Happiness is the Wrong Metric
by Not Sure
The Ides of March 2026
Written to accompany Alan Watt Redux 254.
John Locke was an English philosopher, a physician, and a member of the Royal Society. If you visit the website of the Royal Society today, you will read that “We are the independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity.” Alan Watt has told us about the history of the Society and called it an occult organization. In the early days of the Royal Society, they used a beehive as their logo, the symbol of a well-order society.
Visit www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com and have a listen to this talk from Alan Watt. In the first section, he discussed the Royal Society.
Alan Watt blurb “Something Wicked” – August 9, 2020
In, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” John Locke wrote to an anonymous ‘Sir’:
“Since you are pleased to inquire what are my thoughts about the mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of religion, I must needs answer you freely that I esteem that toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church.”
Locke’s writings on toleration led to the idea of the separation of church and state. He was a Christian with a Calvinist upbringing. His own ideas were heterodox; there is proof he rejected the God-head as a Trinity and embraced explanations of the divinity of Jesus found in Socinian and Arian thought.
John Locke was an Enlightenment thinker. He promoted reason to a high place in Christian life and in all endeavors. Divine revelation cannot be verified or evaluated by reason. Someone may claim to have received a divine revelation, but this must (somehow) be verified before it can be believed.
The move away from the Divine Right of Kings, seems by necessity (across generations of philosophers and sociologists) to move humans away from divine rights, from God-given rights, and towards natural rights that are not bestowed upon us (by a Creator) but are inherent to human nature (born that way). Of course, Locke also claimed that we were born tabula rasa (clean slate), so it would behoove us to hurry up, chop-chop, and figure it out before some king or head of state tells us we were not born with natural rights.
John Locke’s writings on the mind have informed thinking about personal identity and concepts of the self. He is often called the “father of liberalism.”
Classical liberalism: free markets (hahaha), laissez-faire capitalism, freedom of speech, limited government, economic freedom (since when?), personal autonomy, rights of the individual, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera (The King and I).
It was from Alan Watt I learned that John Locke wrote extensively about Life, Liberty, and Property. Perhaps if Locke had a belief in a Trinity, this was it.
Life
Liberty Property
I also learned from Alan (God bless the Scotsman who knew all about American history and its ‘founding fathers’) that Thomas Jefferson took Locke’s idea and modified it.
This year on July 4, 2026, America celebrates its 250th anniversary of American independence, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps there is more to be said and written about this in the coming weeks and months, but for now let us examine these words from that short declaration:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The rights are said to be conferred by my Creator, but how much happier I would be if I was left on my tod on my own PROPERTY, unmolested by tax-collecting goon-gangsters, henchmen of my government. Thanks again for that, Alan, though he usually put the extra spin of ‘Jack’ on the tod.
In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken wrote a paper that was published on the World Economic Forum’s website. It was a hypothetical thought exercise. I do those sometimes, thought exercises, that is. Much less exertion involved than with physical exercises. In a recent thought exercise, I was Empress of the Universe, and all matter (humans included) conformed to my will. When I shared this amazing exercise with a friend he told me it had already been used as an episode of Black Mirror. Season 7, Episode 2, Bête Noire. Tant pis. Auken’s hypothetical scenario for the WEF gave us the phrase, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” and explored a future where individuals rely on the ‘sharing economy’ for housing, transportation, appliances, and clothing—renting or leasing everything instead of owning it.
The sharing economy lands me at Communitarianism and Amatai Etzioni. We will seldom hear the concepts of sustainable communities and sharing economies called Communitarianism, which like Agenda 21 got a bad rap and needed to hide or be called something else. Agenda 21 could be thought of as an umbrella that shelters an idea like Communitarianism. Agenda 21: Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, sounds like something that is transmittable by unsafe practices).
The 17 goals, er, um, sharable, transmittable…
Communitarianism: ‘common good’ over individualism; critique of liberalism (see Locke), shared purpose (“We’re all in it together.” “There’s a war on, you know.” A variant for Covid… “Together…apart.”)
(As framed by the UN, were these human rights ‘natural’? ‘God-given’? Karen-enforced?)
COVID-19 and Human Rights: We are all in this together
https://unsdg.un.org/resources/covid-19-and-human-rights-we-are-all-together
How are people shaped? What forces, nannies, headmasters, traumas, and stick horses shape their natures, paint pretty pictures on their tabula rasa?
