The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one seems quite sure which way it ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no . Jonathan Swift seemed to think so when he attacked the idea of happiness as "the possession of being well- deceived", the felicity of being "a fool among knaves". For Swift saw society as Vanity Fair, the land of false goals.
It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of fools and knaves. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess enough.
And at the same time the forces of American commercialism are hugely dedicated to us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them-and to create them taster than any man’s budget can satisfy them. For that matters, our whole economy is based on a dedicated insatiability. We are taught that to possess is to be happy, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. It was only a few years ago, to cite a single example, that car dealers across the country were flying banners that read "You Auto Buy Now". They were calling upon Americans, as an act approaching patriotism, to buy at once, with money they did not have, automobiles they did not really need, and which they would be required to grow tired of by the time the next year’s models were released.
Or look at any of the women’s magazines. There, as Bernard DeVoto once pointed out, advertising begins as poetry in the front pages and ends as pharmaeoia (药典) and therapy in the back pages. The poetry of the front matter is the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. These, the flawless teeth. This, the perfumed breath she must exhale. This, the six-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever.
Obviously no half-sane person can be completely persuaded either by such poetry or by such pharmacopoeia and orthopedics. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy the dream as offered and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers but what is it trying to buy.
The idea "happiness", to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle. To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to set the materialistic extreme. To think of it as the idea one senses in, say, a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. That holy man’s idea of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himself. In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. Fie sits immobile, rapt in contemplation, free even of his own body. Or nearly free of it. If devout admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why be concerned What is physical is an illusion to him. Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through a fantastically demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy within him.
What does the author imply by quoting Jonathan Swift’s sentences about happiness "the possession of being well-deceived", the felicity of being "a fool among knaves"