Issues that you already know to poke holes in a simplistic model of "happniess":
Stockholm Syndrome; enforced and coercive signaling games around happiness; wireheading; "forced orgasms" of various kinds; smiles painted on soul; internalized self-deception under social pressure not to betray unhappniess with the "virtuous" life; the structures of "Libidinal economy" and the assorted Freudo-Marxian stuff...
The family is the agent to which capitalist production delegates the psychological repression of the desires of the child.[41] Psychological repression is distinguished from social oppression insofar as it works unconsciously.[42] Through it, Deleuze and Guattari argue, parents transmit their angst and irrational fears to their child and bind the child's sexual desires to feelings of shame and guilt.
Psychological repression is strongly linked with social oppression, which levers on it. It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism.[43] A capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family is precisely the powerful tool able to counteract those forces.[44]
The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression,[44] as also said by Foucault in the preface, loving power and desiring "the very thing that dominates and exploit us."[45] The Oedipus complex arises from this double operation: "It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives."
You can probably see my line of objection, ja? I think you haven't given it as much serious consideration as I have given the far-right worldview, dude.
P.S. a quick google search also reveals that Alice Miller, a psychologist who survived Warsaw under the Nazis, has written a lot about abusive family structures from an anti-patriarchal/anti-authoritarian standpoint. Here is some anarchist (?) type ranting/blogging about the implications of Miller.
P.P.S. a paper that, in defense of Deleuze, criticizes Zizek's critique and rejection of Anti-Oedipus.
Yes lots of other possibilities, I'm well aware of those. I wanted to emphasize it that the simple truth is, that when people say they are happy, you should take it as evidence they generally are happy or at least not suffering. I did this because if this isn't pointed out people will avoid updating as much as they should using the possibility of different explanations as a rationalization.
Be honest, do you think you would feel the need to invoke or investigate those alternative possibilities to explain away greater self-reported happiness in nations with...
Related to: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity, Does My Vote Matter?
And voting adds legitimacy to it.
Thank you.
#annoyedbymotivatedcognition