Can We Choose to Be Happy?

Damaged religious figures stand in Nagasaki, Japan six weeks after the city was destroyed in a U.S. nuclear attack. Photo: Public domain

Yoshida Katsuji was 13 years when the United States military dropped an atomic bomb on his home city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The nuclear blast peeled the skin off his arm until it was hanging off his fingertips, and left his chest and legs badly burned. But it was only when he saw his reflection in a broken piece of glass that he realized the extent of his facial burns. He did not recognize himself.

The experience of Yoshida and other atomic bomb survivors—known in Japanese as hibakusha, or “atomic bomb-affected people”—is told in Susan Southard’s book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. Though inspiring in its account of human resilience, it does not make for easy reading. Southard describes the experience of several survivors of nuclear attack and its impact on their lives in the days, months, years, and decades afterward.

In Yoshida’s case, he was hospitalized for several months after the bombing. While the left side of his body began to heal, his right side stayed scabbed and infected. Eventually his right ear rotted and fell off, leaving only a small hole through which he could hear. Doctors performed skin graft surgery. But for the rest of his life, Yoshida would be disfigured and suffer pain. His face drew stares wherever he went, causing him to hide from others. For years he struggled with feelings of shame and despair.

As a young man, he started to become active in the antinuclear movement and hibakusha support groups. In the early 1960s, a qualitative change in Yoshida’s outlook occurred. Southard describes the continuing effects of Yoshida’s exposure to the atomic bomb at this time, but one paragraph has stayed with me:

After years of anguish and constant reminders of his hibakusha identity, in the early 1960s, Yoshida made a choice to be happy. [my emphasis] He realized that no matter how much he worried and fretted, he could never erase the experience of nuclear war or get back the face and body he used to have. “I resolved to make the best of the situation,” he explained. Turning away from the deep sense of gloom that pervaded his thoughts since the bombing, he began identifying positive aspects to his life, starting with the many people who had helped him over the years even as they, too, had suffered.

In subsequent years, Yoshida made more of an effort to step out of the hidden confines of the warehouse at his job. He played on his company’s baseball team and gained a reputation as a talented player. He served as secretary-general of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Youth Association, grew more comfortable talking to others, went to parties, rode a motorcycle, and eventually married and had children. In his old age, Yoshida often spoke to schoolchildren about his experience and led tours at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. The impression one is left with before his death on April 1, 2010 at the age of 78 is of a friendly, outgoing man with a self-deprecating sense of humour. In a word, he seems happy.

I think of Yoshida’s story a lot these days, when there are plenty of reasons for people to feel unhappy. A report published in January by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto found that Canadians are experiencing the highest levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every day the news seems to get more and more depressing: war, inflation, poverty, homelessness, police brutality, mass killings, racism, oppression, an endless pandemic, and ever worsening climate emergency that the current system is completely unable or unwilling to address.

On an individual basis, many people I know have suffered the deaths of loved ones or other tragedies. Speaking personally, 2022 has been the worst year of my life. In the last 12 months my father and both grandmothers died. Interpersonal relationships have ended or changed for the worse. City life is full of misery, which can’t help but grind you down. I currently live in St. James Town in Toronto, and there’s a lot of poverty, addiction, and mental illness in my neighbourhood. A guy got shot right outside my apartment building in June. People in general seem more on-edge these days.

There are two major ways people tend to react to individual and societal misery. One is to take an individual approach, and seek to improve one’s own quality of life. Another is to seek to change society through political action. The former is the approach that is more pervasive in popular culture, whereas the latter is often reduced to voting in elections. It’s no surprise the individualist approach tends to be the one we see exalted most often in the media, since it does not threaten the status quo.

Strictly speaking, it’s not an either/or question. You can work on improving your own outlook and your own life, while also striving to improve society and the world. You might call this the “Man in the Mirror” perspective, as articulated by Michael Jackson:

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make the change

To be clear, I have no problem with the idea of self-improvement and trying to have a positive outlook. For some people, such as Yoshida, it can genuinely change their lives. He really does appear to have made a decision to become happy and succeeded—though he also did so in the context of Japan’s postwar economic boom, which allowed the average person to have a higher standard of living.

My problem comes with the thinking where all problems are reduced to individual attitude. Chris Hedges and Barbara Ehrenreich have written extensively on the “cult of positive thinking”, really a kind of magical thinking. I’ve known people who bought into the “law of attraction”, the idea that you only have to think about what you want hard enough and it will come to you. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Larry King heavily promoted the film and book The Secret which revolves around the law of attraction. The implication of this “law” is clear: if you don’t get what you want in life, it’s because you didn’t want it bad enough.

In Empire of Illusions, Hedges writes about how and why corporate culture promotes positive thinking: “If we are not happy there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism, especially about the goals and structures of the organization, are condemned as negative and ‘counterproductive.’” Meanwhile in her book Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich studies positive psychology and its ability to quash dissent by encouraging people to blame only themselves for any problems they might have. Sonali Kolhatkar writes in her review of the latter:

Ehrenreich, who survived cancer, said she began her investigation into the ideology of positive thinking when she had breast cancer, roughly six years before Bright-Sided was published. That’s when she realized what a uniquely American phenomenon it was to put a positive spin on everything.

She applied that idea to economic inequality, discovering an entire industry telling struggling Americans that their poverty stemmed from their own negative thinking. It promised they could turn things around if they simply “visualized” wealth, embraced a “can-do” attitude, and willed money to flow into their lives.

Central to this industry are “the coaches, the motivational speakers, the inspirational posters to put up on the office walls,” said Ehrenreich — and many megachurches and multi-millionaire “prosperity gospel” preachers, too. “The megachurches are not about Christianity. The megachurches are about how you can prosper because God wants you to be rich,” she said — adding that in many of them, “you won’t even find a cross on the wall.”

