Threatening Happiness: “No One Can Compel Me to Be Happy Their Way”

Starting from classical philosophical suggestions about the status of happiness recipes that suggest the optimal ways to reach it, I will soon illustrate the fundamental Kantian suggestion: “No one can coerce me to be happy in his way”, that is, an individual has the right to choose their own kind of happiness “provided he does not infringe upon that freedom of others to strive for a like end which can coexist with the freedom of everyone”. I will conclude that happiness (and even its very possibility) is constrained in a relational interplay in a collective of human beings. Thanks to the events that took place during the notorious “enclosures”, which violently expropriated peasants by destroying their homes and cottages during the so-called primitive accumulation of capitalism, I will provide a very clear example of the relational nature of happiness and even its potential to be jeopardized. The idea of a “moral bubble” will be proposed as an explanation for why some people fail to recognize the harm they create when they jeopardize the happiness of other humans. A study of the current predatory neoliberal capitalism’s peculiar propensity to make the majority of people unhappy will be the focus of the last section. The article interdisciplinarily aims at bridging philosophy, economics, sociology, and political theory, enriching the philosophical analysis with historical and contemporary contexts, and also providing the following critical engagement: the analysis of how dominant narratives and economic frameworks serve to mask violence, thus challenging readers at least to reconsider accepted truths about progress and prosperity.