Opinions of 'ordinary people' and supposed experts were consulted, such as Ekhart Tolle and an American Indian in a dumpster. There was a vast array of approaches to the pursuit of happiness, sort of like flavors that one person preferred over another. There was the usual distinction between pleasure as something sensual that you can often get for free and happiness as something transcendental that you have to earn. On what happiness is, however, there was remarkably consistency, although communicated in various ways - again you get to choose your flavor. The consensus, however, was that happiness is what remains after ego detachment, gained not just through thought but through actions, and not directly the result of circumstance such as being rich or poor. There was, of course, agreement that pressing existential disaster, such as what is man-made like war, and what is called a natural disaster, such as famine as a consequence of a locust plague, or a volcano quite suddenly erupting was not conducive to happiness.

My own definition of happiness remained unchanged before and after the adventure of making this film, and that is that happiness is a blissful state of self-forgetting, that can be attained through the discipline of meditation, or just wailing away on the saxophone. Because, from my own experience as keyboard player in a rock band, I had noticed that when the music was really happening, I was not, in a sense, there. I was the music. This was also true when I was reading a good book, or engrossed in a good movie. Quite simply, I was not there, only the experience was there.

Now, if the gist of the above is true at all, capitalism has not made people generally happier than they were, except in the sense that it resulted in insulation from pending or actual existential disasters, which it also created with furious frequency. Before capitalism, when most people were living an agrarian life under the authority of the aristocratic class, and when what you were born to defined what you would be, people were just as happy or unhappy as now - quite often happier. Of course, whether in Athens in classical Greece, Istanbul in the 14th century, or, France under the autocracy of the Sun King, people tripped themselves up by behaving badly, usually by choosing vice, like greed over virtue, like largess - but in the absence of plague or war, people, peasants and kings, were easily as happy or unhappy as we are today.

If the gist of the above paragraph is also true, it is incumbent to ask ourselves what, then, defines true human progress? If it is not in human happiness, what is it? Globally under capitalism, weighing the lives of those humans who are insulated from the direct blast of impending disaster, against those humans who daily fight in one way or another, just to survive another day, we can conclude that capitalism has only delivered a promise of a better life for most people, a life in which you and I are emancipated to pursue personal happiness. If it is my chance to pursue happiness at the price of your chance, then there has been little progress. If we set up the game so that either I win or you win that chance, that has not actually delivered happiness, just exchanged one person's chance at the wheel at the expense of another.

Can true happiness be attained when you are the exploiter? Is there an equal chance at being happy when you are the one exploited. I would say not only is that not a equal-sum game, it is a lose lose proposition. I would further contend that this is the capitalism game at hand, and over my own life-experience so far, I cannot see how that gain of a two car garage, at the expense of someone sleeping in the snow and rain is conducive to overall human happiness, and, here is my real point, the happiness of the owner of that two car garage, and the two fine Mercedes automobiles sheltered therein, is also not guaranteed in this bagain. You cannot buy your way into happiness, or, we are told, into heaven.

I speak of true happiness, remember, as forgetting your petty self and entering the blissful state when you are just the music. Certainly when the Nazis were rolling over Europe, there was a kind of prideful elation in the population on the winning side, but when what they had been doing to the other side was being visited upon them, the resultant feeling was then the opposite. When the German soldiers were raping Russian women, they experienced no doubt pleasure, but when the Russians were returning that favor in Berlin, the Germans did not say, fine, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. In other words, what happened in Part One of the story and then turned around in Part II of the story, did not equate to a happy-ever-after for either side. Pleasure does not equate to happiness. Pleasures at the expense of the opposite for other people results in unhappiness all around. Respect for the feelings of others, and equal dignity, probably is conducive to happiness.

So here is the first question I really need to ask, if the Nazis had not been defeated would the German population have been happier compared to now, seventy-five years after they had been defeated? What then can be said of happiness and self-delusion?

This is why I remain opposed to capitalism and in favor of socialism. From each according to abilities to each according to needs, is a superior metric - that is, if the most happiness for the most people is the metric. Does that not make sense? One can, probably, with some work, learn to choose happiness, but that is a process rather than a goal and it does have internal rules - like physics has rules. It probably needs to added, however, that none of us fully understand the rules for either happiness or physics, but we are getting there, I think. Or not. I still say this is our choice to make, and me, I choose socialism. Happy New Year.