The Me Society – Sunday, October 12, 1980
Critics call our modern world a “me society” in which everyone is trying desperately to please himself. We are taught to see people only in terms of what they can do for us. We look at life in terms of “making it.” The unsaid question that lurks behind every activity in this type of society is, “Does this enhance me?” In fact, we’ve come honestly to believe that if we try hard enough, and long enough and ambitiously enough to please ourselves—we finally will.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with desiring to be happy. There is an innate yearning in our nature to that very end. The Constitution of the United States even calls the pursuit of happiness an inalienable human right. Where we seem to be so mistaken these days, however, is in believing that happiness is an end in itself, and not a by-product of something else. We may satisfy all our senses and still not be satisfied. We may fulfill every selfish whim, aggrandize ourselves until our ego is the biggest thing in the world—and still feel empty. Many may have seen the world, but in its far-flung countries, they have still seen only themselves.
If happiness is not a product, we can possess by pleasing ourselves, what is it a by-product of? Robert Browning once said, “Make us happy and you make us good.”1 That is certainly true, but so is its reverse. “Oh make us good, and you make us happy.”
Another writer observed, “In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors.”2
Because we are really children of God and our natures have the capacity to be as his, it will always go against the grain of reality to try to find happiness in self-indulgence instead of in self-mastery, in admiring those who are served instead of those who serve. The Lord has informed us of eternal laws and begged us to conform to them not because he likes to see us struggle at principles that are above us, but because it is only in that struggle and triumph in them that happiness can ever be found.
When we seek for happiness elsewhere, in the satiating of our senses or the thrill of a moment, we are as children in an amusement park attracted by the bright lights and noisy promise of a temporary but false happiness.
The problem with a “me society” and its pursuit of pleasure is simply that it does not work.
1 “Happiness, Peace, Sorrow, Discouragement,” Richard Evans Quote Book, Publishers Press. pg. 147.
2 Ibid., pg. 147.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
October 12, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,669