I think you may be changing the subject. I was claiming that most people in history were objectively miserable for all those reasons I gave, and that this didn't normally lead to revolt against any conditions perceived to have caused their misery.
If you say most people didn't experience miserable conditions as a conscious or even background source of discontent, I'm not sure I disagree. That might help explain why misery doesn't lead to revolt, at least not automatically. I did quote Dostoevsky's aphorism that "man is the animal that can get used to anything." I'd add that adaptive preference formation, the sour grapes effect, coming to want what you (think you) can actually get and not want what you (think you) can't get, is a well documented fact about human cognitive psychology.
These considerations would also help to explain why "rising expectations" are a contributory factor to revolt, if they are: if you become aware that it doesn't heaver to be like this and that things could be better, you might find yourself wanting more and interpreting your own past differently, as miserable rather than just as the way it is.
Anyway, since I didn't disambiguate between objective misery, conditions that cause suffering and diminishment even if people don't acknowledge this, and the subjective, recognized experience of misery, I can see how what I said was potentially misleading. I was puzzled by your questioning my claim, which I thought was obviously true, that most people in civilized history have led lives of misery, but I can see why you doubted whether most people experienced their lives as miserable. There we agree. Probably they haven't, and that is part of the problem.
Now, I am not saying that we should go out and try to convinced people that their lives are miserable. ("No, no, you are really unhappy! You only wrongly _think_ that you are happy!") Rather the thing is to persuade people that their lives could be much better, and that it is wrong that their lives are not as good as they could be. Psychology will do the rest for us.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 28, 2007, at 4:15 PM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure what Doug means when he says,
> "There's plenty of
> > evidence that
> > poor people aren't all that unhappy - and that
> money doesn't make
> > people
> > happier." Surely he must define "poor" in a
> limited way.
>
> I'm referring to the so-called "economics of
> happiness" literature,
> which shows that economic growth has not made people
> in given
> countries happier over time, and which shows that
> rich people aren't
> always all that much happier than poor people.
>
> Of course, people may not have the imagination to
> see their own
> unhappiness, as Tahir might say.
>
> Doug
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