What a happy lot!

The commentary on the US political scene in the latest issue of The Economist (January 7), referred to a classic essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", written by Richard Hofstader and published in 1964. The thrust of the commentary was that while the original essay was aimed at the Republicans of the Goldwater era, the same arguments can now be applied to today's Democrat Party.

In his essay, Hofstadter had argued that the "paranoid style" expresses itself in three ways: "heated exaggeration", "suspiciousness" and "conspiratorial fantasy".

Reading through this, I could not resist drawing a parallel with the Maltese political scene. In the Seventies, under the Mintoff regime, one could say that the Nationalists practised "paranoid politics". Now it seems to be Labour's turn. And so it came to pass that "heated exaggeration", "suspiciousness" and "conspiratorial fantasy" have become a permanent feature of Maltese politics! By simply switching on to the news dished daily on Super One TV or reading the MLP's Sunday paper KullHadd, one can get as big a dose of exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy as one fancies! The GWU papers, of course, do their best in a supporting role.

In spite of all this paranoia, the Maltese people are a happy lot - the happiest in the world, according to a study by a Dutch professor. The study carried out by Professor Ruut Veenhoven of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam was recently published in the Journal of Happiness Studies and was the result of, among other things, surveys made on some 100,000 people in 90 countries who were asked to indicate their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. The end result of this study put Malta in first place and the United Kingdom in 21st.

Experts in the field believe that the most important characteristics that underlie happiness are health, family ties and relations with others. Interestingly, money is well nigh irrelevant to happiness. According to Professor Veenhoven, his research leads one to conclude that the link between happiness and money is significant only at the lower end of the money scale and this link plateaus at the level of an annual income of some $10,000. When viewed from this angle, one can realise why Malta fared so well. Our family ties and relations between us - political paranoia aside - are very strong, partly as a result of our small size. We live in a small community where everybody practically knows everybody else - or at least a relation of everybody else - and we can boast of a health service that is also in the top league of the WHO stakes.

When things really got bad in the messy run-up to the 1987 election, a former colleague of mine - who is now retired from the political scene - used to insist that the real reason why the situation did not deteriorate even further, was because in Malta you could not find one person who was a supporter of one of the two main political parties who did not have a family relative who was a supporter of the other party. Family ties in this small island run deep.

The importance of close family ties in this study came out to the fore when it resulted that the people of some South American countries like Colombia and Uruguay that are afflicted with civil strife, a high level of criminality and enormous economic differences between the poor and the rich, are happier than the people of several developed countries, including the UK.

On the other hand, reading through the letters columns in the local press one gets the impression that everybody is all the time grumbling and complaining about something or other. One should certainly make a distinction between the spins in the Labour media and the letters written by genuine correspondents appearing in all the newspapers, including the left-leaning press.

Many of these letters are inspired by authentic and legitimate concerns and not political spins. Yet the attitude adopted by most of these letter-writers indicates that moaning seems to be the order of the day. Whether it is potholes, vandalism, litter-bugs, local wardens, the bad manners of other drivers, staying in queues for an inordinate amount of time or the behaviour of rude (un)civil servants, the "Maltese gemgem" syndrome is still alive and kicking!

The most telling irony in all this is that the citizens of those countries we envy because we think that almost everywhere else in the developed world things are run better than here are, in fact, less happy than the Maltese!

What really bugs me is when some correspondent emphasises his complaint by implying that things in Malta are similar to - or even worse than - what one finds in a "third world country". While I have no bias whatsoever against developing countries, I can only conclude that some of us Maltese are ready to denigrate our own country at the least provocation, uttering statements that have obviously no basis of truth. I bet that most people who write comparing Malta to a "third world country" have never visited such a country themselves and do not know what they are talking about.

Nonetheless, resorting to denigrating our own country so often and at every opportunity that arises could be, after all, simply the upshot of our paranoid politics. Politicising every issue that crops up and exaggerating our country's problems and defects could still be the effect of the influence of one's political allegiance. I suspect, perhaps sounding somewhat paranoid myself, that there are too many people who let their political bias blur the facts and obfuscate their objectivity.

And yet, we who live in this country of constant contradictions have now been touted as the happiest people of the world!

micfal@maltanet.net