I credit the video for tagging some habits of thinking and acting that have gone largely unquestioned for decades.
...“Butan has something unique in the world that all other countries ought to imitate: the Gross Domestic Happiness index. For the ruling king and monk, what counts foremost is not the GDP — gross domestic product — measured on the basis of all the material resources and services that the country boasts, but the Gross Domestic Happiness — the result of public policies, good government, equitable distribution of earnings from the surplus of subsistence agriculture, ranching, plant extraction and the sale of energy to India, the absence of corruption, the universal guarantee of quality education and health care, with passable highways through fertile valleys and high mountains, but especially as fruit of social relationships of peace and cooperation among all people. This has not managed to impede conflicts with Nepal, but neither has the humanistic intent of the kingdom wavered. The economy, which is the golden calf of the globalized world, appears as only one item in the set of factors to be considered.
Behind this political project lies a multidimensional concept of the human being. The human being is conceived as a knot of relationships pointing in all directions who, yes, hungers for bread as do all living beings, but who is mainly motivated by hunger for communication, coexistence and peace which cannot be bought in the marketplace or on the stock market. The role of government is to tend to the life of the people in all its dimensions. Its fruit is peace. In the unsurpassable definition that the Earth Charter developed about Peace, it is "the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which all are a part." (16, f)
Happiness and peace are not built on material wealth or the paraphernalia that our poor materialistic civilization gives us. It sees the human being only as a producer and a consumer. The rest doesn’t interest it. Therefore we have many desperate rich people, young people from families without economic problems who commit suicide because they don’t find meaning in abundance. The law of the dominating system is: he who doesn’t have, wants to get; he who has, wants more; and to him who has more, it doesn’t seem like enough. We forget that what brings us happiness is human relationships, friendship, love, generosity, compassion, respect…things that are valuable but cost nothing. The tragedy is that this humanly poor civilization is destroying the Planet in its desire to get more, when the important thing would be to try to live in harmony with nature and other living beings.
Butan gives us a beautiful example of this possibility. Wise was the observation of a poor person from our community who commented: "that person is very poor, so poor that all he has is money." And he was notoriously unhappy.”
Source: Gross Domestic Happiness
Free translation from the Spanish provided by Anne Fullerton. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.