This kind of “why do we seek out happiness/pleasure but stories of artificial happiness/pleasure utopias always read like dystopias” question baffled me a lot until it occurred to me recently - happiness and pleasure are evolved systems that evolved for a reason. It feels absurd to treat them like a goal because they’re not a goal, they’re a measure. It’s a bit like you’re heating something and looking at the thermometer to check it’s heating right, and someone says “hey why don’t we paint the thermometer to have the value you want, that’s much simpler and you’ll reach your goal fine” and the answer is yes, but no. Yes, the thermometer will have the value you were aiming for and it may have looked like that was your goal but actually no, your goal won’t be achieved because the real goal was never the thermometer it was heating the thing.
In our case, happiness, pleasure and so on evolved to drive us towards certain states and behaviors that it was evolutionarily beneficial for our ancestors to be in. Being physically comfortable, safe and healthy, being well-regarded by peers, achieving personal and collective goals, having friends and family who love you/have your back and you them, acting in line with what one feels is best, etc etc etc.
I think that has two consequences: 1) it’s entirely possible that perfect happiness/pleasure isn’t something we can ever attain, or that it’s even a coherent state, via real OR artificial means. Because happiness/pleasure evolved under constraints that didn’t include the requirement that such a state be attainable or even coherent. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it definitely means there is no guarantee that it is. Certainly our current experience with happy-making drugs suggests it’s much harder than you’d think. And 2) it puts into question the assumption that this state is “good”. These dystopias always seem so sterile, like what’s the point of all those people being happy, why have this system go to all that trouble to make it happen? Well, why should we care about anything, right, it’s all value judgements. And there are obvious reasons humans would value happiness. But there are also obvious reasons we’d value safety, comfort, loving friends and family, having children, achieving personal and collective goals, social status, discovering new things, leaving a legacy, etc etc. The “artificially happy people” dystopia assumes that we value happiness above all those other things but that’s an illusion borne from the fact happiness is a unified system driving us to all those things. A bit like thinking money is the most important thing because everybody is trying to get some, when in reality the money is just the unified vehicle for various things we really want - products and services, security, status, etc.
So insofar as all of those different goals are things we care about because we evolved to, it seems both more parsimonious and more robust to focus on goals that happiness/pleasure evolved as instruments to achieve rather than trying to hack the thermometer.
Arguably that’s the difference between actual utopias and “we’re all happy, that’s good right?” dystopias. Actual utopias explore the conditions for human flourishing, and either portray happiness as obviously following from that or straight-up don’t focus on happiness at all. Happy dystopias are dystopias precisely because the conditions they show are so antithetical to human flourishing that no reader would buy the characters are happy without the in-Universe happiness drugs or brainwashing or whatever.
The thing is that, technically, “human fluorishing” (understood as the evolutionary tendency of our specie to thrive & expand) is not something that can be maintained indefinitelly. The experiments regarding behavioral sink show that when the conditions are overly favorable, those survival / thriving instincts don’t play in our favor and nature tends to bring out all kinds of deviant behavior / unhappiness.
Sure, we are genetically predisposed to try and thrive as much as possible, but I’d argue a “real utopia” where humanity is “fluorishing” and at the same time “happy” is either unsustainable long term, or requires a very nuanced definition of “fluorishing” / “happy”.
The thing is that, technically, “human fluorishing” (understood as the evolutionary tendency of our specie to thrive & expand) is not something that can be maintained indefinitelly.
I meant “human flourishing” as a shorthand for the list of things I listed, as in “things that tend to make individual humans feel fulfilled” not the expansion and thriving of humans as a species. I don’t think the latter is always seen as utopian; for example if I were to list utopias like The Culture, The Federation in Star Trek, Le Guin’s short stories, the Abbey of Thélème… Some of those do feature human expansion although even there it’s not uncomplicated (The Federation not only explores but also colonizes uninhabited worlds and I think it’s fair to see “the expansion of the human species” as part of its utopian vision; I think the same is true of The Culture but the books also challenge the idea), others straight-up reject it like many of Le Guin’s utopias, and I think ancient versions of the genre like the Abbey of Thélème don’t think that much about it at all. However all of those utopias portray humans as having or being able to achieve a variety of “personal fulfillment” goals such as those I listed; those are what I meant. I do think our evolutionary tendency to thrive & expand may be worth valuing for its own sake, contra Le Guin, but that’s a different conversation.
Having said that I don’t think the “rat utopia” experiments say that much about human flourishing. For one thing those “utopias” didn’t meet all of the rats’ needs - they had unlimited food and safety from outside threats but they didn’t have unlimited space or the kind of stimulation they evolved to thrive and maintain their social structures in. I guess it’s good nuance to understand that “flourishing” doesn’t reduce to “unlimited food and safety from predators” but that organisms have other needs too (notably space), but I think it’s something most people realize already. Note that stories that do feature “the evolutionary tendency of our species to thrive & expand” as utopian tend to have the opposite of a “rat utopia”, with space colonization/exploration making space unlimited but with challenging conditions.
