“Driven by a desire for happiness at the expense of sadness, bolstered by capitalistic seeing and virtual reality, obsessed with abstraction and delusion, most of us are walking around half blind. Does this blindness partially account for a recent study, reported in Psychological Science, that found that happy people are more likely to be bigots than sad people? Does this inabiity to see clearly further account for the fact, revealed in the 2006 Pew Report on Social Trends, that Republicans, who can be a somewhat warlike bunch, are happier than Democrats? Is our nation’s happiness, its crass self-satisfaction, its wretched contentment, partially responsible for its getting behind a recent war that never should have occurred?”

—Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, 2008.