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 p The sense of contentedness is the expression of the sum of expectations and ideals frequently called consumer ideology.  [24•* 

 p The proponents of this ideology believe that in the 20th century the individual in the industrialised capitalist countries has finally received the long-awaited possibility of living entirely for himself. For that reason hedonism has become his ideal in life.

 p Hegel had called hedonism a Faustian consciousness thirsting for happiness, striving to bask in it but never creating it. Hedonism—both vulgar, simplified, dictated by unchecked passions, and “cultured”, modern, aestheticised and condemning dissoluteness—identifies the good with the enjoyable. As seen by this doctrine, all people can only act out of a desire for gratification (psychological selfexplanation) and must act desiring gratification (ethical self-assertion).

 p Under this frame of mind the motivations and purpose of life, even in each of its periods and forms of manifestation, are reduced by hedonism to the receipt of maximum enjoyment and to a minimum of suffering. What, by this logic, brings pleasure is of no import. The important thing is its duration (quantitative aspect) and intensity ( qualitative aspect). The problem of the choice of the ideal in 25 life is in this case considered anew, but only from the standpoint of the efficacy of results, of the distribution of priorities in the range of desires, in the computation of the pros and cons of short- and long-term balance forecasts. Within the limits of this doctrine even the “nose had to have some interest before it would decide to smell anything”.  [25•* 

 p The hedonistic ideal is only outwardly simple: the difficulty of achieving it lies not only in the constant clash with the interests of other persons acting in the same manner and pursuing analogous aims, but in the basic impossibility of exactly distributing desire priorities on the grounds of an extremely unreliable calculation, of a forecast. However, our purpose is not to dispel the doubts of the hedonist (homo ludens) trying to force his way through the thicket of contradictions between his own aspirations.

 p Let us try to review the social effects of hedonistic practices. The first point that arises is: the hedonistic ideal and its practices have a long history, while as a phenomenon of mass consciousness consumer ideology is relatively new. Are they comparable?

 p Indeed, the ideal and practices of hedonism appeared and spread in early class society. In their long history one can, incidentally, find some grounds for a word of praise. On the cognitive level the hedonistic principle allowed identifying the actual dependence between people’s requirements, between their interests, and their social aims and moral tenets. It was indisputably this same principle that was behind the progressive idea that enjoyment was morally licensed, and behind the criticism of religious, mystical asceticism. On the ideological level hedonism was one of the first theories in which, albeit curtailed, the aspirations of the people were articulated.

 p Still, hedonism was an expression of, first and foremost, the ideal and practices of the exploiting classes, an expression of their class, group and individual egoism. Hedonistic practices quite obviously required definite social privileges. Any attempt to make them universal accentuated the 26 question of providing the masses with the means of enjoyment and of developing their capacity for enjoyment. The hedonistic appeal underwent metamorphoses that ended with the masses being taught to accept sterile morals calling upon them to submit to actual suffering for the sake of an expected blessing. “The philosophy of enjoyment was never anything but the clever language of certain social circles who had the privilege of enjoyment. Apart from the fact that the manner and content of their enjoyment was always determined by the whole structure of the rest of society and suffered from all its contradictions, this philosophy became a mere phrase as soon as it began to lay claim to a universal character and proclaimed itself the outlook on life of society as a whole. It sank then to the level of edifying moralising, to a sophistical palliation of existing society, or it was transformed into its opposite, by declaring compulsory asceticism to be enjoyment.”  [26•* 

 p Contemporary capitalism introduced some amendments into the mode and content of enjoyment. In order to understand these modifications it is necessary to take a closer look at the following elements.

 p As we have noted, in the capitalist countries the living standard of many working people (blue- and white-collar workers, and working intellectuals) has risen compared with the past century. This growth is the direct result of the persevering class struggle on an international and a national scale and also an indirect result of this struggle—the concessions which the ruling class made “voluntarily”. Hedonistic ideals and practices ultimately led to the evolution of some material means of enjoyment and, by virtue of the general cultural growth, some means of promoting 27 the capability for enjoyment. The hedonistic principle, which claims to understand society as a whole, is no longer threatened, in any case directly, with conversion into a moralising ascetic preaching.

