People were far more happier some 40 years ago
because they could dream about space travel and all other developments in
scientific/technological fields. That's somewhat different today or maybe I'm
wrong ? -Ercan
Let us not forget that this same time period was witness to some of the most significant social unrest in the history of the Western world. Young people were waking up to the other kind of myth...the not-so-good kind... that is used to evoke patriotism for causes that fly in the face of the foundational tenets the United States was supposedly based upon.
Walter Cronkite was in one evening telling America that man walked upon the moon. On another evening, he told America that the military action in Vietnam was a mistake. The psyche and the shadow were in conflict and this young nation was finding that the illusory superiority that it enjoyed in the 1950's and early 1960's was exactly how it was portrayed in "Leave It To Beaver"...total fantasy. The hangover we are experiencing now is in no small part still easily traceable to that period when the monied interests realized that the myth of perpetual prosperity was unsustainable and the crumbs that had been tossed to the masses were going to have to be slowly, but meticulously, swept up. That process has been ongoing ever since.
I tend to think that the image that Joe spoke about at the end of his life, this image of Earth from the moon, has been lost in the debris of progress. Kennedy's call to action died with him in Dallas. We still got to the moon, but once that was done there was no real pause to reflect on where the nation had come from and where it was going. Instead, the nation launched into the hedonistic debauchery of the 70's and the drugs of choice, primarily "speed" buzzes, set the pace for what was to come...a society moving at an unprecedented pace toward absolutely nothing.
Even our market economies have reflected this contemporary grasping of air. We trade in commodities, but do not have to take responsibility for owning them. They just simply pass through our hands and we feel entitled to profit from the process, not the success of the product. Worse, we expect to be shielded from the consequences of bad decisions in the same arena. Nobody should lose, whether it is on the playground or in the pits of Wall St. The same folks who would tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps were first in line with their hand out when their decisions pulled the rug out from under the entire Western economic system.
It is, for such folks, a no lose situation. Reap all of the reward, without the least amount of responsibility. Welcome to the new playground, same as the old playground. So to come back to the primary question of happiness, I would ask,
have we ever been happy? Or was that just the buzzed euphoria of perceived power and dominance clouding our vision? Social beergoggles, if you will.
"He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." -Douglas Adams