Morbid happiness

An item on the Beeb alerted me to the fact that the Danes have yet again scored highest in some international measurement of
happiness levels. Gentle reader read that correctly: the Danes. I do not, as the same reader will know, take much delight in statistics,
and so am inclined to manifest scepticism. I do not know, for instance, whether an objective test of happiness (the murder rate), or the
corresponding subjective test (the suicide rate), will confirm the surveyors findings. The Danes may consistently say they are happy,
but are they really? And if it is so, why?
My own anecdotal approach is at odds with the methodology of the United Nations World Happiness Report, but there you go. The
Danes I have met are, even in the aggregate, statistically unrepresentative. Therefore my observation, that Danes tend to be less
playful than Germans, more dour than Scotsmen, and cautious like Swedes, may be dismissed as the product of bigotry. (I have
enjoyed their company, nonetheless.) The one truly happy Dane I met seemed pleased mostly by his distance from Denmark (we were
somewhere in East Asia at the time). He assured me that his countrymen wouldnt recognize fun if it dribbled all over them. I have
heard Copenhagen compared to Ottawa. I would have thought the whole point of Nordicity, or Northernness, after all, is the mastery
of indifference to merriment.
But then, happiness would seem to be defined by the UN happiness bureaucracy as self-satisfaction. This means high points for
smug. It could explain why, for instance, the Italians, who still do merry by unlapsed Catholic instinct, and have no very high
opinion of themselves, failed to score on the survey questions. They might not even have taken them seriously. There is a certain
earnestness in the Northern psyche; Im sure the Danes took the time to figure how to ace the test.
Oh dear, now Ive gone and looked it up. As I suspected, the Danes are near the top of the world suicide table. Theyre not actually at
the top, but the countries ahead of them are just what youd expect. Lithuania wins first place; it is amazing they have any people left.
In their disposition to kill themselves, Baltic countries, and other Scandihoovians, are all competitive, with Russians. Bhutan is right
up there, too, incidentally (I believe their government inspired the creation of the UNs new happiness index); and the one mystery is
how Canada fell behind the United States. I should have thought everyone knew what high latitudes do to the human soul, through the
long winter nights. (Living permanently in the shadows of great mountains explains most of the other cases.) Humans were designed
to sometimes feel the sun. Deprived of this, they work themselves slowly off their hinges.
But again, statistics dont explain anything, and those which report what people think especially what they think about themselves
are least likely to be useful. I dont trust the correlations; even after explaining in the usual yawning way that correlation is not
causation. The most you can hope from this pseudo-science is for a number to quote, as a mnemonic aid, to support some belief
pattern. A random number would do as well, which is why most people with axes to grind simply make numbers up on the fly, then
repeat them back and forth to each other until their friends in the media take up the mantra, and there are more little lies to buttress the
big ones.
Happiness is anyway a vague concept. It had some meaning two or three centuries ago, when it suggested not only prosperity but
the fittingness with which it had been achieved, so that a man who had earned his good station through work, foresight, and good
living, would be thought happier than a man who had, say, just won the lottery. And, people not being all quite the same, happiness
might take different forms in different individuals; thereby becoming unmeasurable in a final, categorical way. Nor could there be any
need to measure it. Not so today, when the need to measure everything is taken as self-evident, and what cant be measured is held to
not exist.
The current sense assumes that happiness is indistinguishable from pleasure, and that it is therefore bestowed by some external agency
as when you do something, or go somewhere, that will make you happy. In the clip I saw, the BBC cameras took us straight to
Copenhagens Tivoli Gardens, by way of exhibiting this empty modern ideal. The presenter gesticulating in that trademark,
jackass, BBC way then interviewed some smiling young student of sociology, who thinks the Danes must be happy thanks to their
highly evolved welfare state. (To which one might add the loss of that old Bible-thumping premonition of eternal hellfire.)
I would instead suggest looking for an explanation in geology. From some shrink, writing in the New York Times, we learn that
lithium levels vary in the local rock, and that considerable differences in human behaviour (as statistically indicated) may be attributed
to local concentrations, carried in the water supply. Moreover, one may ask what else the people are drinking. For while lithium may
have toxic and sometimes lethal effects in high doses and chloride form, it can be used more subtly. Apparently, Americans were
much happier before 1950, when moderate doses of lithium were added quite purposefully to commercial soda drinks. Thats what put
the up in 7-Up.
Today, after the discovery of how useful lithium can be in helping to level, if not lobotomize, some of the more alarming bipolar
cases, the proposal to add it methodically to the water supply, along with fluoride, is coming into vogue. It may soon be a
progressive cause, such that no one will be asked to vote on it. What better way to deal with a general population which, thanks to
the success of other progressive causes, is now going insane?
Pourquois pas, as they say. We may not realize this trace element is already present in the water, and in everything else just as we
do not realize that e.g. apples are mildly radioactive. This knowledge tends to be suppressed, to save us all from malades imaginaires
the hypochondrias and hysterias that overload our socialized health-care systems until it is needed to promote some
environmental scare. Unfortunately, the Internet has now pulled out all the stops, and people can scare themselves without organized
assistance.
My speculation is that little Denmark may be sitting on peat strata with a remarkably high lithium concentration. This might explain a
lot of things about Denmark a world leader in ion-lithium battery technology.
Alternatively, one thinks of Mogens Schou, the Danish pioneer of modern psychopharmacology, who began testing the effects of
lithium on his co-workers and many others back in 1949, on such a scale that one thing may have led to another. Perhaps the Danish
authorities are secretly putting tonnes of lithium into the water supply, merely as an extension of Dr Schous research, not realizing
that the man is dead and they can stop now.
There is, of course, a little problem with lithium as a catch-all cure for ambient mental illness, for while the dont worry be happy
response to increased lithium doses is a commonplace of current psychiatric medicine, it does not have the same effect on all
customers. Some, reasonably tame before, flip right out upon receiving it. Others are inspired to feel better about themselves while
committing major crimes. Yet the prevailing statistical utilitarianism continues to insist on the greatest good for the greatest number,
and it is the presumption of modern technology that exceptional cases may be overlooked.