Bhutan’s pursuit of cathode-ray happiness

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 10:51:00 -0400
/society

The Guardian has this piece on the social destruction apparently caused by the introduction of TV in Bhutan. I’m just going to quote the utilitarian tragedy:

“His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state.” And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation’s guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.

But happiness proved to be an elusive concept. The Bhutanese wondered whether it increased with a bigger house or the number of revolutions of a prayer wheel. A delegation from the foreign ministry was sent abroad to investigate whether happiness could be measured. They finally found a Dutch professor who had made its study his life’s work and were disappointed to learn that his conclusion was that happiness equalled UKP 6,400 a year - the minimum on which one could live comfortably. It was a bald and irrelevant answer for the Bhutanese middle classes, whose average annual salary was barely UKP 1,000 and whose outlook was slightly more metaphysical.

I can image the constitution: “Life, liberty and the state standardised level of happiness”.