The Feelgood Virus Rules the West

What has happened? These days “feeling good” has become a motive in western society to buy, act, and behave. The criteria for whether or not a thing has value, is whether it feels good or it feels bad. The antithesis of this is that if something doesn’t feel good it has no value.

The problem with this credo is that nothing has ever been achieved which advanced the well being of mankind without some struggle – and struggle doesn’t feel good. Schools often teach that correcting children might stifle and therefore damage their creative spirit, so we must always praise everything a child does. This is not to say that criticism and punishment should flourish, but a balance between praise and criticism is helps us to understand the world.

It may be that a prosperous time post war time in which parents and society indulged their children by giving them “all the things I never had” spawned the “Me” generation. If you indulge a child too much he will come to expect everything he wants and that he is the center of the world and is disappointed when experience tells him otherwise. The “me” generation couldn’t come to terms with the fact that we are not the center of everyone else’s world. Those born after the Second War have been taught to follow their own dreams at the expense of all else. The resulting isolation of individuals in a “me” society has been exacerbated by indulgent parents, and tolerant society, by television, danger on the street corner, drugs, and the culture of fear, until almost an entire society is composed of unconnected individuals who can only substitute real life with virtual belonging.

There seem to be exceptions to this world of isolation such as participation in team sports (only as a player however, since a spectator retains his isolation), but even the players are taught that their motive for playing is that it “feels good to win”. Feelgood victory dominates pep talk.

Some people feel good belonging to something. Perhaps they are fans of a certain television program, yet they watch television isolated from their fellow addicts. They participate in this form of virtual belonging because it makes them feel good but in fact they are only spectators.

Pop music and films are geared to sales and encourage consumers to buy products to take home. People still go to concerts, clubs, and movies, but the driving force behind the production of these commodities is to sell the products for people to take home and “feel good” in isolation.

The experimental drug culture from the ‘60’s onward encouraged drug taking as a way of “feeling good”. Of course taking a drug is a personal experience; the user is the only one who feels the effects. Observers might see the results, but the experience is basically internal to the user. Drugs are taken for escape and entertainment. Alcohol is the same.

In many other societies around the world people have more pressing needs than “feeling good” so the idea that this “feeling” is a reason for making decisions, is viewed as a somewhat obscene Americanism. Someone who must expend hard earned energy to search out food to give them the strength for the next day doesn’t jeopardize his own life by basing his decisions on what feels good. Most other societies have a much more solid foundation on which to make decisions, such as whether an act is in harmony with the known world and is in harmony and balance with nature. Western society’s soul has come adrift from its anchorage, so it searches worldwide to find something to fill the gap. That gap for many in the west is the hole left in Christianity by the battering it has taken from science. Church makes some people feel good, but many are no longer satisfied with traditional answers to the inevitable questions posited by science.

If a man in a poor country has scraped together enough money to buy a product, his choices would probably be based on factors such as usefulness, reliability and price. He might base his decision on what might help himself or his family, but to chose something because it “feels good” would be the least of reasons for making a choice. There is the indefinable factor of something’s rightness (its usefulness, reliability and price) making if feel good, but the siding only with the wow factor would be considered foolish.

The western marketing colossus attempts to create needs where none previously existed by exploiting human characteristics such as pride, envy, and a desire to feel superior. Television, which is watched worldwide, is an ideal medium for insinuating these new needs into every level of society. Feeling good is an easy sell, but the underside to the pitch is that we think that need these things that make us feel good as a way to cover up emptiness.

This is not to say that man doesn’t have a desire to feel good, but to believe that this desire is a philosophy, a way of life, or a reason for action, makes for an empty life spent traveling between one indulgence and another; an existence without heart, spirit or soul.