People are not happy in Europe and that’s really interesting because that’s where all the unhappy people who have had it with America say that they are going to go.
But these days Europe is importing happiness from America. Alright, alright maybe not exactly importing happiness but they are making their state schools teach eleven-year-old how to be happy. They can’t find anyone in all of Europe to teach happiness so they sent to America to find an expert in happiness.
Professor Martin Seligman, from the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most influential psychologists of his generation, has been drafted in to train British teachers so that they can deliver classes to nearly 2,000 secondary school pupils.
Why, because of an epidemic of depression, self-harm and anti-social behavior among young British people. So the Brits figure that they will round up all of the eleven-year-olds and teach them how to be happy.
Figures show that at least 10 per cent - three children in every average-sized class of 30 in the country - are experiencing symptoms of severe depression, including suicidal thoughts, prolonged bouts of despair and the urge to cry on a daily basis. Twenty-five years ago the average age people fell ill with depression was 30. Today this has fallen dramatically with 14 the age at which mental illness first strikes.
Not every one is happy with the state’s decision to teach happiness. Sean Gabb of the Brussels Journal says, “Only we can pursue our own individual happiness. Any government that believes itself to know better than we do ourselves how to make us happy is guilty of a most presumptuous arrogance. Any government that tries to put its belief into action is by definition tyrannical. Its means must entail a searching inquisition into our thoughts and a close control over our actions.”
He believes that, “These lessons in happiness will inevitably turn into propaganda sessions in which children will be lectured into a celebration of the moral sewer than our masters have made of modern England. They will be told that our enlarged, activist state is a good thing. They will be told that the denigration of our history and customs is a release from the dead hand of the past.”
According to Sean, Brits live in a country where strangers and criminals have more rights than citizens have; where citizen’s votes, once at the age of majority, are worthless to change British rulers, or even hold them to account; and where citizen’s lifestyle choices are constrained as they never were in the past. Sean believes this to be a recipe for despotism.
An epidemic of depression, self-harm and anti-social behavior, professor Seligman when you return to America please look up the Democrat party because nobody has been happy in that party for the last six years!
