One of the well-studied facts about the mechanisms of pain/pleasure, joy/sadness in human beings is the asymmetry of the impact they cause on us. Specifically, negative events cause more impact than benign events.
The biological and evolutionary basis of this asymmetry is simple: it is the negative that brings us death. Therefore, we have to be very reactive to dangers and to what causes us pain, in order to avoid the great evil. On the other hand, what is beneficial to us generates good sensations, which lead us to approach and repeat, to stay alive (feed, hydrate, reproduce, socialize). But the intensity of pleasure doesn’t mark us as much as the fear of pain.
Our biological and psychological functioning has an important consequence for our individual and collective lives: low-risk environments are more conducive to happiness than highly volatile environments. As uncomfortable as adrenaline junkies are in the most controlled environments, the vast majority of human beings thrive most when the risk is lower.
From the civilizational point of view, in fact, this has been the path traced: from the beginnings, when human beings lived in the face of great meteorological, food, health or predation risks, to modernity in which our control over energy, hygiene or food production allows us to free ourselves from the fear of not knowing how to survive the next day.
However, and because there are no free lunches, in the process of mastering the risks that we have tamed, we have created others. The classic example is unemployment. There is only unemployment because there is employment, that is, it is because we have specialized in such a way that we can be in the terrible situation of the market not needing, at a given moment, our specific contribution.
This means that, in order to truly enjoy the security that modernity, technological progress and labor specialization bring us, we have to minimize the social risks of the complexity that life in cities and global networks generates.
This can only be achieved with an institutionalized sharing of these risks, preventing people from suffering the inevitable falls of the leaps that are taking place.
That is why developed and effective systems of social security are vital for the happiness of nations, in which those who are lucky enough to be rich help those who are unlucky to be poor, those lucky enough to be healthy help those who are are unlucky to be sick, those lucky enough to be intelligent and efficient help those unlucky to not be, those lucky enough to be born privileged help those who were born discriminated against.
In addition, this sharing of social risks is also the best way to boost leaps: the less we are left behind, the more we will be moving the world forward.
The texts in this section reflect the personal opinion of the authors. They do not represent the VISION or mirror its editorial positioning.