I have read just a little of this book since receiving it March 17. I first started thinking about the concept after watching Sleeper by Woody Allen many years ago. The orgasmatron. The Orgasmatron Society, that's what I termed America. Later, reading The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, I found to my satisfaction the well-spring of the Orgasmatron Society.
Dworkin is a M.D. and a Ph.D. Artificial Happiness was published in 2006. At the time, perhaps now, I don't know, physicians were engaged in a revolt against the widespread prescription of psychotropic medications in the 1950's and 1960's. The Valium housewife, and etc. Drugs had created Artificial Happiness.
The new "ideology" was "revolutionary" (page 2); in its practice the new ideology turned to "alternative medicine" and "obsessive exercise" (page 3). The mantra of the revolution was "Drugs are for people who can't handle real life". "Artificial Happiness's distinctive feature is its power to resist life." (page 4)
Alternative medicine didn't work for many patients as well as traditional medicine, and exercise, especially if it was "obsessive", led to its own sequelae. "Why do I need a knee replacement, doctor? Why is my daughter anorexic? Why did those crystals not make me happier? No pain, no gain? Are you out of your mind?" Alternative medicine was often quackery.
Came a counter-revolution. "Real life is for people who can't handle drugs." I heard that on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980. When I was first prescribed Wellbutrin in the 1990's I realized that I needn't have lived with mild depression as I had for 30 years. If that well-being was "artificial", sign me up. "Better living through chemicals" became my own mantra.
We have been on this see-saw for half a century. What Doctor Professor Dworkin does not do is perform "root cause analysis", as practicing physician teams do when their methods have occasioned a catastrophe such as amputation of the wrong limb.
Dworkin is myopic for being a polymath. It's right there under his nose. But not in the index of the book. I checked. His study group is Americans: "...a new class of Artificially Happy Americans", "...these Happy Americans" (pp 4-5) One of his case studies is "Bill Mansfield", a "swinging bachelor" in New York City who "began to lose interest in his endless pursuit of women." (page 6) Stop right there, Dr. Prof. Dworkin. You nailed it! You got to the root cause if you could see the forest! Why America? Why happiness, why pursuit? Go further back than the 1970's; go to the 1770's:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
"Bill Mansfield" was doing what our Founding Fathers wrote he had a God-given "unalienable right" to do. A God-given right becomes an obligation in the receiver. Pursuing, Merriam Webster,
That's predatory! Pursuing is pathological and "obsessive". The Pursuit of Happiness, elevated to a God-given right coequal with Life itself and Liberty, is counter-historical, counter-sensical, pathological and obsessive. So is a society so-founded. It is the Orgasmatron Society.
