Government-Enforced Happiness: Buddhist Ultilitarianism in Bhutan

Run­ning a coun­try is not easy. As hard as you try, you sim­ply can’t make every­one happy. Or can you?

In the late Eigh­teenth cen­tury, Eng­lish­man Jeremy Ben­tham sug­gested a Util­i­tar­ian approach –gov­ern­ments should aim to bring the great­est hap­pi­ness to the great­est num­ber of peo­ple. His con­tem­po­raries in the New World agreed and declared “the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness” as an inalien­able right. They were off to a good start.

But this focus on good feel­ings was not to last. The new nine­teenth cen­tury thinkers found hap­pi­ness too hard to mea­sure and thus an imprac­ti­cal way to judge progress. Gov­ern­ments backed off and shifted their focus to less sub­jec­tive met­rics like eco­nomic growth and crime rates. And that might have been the end of it if not for another Eng­lish­man, a Psy­chol­o­gist named Adrian White. In 2006, Mr White pub­lished a sur­pris­ing study. Using data from 80,000 respon­dents, he ranked all of the coun­tries of the world on their peo­ples’ rel­a­tive hap­pi­ness. It didn’t shock any­one that Den­mark, with their high stan­dard of liv­ing, came out on top or that a war-torn coun­try like Burundi came last. But what con­fused many peo­ple was that the remote Himalayan king­dom of Bhutan came in 8^th place, a com­fort­able 15 places ahead of the United States.

Bhutan did this despite rank­ing near the bot­tom of the world on qual­ity of life mea­sures. Bhutan comes 134th out of 177 coun­tries in the Human Devel­op­ment Index rank­ings, for exam­ple. To put that in con­text, peo­ple born in Bhutan die about 20 years ear­lier than those born in Canada. The dif­fer­ence, I sup­pose, is that in Bhuan they’re dying a lit­tle bit happier.

How much hap­pier? Only 3% of Bhutanese report being unhappy. This is quite a fig­ure con­sid­er­ing that psy­chol­o­gists say that 1 in 10 peo­ple suf­fer from some form of men­tal ill­ness (most com­monly depres­sion). Even depressed peo­ple, it seems, are happy in Bhutan.

So how do they do it?

Quite sim­ply, the gov­ern­ment in Bhutan tar­geted the increase in their people’s Gross National Hap­pi­ness (GNH) with a single-mindedness that would actu­ally make us in the west­ern world a lit­tle bit uncom­fort­able. Not only do they mea­sure  along­side Gross National Prod­uct (GNP), they put people’s hap­pi­ness above every­thing else. (Update: I’ve just dis­cov­ered that in 1990, Bhutan expelled 100,000 eth­nic out­siders from the coun­try –appar­ently in an attempt to boost the country’s aver­age hap­pi­ness. To me that seems a bit of a cheat. This is one of the dan­gers of putting too much stock in one mea­sure of suc­cess. Human rights and every­thing else is over­looked. As a school teacher I’ve had a lot of sim­i­lar dis­cus­sions about how we mea­sure suc­cess in schools.)

The gov­ern­ment and the peo­ple of Bhutan delib­er­ately sac­ri­fice eco­nomic growth,  tobacco, plas­tic bags, for­eign invest­ment and tele­vi­sion –just to name a few– because they are seen as impede­ments to con­tent­ment.(Update: How­ever, despite these lim­i­ta­tions Bhutan had the sec­ond fastest eco­nomic growth of any coun­try in the world in 2007).

Clearly these kinds of lim­its wouldn’t be easy for us to swal­low in the west and yet we’d like the gov­ern­ment to do more. A BBC sur­vey recently indi­cated that 81% of British peo­ple think the gov­ern­ment should focus more on mak­ing them hap­pier, rather than wealth­ier. But again, I might not want them to go as far as tak­ing away my TV.

I’ve been read­ing a lot about Bhutan, try­ing to fig­ure out what lessons we could prac­ti­cally apply over here to give us a bit of the hap­pi­ness they enjoy. The best thing I’ve uncov­ered is summed up in this quote by a western-educated Bhutanese man; he says, “the real appeal of Bhutan is that we feel human” (Front­line). To me that says a lot.

When you have a com­mu­nity of peo­ple com­mit­ted to an ideal, even some­thing as sim­ple and obvi­ous as try­ing to make their coun­try a hap­pier place, that’s a pow­er­ful thing.  Part of that power is the will­ing­ness to make sacrifices.

World Map of Hap­pi­ness – Top 10

1. Den­mark
2. Switzer­land
3. Aus­tria
4. Ice­land
5. The Bahamas
6. Fin­land
7. Swe­den
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada

(Top 10 Source: Uni­ver­sity of Leices­ter)