SELF-COUNSCIOUSNESS AND INDIVIDUAL HAPPINESS IN MODERN SOCIETY

Abstract

The subject of this paper consists of an analysis our modern society and it’s legal system with a special accent on the psychological and legal concepts of happiness, wellbeing, pleasure, etc. Sometimes, the price for a civilized world was considered to be the repression of pleasure in order to obtain culture and a high technological level of existence. I referred mostly to eastern European realities, to the great amount of unhappiness that surrounds us due to the major social and economical changes and the very few actual instruments that society offers people in order to achieve their goals. There is no conspiracy or the involvement of a higher power, it’s just the burden that the state, the family or the neighbors put on us and our need of being loved, appreciated and accepted. In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse built a very interesting and realistic metaphysics of psychology starting from the work and theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. The human being’s destiny is described and analyzed in a universal and, in the same time, original manner that we use until today in order to understand ourselves better. Happiness can be reached only in a way that is harmonious with our biology and nature. Man is “zoon politikon”, as Aristotle pointed out in Politics and: „state is a natural institution ... man is by nature a social being, whereas antisocial in nature, not in occasional circumstances, is either superhuman or beast” (Aristotle 2008, p.22). We cannot live alone, we need each other to know, create and understand ourselves. But socialization is good until we reach a fragile point, where we start to feel oppressed and suffocated by the other. The society appeared in order to fulfill a basic need but it has been perverted in ways lot more frightening than the powers of nature. Modern society is aggressive and overly technical and industrialized. The opposition between communism and capitalism feels like overrated for someone from Eastern Europe. Our country has been under communism for 45 years and for the last twenty five we have been trying to build democracy. We have been witnesses, as well as authors and victims, to the development of market economy and the excessive commercialization of unnecessary goods that are purchased continuously despite the fact that we know and are warned about their lack of utility and irredeemably damage that could make our health. Human sciences are used to create addiction to goods we don’t really need and activities which couldn’t possibly make us happy according to our biological nature.