George Ionescu on Happiness and Defining Freedom by What It's Not

Walnut

Let's talk about a Romanian named George Ghiță Ionescu who wrote a lot of books, who became a British Citizen, who from 1958 to 1963 was Director of the Romanian Radio Free Europe and following the formal demise of the Soviet Union he founded the Bucharest School of Sociology. When you're born in 1913, gain awareness in the First World War, survive the 1920's and 1930's, live through the Second World war, survive exile, return to your home land in 1989 and in 1996 die at the age of 83, you might have a right to wax lyrical on the subject of politics and happiness. George's overall view was that the promise of happiness through politics is illusory. "How did he get there?" Like all students of the Enlightenment he starts out defining what he means by happiness by comparing Bentham and Aristotle on the subject of happiness. Bentham's utilitarian morality produced a hedonistic happiness of the greatest number. Aristotle's eudaimonic happiness - or 2500 year old woke of a good life lived virtuously, an idea so dripping with irony David Wallace might have blushed, has been centered on a sense of meaning, purpose, personal growth, and self-actualization which as everyone attached to the Culture Industry knows was achieved through a solid Protestant, or Calvinist ethic of hard endless and often pointless work that produces obedience and surplus enough for the dreamscape of picket fences and neighbors who make apple pies then send their horrible children round on Halloween to beg for chocolate. George Ionescu's pragmatic point was that attempting to legislate for an individual's internal and subjective state of happiness was ludicrous. Government, political systems, respond to measurable, or at least generalizable, outcomes. Whether you called it Tyranny or Paternalism, George distrusted any suggestion that the government or the state should be the arbiter of the Good Life or of the happiness of the greatest number. No, no no! "Happiness" wasn't the goal of politics it was a by-product of other legitimate goals of politics. George Ghiță Ionescu went on to suggest a few legitimate goals of politics that contributed to the by-product of happiness: Life, Liberty and a Just Framework were exampled. Mind you, and here's the reason George is a wise man, he was confident in his assertion that a Free Society wasn't necessarily a Happy Society.  So what did George mean by freedom : He saw it as an ideal and as a political goal. He saw it as a critique of communism, fascism and tyranny. He saw ideology as a threat to Freedom. He saw populism as a mental constraint chock full of unidentifiable conspiracy theories untouched by reality, it was a mentality maintained by a sense of persecution and it too was a threat to Freedom.