Ufology: Happiness vs Unhappiness

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

My pal Nick Redfern takes me to task my previous piece here where I chide the Facebook dalliances that UFO buffs are engaging in, rather than pursuing the UFO phenomenon as seriously as they once did.

That is I’m chastising the massive nonsense that is inserting itself inside Facebook pages of ufologists.

Nick makes the argument that ufologists are human beings who like to enjoy themselves like any normal human being would or should, and his point is well-taken by me.

Nick’s position is supported by an April 12, 2019 TLS [Times Literary Supplement] review of a book by David Wooten, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable appetites from Machiavelli to Madison [Harvard University Press, $35].

The essence of the book concerns itself with the “pursuit of happiness” an outgrowth of The Enlightenment from which the American Declaration of Rights, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Jeremy Bentham’s Fragment on Government among other manifestos cheering on the idea that Western societies came to understand that happiness is a kind of human right.

There are those who see this “right” to happiness as an idea with problems in today’s societies:

https://aeon.co/essays/cheerfulness-cannot-be-compulsory-whatever-the-t-shirts-say?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0fdc7fe386-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_05_02_04_49&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-0fdc7fe386-70375581

But the idea of happiness as a philosophical system has been with us since the time of the early Greeks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_happiness

As a toady of philosopher Arnold Schopenhauer, I’m not inclined to tout happiness as a valid way to live:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer

But Nick is beloved by his friends (and enemies too actually; they know his talent), while Schopenhauer and me are eschewed pretty much.

Let me say that I enjoy seeing the non-ufological activity of UFO buffs. It’s just that as others (DeLonge and Elizondo, plus the Navy, to name a few) are taking away the phenomenon from long-time UFO enthusiasts, my UFO pals are resorting to frivolity and foolishness in their pain of losing control of the one thing that gave them some cachet, at least in the fringe UFO community.

But for those of us with uppity, elitist viewpoints, there is Nietzsche’s observation that “human excellence and the aesthetic pleasure it provides (think Beethoven and Goethe), make life worth living.” [TLS, Page 27].

RR