 p However, this is only an empirical impression of the situation. A Marxist analysis shows that for the working people the question of the means of a worthy existence, as far as that is possible under conditions of capitalist exploitation, remains more acute than the question of the means of enjoyment, to say nothing of the fact that their vital interests require the abolition of the system of exploitation and coercion.

 p Bourgeois reality gives daily reminders of this, especially if it is remembered that the rise of the living standard has been accompanied by a growth of the cost of the reproduction of labour power. On account of the complication of life and the mounting nervous stress and monotony of labour to a level incomparably higher than, say, 100 or even 50 years ago, it is vital to improve the structure of nourishment, at least partially to satisfy the radically increased requirement for recreation, and provide needed education, albeit in curtailed form. Under capitalism the technical modernisation of industry has imposed an oppressive rhythm of work that leads to increased fatigue among working people of almost all categories. As a result, an ever larger proportion of the time free from work is consumed for the simple restoration of vital strength and not for self-development. In no way contributing to the individual’s development, the time spent to restore the capacity for work performs what is essentially a service function relative to capitalist production.

 p At the same time, ever higher demands are made of the blue- and white-collar worker with regard to his development and to himself as an individual. In order to have a more or less well-paid job it is necessary to be equal to the standards that society and production set in the way df the individual’s qualities. It is growing increasingly harder “to be a contemporary”. One has to spend more and more time to at least sustain one’s capacity for work. How must one act? What is more frightening, what must one be more apprehensive of—the Scylla of the loss of strength or 28 the Charybdis of the incompatibility with social and professional standards? The choice seems to be quite voluntary. But freedom of this kind is purely formal: it is a choice between two equal evils. Only the superficial observer will believe that all people are getting more and more free time which they can at will use for enjoyment or for the development of their capacity for it. What we actually observe is an exhausting struggle for each free minute.

 p A rising living standard is an indispensable but not the sole condition for the spread of the hedonistic ideal and practice. Let us ask the question: Is not man’s vital activity the main source of and capacity for enjoyment? If in its highest forms, accessible exclusively to man, enjoyment is drawn in the process of people’s activity and is the product of ’the entire content of their life, the problems of hedonistic ideology and consumer practice lose all significance. The most that man can do and desire as the greatest happiness is to work, to associate with people, to create and, of course, consume (“we eat in order to live”); this is what is in your power, what is required of you and what you have as your actual life. It is only when they are blinded by fanaticism that people are capable of renouncing the fullness of life, the wealth of enjoyment, the unity of action and desire for the sake of the ideals of idleness and parasitism, exclusively for the sake of petty consumer interests. It is impossible to select a parallel for an assessment of this sort of self-denial, of which we have conditionally suspected mankind. To use the words of the Soviet poet Mikhail Svetlov, we would call it a struggle for non-existence.

 p An affirmative answer to the question of whether a link exists between activity and enjoyment is correct both in theory and practice. But in a society with antagonistic classes this unity between labour and enjoyment is distorted and false, and often turned into its opposite. Under capitalism labour cannot bring people the highest enjoyment; it cannot become the underlying element of their happiness and a means of development. Under these conditions material wealth becomes hostile to its creators, to the working people. This paradox is called alienation. In the process of labour, which gives rise to domination over nature, neither the working conditions nor the content of work are 29 determined by the working people; its iruits are appropriated either by private proprietors or by the state as a universal capitalist. The working people are increasingly wasted spiritually; in the process of labour they do not freely unfold their physical and spiritual energy, but exhaust their physical nature and destroy their spirit.

 p How can man unfold his essential strength in labour under capitalism when it is not he who involves the natural world in production, while capitalist production draws him into its system? How can work for the capitalist enrich man, i.e., how can it foster the free development of the individual’s physical and spiritual potentialities when labour is stripped of its intellectual, aesthetic and moral content? Under capitalism involvement in labour activity increasingly turns the individual into a one-sided, partial man. In addition, “the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes”.  [29•* 

 p Inasmuch as in the capitalist world material production is regarded as a secondary form of activity and to the extent that participation in it remains even outside moral assessment (or is given hypocritical recognition as an additional stimulator), man sees in labour not the satisfaction of his own requirement but only a compulsive means of satisfying other requirements. In labour he “does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy”.  [29•**  He does not see the positive significance of his vital activity, does not feel a sense of responsibility and does not breathe the air of freedom.

