Update (4 Apr at 10:00 PT): a thought and a request.
Thought: The existential flaw in capitalism is that it legitimizes seeking one’s own happiness at the expense of others. Discuss.
Request: Enough the with thread highjack over the photo, please.
OK, Finland’s cold in winter. And dark. And Finnish is a hard language, distantly related to Estonian and Hungarian (also difficult languages) but not to any other European tongue. Still, this year Finland tops World Happiness Report for fifth time in a row, so they must be doing something right.
Kinsey Gidick, who lived in Finland for a year as a high school student, and who still maintains lots of connections there, wrote an article in the WaPo the other day that got me to thinking about what Finland is doing that we need to think about: Is Finland really the happiest country in the world? Finns weigh in. She argues that
If the World Happiness Report is to be believed, Finns are masking a deep contentment built on an appreciation for a society that puts the public good first.
Meaning that:
“Everybody has access to the basics,” says Liisi Hatinen, a communications coordinator in Espoo, a city outside of Helsinki, and a mother of two. She’s talking about guaranteed health care, tuition-free school, a living wage and affordable housing. “These programs are well thought out and work, so that’s the basic foundation for you to be happy.”
Other Scandinavian countries also use this approach to life — and several are high up on the happiness list as well — though the Finns seem to do the best job of it.
A key point is this:
Where people of other nations, including our own, measure success in material wealth — the right car, the bigger house, the best job, the better neighborhood — Finns find satisfaction elsewhere.
For the past several hundred years, since the rise of mercantilism, much of the West (the US and Europe) has pursued happiness by acquisition. “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins” might be our informal motto. It used to be that the wealthy did acknowledge noblesse oblige, the sense that great wealth also carried some responsibility to help the public at large — libraries, universities, art and music, etc. But in recent decades capitalism has become so extreme, greed so predominant, the pursuit of money — and of power gained by money — so all-encompassing that it is tearing our society apart.
(There’s also the worldwide exploitation by the capitalist West of most of the rest of the world, a diary in itself.)
We are approaching, not the Gilded Age and its collapse in the Great Depression, but the leadup to the French and Russian revolutions, where a smaller and smaller group of people accumulated more and more power and used it to protect and further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. The world is ripe for a change, quite possibly an explosive one.
Capitalism, I have become convinced, has reached the end of its useful lifespan. It hurts too many people and helps too few. If we had never experienced an age, a political structure, whose intention (however imperfectly achieved) in which “We the People” vowed to "promote the general Welfare,” we might not know that life can be better for most of us. But we do know.
I can’t say what will succeed capitalism, nor how violently those few who benefit from the current extreme capitalism will defend the status quo they have recently created. What I do hope for is that something like the Finnish model will emerge, in which people strive for many things, including material comfort, but they do so with the common good as their primary goal.
Not that Finland is perfect by a long shot. The Finns do have the advantage of being largely homogeneous, and this leads to significant racial discrimination against Africans and other minorities. The human race, Finns and other Scandinavians included, has an awfully long way to go. But I suggest that the Finnish outlook on life points us in a forward direction.