John Locke was born a Puritan. His father was a Parliamentarian. He was ten years old at the outbreak of the English Civil War pitting Charles I’s Royalists against the Parliamentarians (Roundheads). John’s father was a Parliamentarian and fought as a captain in the cavalry. By the time of Charles I’s special trial convened by Parliament, John was a student at Westminster School which was half a mile away from the site where Charles I was executed. Westminster students weren’t allowed to attend the execution.
Amatai Etzioni was born Werner Falk in Cologne, Germany in 1929. His family fled Hitler’s Germany, lived a year in Greece, waiting to be processed on to Mandatory Palestine. The family arrived to Haifa, Mandatory Palestine by 1937, where the surname was changed to Etzioni and young Werner studied Hebrew. From Wiki, we learn that Werner’s school principal encouraged him to take a new name and he was given ‘Amatai’ based on the Hebrew word for truth (emet) and the name of Jonah's father in the Tanach (Amittai). The significance of this (did Werner choose the name? His father? His principal?) could be mulled a while, and this is just one small fish to consider. In Judaism, Teshuva is ‘to atone’, to repent and be forgiven. Jonah, the son of Truth (Amittai) was told by God (divine revelation?) to go to Ninevah and tell the people who lived there that they were wicked and needed to repent. Jonah was only interested in truth, not in repentance and was reluctant to follow this command. This disobedience resulted in his being swallowed by a whale (a large sea creature, Leviathan) where he stayed for three days and three nights, until the big fish vomited Jonah upon the shore.
In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Etzioni dropped out of school to join the elite commando force called Palmach, a branch of Haganah, the underground army of the Jews in Palestine. Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary force of the Jews in Palestine during the period of the British Mandate for Palestine, when Britain administered the region (1920-1948). Palmach is contrasted against Irgun, (which was a terrorist organization…by any metric), as seeking to influence British and public opinion rather than inflict casualties. It is interesting to note, however, that when Palmach dissolved in 1948, its members became the backbone of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
These childhood and early manhood activities naturally shaped the tabula rasa of Amatai and he detailed a bit of it in a short film about him entitled “The Making of a Peacenik.” I have not watched this. Knock yourselves out. I noticed it was uploaded by the Elliot School of International Affairs.
International Affairs, International Studies, International Relations. Trace the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in shaping the academic study of International Relations (IR).
The Making of a Peacenik: Amitai Etzioni
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZgWXzTQc2g
Etzioni would return to his studies, primarily in the United States, focusing on sociology. His work on Communitarianism played a pivotal role in shaping this as an area for academic studies and policy making.
In 2018, Etzioni published a book entitled Happiness is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism, and indeed if the Orange Man represents Populism in the dialectic, then people will look for alternatives.
“This timely book addresses the conflict between globalism and nationalism. It provides a liberal communitarian response to the rise of populism occurring in many democracies. The book highlights the role of communities next to that of the state and the market.”
The book is dedicated to “the moral wrestlers” and who of us don’t ask questions about what is right, just, moral? Section 1.7.1 is entitled “Happiness: Asked and Answered” wherein he briefly outlines the challenges of measuring satisfaction, whether against a hedonistic concept of sum-total of happiness or a different, collective measurement. He proposes a few ways to measure a nations’ moral behavior: child abuse, corruption, volunteerism, etc.
In Section 6.7, entitled “True Flourishing: A Communitarian, Postmodern Culture,” subsections include “The Contentment of Mutuality” and “Happiness from Community Involvement.” Section 6.8 is “Contributions to Sustainability and Social Justice.”
In Chapter 15, we meet son-of-Amatai, Oren Etzioni, co-writer of the chapter entitled, “Incorporating Ethics into Artificial Intelligence.” In Hebrew, Oren means ‘ash tree’ or ‘pine tree,’ an evergreen. First-born, stability, longevity. Oren Etzioni is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at University of Washington and the founding CEO of Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His studies include intelligence and machine learning. He coined the term machine reading. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) was the brainchild of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates. The Institute “seeks to conduct high-impact AI research and engineering in service of the common good.” In this father-son chapter collaboration we learn that smart cars need ethics, and they ask if smart machines can be made into moral agents.
Thomas Jefferson memorialized rights from the Creator, though he gave us Property instead of Happiness – ephemeral, here today, gone today, mood swings and all. Alexander Hamilton in answering an essayist who called himself “The Farmer,” wrote (emphasis mine):
“The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society…The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
Please, take your communitarianism and put it in the rubbish bin with every other ism that ever was and ever will be. Take your happiness, and your ‘for the common good’ happiness-substitutes and put them all where the sun-beams don’t shine. As for me, I’ll be sitting here on my property-that-never-was-mine, basking in the sun beams from the hand of the divinity itself.
© Not Sure