Dennis Prager

By Wendy Shalit

To Dennis Prager, happiness is a kind of craft, or what in philosophy class is called a techne. If you practice it, you can master it.

First, working at happiness entails "developing attitudes that enable us not to despair." One of these attitudes we are to develop is that life is tragic. Prager points out that if we assume that tragedy is normal, then instead of "waiting for something wonderful to happen" to make us happy, we will be happy by default. Next, we must recognize that our nature is insatiable and we will invariably be dissatisfied. To control this insatiable nature, we should distinguish between " necessary dissatisfaction" about things that we can change, and "unnecessary dissatisfaction" about things we cannot change.

It also helps considerably if you lower your expectations to meet reality. One of Prager's examples is a man waiting for "a Playboy Playmate who studies Torah." This is unrealistic. He reminds us that, "in general, expectations lead to unhappiness." So does hoping for unconditional love: "Seeking unconditional love is a vestige of childhood." Prager even equips us with a formula, "U = I - R," which he calls "The Unhappiness Formula: the amount of Unhappiness equals Images minus Reality."

The Harvard Independent, April 9, 1998

Reading for Bliss

"Happiness is a Serious Problem"

By Andy Rice

This is a very happy book. From the yippee-yippee subtitle ("A Human Nature Repair Manual") to the nearly double-spaced lines of text, Dennis Prager's "repair manual" drips with the stereotypical feel of a self-help book. Just glancing over the table of contents makes the reader bibble with joy. A skim of the text makes him feel boundless and boisterous, and fills him with a desire to scream at the first person he sees,"You can do it too, Jimmy!"

Yet it is what it is. Prager didn't want to write an esoteric book about the meaning of the atom. Rather, he sought to create a practical book that would appeal to the masses, and he succeeds. For the unhappy person, it offers an explanation and a solution for his problems in an easy-to-read language. Even for someone perfectly content, the book provides a constructive perspective on relations with other and contains some interesting philosophical points.

Divided into three sections, the book explores the nature of happiness, the obsticals to achieving it, and the path to becoming more happy. "Happiness is far more than a personal concern. It is also a moral obligation," he argues. "We owe it to...everyone who comes into our lives to be as happy as we can be." Yet no one can be happy all the time. "Human nature is insatiable," he continues. "To be happy, we have to battle outselves, and this is not something many people want to hear." The key to being happy, he comments, lies in "passionate moderation." People who live by only "holy" principles or by strictly "lower" drives will not be as happy as those who acknowledge their natural instincts, but appease them in moderation. "Neither extreme is conducive to happiness, because both extremes produce people preoccupied with lower feelings, not freed from them," he states. "To abolish all lower thoughts, you would have to become more than a good person; you would have to stop being a person and become an angel."

In the spirit of Deepak Chopra, Prager writes a book that tells people what they want to hear: To really be happiest, you've got to drink and have sex a little. In the process, however, you must be careful not to overstep moral bounds. He doesn't claim to have written the foremost authority on happiness, but rather a pragmatic outlook on how to enjoy life. Despite the heavy hand of didacticism, the book contains useful grains of truth. Finding happiness troubles everyone, but, for Prager's readers, the prize is always lies just a few pages away.

This review is from The Harvard Independent at: http://hcs.harvard.edu/~indy/info.html

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