Welcome listeners to the Edgius Desk, our regular First Things podcast.

This is Rusty William, here in Newark, and I'm just delighted to have Ronald Dworkin with me, the author of

the Politics of Unhappiness in the May 22 issue. Ronald Dworkin is a physician and

political scientist. He's a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. And it's the author of

Artificial Happiness, a 2006 book that provided got you interested in this. Is that right?

This question about constructed feelings. Yes, actually that book, Artificial Happiness,

was built on another essay I had written

a few years before for the public interest called the medicalization of unhappiness, where people

were, I noticed a trend among patients that I was dealing with in the hospital who were more and more

on these antidepressants, but there were other avenues of finding artificial happiness, alternative

medicine and exercise, endorphins.

And I saw this phenomenon of people trying to find happiness in artificial ways.

I thought that was a problem.

I thought they were arresting their impulse that changed their lives and their lives needed changing by taking these medications.

Artificial unhappiness is sort of a different animal altogether, but it does come extension of my work from artificial happiness.

Well, you point out there's a paradox. I mean, people have negative feelings, but you distinguish that from unhappiness.

Explain.

Yes, we all have unhappiness that's direct and immediate from some kind of negative stimulus.

So I mentioned in the essay, we stub our toe, we feel miserable, we feel unhappy.

We're fired from work, we feel miserable, we feel unhappy.

It's a direct and immediate association.

But in other ways, we sometimes

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