In David Brook’s column earlier this week, he talks about the emergence of a “scarcity mentality” in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Scarcity mentalities are non-starters, he writes. It
“seems like a shift in philosophy. But it’s really a shift from a philosophy to an anti-philosophy. The scarcity mind-set is an acid that destroys every belief system it touches.”
Historically, though, those philosophies have existed, and they worked pretty well – Trump’s handling of them aside.
This got me to thinking about the metaphors that people use to figure out the path to well-being. In times when economic resources are scarce, there seems to be a tendency toward thinking that psychic resources are scarce, too. People took what they knew about the world, and applied it to the mind as well. Scarcity in the 19th century lead to beliefs that seem odd today, like the idea that the emotional exhaustion of a failed love affair could destroy your health, and the notion that children should be kept away from excitement if they were going to grow up strong.
By the early 20th century, though, the metaphor had changed: as the economy began to expand as a result of more efficient human work – aided by the advances of the industrial revolution – and so the idea that minds worked that way as well came into vogue: exertion was suddenly good for you. You could work your way to happiness.
So if ideas about minds are reflections of our worlds – adaptations of the metaphors that appear in our cultural environments – where are we today in our thinking about happiness? Are we wrapped up in computer metaphors, or something else? Is the outside-in approach, where you “fake it ’til you make it” actually the Facebook model of happiness, where you present your ideal life and hope it trickles down?
I’ve given those historical ideas a better exploration in today’s article, which you can find here.
What do you think?
on the search for happiness, and its unintended consequences