Reflections on Happiness, Structures, and Systemic Issues

I saw a note about that the responsibility to be happy can’t be placed exclusively on the individual. Next to the systemic issues at play. This within me sparked questions, I then was pondering. With this, I would like to share my musings and thoughts on the topic.

Firstly, I’d say yes there are systemic issues. Though at the same time are not these issues things that do not solely exist outside of people? I’d say the system itself is a complex web of attitudes, believes, emotionally ingrained patterns, that drive certain behaviours, that thus perpetuate these systemic issues.

Though on another note why would we have to be happy. Maybe the standard of having to be happy, which the culture pushes onto the individual, is itself an issue. Sometimes people are angry, sad or whatever they feel about their situation. Is this also not their right to feel such. Their circumstances can surely be such that they would not make money, or anything else is outside reach. Many things are outside of our direct control.

Yet maybe in a deeper sense is not the carrot of needing to be happy that is hung in front of people, through the system that perpetuates this myth itself, not an issue? As if happiness can be reached through external material means. Is contentment and allowing ourselves to feel what we do without any judgment imposed upon the emotions we feel, as long as it is expressed healthily, not that which liberates us from the entire pressure of this responsibility to be happy?

Further it made me wonder about the notion of structure and it’s nature. Personally I would say that I can't really pinpoint or even see the structures people talk about. Where are they? Is it not people that operate the constructs that we call "structures". How is one to separate one from the other? As such what if these structures are more psychological in nature through on going cultural and familial conditioning, which creates the illusion of structures. Though in actuality if we were to suspend these narratives, we find nothing but buildings, and people walking within them, acting out a narrative that perpetuates and creates the illusion of "structure". We might see only buildings and people acting out societal roles. Does this not imply that the concept of structure is a product of human interpretation and interaction rather than an objective reality?

I would say that the society that currently exists as such, only does so through the inter-generational perpetuation of the pattern that leads to the systemic issues, through the continuation of the behaviour, which surely is encoded in laws and such. Yet are not laws, mere words on a paper? They hold no power on their own. Only due to people acting as if they have power, do they have power. Which is true for those ruled, and those ruling. Yet if you take it all back to it's source, did it not start with ideas uttered by a human? So hence where do such ideas, and anything arising from it come from, other than a human? So might the solution not be then also within the human? As even any action we take collectively to address these issues. Is this not to persuade another human, and with it change their ideas? Thus evoke the searched for change, which thus changes the “system”.

Just look at any other society or civilisation in history. Is it not that their system is different, and thus also had different systemic issues? Even if surely, they had issues that are very human in nature, that we also share? We can, thus verily see then, that ancient China, or Ancient Egypt, or Ancient Mesopotamia, or even Ancient Rome, is nothing alike to our system. Yet it was operated by humans like us. Did then not any said system arise from said people? As before their cultures existed as they did, lets say in Neolithic Egypt, the Middle Kingdom in that form did not exist, and thus not said system. So is it not that any system arises from the beliefs and actions from those who create and thus intergenerationally perpetuate said system?

Can we thus not be freed from this system, through internal means first, before we change them externally? As this would free us from the mental and emotional chains that restrict us to the ideas that make up the system. What depth psychology would call the cultural and personal complexes. Inherited from ones family and society, through conditioning and various environmental sources, including trauma, that create blocks on the inherent individual archetypal expressions of the soul.