Now Then, Are We All Happy!!?

It seems the government wants to know if we are happy. How to relate this to Blacka? Is it possible that SWT people are happy in the same way that we are? What is it that makes Nigel and Co. happy, apart from the satisfaction gained from installing barbed wire and destroying trees that is? As it happens, I do sometimes wonder whether SWT has a different culture to other people. For example, to what extent are the differences between this blog and SWT down to cultural mindset, generational perspective, and/or perceived self interest? Now there’s a question to while away the long hours in the pub of a winter evening. But you can’t listen to them talk for many minutes before you decide they ‘just don’t get it’, or more likely ‘just don’t want to get it’; probably they say to each other that we ‘just don’t get it’. Those who have had any experience of teenage children will recognise that sinking feeling. Yet it’s always been my contention that they do actually get it but can’t allow themselves to acknowledge the fact.

What prompts these philosophical ramblings is hearing today that the Prime Minister is embarking on a ‘Happiness Survey’. Now this is the kind of pernicious thing that SWT could have done. In fact they did try it once with a Visitor Survey of Blacka Moor while believing (or rather claiming) that it was with best intentions; this was shelved after complaints but I’ll be surprised if it’s not being used somehow somewhere in some of their publicity to demonstrate that everyone apart from a very small unrepresentative few think that SWT is doing a magnificent job.

The problem is the big one of Control. Those ‘In Control’ use the results of these surveys to secure their own positions. Evidence is gathered, honestly or not, they compile statistics, they analyse results, they define the key issues and off they go. Each stage of the process brings opportunities for subjectivism and corruption but results are always presented as being objective. The next step is to distil the essential findings into a top-down programme that persuades all but the most sceptical that they know what people want and they then proceed to dispense just that kind of spurious contentment to the public. It is primary totalitarianism a la Brave New World. Eventually the discontented are excluded from Paradise because they are not happy according to the findings of the surveys. The tyranny of surveys and statistics is all part of the way that control is exercised by those in power. Many dodgy surveys are presented to councillors in local government and to the media weekly and very few receive anything like the scrutiny they deserve. All you need to do to bamboozle the average committee member is to distribute a paper with various supposed ‘findings’ beautifully presented with tables and graphs, sprinkled with figures and percentages written in the approved style. Courses are run on this, not necessarily titled ‘How to Get What You Want Even When You Are Wrong’.

The lesson is thus: question every statement and every assumption especially those that we are expected to take on trust. That is the scientific approach and should also be the political one. Some of the better Parliamentary Select Committees do proper scrutiny. So should we all. Thereby we might achieve true happiness.