 p Under capitalism man feels free and contented only in activity which, he feels, has meaning and is unconstrained. In capitalist society he seeks emancipation from the oppression of depressing functionality, from segmentation, which prevents him from voluntarily entering reality and jettisoning the indifferent, detached attitude to reality. It seems to him that here he is escaping the influence of things, that 30 he is himself commanding them. Here—in the realm of consumption—he has a sense of freedom.

 p As participation in production of wealth, which holds him in bondage, becomes more meaningless to man he adopts an increasingly indifferent attitude to labour, submerges himself ever deeper in the world of consumer interests, sets himself the more sordid aims and clings more doggedly to the semblance of freedom. “Certainly,” Marx notes, “eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.”  [30•* 

 p But in capitalist society, apart from his work, man is involved in a mass of other social relations, in which he might compensate for his alienation in labour. This might be true if labour were only the function of producing commodities. Actually, it can by no means be reduced to this function: labour has created and continues to create man. It performs the function of the self-generation of man. Thus, if labour is alienated, it is the source of alienation in all other forms of human activity.

 p In the social relations obtaining in an antagonistic society man remains a functional element, an anonymous executer of the depersonalised will of things. His own will gradually evaporates like boiling water in a red-hot pan. Under capitalism the objective value of social prescriptions is as indifferent to the executer as the objective importance of labour. What remain are obligations lacking human warmth and denied the illumination of comprehended purposefulness. Man functions, creating, if there is a need for it, the semblance of interest in the performance of the social role accorded him.

 p From the formal, judicial standpoint the relations between people in an antagonistic society become functional relations. In them the importance of each individual is determined chiefly by the value of the services he is able to provide. Where we see something else we find either a bigoted camouflage of the motivations of service (a mass 31 example of this is the doctrine of human relations, whatever the odes devoted to them) or observe the casual nature of human relations from the standpoint of the rationally operating system of social institutions. This fortuity may become a necessity only when it evolves into a tendency opposed to the capitalist system.

 p The masses are prompted to adopt a consumer orientation by the official social and political life of capitalist society, from which they are expelled and where bureaucratic arbitrary rule is legalised. A spirit of alienation reigns even in the bourgeois state apparatus itself. A growing number of officials are doomed to incomprehension of the purport of their activity in the context of the operation of the machine as a whole. Knowledge is doled out to them sparingly and confined to the minimum needed for the fulfilment of a single rationalised operation. Under capitalism the civil servant is as much a functionary, a partial man, as those to whom he issues orders. He does not go farther than to attempt to turn state aims into bureaucratic aims, or treats them as personal aims. The latter are subordinated to the consumer interests we are already familiar with. Hence the specious character of administration, the ostentatious zeal, the corruption of the apparatus and the attempts to achieve freedom outside the dehumanising duties and functional relations of capitalist society.

 p In capitalist society alienation manifests itself also in the field of culture, where man runs into a widening world of spiritual wealth. But having neither the means, the strength, the time nor the appropriate training, he finds himself unable to assimilate all this wealth. If he finds access to this wealth it is only outwardly, by acquiring knowledge in the undecoded form of ready-made formulas, adapted conclusions, norms or directives, or by familiarising himself with it through the acceptance of forgeries.

 p As a consequence of this mode of involvement in capitalist society and assimilation of culture, the individual does not feel he is freely operating in it and does not become part of it. Incapable of anything save infantile social reflexes and having no understanding of the world in which he lives, alienated man is unable practically to assimilate the wealth of culture, which represents his own crystallised 32 essence, and finds himself under its oppressive heel, for bourgeois culture is used as an instrument of class rule.

 p Thus, fitted into production and managerial processes, realised science opposes the blue-collar (and, to a large extent, the white-collar) worker as capital, belonging to capital in one way or another, and used as a means of exploitation. The strength of science is alienated from man inasmuch as it does not come forward in the form of his own strength.

