Abstract

In various places today we encounter a veritable cult of happiness, a socially mandated optimism, and a pathologization of persistent negativity or reluctance to participate as sickness to be treated. In this essay, I develop a critical perspective on this system of hegemonic happiness through an engagement with the thought of Adorno. It acts, I argue, as ideology in his sense of the term. After situating the discussion in the context of the broader philosophical project of Negative Dialectics, I elaborate the sustained critique of “the doctrine of inner health” laid out in Minima Moralia. Then, as an expansion and update of this critique, I consider in more detail the prevailing form of the inner health discourse—what I will call “the happiness machine.” As a brief excursus into popular culture, I read an episode of The Twilight Zone as an apologue for this ideological mechanism and its functioning. Finally, I suggest a way of articulating refusal of the happiness machine rooted in Adorno’s conception of resistance.