The community of prejudices threatens human survival:

The recent news about the rape cases in India reported that the law enforcement officer was luring the female rape victim responsible for causing the crime. Muslim women are fully covered and yet rape cases are high in Muslim countries. This shows that sexy female attraction is not the cause of the crime of rape. In the same bizarre way, victims of bullying in government organizations are often responsible for creating their own victimhood. Closed minds are so blinded that they cannot see the culprit as the culprit and thus the poorly analyzed problem fostered victimization. The supposedly intelligent beings in the system also simply ignore the truth in their twisted brain.

The twisted thinking taught by a culture to dislike a particular group perceived all problems to be caused by the disliked group. Victimizing the victim is not just an individual misjudgment about the victim alone; it is a major error of social judgment against a particular group despised or held in low esteem. When the mind is conditioned to perceive the victim as the defaulter, the prejudiced mind treats the victim as the culprit which effectively places the culprit as the victim. Such a prejudiced mind will look for reasons to blame the group considered inferior or dangerous to the community. This type of mentality justifies all the actions of the culprit on the target victim group as deserved and therefore the criminal action should not be questioned. Repeated criminal action in the form of discrimination, harassment, victimization and torture produces a series of negative results in the living conditions of the detested group.

The worst result is the suffocation of the spirit of living. In many cases, torture uses an invisible technique to exclude the group and deny them the opportunity under flimsy arguments. The invisible technique is preferred to the visible technique because the crime cannot be evidenced, making its application armored but very lethal.

The invisible technique is used to kill the spirit in order to live and this produces more cruelty than instant physical murder. The cruelty of applying a process of slow death through a life condition reduced to an unbearable level is aimed at trapping the victim into self-annihilation. Self-demolition manifests itself in alcoholism, drug addiction, and the adoption of an unhealthy lifestyle due to depression. The depressed living condition can even tempt the victim to commit serious crimes such as suicide and murder. Victims who could be rescued also have little chance of survival, as they typically suffer from psychological trauma. The damaged condition denies the victim the opportunity to lead a normal life like others. The most disgusting part is when the victimization goes unchallenged and the crime is forgiven so that the criminal continues with the crime. This kind of attitude and social behavior towards a particular target group certainly does not project a happy community life.

Prejudice exalts the myopic existence of a few:

The cultural attitude of despising a particular group passively supports the dependence of the perceived weaker group on the stronger force as a natural equation. In other words, culture justifies unequal treatment. By accepting inequality, the culture fails to recognize the potential, creativity, and strength of the hated group. So the common attitude is to quietly condone unequal treatment and be apathetic to the suffering of the aggrieved group.

The myopic group that only exalts itself as worthy is guilty of the crime against humanity. Such a myopic group exists in backward communities as well as in advanced societies. It is observed that the traditional cultural perspective acted as the main feeder of the prejudiced attitude. Western historical racism forms the social milieu for current social prejudice about certain groups. The historic Jewish Holocaust and the general tendency to view Jews differently today have stemmed from the same social environment. The Indian tradition offers another outstanding example of prejudiced existence. The victimization of a schedule caste or tribe in India hardly exudes sympathy from other caste communities. Similarly, the female sex, held in low esteem, is seen as the temptress in the crime of rape. Middle Eastern dictatorial torture legitimized by the cultural belief in the divine right of the ruler is accepted without question under a similar culturally conditioned mindset.

The unhappy condition makes a nation unhappy:

While the US is fortunate to have questioning minds to seek truth and seek justice, the Muslim community under a tightly controlled system is incapable of questioning authority. And while Indian citizens protest loudly these days, they hardly reach the desirable level of curiosity or the audacity to question authority. Today, democratic India lay buried in the scruples of life hidden by the GDP bubble. India on the rise, saddled with a growing population of over 2.5 billion, has also witnessed an increase in the size of the starving poor living in ignorance and illiteracy. Rising India is ranked as the infanticide, rape and suicide capital of the world with a possible distinctive position of the largest number of insurgents in the world. Paradoxically, India’s shining majority struggles under unequal access to opportunity and an unequal distribution of newly acquired national wealth. Bright India’s poor majority is the culturally undervalued category belonging to the lower castes and tribes, including the Muslim minority, loosely referred to as the underprivileged group.

Undeniably, the unhappy poor condition of the majority, the silent sufferings under the dictatorial regime and the racial victimization are indicative of an unhappy condition.

What you measure is what you get:

The British government recently introduced the measurement of happiness. The political initiative is intended to help assess living conditions based on the impact of social and public policies to measure happiness. Measuring happiness as a policy will help the government better understand people’s needs. It will also help people stay focused on how to get happiness instead of diverting attention on trivial matters to cause social tension and increase crime.

The measurement of happiness will direct all citizens towards a common goal of achieving national happiness. It will teach people the real problem facing the country and urge them to stick together instead of wasting time hunting down the group they don’t like. It will show that a nation does not need to assume global power to make its people happy. It will reveal that corporate profits have not improved living conditions nor does high GDP automatically alleviate the living conditions of the poor. The vast majority who struggle in poor conditions do not feel the consolation of a fat salary earned by some individuals who benefited from economic growth. For a high earner too, happiness does not lie in working for a big name organization when happiness is the way one is treated in the organization.

Ultimately, happiness is how an individual feels about living conditions and how they are treated in the system. Happiness comes only when one feels safe, secure, and “enabled” to lead a meaningful life. Happiness is when the individual is ‘enabled’ through equal access to opportunity without anyone being denied the opportunity to feel the change in living conditions. Happiness is when each individual earns, lives and grows through the opportunity given under the shared national wealth without prejudice with equal access to opportunity. Happiness is when it comes to serving a legitimate citizen and not criminal to protect the interest of the nation.

Happy individuals with happy living conditions make a happy country. Although emotion cannot be measured, the impact of social and public policies on citizens can be evaluated to measure happiness.

Author’s note:

This piece is the result of the exchange of thoughts and information through the Internet interface. My recently published article on institution building touches on the emotional aspect of governance in the Indian context which has recently been inundated with news of suicides. With an increasing trend of suicide in the service, the issue of ‘happiness’ becomes more relevant to sustain productivity management in both private and public affairs. Western countries are well informed about theory and practice and a recent survey ranked the Scandinavian countries as the happiest countries. Surprisingly, Israel caught up in the Middle East crisis ranked very highly. The ratings revealed that happiness is not just about GDP and money; it is a feeling given and received. This writing aims to arouse interest and generate debate on such a critical aspect of governance based on human emotions and feelings. The article is written from my own experience and is reinforced with current information on developments in governments around the world, with a focus on regions with serious problems. The article is an opinion contributed by me as a creative resource to benefit broad-spectrum readers.