Happiness and Freedom

Would you be happier as a freeman or as a slave? History has answered this question many times with wars and revolutions. From a state of unhappiness based on denied freedoms and rights, people have fought and died for freedom. The United States has had several movements for civil rights, freedom and happiness: 1776, 1860, and 1960's. The first was memorialized in a document containing within first lines:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

A normal, average person cannot have happiness without freedom and rights. Only by having the freedom and right to solve the problems of one's life can one know the happiness that comes with fewer and fewer time-wasting problems.

Afterthought:

  1. Semantic circularity or similarity can reflect the dynamics of human interaction. This writer puts much stock in the origin of the world "friend" coming from Old English for "free." A person who helped you find freedom from your problems was a "freeing person" or friend. This relationship is noted closely in German were the words free and friend are more obvious, frei and freund. In German, one can see the semantic relation of freedom from problems to the joyful emotional reward, freude. One has joy when with a friend one is free from life's problems, that is, Man hat Freude, wenn mit einem Freund ist man frei von den Problemen des Lebens.