exploited this tendency as well (why do you think we don’t currently rely on nuclear power…) though clearly the Republican Party currently owns the disastrous ramifications of this behavior.
Barack Obama is not an ideologue, which is fortunate given the wealth of power he currently has. He understands that so long as he behaves from a place of justice and prudence, he will end up creating a situation in which most will be able to be happy. Hence, compromising on the stimulus bill in order to ensure something was done to employ Americans. Hence reconsidering the nationalization of banks to ensure that capital flows freely and American businesses can produce goods and services. This is a man who understands that cutting fifty billion dollars from a stimulus package in order to get the votes necessary for passage is not only good politics, but also good governance. After too many years of folly and injustice, America finds itself at a moment of true peril. I genuinely believe that we are lucky to be led by a man who understands far better than I ever could when preferences are just preferences, and when they are the necessary dictates for action.
