Dear governments of the United States and other countries,
I see by this article, Psychologists Say Well-Being Is More Than ‘Happiness’, that some of your academic helpers are hard at work figuring out how you can increase our well-being. I have a suggestion: Please go away and leave us alone.
While there is truth underlying the statement, “To plan Government policy purely on economic indicators such as GDP seems inadequate, so the development of an additional index of well-being is wise,” there is the implied falsehood that you know what we need to live fulfilling lives. You haven’t shown any evidence of such knowledge. And you haven’t done all that well at even taking care of the most basic responsibilities of government — such as maintaining public infrastructure or keeping the streets safe. Maybe you should be a little bit more humble when it comes to ever greater efforts to make us, your citizens, happy or to increase our well-being or whatever it is you want to do to us.
We, your citizens, are struggling in our own human-scale lives. Yet, unlike the modern governments, especially those of the great powers, we give some evidence of being able to do things which are both great and good. We’ve even been making some progress in proving Hobbes wrong that we need you — centralized governments with great and general powers — to give us lives better than solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Those who have done better than you, such as Mother Teresa and her nuns or Doctors Without Borders, have had to divert a lot of their efforts to mopping up the messes you’ve made. Businessmen who actually produce desirable things or useful services and provide jobs without having access to subsidies from the taxpayers of this planet are having a lot of trouble holding their own. That bodes not well for the masses who like to eat and to heat their houses in winter. Please go away and leave us alone.
We could accomplish great things if you would go away and let us re-form our communities, maybe form seven coherent countries or more from the United States. How many from China and India? I wouldn’t even guess.
So, I’ll suggest: Please, go away and leave us alone. Leave us in peace to deal with our problems, including some nasty ones you created for us.
You’ve done enough harm. Did I remember to ask you to please go away and leave us alone?
We’ve got some serious work to do, finding new ways of making livings and new ways of heating our houses and powering our gadgets. Or maybe doing without so many gadgets. In any case, you seem inclined to favor solutions which don’t work or work to evil purposes. Sometimes you even favor solutions to mysterious problems seen only by you and your profit-seeking allies.
Why did all of you go along with the American government as it suppressed safe and efficient forms of nuclear power-reactors and promoted forms which happen — coincidence I’m sure — to produce not only lots of poisonous and useless materials but also a lot of weapon-grade plutonium? Why did all of you take so much tax money to build highway systems which led to centralized factories, malls, and other unsustainable economic entities?
I admit you have done remarkable things at times. Who else but you in particular, the United States government, could have set out to increase the well-being in some of the most troubled neighborhoods of Harlem and turned them into absolute hell-holes? And then have gone on to do the same to many inner-city neighborhods without so much as re-thinking what you were doing? There are a lot more embarrassing questions where those came from. But how can they be embarrassing to those who seem to have no sense of shame? Your collective self-esteem also seems to overwhelm any memories of what you’ve actually done.
For all the good it will do, I’ll make a suggestion: Please, go away and leave us alone. Don’t worry about our well-being. We’ll somehow manage without you. Maybe we can do better without you. Maybe we can even create some governments that might do their jobs and not worry otherwise about our well-being, nor about the well-being of foreign peoples. Some of you seem to think you can increase the well-being of far-away human beings by way of bombs and depleted uranium and drug-based economies.
I suspect there’s a Darwininian test for governments. You, governments of the earth in this year of 2011, are flunking that test badly. That leads me to suggest that you go away and die far from us before you destroy more water systems or homes or kill more innocent creatures in your death throes.
In closing, I’d like to suggest that you go away and leave us alone.
Yours truly,
A Concerned Citizen of the USA