by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan.
— Thomas Hardy
Well, here we are. 2024.
The year of the Digital ID.
The year of the CBDC.
The year of the Great Reset.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The year of the Scamdemic Treaty.
The year of the next Great War.
The year of the Polycrisis.
The year of the Deep Fake Selection.
You know: 2024, the year we learn to pursue happiness.
What? You don’t think these problems will afford us the opportunity to pursue our happiness? Then you don’t know what happiness means
Here, let me explain. . .
The Meaning of Happiness
I’m sure my readers, being a highly literate bunch, are familiar with the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Orwell lays out “The Principles of Newspeak,” the “official language of Oceania” that was created to “meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.” And, if you are familiar with that appendix, then you no doubt recall how Orwell explains that the opening passage of the Declaration of Independence—
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . .
—would not be difficult to render in Newspeak, but actually impossible.
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
“What a delightfully creative bit of science fiction writing!” you might have thought upon reading that passage. “That Eric Blair sure did have some imagination!”
Except, it wasn’t fiction.
You see, I recently released the first #SolutionsWatch of 2024 under the title, “How To Be Happy.” Of course, the usual gaggle of comment-first, watch-the-video-later types immediately rode in on their high horse to proclaim that happiness is a silly concept and unworthy of pursuit. Now, aside from the fact that this was the very point the people in that video were making, the fact that so many commenters were compelled to chime in with this particular hot take is itself rather revealing. It shows that Orwell’s Newspeak nightmare, in which we won’t be able to understand the Declaration of Independence, isn’t a warning of what might come. No, it’s a testament to what has already happened. (Or should that be “hap”-pened.)
You see, “happiness” is one of those words that has strayed so far from its original meaning that we can no longer recognize its roots. In this case, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) kindly informs us, both the adjective “happy” and the noun “happiness” are derived from the root word “hap,” meaning “chance” or “fortune.”
“Happiness,” then, is the experience of being favoured by good fortune, as in: “all my lyf hath ben nouryshyd in happynes” (the OED’s first recorded usage of the word in English). In the Declaration, then, Jefferson (or is it Thomas Paine?) does not intend to enshrine anything as base as a mere passing physical sensation or emotion as one of the “inalienable rights” endowed on us by our Creator. The founding document of the War of Independence was not predicated on your right to stuff your face with beer and nachos while watching a sportsball game on a widescreen TV.
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