 p Even in the case of a person professionally engaged in science, his work under capitalism is alienated activity; first, because spiritual production is likewise fragmented on account of the division of labour in science, while the limited function performed by him prevents him from understanding the integral significance of the entire process of scientific activity and does not give him deliverance from “ professional imbecility”; second, because in the epoch of statemonopoly capitalism this activity is subordinated to petty bureaucratic tutelage with its striving to organise and dehumanise everything; third, because in its results—ideas, discoveries, inventions—scientific activity divorces itself, slips away from its creators, acquiring an independent existence that is alien to them, and is used for purposes that have nothing in common with the aims of science and are even hostile to science (for military purposes, or intensifying exploitation, for controlling behaviour, and so forth).

 p Art culture, too, finds itself in bourgeois society’s “zone of alienation”; it becomes an important element of the bourgeois organisation, a covertly operating means of manipulating people. This splits art culture into mass and elitarian culture. The former, permeated with the cult of consumption, becomes a means of diversion, a colossal factory of dreams. Small wonder it is called conserved and cheap, a reservoir of illusions, a culture of quantitative superiority, a translation of culture into the language used for advertising detergents, the folklore of industrial man, a disorganised subproduct of real culture, and so forth. The scenario designation of serially produced and mostly visual mass culture is to embellish the world in which the victim of alienation lives. Its purpose is to provide the means of oblivion, of 33 distraction from the alienation of life, to propound standardised tastes, desires and hopes, to proliferate the sense of contentedness under conditions where there is more than adequate reason for serious discontent. Its influence on the mind of the individual produces a “pseudo-world”.  [33•* 

 p Subordinated to commercial interests and the perverted requirements of its consumer, winning the market on account of its cheapness and huge circulation, and becoming an enjoyment service, the mass culture of capitalist society achieves its purposes by influencing the subconscious, by promoting the cult of strength, sex and entertainment. In its own way it has been successful in the fulfilment of its function, flexibly and speedily responding to fashion, forming it and, at the same time, remaining entirely dependent on it. In their turn, elitarian culture and avant-gardism, resting on motifs of the criticism of the sense of contentedness, depend on mass culture in the same way as the positive depends on the negative.

 p In capitalist society the large number of people employed in spiritual production have become clerks of scientific and artistic business with all the ensuing consequences. The functionary of mass culture does not take his work seriously, being aware of or guessing its actual purpose, and conscious of the crude stereotype character of the creative process in which he participates. He regards the work giving him an income and a status solely as a mask. He can only dream of dropping this mask, and in this dream he surmounts the materialised relations between the artist and the public, gets through to the audience, by-passing the organisational, ideological and financial barriers in bourgeois society. Similarly, the scientist dreams of achieving a level of universality in his knowledge that would enable him, in the awareness of his irreplaceability, drop the humiliating mask of a submissive functionary in a narrow field of knowledge, and allow him to quit the exhausting struggle for competitiveness. He dreams of becoming, at the price of his own efforts, master of his own cognitive interests and the party responsible for the utilisation of the results of his own scientific quests.

34

 p Thus, only by understanding the destructive operation oi capitalist exploitation and alienation can one appreciate how the growth oi material possibilities in the sphere ol consumption, representing an important milestone of social progress, led not to a higher development level of the individual but to consumer ideology, to the hedonistic ideal and practice with their social, psychological and moral distortions.

 p Consumer cares worry the classes, circles, groups and substrata that in one way or another feel the pressure of an alienated world, including those to whose advantage it is to preserve that world. Organised as a class, the bourgeoisie seek to step up consumption, using all the economic levers available to them, from state regulation and consumer credit to huge outlays on advertising. This is not accidental. The average profit rate tends to drop. One of the means of combating this tendency is mass production. Although during the past few decades the capitalist world has witnessed a steep rise of the cost of production and marketing due to the higher prices of raw materials and labour power and the larger expenditures on plant and research, this cost is distributed among the growing mass of serially produced commodities, thereby yielding a continued maximum profit. But this requires an expanding market and organised sales: mass production demands mass consumption and pressure on the market by special, drastic psychological or extra-economic means.