But the cult of positive thinking ultimately has more secular roots. “It grew because corporations needed a way to manage downsizing, which really began in the 1980s,” she said. Businesses that laid off masses of employees had a message that “you’re getting eliminated… but it’s really an opportunity for you. It’s a great thing; you’ve got to look at this positively. Don’t complain.”

Eventually, Americans internalized the idea that losing one’s job has got to be a sign that something better is coming along and that “everything happens for a reason.” The alternative is to blame one’s employer, or even the design of the U.S. economy. And that would be dangerous to Wall Street and corporate America.”

Conservatives and reactionaries tend to most stridently echo the idea that everything comes down to the individual and that those who demand better conditions are just spoiled whiners. That’s how we get right-wing memes that glorify being exploited and risking serious death or injury for pathetically low wages. But as the economic outlook continues to decline, young people in particular are rejecting such ideas and returning to the best traditions of the labour movement. They’re forming unions and fighting for better wages and working conditions. That’s what I call a positive outlook.

Another area where the individualizing of problems expresses itself is in therapy and counselling. I’m not saying therapy can’t be effective; I’ve spoken to a counsellor in the past and found it helpful. But there are limitations to therapy, which at its heart is about changing your individual perspective. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that if you change your outlook, you will see improvements in your personal life. But there are other, systemic problems that no amount of positive thinking will fix. Will one’s exorbitant rent go down if you adopt a “can-do” attitude? Will inflation stop eating away at your paycheque? For a member of a marginalized group, will a more positive outlook change the fact you are more likely to be murdered by police?

Ultimately, this comes down to the difference between idealist and materialist ways of thinking. A lot of petit-bourgeois activism revolves around the idea of “raising awareness” and convincing politicians of the need to address homelessness or the climate crisis—in essence, to have the right outlook or perspective. But the reason nothing is being done about these problems isn’t because of a lack of awareness or “wrong thinking” by politicians. It’s because we live under a mode of production, capitalism, that is based on maximizing private profit, not satisfying social needs—and where all other factors, including a habitable planet, are secondary.

In the last analysis, material conditions determine consciousness and not the other way around. Yoshida Katsuji’s life was forever changed in 1945 because he came of age at a time when imperialist rivalries exploded in the Second World War, when the technology had developed to build a nuclear bomb, and where the U.S. government was determined to use it as a warning to the Soviet Union. But Yoshida was also later a young man at a time when Japan was experiencing its postwar economic “miracle”. When a socioeconomic system is still capable of moving society forward and raising people’s quality of life, the population as a whole tends toward a more hopeful and positive outlook.

Ted Grant, in his 1997 book Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, made this point when comparing the Soviet Union after World War II to the economic basket case of newly capitalist Russia in the 1990s. After the unprecedented devastation of the war against Nazi Germany, even when taking into account the parasitic role of the Soviet bureaucracy, the U.S.S.R. experienced rapid recovery and high economic growth on the back of its nationalized planned economy. This in turn left an impact on the consciousness of the population:

Despite the low standard of living and the material hardships (the problem of housing was particularly acute), there was a general feeling of optimism. This is in stark contrast to the present position, where the collapse of living standards associated with the movement in the direction of capitalism produces no optimism, but only fear and lack of confidence in the future. This can easily be demonstrated with reference to the level of population growth. After the war, the birth rate grew rapidly. In the last five years, the birth rate has slumped, not only in Russia, but throughout Eastern Europe. This most elementary of human responses tells us far more about people’s real attitude to society than any amount of election statistics.

By the same token, when one compares Japan’s postwar boom to the economic malaise the country has suffered in recent decades—following the bursting of the 1980s speculative bubble and ensuing “lost decade” of recession—one sees a considerably less optimistic outlook today. In 2021, Japan’s birth rate hit a record low, plummeting to a level unseen since the annual survey began in 1899. Meanwhile, Japan has seen the growing phenomenon of hikikomori, predominantly young men who seek total isolation from society. Hikikomori tend to become more shy, insecure, and withdrawn; lose friends, and talk less. In essence, they experience the exact opposite of the transformation Yoshida Katsuji went through during the 1960s boom, when he became more outgoing and confident and gained friends.

Is there a direct relationship between social, political, and economic conditions, and the mindset of the individual? Not necessarily. But there is a dialectical relationship between the two, which explains why rates of happiness tend to increase or decrease in certain times and places. As Marx famously wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The degree to which we can “choose to be happy” is inseparable from the context in which we live, the prevailing material conditions, and the development of the productive forces. You may “choose” to be happy, but the degree to which you succeed will often depend on broader systemic factors.

Socialist Revolution, the U.S. section of the International Marxist Tendency, said it well in a 2018 article on self-improvement and self-care, which it described as “survival tactics of late capitalism”:

In the absence of mass workers’ organizations fighting collectively against the bosses to improve our quality of life, it is no surprise that people seek solutions in isolation. However, as many are coming to realize, these individual “solutions” lead nowhere meaningful. The only effective way to address the rise in depression and anxiety is to end the economic order which places the vast majority of people in a tumultuous, insecure position, and build one in which human need is prioritized; that is, to end capitalism and build socialism. But that cannot be achieved through lifting weights or lighting candles, but only through unified collective action.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for Yoshida Katsuji and anyone else who manages to improve their lives by cultivating a positive outlook. I’m inspired by any human being who is able to overcome unspeakable tragedy and suffering from crimes against humanity, such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I also have respect and admiration for great revolutionaries who helped organize the masses to radically transform society for the better, and in doing so laid the foundations for far more people to achieve happiness. These two groups aren’t mutually exclusive. But the difference between them is the difference between mere positive thinking, and a truly revolutionary optimism.