The Pursuit of Happiness

Yesterday, like every day of the week I set out for work, a twenty minute walk through the congested side streets in the outer nowhere regions of Tokyo, and then another twenty minutes on the train. Earphones slipped over my head to block out the inessential din of advertisement and fortify me against an average of half-a-dozen times I am nearly run into or over by cars and bicyclists and mothers pushing strollers. I used to just listen to music. A year or so I graduated to podcasts, and recently have made another move. I've stated listening to a variety of different lectures. The one I was listening to basically traces the ideas of governing from ancient Athens to America today. As the lecturer read the first few lines of the Declaration of Independence I was reminded forcefully of how hearing something again and again somehow makes us not really hear it at all, just repeat it by rote as meaningless sound.

'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Even when people do think about this often quoted refrain they usually just attribute their own meaning to it. What they figure happiness is. In a capitalistic society usually I think people see it as life, liberty, and the pursuit of money. Which is slightly ironic considering where the line originated. Its basically lifted from Locke. Except his version really was 'life, liberty, and property.'

A different lecturer said that it was probably changed due to the controversy over slavery. The writer(s) (Jefferson)* wanted to include nothing that might encourage people to argue that they had the right to own another person. But perhaps he also foresaw how badly people might misinterpret the idea of 'property.' Something we can see every time we turn on the news. Our ideas of entitlement and ownership over the last few decades have spiraled completely out of control. Intellectual Property is probably one of the best examples where thats true. Patents and copyrights are perfectly good ideas if you keep it within reason but when it gets to the place that one company is suing another because they used the same color in their logo we ought to know something has gone wrong. People can not own colors, people can not own words, and charge you for the use of them. You may notice that in my photos there are very few pictures of people, and one of the big reasons is that I cant get over a feeling someone is going to sue me for using an image of them or something. Not 'your stealing my soul' but 'you are depriving me of my god given rights to profit from the use of my own visage.'

Corporations and private individuals strive harder and harder everyday to plant their flag in some new concept, some new combination, trying to expand their territory further and further into what we used to think of as belonging commonly to us all. After all there has to be a buck to be made. Locke believed that we own in common all of the world and everything in it. Only the labor of a persons hands could set something especially apart for him or herself. If you work the land to grow food, the food becomes yours threw your labor. If you build a chair, even thought the wood you built it from was owned in common the chair is yours because you made it. That was his meaning when he said property. He believed every man had a right to profit from his own labor, and to own what he himself made.

Often it seems like thats the one thing that people don't have anymore in the US. The lion share of any profit for any labor goes to the company not the worker. What you make is sold for hundreds or millions and you yourself get only a pittance. Anything you make can be instantly snatched out from under you by patent squatters.

As responsible citizens we should read these things for ourselves. If the Declaration of Independence and much of The Constitution are based on ideas in Locke, we should read Locke. Modernly we have no idea what the meaning of life liberty and property really was, and a lot of time I have a feeling we have a fairly poor idea of what happiness is too.

*Jefferson was given the task of writing the original document but it was edited by John Adams from MA, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of PA and Robert R. Livingston of NY .