Claim the right to be unhappy

     Today in class, we were discussing the problem of evil, and how God could exist, in the way that he is typically understood - all good and all powerful, when we also find evil in the world.  When we were discussing whether good could exist without evil (one that God could supposedly create if he were omnipotent), one of my peers brought up an interesting situation: what if a couple were to go off the grid and raise their child without ever telling them no, but always praising him.  This child would seemingly grow up in a world where he did not know of evil and would only see good, though in degrees.  Would the less-good become the child’s “evil” or is this a possible situation where a person could grow up thinking there was only good in the world - meaning that it may be possible for a God, as we picture Him to be, to make a world of only good without evil for contrast.

    Aldous Huxley does not seem to believe this is possible, or at least that life would lose some of its meaning if the world were set up for there only to be good and happiness.  This is a bit of a stretch from the picture of the child, but bear with me.

     In Brave New World, Huxley creates his own world where things are set up by the Controller so that everyone is happy.  Everyone is genetically engineered so that they have their own place predetermined for them in society; people are controlled so that they always make the good decision (the decision that would allow society to keep working so that everyone can continue to believe the world to be all good).  Is this a Utopia or Dystopia?  People are controlled, but they are happy.  When the Savage (a character in the story who did not grow up in society and was not genetically engineered), argues with the Controller at the end of the book, the Savage says that he does not like how this world is.  He talks of Othello and beauty and all of the other things that the Controller had had to destroy in order to make his world.  The people are entertained with new, simple, meaningless “feelies,” so as not to be distracted by the old and beautiful.  “The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death...”  Without “high art”, without liberty, without thought, what does life mean?  Perhaps good is not exactly what we think of it to be?  According to the Controller says, “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”  Does this mean that all of our bursts of feeling we usually think of as true happiness, the really good moments in our lives, could be the reason we have evil in the world?
     Imagine if aliens came to Earth and told us that we were actually being controlled all of this time by some mind control; they could now free us so that we could experience “true happiness.”  But, of course this would come at the cost of “true evil” as well, which would be even worse than what we know.  What I mean by this, is that is it worth it to leave the world that we know to discover the truth with maybe more happiness, but also with more pain and suffering?  If we never knew it, we could never know we were missing it.  But, could we say that this is truly happiness if we have it at the cost of our liberty?  According to Swinburne, this is the reason God allows us to make our own decisions.  Liberty is a higher good that is worth the evils that come along with it.  Now that you have all of this to consider, would you give up a world of Freedom for a world of Good?  Or would you say, like the Savage, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”