Bhutan- The Happiest Country in the World!

Bhutan is one of the most unusual countries in the world. It is a small, landlocked nation nestling in the Himalayas tucked into the gap between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet. It is the St Kilda of the world (see Chapter One of my novel Rockall for the details of St Kilda: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2009/02/rockall-chapter-1.html), isolated, cherished and virtually unknown to the outside world until very recent times. It didn’t have an airport until very late in the 20th century and doesn’t even have roads crossing its borders either. To this day, Bhutan is one of the most difficult places in the world to get to. The British actress Joanna Lumley made the first TV programme ever filmed in the country in the 1990’s when she traveled through Bhutan by donkey. The isolation of the country is partly a gift from its geography; it is surrounded by high, inaccessible mountains, and partly through a deliberate isolationist policy of its government. Bhutan has a unique culture and is very picturesque with beautiful, alpine-like scenery filled with ancient traditional Himalayan architecture. It would become a must-see tourist destination if it ever got on the beaten track. The government is concerned, justifiably I think, about the encroachment of modern Western culture which has ripped through most of the world, especially Bhutan’s neighbouring countries, like a plague of locusts (maybe they’d heard the sad tale of the death of St Kilda). Bhutan banned tourism and was the last country on Earth to set up an airline and TV service. Until a few years ago it was also the only nation on Earth not wired up to the Internet. This has now changed; here is Bhutan’s official government portal: http://www.bhutan.gov.bt/government/index_new.php

I think that the most interesting aspect of Bhutan, and one that should raise serious questions across the world, is that it is reported to be one of the happiest countries on Earth. The Gross National Happiness Index was invented in 1972 by a Bhutanese king Jimne Singye Wanchuck. In the Western world we judge a nation's well-being by very logical and measurable quantitative factors: its gross national product, its per-capita income, literacy rates, infant mortality rates etc. These are things that can be easily calculated through a study at a government records office and made into a graph or sliding scale that the rational mind can comprehend. The GNH Index if far harder to gauge. It consists of a list of questions that address qualitative and spiritual as well as material aspects of a nation, on a personal and collective level. Along with the usual questions on how much money and amenities they have access to, people are asked things like: “Do you feel you are a valuable person?” “Does your life have meaning and purpose?” “How often do you laugh?” "Do you feel you have fulfilling interests in your spare time?" "Do you often get bored?" “How often do you feel very joyous?” Once the index was complete it showed some extraordinary results. Most statisticians had expected the GNH index to be proportional to the conventional indexes used to judge national well-being, but this didn’t happen. Although there is some correlation, for example there is a swathe of low-scoring countries in regions of the world hit by multiple wars and crippling poverty, like sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; the comparison indicates that material security and luxury are not directly related to GNH. Nations with high conventional-scores sometimes have low GNH scores, like the United States, Finland and Australia. My own nation, the United Kingdom, scored 40.29, putting it below median average. Conversely, some nations with low conventional assessments scored high on the GNH index, like many parts of Latin America, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, which came 13th in the world with a GNH score of a whopping 61.08. Bhutan is not only culturally isolated and technologically backward, but it has a low per-capita income and is not a liberal democracy; in fact it is one of the few absolute monarchies left in the world. In political terms it’s the equivalent of England in the 11th Century. What it does have in abundance is spiritual tradition. The nation is mostly Buddhist and spiritual development and practice is a big part of everyday life there. Life is simple and straightforward; poeple eat their own farm produce and make song and dance for entertainment. In a way Bhutan is what a lot of people in much richer countries feel they are lacking in their lives and culture.

This is intriguing. We are told that the only goals in life are the acquisition of money, property, status and power. So then why isn’t the GNH index on a par with the GNP index or the other conventional standards of living index? This should tell us that as the Biblical saying goes, “Man does not live on bread alone”. Not only that but too much Biblical bread at the expense of everything else can generate more problems than it solves. The richest people on Earth are far more likly to suffer from depression and die by their own hand than the average person in their country. Why is that? This not only proves true the cliche "money can't buy you happiness", but it also shows that it can take happiness away! This runs contrary to one of the cornerstones of Western Culture: that the one goal... The One Goal... of life is to aquire as much money, status and property as possible. He who dies with the most of that wins. It's that simple. Being rich is the nearest thing the West has to paradise; it's the secular Heaven. So you'd have thought that rates of depression and suicide would be much lower among the very rich, instead of the opposite. I've never been rich so I don't know for sure. However, if you put this together with these anomalies in the Gross National Happiness Index and I can make a conclusion: Material comfort and riches are not the only things that make human beings satisfied. I don’t dispute that the material is important; we all need to eat, breathe and drink, but humans are not just eating, breathing and drinking machines. We have a spiritual dimension to our selves, a soul if you wish, and a requirement in that dimension. This requirement has been neglected by Western society. It has been relegated to the realms of the irrelevant and epiphenomenal. Many Western thinkers even claim it is a delusion, a non-existent fantasy. I think that the GNH study indicates otherwise. Both political leaders and society as a whole must understand that looking after a people’s material need alone is simply not enough to create or maintain a peaceful and contented world. We need to nurture and nourish the spiritual.