“You call the police on your mobile phone, and say / my right to fun is threatened, must I face this on my own?” - Cathal Coughlan, “On the Parish”

Who has the right to be unhappy? Whose unhappiness is genuine, consequential and worthy of attention?

Let us imagine a felicitous, well-ordered society in which there are three classes of person: citizens, slaves and victims. The citizen has a duty to be happy; he has no reason not to be, and if he should become unhappy then that is a private problem for which his society has ample remedies, of which he should promptly avail himself. The victim is a citizen who has fallen foul of some misfortune, which has robbed him of the happiness that is due to him as a citizen. When the television reporters ask him how he feels about it, he says that he is “devastated”. He is an object of pity and indignation, and his unhappiness is keenly felt by everyone for almost the entire duration of the news broadcast in which it is publicised. It is understood that even in this well-ordered, felicitous society there will always be some victims, and the status of victimhood is even perversely prized among some of the citizens, over whom it exerts a strange fascination. Finally, and most numerously, there is the slave, who is not expected to be happy: he has no reason to be, and his apparently spontaneous joy in being alive is frequently pointed out in rebuke to those citizens who are failing in their duty to be happy.

Now let us suppose that the slaves revolt, smiling all the while as they liquidate (and, in a few regrettable cases, liquidize) the citizenry. A new society is swiftly instituted, in which there is neither citizen nor slave and the burdens of life are taken up equitably in a spirit of universal compassion and solidarity. What will the distribution of happiness and unhappiness be in this society? A poll is taken; it emerges that some people are, in spite of everything, unhappy. A group of mathematicians have become frustrated in their efforts to prove some theorem, which remains impervious to their methods; the most brilliant of them has leaped out of a window, and the others deeply mourn their loss. Reichian sex-hygiene has failed to prevent people from getting monstrously entangled in doomed love affairs. A blue mood settles over an elderly woman as she sits on a park bench in the public gardens, watching the pigeons peck at something only pigeons would consider it worth pecking at. Such people are neither citizens failing in their duty to be happy, nor victims unjustly deprived of their happiness, nor slaves who can have no expectation of ever being happy. They are human beings engaged in the various travails of existence. Their attention to their own (and each other’s) unhappiness, its causes and its circumstances, is part of the way in which their society knows itself as a human project.

I propose “militant dysphoria” as a name for unhappiness that demands such attention: not therapeutic remedy (although that may also be appropriate; I’m not opposed to healing, as such), but to be included in the way in which society knows itself, critically and existentially, as a situation in which human beings live.