I’m also not convinced such behavioral sinks apply to humans, or at least apply to them as completely as they did to those rats. Some unique features we have that seem relevant here include our level of sociality, playfulness and adaptability. Humans are much more social than our closest relatives (& maybe all mammals) so overpopulation doesn’t have the same impacts on us as others. We also (literally) play a lot more than any other species, in the sense of engaging in behaviors for the sake of random goals instead of the more straightforward ones that usually motivate us - in that category I’d list not only what we understand as play and games, but also things like art, science, sports, random hobbies, etc. We don’t only individually play, but as cultures we devote time and resources to goals “for their own sake” instead of concrete survival/expansion. I’d guess such random behavior serves as a natural outlet in cases where conditions are “too favorable”, one that we probably literally evolved to engage in (evolutionarily speaking play has the purpose of learning new things, and you do it when conditions are favorable enough that you don’t need to focus on survival), meaning it’s likely to feel satisfying to some extent at least. Finally, Alison Gopnik says adaptability is a hallmark of humans as a species and I think that claim holds up - human societies have proven able to adapt to a huge variety of environments, both physical and social. Our own societies are extremely different from the kind we evolved with and have tons of issues, but they still basically function, with a huge proportion of humans in them leading lives that range from satisfactory to fulfilling, in a way that wouldn’t be true of a comparable number of chimpanzees. So I have doubts that we’d completely collapse as a species because of something so generic as conditions being “too favorable”. Humans and human societies can be broken, no doubt about that, but that usually involves extreme scenarios. Unfavorable ones, at that.
It might be worth noting at this point that a lot of us, particularly of the “posting randomly on the internet” variety, do functionally live in “rat utopias” with unlimited food, no predators but limited space and tons of people around. And I think most would attest that while it’s not the key to perfect happiness, it also hasn’t devolved into the horrifying hellscape the rats experienced.
This isn’t to say I think human utopia is possible/coherent/compatible with our nature. I just don’t think the rat experiment is a very good example for that argument.
Thanks for the thoughtful response :)
I meant “human flourishing” as a shorthand for the list of things I listed, as in “things that tend to make individual humans feel fulfilled” not the expansion and thriving of humans as a species.
But wouldn’t “human fluorishing” be a lot more in line with reaching the “states and behaviors that it was evolutionarily beneficial for our ancestors to be in” as you so elloquently explained before?
I feel that most (all?) of the things you listed are only good because they serve a purpose towards that goal. We like being safe/healthy because if we didn’t we would risk dying (the opposite of thriving), we like working in groups & helping / getting approval from each other because a community is stronger together (higher chances of survival), etc.
I feel those causes of happiness you list are also consequence of natural selection pushing our species to thrive & flourish. There’s no compelling reason to have them as goals by themselves either. In fact, seeking these things might also prove just as pathological as seeking happiness. It’s not always good to desperatelly seek approval from peers regardless of the consequences, for example. And sometimes, obsessing over those goals can cause frustration/stress.
For one thing those “utopias” didn’t meet all of the rats’ needs - they had unlimited food and safety from outside threats but they didn’t have unlimited space
True, though space is never really unlimited, not even the Universe is infinite (in Star Trek they simply haven’t reached the limit of their expansion… but they are in a gigantic enclosed rat box that ultimatelly has to reach a tipping point, even if it takes millenia).
My point wasn’t that an utopia can’t work for a period of time, but that it’s unsustainable in the long term to keep up with the constant growth that thirst for happiness pushes all living beings towards. At the beginning, the space the rats were given was more than enough, and the utopia worked just fine for several generations.
I’m also not convinced such behavioral sinks apply to humans, or at least apply to them as completely as they did to those rats. Some unique features we have that seem relevant here include our level of sociality, playfulness and adaptability.
I’d argue humans are already full of deviant behavior, just like those rats. Our sociality, playfulness and adaptability is ripe with unnatural deviations.
Videogames, art, entertainment, sports, spending the time in the internet, random hobbies, porn… I’d argue all those are behavioral anomalies. They might be connected deep inside to a natural need, but it’s under so many levels of abstraction that the gratification we feel from those stimuli has been long dettached from the original natural purpose that made us enjoy those things. Those behaviors are just a more complex version of how Pavlov dogs salivate at the ringing of a bell. They come with more steps, but they are not so different from the distopic “happy pill”.
We might not be starving for space, but we do have limits in resources, and the capitalistic thirst for constant “economic growth” that provides so much happiness to many is not sustainable, in the same way as the population growth wasn’t sustainable for the rats.
During the experiments some rats started behaving more like humans. They lost interest in sex and didn’t get into fights, some preferred to avoid socializing, some just slept, ate and groomed (Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones”).
I feel that the problem in the end is not so much in “instant gratification” vs “naturally experiencing the things that lead to that gratification” but in “instincts” vs “logic”.
Happiness, dopamines and such, are just how nature pushes us to have a goal to seek. If we were pure creatures of cold logic (like say… Vulkans, to keep with the trekkie references) we would never have a need for happiness, we would be calm, at peace… not exactly happy, but not unhappy either. It would be a relatively healthy state, never feeling stressed.
The problem is that we do need animal instincts to have a purpose. There would be no reason for humanity to do anything without our reptilian brain giving us a motivation. There’s no logical reason to not just let ourselves “die”. No reason to have sex (I guess that’s why Vulkans become irrational on mating season). It’s not like the existence of humans makes the world “better” in any objective absolutist way. The only reason we see our life (and that of others) as a good thing is because we are programmed to see it as such. But the planet, the universe, they don’t care… they’ll continue “happily” existing after humanity is extinct. Humans are a lot less significant in the grand scheme of things than we think we are.
I think we just need to learn to control our emotions. Dopamine is overrated. And I bet we would just build tolerance against it if we were constantly receiving it.