Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 22
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are happy with it, societies seek to devalue others’ suffering and put impudence on
the miserable to be more like the happy (as opposed to placing responsibility on the
happy to help those around them). People therefore stop asking ‘What should we
change about the world to keep me happy,’ and instead ask ‘What should I change
about myself to keep me happy’; the answer inevitably being one of the ‘happiness
indicators’ which, as Ahmed points out, are what society already defines as good
behaviour.
Sara Maitland offers a similar argument from the opposite perspective: if you
can control people by defining things you want them to do as happy, you can also
control them by defining things you do not want them to do as sad. Throughout her
book How to Be Alone, she argues that our views about happiness are contradictory:
‘We see moral and social conventions as inhibitions on our personal freedoms, and
yet we are frightened of anyone who goes away from the crowd and develops
“eccentric” habits’.23 Societies tell people what they have to do to be happy, then
punishes them for doing it. These conflicting messages have caused us to ‘live with
two radically contrasting and opposed models of what the good life would or should
be’, creating: 24
[A] slightly slick tendency to blame all our woes, and especially our social
difficulties, either on a crude social Darwinism or on an ill-defined package
called the “Judaeo-Christian paradigm” or “tradition”. Apparently this is
why, among other things, we have so much difficulty with sex (both other
people’s and our own); why women remain unequal; why we are
committed to world domination and ecological destruction; and why we are
not as perfectly happy as we deserve.25
Thus, happiness creates civil inequality and, more than that, locks people into these
inequalities. This is a critique that Rick and Morty fundamentally agrees with.
Firstly, it should be noted just how anti-institutional Rick is. Several thousand
versions of Rick from parallel universes actually set up a Council of Ricks purely to
protect themselves from the institutions which seek to control them. The Rick that the
23
Sara Maitland, How to be Alone (UK: Macmillan, 2014), 15.
Ibid, 35.
25
Ibid, 35.
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