Conclusion

Abstract

examines 1888challenges to the emphasis on happiness and optimism under both socialism and capitalism. The erasure of sadness or despair appeared coerced to Theodor W. Adorno, and psychology’s emphasis on enhancing happiness only encouraged people to accept their oppression. His solution was to split happiness into two parts, with pleasure being only the illusion of true happiness. In the 1960s, there was a continual attack on manufactured happiness in the United States. The terms “Couéism with organ music”—originally directed at Peale—and pollyanna capture the disgruntlement with too much focus on happiness, which struck critics as phony. In 1963–fourteen years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of national reconstruction—a debate about whether a revolutionary could be happy took place on the pages of the national journal China Youth. Letters from students suggest that just as China was on the brink of the Cultural Revolution, young people not only had detected logical contradictions in the system but also were willing to participate in what they surely knew was a dangerous form of publicly questioning the status quo. The sensibilities of the Misty Poets, although not completely new in global terms, were a further development within a continuum of dissatisfaction with the contradictions of revolutionary optimism.