 p For the bourgeois consciousness the ascetic or stoic ideals are losing their primacy. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx wrote that the bourgeoisie’s actual ideal was the ascetic, usurious miser opposed by the ascetic but producing slave, the worker having no more means than necessary to go on wanting to live. The less a person eats and drinks, the fewer books he buys, the less frequently he goes to the theatre, to balls, to the cafe, the less he thinks, loves, theorises, sings, draws, and so on, the more he saves. As the bourgeois sees it, a person has to “economise” on participation in society’s affairs, on compassion, on trust, and so forth. All passions and all activity have to be subordinated to the single passion of gain. ’The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the 35 greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”  [35•*  In the hands of one person mankind’s alienated might becomes superhuman force. Represented in money as the fullest equivalent of man’s essential strength, it is capable of turning impression into reality and vice versa.

 p Marx’s characteristic of the bourgeoisie’s ideal in life was exact and true in his day. But with the prominence now given to extravagance, thoughtless consumption and the cult of comfort, the situation has somewhat changed. The aspiration for accumulation, for the self-growth of value has been and remains the inducement of capitalist production. But it is no longer accompanied by self-denial. Due to the discrepancy between accumulation and consumption it is now possible to shift the centre of gravity from one ideal to another. Inasmuch as the guideline on accumulation has solely accumulation as its aim, while the guideline on consumption gives the orientation solely on consumption, onesidedness (either an “economical man" or a “consuming man”) becomes inevitable in the ideals of the bourgeois consciousness.

 p The success of consumer ideology was facilitated also by changes in the condition and guidelines of a numerous substratum of the petty bourgeoisie. In the epoch of the “ democratisation of business" it is extremely difficult to run a clear-cut line separating it from white-collar workers and intellectuals, on the one hand, and from the middle bourgeoisie, on the other. Whereas formerly the small entrepreneur usually realised the blueprint of his career independently, displaying stoical restraint and ascetic self-denial, today it is impossible to give effect to individualistic inducements outside the corporate system of business. Hope for success in business, for the “capitalisation of posts" can only be given by activity within the framework of big business.

 p Being in an organisation and in the resultant system of social dependencies, the agent of capitalist social life has constantly to demonstrate his fitness for the jobs he holds and for the posts he looks forward to fill. To conform means 36 to be utterly loyal to the interests of the corporation or to one link or another of a state institution. It means to be a convinced adherent of the sense of contentedness, to harmonise one’s aims and guidelines with those that are predominant.

 p But career advancement is accompanied by changes in the consumption level, which is usually above the real income, for it serves as a claim to a higher post. Expenditures are thus one of the means of the competitive struggle. (The difference between income and expenditure is covered by consumer credit, which has reached astronomical proportions during the past few decades.) There is competition in spending, and in consumption, which knows no bounds and is aimed at winning prestige and trust. Under capitalism prestige is given by .social status most tangibly embodied in consumer spending. The function of control is exercised by the watchful eye of conformist public opinion. In order to avoid being discredited by it and ensure a further rise up the hierarchal ladder, the participant in this competition has to abide by the order and tastes prescribed under capitalism (“this is necessary”, “position has its responsibilities”, and so forth), and profess the appropriate convictions, which boil down to the approved dogmas of the sense of contentedness. Any violation of order, of the norm of purchases, spells out a lowering of prestige. Conformist opinion acts with sadistic cruelty, persecuting the non-conformist with the same zeal that the Inquisition persecuted heretics in the Middle Ages.

 p The participant in this competition cannot extricate himself from the vicious circle of conventional purchases. Consumer ballyhoo haunts him all his life. On the one hand, he is constantly urged on by his credit debt, because a breach of obligations immediately threatens him with ruin and ostracism by public opinion, which is particularly finicky over such matters. Such a breach adversely affects or altogether excludes the possibility for further advancement.

 p Bourgeois society is highly interested in this ballyhoo, encouraging it in every way not only for sales considerations: the featuring of dolce vita stimulates the growth of labour productivity and socially submissive behaviour. It whispers, as it were: “You dislike and probably even hate your job. 37 But if you are efficient you will have more possibilities of deriving pleasure from the acquisition and enjoyment of new commodities and services. Besides, higher consumption is the guarantee of further advancement and, consequently, of more freedom during non-working time. Possibly this depends on opportunity but it also depends on you: you may reach a position where you need not work at all and, at the same time, broaden your consumption.”

