Happiness is Relative

 If you were watching the stock market numbers last Tuesday, you would have seen them plunge into the red. This was a predictable result, of course. Trump chose that day to launch an unprovoked trade war against our two closest neighbors and biggest trading partners: Mexico and Canada. It amounted to a bizarre first strike in the economic equivalent of nuclear war—except, one lobbed against our own allies, with whom Trump himself inked a trade deal in his first term. Of course markets would not react well to this madness. 

But then, if you checked back on the markets the very next day—Wednesday—you would have seen something odd. The markets were back in the green. Why? It wasn't because Trump had changed tack yet. As of Wednesday, the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico were still in effect. But Trump had issued a one-month carve-out for a handful of car companies, and his officials were hinting that more would come. 

In a sane world, this news would not have been enough to send relief into the markets. The fact that Trump suddenly hints he might be slightly less destructive of the global economy than he was yesterday is no reason to turn outright optimistic. A one-month reprieve for a handful of car companies should not have changed anyone's long-term outlook. (The broader suspension of the tariffs would not come for another twenty-four hours.) 

In a sane world, the market would be measuring its current optimism against the standard of Monday—when their were no tariffs at all—rather than against Tuesday, when it looked like the world was about to enter a new global depression. But Monday had already been forgotten. 

And it has to be admitted that this reaction—however irrational—does reflect something real about human psychology. It reflects the fact that we are always measuring our sense of wellbeing not against some absolute standard—but against our worst fears or past experiences. 

Trump knows this and has been able to exploit it. Part of the abusive dynamic of his administration is to toy with our low expectations. If you set the bar low enough—if you convince people you are a total maniac who may be about to destroy them utterly—then any slightly less terrible outcome seems downright wonderful by comparison. 

This seems to have become a structural feature of Trump's governance. It's part of the Stockholm Syndrome by which he keeps corporate America in line. The first step is to portray yourself as perfectly capable of gratuitously torpedoing the world economy for no reason at all. To prove you mean it, you even conduct the first strike. You actually pull the trigger on the 25% tariffs against one's allies, and watch markets tumble as a result. 

Then, after you have lobbed the first missiles, you can relent. And people will be so relieved by the sudden stay of execution that they actually reward you for it. The market will recover slightly, and you can then claim a victory. 

In absolute terms, of course, you achieved less than nothing. In absolute terms, you made things worse than they were before. But you could have made things even worse than you did, and people will now measure the outcome by that yardstick. 

Human beings, then, tend to forget whatever absolute standards of wealth or wellbeing they are experiencing, and focus on the relative. And political writers have long sensed in this tendency a vulnerability for any long-term project of human amelioration. 

Orwell, for instance, once observed that this feature of human psychology is likely to doom any utopia. Whenever we try to imagine a world of absolute abundance, it is impossible—he writes—to imagine anyone being happy in it. Why? Because: happiness is relative. We measure it negatively against some pain we would otherwise experience, not against an absolute standard. So, in a world that had abolished pain, we would have no concept of joy. 

As Orwell put it: "The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive[.]"

This observation—that happiness is impossible to imagine except as a form of relief—was also a mainstay of the great 19th century pessimistic writers. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt writes, in his Reflections on History, "the idea of happiness as a positive feeling is false in itself. Happiness is mere absence of pain, at best associated with a faint sense of growth." (Hottinger trans.)

Giacomo Leopardi makes a similar observation in his great collection of poetry, the Canti. He writes about a small town in Italy that is just recovering from a severe storm. It is only the relief from the storm's passage that brings them real joy. The same happiness would be impossible to imagine without the pain of the deluge that had just passed over them. 

"Pleasure," he concludes, is a "child of suffering," a byproduct "of dread that's past." In other words: "Surcease from suffering is happiness for us"—to Orwell's point (and Burckhardt's). (Galassi trans. throughout.) Happiness is nothing more than relief from pain. 

Leopardi pairs this poem—"The Calm After the Storm"—with another that shows the reverse side of the same coin. The theme of "Saturday in the Village," which follows it in the Canti, is that the moment of greatest happiness in the village each week comes when all the workers are shutting up their shops for the evening on Saturday, in anticipation of their one day off. 

The sabbath itself, when it comes, is always less happy than the time that immediately precedes it. "Tomorrow again will bring/ Sadness and boredom," Leopardi writes. Sunday, that is to say, never lives up to the hype. It always disappoints the expectations of Saturday night. 

There seem, then, to be two possible forms of happiness available to the human species. We can experience happiness as a form of relief from pain, in the manner described by Burckhardt, Orwell, and the "Calm After the Storm." And we can also imagine happiness as a form of anticipation for relief still to come—that dopamine rush we all feel when we know that the next day is the weekend, and we will finally have some rest. 

What is impossible to imagine, by contrast, is any fixed or permanent condition of happiness. What is impossible to imagine, that is to say, is an absolute standard of happiness. People will always be comparing their present state against their immediate past or future. They will be measuring their sense of optimism about the stock market—say—by what they thought might happen on Tuesday—not what they ought to expect from an objectively sane administration that wasn't going out of its way to try to attack our allies and destroy the global economy. 

But what about Thursday? By then, the markets were tumbling back into the red again—even as Trump loosened his new tariff regime still further. How was that possible? Why weren't people even more relieved? 

Well, the same feature of human psychology was at work. By Thursday, the relief had worn off; or, perhaps, the joy of the tariff relief was all in the anticipation, and so—when that relief came—it was a let-down. 

Wednesday was "Saturday in the Village," when everyone was looking forward eagerly to the promised tariff suspension. But Thursday was Sunday—when everyone realized that even the fulfillment of these hopes was a bitter disappointment—since the economy was still in a needless state of uncertainty and turmoil. 

So, Trump may be able to get far in life by exploiting our low expectations and the relative nature of our happiness. But, as soon as he turns around and starts trying to count on some absolute measures of success, it will be his downfall. 

"Why aren't you people as happy Thursday as you were Wednesday?" one can easily imagine him asking. "On Thursday, you got more tariff relief than you did Wednesday. You should be even more pleased than you were then."

But no, Trump. That's not how this game works. You should know that yourself. Happiness is relative. Happiness is anticipatory. So, your practice of trying to score cheap political points by generating a crisis, and then partially resolving it, has diminishing returns. It is a one-time-only deal. You can benefit from a day's relief on the stock market. But you can't expect that feeling of relief to continue. To do so would be to expect people to be capable of a permanent and unchanging form of happiness. 

And that is precisely what our species seems incapable of...