Aristotle is reported to have said: “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” It would seem that Aristotle was having an off-day when he said that. It turns out that “happiness”, as with so many things which some of us previously, but foolishly, thought were matters of individual responsibility, falls, in both its creation and management, within the mandate of government.
It was an article on page A14 of the July 2, 2016, edition of the National Post which alerted me to the fact that some governments have kindly taken from their citizens the burden of being happy. The article reported that a state in India has created a “Ministry of Happiness”. The state’s chief minister was reported to have said, “The state will be made responsible for happiness and tolerance of its citizens….” Consequently, government, the same entity which brought you income tax audits, will now deliver happiness to you. Sounds counter-intuitive to me.
The article reported that the government will now track growth in “gross national happiness”. I always thought one combined the words “gross” and “happiness” only to describe movies which portray flatulence as the pinnacle of wit.
As I read the article, I wondered if this was some grand hoax so I checked to see if some other news media had reported on this governmental breakthrough in India. I found that the story was reported in the on-line version of The Times of India. It did concern me that the date was April 1, 2016, but the story was also picked up by The Telegraph in the U.K. with this appearing in the July 1, 2016 on-line version of that paper: “India’s notoriously oversized bureaucracy has found a new way to expand - the country’s first ministry of happiness, dedicated to ‘putting a smile on every face’. The new ministry will be created by the central state of Madhya Pradesh to ‘track our growth’ in a manner based on Bhutan’s concept of gross national happiness....”
On top of that, The Times of India article mentioned that the United Arab Emirates also has a Ministry of Happiness. I checked that out, and the creation of such a Ministry was reported by cnn.com on February 15, 2016. Then I discovered that Venezuela has vice-ministry of “supreme happiness”. “A new Vice Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness has been created by Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan president...”: the October 26, 2013 on-line edition of The Telegraph (U.K.).
So, I am reasonably confident this is not some great April Fool’s Day prank (well, no more so than the creation of any new government department).
It should have come as no surprise to me that the United Nations has also put its oar into these waters. It turns out that there is a World Happiness Report 2016 Update which ranks 156 countries “by their happiness levels”. In 2014, Canada was ranked 5th; Switzerland was 1st (I attribute that to chocolate being more popular than maple syrup). In the latest update, Canada slipped to 6th and Denmark leapt from 3rd in 2014 to 1st in the update, with Switzerland falling to 2nd. It would seem that Danish beer makes one happier than Swiss chocolate.
You just know that it will only be a matter of time before some government in Canada decides to take on the role of “happiness” creator and regulator. I foresee the long-form census questionnaire growing by two pages (that won’t help improve the level of gross national happiness). There will, of course, be long litigation to determine whether “happiness” falls within provincial jurisdiction (property and civil rights) or federal jurisdiction (the peace, order, and good government residual power), and, happily, that alone will increase the happiness of lawyers and constitutional law professors.