 p Further, the participant in inner-corporate capitalist competition is drawn into the merry-go-round of purchases of his own will. Of course, extravagance in consumption with debts hanging round his neck compels him to exert himself, constantly spurred by fear of breakdowns, failures and trouble at work. This fills his life with unending anxiety and uncertainty for which he pays with fatigue and nervous stress. In this rat race he has to sacrifice not only his health: in order to remain in the race, to discharge his duties on the proper level, he has to economise on self-development, go into narrow specialisation, limit his association with other people and his cultural requirements, and frequently backslide on his morals. This forced asceticism and depersonalisation takes place precisely at a time when the general complication of social life and of the requirements of production and management objectively demand the maximum development, not the narrowing, suppression and extinction, of the individual’s strength.

 p But habit easily becomes second nature. Spiritual emptiness and dehumanisation demand a price. The individual psychologically adapts himself to a functional existence. The anonymous actor gets used to his role, and he begins to like it. A life-time of play-acting, existence guided by the opinion of others, and anonymity cease to worry and bother him. All he wants is success embodied in consumer symbols (quantity and value of purchases), he overcomes fear, violates the taboos of conformist public opinion, linking his ego more closely with a studied, approved role. He pawns his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for things: fashionable, costly, in short supply. Freedom is identified with success, patriotism with allegiance and chauvinism, happiness with a carefree life, all-sided development with dilettantism. Consumer cares supersede all interests, subordinate all 38 impulses and underlie all calculations and personal plans. The danger of depersonalisation, of dissolution in a crowd is removed by an insignificant and petty diversity in the consumer choice, by a magnified desire to create the impression of free-thinking and of inimitability in clothes, appointments and rituals. The individual becomes an artificial man and an ideal object for ideological manipulation. Nothing non-human is any longer alien to him.

 p The sense of contentedness is linked chiefly with the consumer ideal. Devoid of spirituality, it is utterly prosaic. Hegel noted that in bourgeois society the individual is active not by virtue of his own integrity but under the pressure of external circumstances. Forced to work by need and to abide by laws without respecting them, he is deprived of plasticity and integrity and is enmeshed in a web of dependencies. His independence surrenders to the commonplace. However much a rebellious individual quarrels with the world, however much he is thrown from side to side, he ultimately smashes his teeth, and with his desires and opinions blends into the relations and reason of that world, with its coupling of things, and acquires his appropriate little place in it.  [38•* 

 p In Hegel’s day the bourgeois ideal in life was simply wingless and could have some sort of reason. But the present sense of contentedness has become simply vulgar. It has made a clean break with ideals without regret, as with the attributes of antediluvian romanticism. The place of heroes has been taken over by the “lonely crowd”, the poetry of hopes has given way to the prose of consumer calculations, paltry expectations and petty aims. There is no room for heroic emotions when attention is focussed exclusively on things and on the ability to acquire and use them, when the whole philosophy of life boils down to getting as much enjoyment as possible with the least effort.

 p These ideas were quite accurately conveyed by Alberto Moravia. Following an accident the leading character of one of his books, an American, finds himself in the nether world. But the paradise hi- had known in detail since 39 childhood from the Scriptures did not materialise. He found himself in a giant department store. Excited beyond measure, people were crowding the counters buying things they had always cherished. Their attention was attracted by a parade of new commodities, while the things they had bought earlier were by some miracle converted into crisp cheques again and again.

 p However, consumer society is not devoid of a sort of lure. Under pressure of competition, the cult of acquisition is steadily perfected. It can tempt and attract: along with forgeries there is a mass of really valuable services and necessary things. It is fostered by deafening and repressive advertising, by marketing, which absorbs huge sums of money, by the system of consumer credits, commercial remissions, cheap sales, and so forth. Not everybody can withstand the temptation of participating in the “greatest freedom of the 20th century”, in the unrestricted (with the exception of money, of course) orgy of buying. This freedom is so simple: “Consume and let consume!”

 p The individual becomes a captive of this way of life, which kindles his consumer instincts. Man, writes the American psychologist Erich Fromm, describing this state, has become an eternal suckling, always waiting for something, and invariably disappointed. With his whole life concentrated on the manufacture, sale and consumption of commodities, man himself becomes a commodity.

Rather than being happy the sense of contentedness is made happy. It proudly wears the regalia of content. In its eyes an unhappy person is only an exception to the rule, a sick man. The notion about this “normative” happiness brings us to some moral problems of the sense of contentedness.