Caring about the happiness of others
06 Feb 2012 | Action for Happiness
This article is a transcript of a conversation between Professor
Lord Richard Layard, co-founder of Action for Happiness, and Richard
Holloway. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland on 15
January 2012. Listen to a recording of the
conversation.
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Richard Layard: "I think we ought to agree is
that the best state of affairs is one where as many people as
possible are happy and as few as possible are miserable, and that
therefore the way we should lead our lives is to try and produce as
much happiness as we can in the world around us and especially as
little misery; I think that should be the central ethic. But it's
something that we have to take deep inside ourselves as the basic
habit on which we base the way we live. And of course what
follows from that is that we are not going to have a happier
society if we're each pursuing our own happiness: we're going to
have a happier society if we're each pursuing the happiness of
other people mainly. The basic source of misery is self and
self-absorption and I think we have moved somewhat towards a more
self-absorbed society where people have been encouraged to believe
that their job in life is to make the most of themselves rather
than to contribute to the lives of others, and I think that we've
got to get back to a more 'other-oriented' society.
Incidentally, we have founded Action for Happiness, which is a movement of
people who are pledging to live in that way. The churches used to
perform some of this function of taking people outside themselves,
enabling them to form alliances with other people from whom they
derived strength. I think we need secular forms within which people
can get that strength from others, affirming what they really care
about, and from that, taking action to put those principles into
effect. We've got a very bad set of values of a very
individualistic kind that have crept in over the last 30 years.
They've come in partly because there is a vacuum that has been
caused by the decline of religion, but we've got to plug that
vacuum with a really positive idea that young people can grow up
from primary school onwards believing that their job is to create
as much happiness as they can in the world around them and as
little misery; that's a very powerful idea."
Richard Holloway: "You say that there's a
science of happiness, but do you think we can be happy by trying to
be happy? Doesn't it come when you're collecting stamps or
conducting an orchestra, or climbing a mountain, or helping your
next door neighbour? Talk us through this 'science of
happiness'."
Richard Layard: "Well one thing which it does
show is that one of the surest ways to be happy is to try and
contribute to the happiness of other people, rather than just
pursuing your own happiness. People who are more concerned with
other people's welfare than their own are actually measurably
happier. It can also be shown in an experimental sense that if
things happen that make people more prone to help others, they do
thereby become happier, and this is confirmed also in the
neuroscience of the brain.
Of course we have lots more evidence about the factors that make
people happy: we know that relationships are the most important set
of things, particularly relationships in the family or with close
loved ones, relationships in the community (do you feel safe in the
place where you live, do you feel warm about the community in which
you live)- all of these things are important. But also, there is
the inner life, and I think one of the things which has struck me
in my research is the huge importance of mental illness. For
example, we've got studies where people have been followed right
through their life up to their 30s and you try and explain who is
in misery and who is happy in their 30s. You find absolutely
overwhelming that a person's record of mental illness, indeed right
back into their childhood, comes out as the dominant factor
affecting a person's happiness, and we have terribly neglected
this.
We've neglected developing really good mental habits and
strength in our children by focusing so much in our schools on
preparation for exams and for success in the 'great race of life',
rather than success in a deeper sense: in terms of satisfaction
from your lives and what you give to others. And we have not taken
advantage of the now very good programmes that are available to
help children build resilience, to understand their own emotions,
to understand the emotions of others. Of course in the end we need
to teach children not only to be good at managing their relations
with their fellow children but to get ready for their
relations with the other sex, and to think seriously about what
would be involved in having a child."
Richard Holloway: "Isn't there a sense in which
we've become an 'instant gratification society' in all sorts of
ways. We look for instant fixes; there's an enormous reliance on
the chemical approach to mental illness (I know there's a role for
it), the kind of celebrity culture kids want to jump immediately
into: fame and riches? How do we develop that what you might call a
'social patience' in people; how does your small, quiet voice of
sanity get through that babble?"
Richard Layard: "I would put a huge amount of
faith and stress in our schools. There's an interesting movement of
Values Schools, which I like a lot, in which they pay particular
attention to the importance of words, and they have a value for
each month; they really concentrate on it and make it real to
people. For example they have a month where 'generosity' is the
word of the month and then 'honesty' and so on. I think words have
more of a power than we give them credit for in our modern, very
visual kind of society, and we need to build on that.
But I want to go back to what you said about mental health and
chemicals. The great progress in the last 30 years in helping the
mentally ill - and I'm talking about at least 1 in 6 of people who
are suffering from depression or anxiety conditions - has been in
modern, evidence-based psychological therapies, like
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy which we know can 'cure', if that's
the right word, at least half of the people who experience these
therapies within 4 months. And in the case of these anxiety
conditions, people suffering from social phobia, panic attacks,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, just general anxiety, can be totally
transformed; they can get rid of all their symptoms for life after
something like 16 hours of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy.
These should be simply routinely available to the whole
population, and the ideas behind them should be a basic part of our
culture, which would help to prevent these problems as well as help
us to cure them. So we want people to feel in control of their
lives. We know that a feeling of being in control of your life is
one of the most important elements in a happy life, and that
includes being in control of your mental life. You can be taught to
be in control of your mental life, and in control of your mood:
you're not simply a plaything of either fate or of your emotions.
You can manage all of that."
Tags:
Be a Happiness Activist, Education