The Pursuit of Happiness first of two parts
Buy-electoral materialists, conservatives, like to say that Jefferson should have stuck with one of the out takes from the Declaration of Independence. "No, no," they say in high federalist tones, "Not 'happiness', 'property', the pursuit of property is the correct reading of the line,". It's not that they notice that something generally considered as frivolous as happiness is put on the same level as life and liberty, with them it's all about the property, their highest value.
Without the gall to second guess Jefferson, I doubt that he got the line wrong in the end. So the question is what the pursuit of happiness means and especially what one person's pursuit of it means in relation to that of other people. Thomas Jefferson's life shows that isn't a simple question, but it isn't the all-out invitation to piracy that today's conservatives intend.
Jefferson was a hypocrite, as anyone can see. The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and kept slaves can't escape that judgment except by replacing him with a fiction. He, himself, said that his way of life couldn't be supported without slavery and there is the feel of shame in his words. Keeping slaves is not honorable. This is most true for someone who wrote the words of the Declaration and he knew it.
He didn't move to a small house he could support on his own work. History would call it unequalled greatness if he had and by doing that he had stopped keeping people as property. But he couldn't' do without his mansion, which was always being redone and always keeping him in debt. He designed a little house but his version of Walden was a garden ornament built by other hands, not a rocket to transcendence.
Freedom was inalienable and given to slaves by The Creator, he alienated those rights from his slaves out of selfishness and at the cost of his sacred honor. He knew that was true, he was a genius not an idiot. Jefferson was a prisoner of property and of luxury. It would be obscene to compare his life to the brutality of slavery but could he have really been entirely free himself?
Pursuing Happiness in All the Wrong Places second of two parts
You can find happiness in friendship, you find it in friendly encounters with strangers and in your family and friends. We need basic material security to be happy but it isn't happiness. Short of famine relief, happiness doesn't come by truck.
Useless buying and hoarding is a sign of fear, of families and communities failing. This covers everything from trying to buy respect to the exercise machine covered with clothes you can't wear. You aren't any better off than you started out but now you've got another payment to make. Enough turns to more than you want and that turns to more than you can ever use. You have to rent a storage unit to get it out of your house. If you didn't buy it to begin with you might be able to afford basic security and have time to enjoy life with other people.
The MacMansion craze that is killing off what's left of the middle class and destroying open land is an attempt to escape the isolated anxiety that life has turned into. Families don't talk to each other in towns full of strangers who are suspicious of each other. And once you're locked in the big house everyone goes off to watch TV in their own rooms. That is until your mortgage rate gets adjusted and you're looking for somewhere you can afford.
Work is even worse than that. It is competitive, cynical and insecure. You are being used and used up. You might not even have the hope that your children can get an education that will give them a better life. They're doomed to even worse than you have it and they resent everything.
You won't find happiness in the package labeled American Dream and the standard alternatives are worse. Forget the myth of the rugged individualist. That is just as phony as the thing they are supposedly escaping. No one is more conformist than those often violent, insecure, tough guys. Look at what happens to one of them who practices real individualism. Their pack turns on them.
The happiness found in decent relations with other people can't be bought or sold, it can't be won by winning. You have to make friends with your family and your neighbors. You can't do that watching a giant TV or DVD. You have to abandon the debt ridden, competitive culture that those continually pitch at us. It's hard to do, especially with children, but it's a lot easier than building a sixteen room house that you'll never own. Debt is a taste of slavery.
When you get your life back you can get past pride. That's a desperate fill-in for self-respect. Self respect comes from getting outside yourself and doing something for someone else. Self-respect gives you the confidence to say no to the sales pitch. Without self-respect no one else is going to respect you, no matter how much stuff you own.
Addendum: This was written two years and several months before the MacMansion of cards came crashing down, the bank bail-out and the disastrous and uneven program of Paulson, Summers, Geithner and the politicians who appointed them in both parties, set us up for bigger banks that couldn't be allowed to live or die by the rules of capitalism that are about as alive as Soviet era socialism is. We live in a cleptocracy, aided and abetted by the ACLU and the strict constructionists of the Supreme Court, the elite law schools and universities that train any more honest or idealistic ideas out of the young of the oligarchy or those who aspire to be oligarchs. Barack Obama is not so stupid that he didn't understand, several years into his greatest mistakes of his first term, that he'd been lied to by the Ivy Leaguers. Oh, and he's still talking in the stupid, futile bi-partisan way that he has all along, even as the media of the oligarchs is sandbagging him over and over again.
This country is in a crisis for a number of reasons, not lest of which is the mess that The Constitution is , set up by oligarchs of the late 18th century in the face of angry Revolutionary War veterans who took seriously the promises made to them and the ideals which the "founders" mouthed, only to be left behind once they were free of England's restraints on their financial ambitions. As I've noted before, Jefferson became an ever more dedicated enslaver of his human prisoners and their children as his enlightened mind calculated the financial value of every slave born to those he kept in bondage, I would assume, he not being stupid, included those born to him through at least one of those slaves. And other "founders" took other avenues of profit in obvious violation of the principles they pledged to defend with their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor", bilking and swindling the common people who had put those on the line for the promise of a democracy that the founders found incompatible with their making the maximum profit. The anti-democratic structures in The Constitution, the Electoral College, the originally unelected and unequally apportioned Senate, the appalling 3/5 provision, allowing slave owners to gain a disproportionate representation through people they would hold were not persons under The Constitution up through the Civil War and beyond, all of the original sins of that Constitutions are the bases of our troubles today.
In last week's appalling rulings by the Roberts Court, the "strict constructionists" asserted things like corporate person hood which are not only not located in any part of the document but was first introduced by a clerk's little noticed note. From that slight of hand is likely to come the complete collapse of either any aspirations for equality under the law, equality of all people and the rule of law, or The Constitution which allows unelected Supreme Court justices, appointed by a president elected under the appalling Electoral College and confirmed by the unrepresentative and unjustly stacked Senate, to baldly lie as it did in the rulings they issued last week. Under our failure of a constitution it took a massive civil war to begin to redress the failures of the "founders" to honor their pledge, it took the enormous bloodshed of the labor movement, the enormous struggle of the suffrage movement and other huge efforts by The People, to try to pry justice out of the grasp of the oligarchs, only to see how two "justices" appointed by a president appointed by their predecessors on the Supreme Court can destroy that effort with lies and The Constitution has no mechanism to correct those lies or to punish the liars in black robes. I am afraid that the next civil war will be far worse and the facists, being armed to the sky, will win, leaving a violent, fractured country that will make the Balkan tragedy of the 20th century look like a mere prelude.
I don't feel much like celebrating the Fourth of July anymore.
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