In the manner of Adriaen van der Werff:
Bubble-blowing Girl with a Vanitas Still Life
(1680 - 1775)

"He spends his wealth on the equivalent of candy and gum."

We were the first country founded on the principle that every citizen was granted the freedom to pursue happiness. Unsurprisingly, this freedom has not resulted in unbridled happiness. Like always, true happiness seems intermittent and the purview of a select few. Most seem to more or less content themselves with the understanding that they possess the right to pursue happiness, even if it continually eludes them. Happiness, under this freedom's influence, seems to have taken many curious forms, the Second Amendment right to bear arms among the strangest. Who would naturally correlate gun possession with happiness? The Beatle's tune Happiness Is A Warm Gun was intended as irony rather than a declaration of natural fact.

Happiness can be a tricky objective. Our forebears carefully included a limited liability statement when declaring many of their so-called natural rights and laws. Adam Smith quietly insisted that Free Enterprise utterly relied upon high-minded individuals to work. This message was a buried lede, and scoundrels engaged in it as if exercising a natural right to rip off others. The stench of this misunderstanding still pervades commerce today, providing ample justification to maintain an administrative state intent upon limiting the damage the scoundrels inflict, with limited success. Today's free marketers insist upon taking more than they give, fair trading apparently meaning that they receive the lion's share while everyone else takes a beating. The sense that this behavior somehow mirrors natural selection and is a key to ultimate happiness also perverts the process that resulted in us. Nobody knows what happens if we change the rules to satisfy lesser selves and iterate for centuries, but early indications strongly suggest nothing good results.

What happens if a society sets itself up to pursue happiness without acknowledging that certain principles must be observed to successfully pursue? Vanities result. Abomination. People who pursue happiness without ethical or moral constraints quickly create a virtual Hell of Earth. They trample all over constituent rights. The happiness that some experience when bearing arms might supersede others' right to life, for instance, or a sense of security. I must consider what exercising my rights does to you, or else I risk robbing you of your happiness to satisfy my own. Such pursuits should not devolve into zero-sum games or result in less overall happiness. If they do, they qualify as Vanities rather than freedoms or rights. If they do, they pervert the intention behind granting the liberty and undermine the very purpose of possessing a right, whether God-given or granted by man.

To live might be to be complicit, but to be complicit does not render anybody Scott-free. Obligations accompany every freedom and every right, like home ownership is more than the mere possession of an asset. Yes, we're still free to smoke cigarettes as a part of our pursuit of happiness, but that freedom does nothing to prevent the smoker from contracting lung cancer. The factor that prevents lung cancer comes with enlightened pursuit. One comes to understand that while there's nothing but choice preventing anyone from deciding to smoke, it's contingent upon those holding the freedom to freely choose not to smoke. That freedom to limit personal latitude when choosing was not explicitly written into the originating documents, but it was implied. The notion emerged from the so-called Enlightenment, where such notions didn't need explicit enumeration because the enlightened understood the intended interpretation.

I do not know how it happened, but the more venial interpretations have become increasingly popular in our more modern times. The old adage insists that there's a vast difference between a jackass and a human, and that difference is found in what the Jackass, rather than in what the human, would never do. Humans have seemingly worn off the warrantee on our freedoms and rights, the limited liability declaration intended to protect both manufacturer and consumer. We abuse our rights and privileges today. We were never free to do whatever we believed might make us happy. Many have come to understand that happiness seems best when served in bite-sized portions and that daily banquets of the pursuit of happiness result in persistent indigestion.

Those insisting that they're making America Great Again cannot name the time when it was as great as they insist it once was. America was never great. If, indeed, it ever was great, it was not great because of its accomplishments but because of its insistences, like the right to pursue happiness. However, it was never just granting or acknowledging those rights that made America great; it was the concomitant understanding of what granting those rights might actually mean in practice. The eleventh-hour Jehus, who've lately begun practicing unbridled excess as their analog for freedom, end up enslaving us. Income inequality might be the gravest vanity of our age and it could be easily ameliorated by the spare application of a few essential principles. We hold the obligation to take up no more than our rightful space. We hold the sacred responsibility to actually do no harm to anybody, even especially the so-called least of us.

We seem to have been flirting with the notion that some of us are somehow better than others. And that some of us are somehow worse. This segregation might be the very worst thing any society actually pursuing any freedom, even happiness, might embrace, for it represents an insidious form of slavery. The every-man-for-himself vanity, the every-man-a-king philosophy renders every man a hopeless pauper, even the so-called winners. Who could represent a sorrier state of any man than Elon Musk? The post-modern Poor Little Rich Boy. The wealthiest man in the world, who might properly be the happiest man alive, but who seems to live his life begreived instead. He has evidently been unable to purchase personal happiness if he was ever even in the market. He takes up more space than anybody should ever need. He spends his wealth on the equivalent of candy and gum. He might make substantial contributions to the betterment of humanity but chooses to pursue building useless colonies on the absolutely uninhabitable planet of Mars instead.

“Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas,” declares the Preacher of Ecclesiastes (1.2; 12.8): “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” It may be for him, but not necessarily for the rest of us.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz