Title : Perpetual Euphoria - Essay on the Duty of Happiness - Pascal Bruckner - book

Summary :

"A new collective narcotic is invading Western societies: the cult of happiness. Be happy! A terrible commandment that is all the more difficult to escape because it claims to be good for us. How do we know if we are happy? And what do we say to those who pitifully admit: I can't do it? Should we refer them to these well-being therapies, such as Buddhism, consumerism, and other techniques of bliss? What about our relationship with pain in a world where sex and health have become our despots?
I call the duty of happiness this ideology that pushes us to evaluate everything from the angle of pleasure and unpleasantness, this assignment to euphoria that rejects into opprobrium or discomfort those who do not subscribe to it. Perversion of the most beautiful idea there is: the possibility granted to each person to control their destiny and improve their existence.
It is then misfortune and suffering that are outlawed, at the risk, by being passed over in silence, of resurfacing where they were not expected. Our era tells a strange fable: that of a society devoted to hedonism, in which everything becomes irritation and torture.
How could the subversive belief of the Enlightenment, which offered men this right to happiness, previously reserved for the Christian paradise, have been transformed into dogma? Such is the adventure that we retrace here."

• EAN : 9782246582212
  
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