American Happiness Propaganda

The most famous books in the field of positive psychology have been published in the United States, repectively by authors living and working in the USA, like Tal Ben-Shahar (`Happier´), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (´Flow´), Ed Diener (´Happiness´), Daniel Gilbert (´Stumbling on Happiness´), Jonathan Haidt (´The Happiness Hypothesis´), Sonja Lyubomirsky (´The how of happiness´) and Martin Seligman (´Authentic Happiness´).

Colin Bear argues that the reason for that is that there are more ´unhappiness factors´ in the USA than in the rest of the modern world. And he raises the question if the science of happiness helps to hide political challenges in the United States that should be tackled urgently, but are not, if you tell the American readers that happiness is a matter of individual effort.