The Pursuit: From Happiness to Options

Warm Greetings to All,

Join Plato's Cave philosophers and Orlando Stoics on Zoom this Sunday morning, Sept 27 at 9:00. (Informal chat at 9:00, forum at 9:15)

NOTE: New Applications for Plato's Cave membership are currently closed. The Plato's Cave forum will soon be discontinued on this meetup platform for reasons stated in my message to members,
and will merge with Orlando Stoics Meetup on Sunday, Oct. 4.
Links and program information may be accessed through our partner organization, the Orlando Stoics meetup, at https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

Active Plato's Cave members can temporarily reserve a place, receive zoom login information on this site, and receive e-mail confirmation, until September 2026.

Every Sunday, a new forum. Our meeting starts at 9:00 AM with friendly wakeup chat; then our select topic panel briefly introduces the subject at 9:15, followed by member discussion and Q&A.
Volunteer introduction panelists will meet following each forum to develop the next program;.

This Sunday - What were we really promised?

What were we really promised?
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men in Philadelphia wrote a word into a nation's founding document that no government had ever promised its people. This week moves from a promise to an escape to a diagnosis, so we end with today, not with the history books.
We begin with Jeffrey Rosen, a legal scholar and longtime head of the National Constitution Center, who went back and read what the founders read. John Locke had said government exists to protect life, liberty, and estate, which we remember as "life, liberty, and property." Three weeks before the Declaration, George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights kept property and added happiness. Jefferson could have kept property too. He dropped it. Rosen shows where the word came from. In The Pursuit of Happiness (2024), he finds the founders soaked in Cicero and the Stoics. In 1815, a schoolmaster in Maine asked Jefferson for advice to pass on to his students. Jefferson sent a passage from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, a Stoic book he had copied out as a teenager after his father died: without virtue, there is no happiness. Franklin and Jefferson each kept lists of about a dozen virtues to practice, and Rosen builds his book around them. For the founders, he says, the pursuit of happiness meant being good, not feeling good. It was closer to what a farmer means by a good harvest than to what we mean by a good mood. A nation could only govern itself if its people could govern themselves.
Erich Fromm, a German-Jewish psychoanalyst who fled the Nazis, tells us what happened to that promise. In Escape from Freedom (1941), he shows how the old medieval order, which told everyone who they were, fell apart. People were set free from the old ties. But being free from something doesn't mean you know what to do with it. Many people found all that openness too much to bear and gave their freedom away to whoever would take it: a strongman, a movement, a crowd. Fromm was writing about Europe, but he also saw a quieter escape, which he called automaton conformity. You keep the right to choose, and then you choose whatever everyone else chooses. It happens everywhere.
Finally, Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, tells us where we are now. In The Paradox of Choice (2004), he argues that after a certain point, more options make us less satisfied, not more. Choosing becomes work. Every choice comes with regret about the ones we passed up, and when things go wrong, we have only ourselves to blame. Krishna Savani, Nicole Stephens, and Hazel Rose Markus took this idea further. In studies published in 2011, just getting Americans to think about choice made them more likely to blame victims and less willing to support the common good. A society that treats happiness as picking from a menu will also treat unequal starting points as each person's own fault. So ask yourself: if happiness is a harvest and not a purchase, what would we have to stop choosing to get it?
Sources:
Jeffrey Rosen
The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (Simon & Schuster, 2024), book page at the National Constitution Center: https://constitutioncenter.org/go/the-pursuit-of-happiness
"The Pursuit of Happiness," Rosen's essay adapted from the book, including the Jefferson and Cicero story: https://constitutioncenter.org/essays/the-pursuit-of-happiness
Declaration of Independence, transcription, National Archives: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), free at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7370
Jeffrey Rosen, Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Rosen_(academic)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Rosen_(academic))
Erich Fromm
Escape from Freedom (1941), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
Borrow or preview at Open Library: https://www.openlibrary.org/books/OL32991577M/Escape_from_freedom
Escape from Freedom, Britannica: https://britannica.com/topic/Escape-from-Freedom
Erich Fromm, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm
Barry Schwartz
"The Paradox of Choice," TEDGlobal (2005): https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice
The Paradox of Choice (2004), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
Barry Schwartz, Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Schwartz_(psychologist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Schwartz_(psychologist))

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https://www.meetup.com/platoscave/
https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

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