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being the person he would like to be. He proudly announces that he has sex with his wife (though her own level of sexual frustration tells us he doesn’t), he proclaims himself a fabulous actor, and he thinks of himself as a loving father who has a strong relationship with his daughter (everything she does tells us that she looks on him with embarrassment and contempt). While maintaining his self-deception, Tobias seems relatively happy, most of the time. Strangely, however, at times he manages to have moments of clarity when he realizes his life is really nothing like the dream world he works so hard to keep going. When this happens he succumbs to overwhelming despair, alone, in his cutoffs, weeping in the shower.

Arrested Development follows the Bluths through several years of their lives, during which we watch Michael struggle for self-awareness yet find misery. We also watch the others maintain happiness in self-deception. So it looks like Socrates’s prediction about self-awareness leading to happiness doesn’t match up with the evidence. That means it’s time to consider another philosopher.

The Arresting of Happiness

In The Conquest of Happiness, the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) gives an account of the relation between happiness and self-knowledge that more clearly accords with Arrested Development. Russell saw the greatest cause of unhappiness as the desire for knowledge—obviously, this is bad news for us philosophers. Rather than appealing to a hypothetical example like Socrates’s cave, Russell uses his own life as his primary example. From a young age, he was an unhappy person for two reasons. First, he desired something essentially unobtainable—absolute certainty about the issues he most cared about. The only way to end this type of suffering was for Russell to change his desires to something short of absolute certainty, which is obtainable. The second reason for his unhappiness was his “preoccupation with himself.”15 Russell, like most philosophers, spent a lot of time thinking about himself, just as Socrates urged. He reflected on his behavior (judging some actions moral and others immoral) and his beliefs (judging some justified and others unjustified). This constant search for self-knowledge left Russell feeling inadequate and prevented him from finding much happiness in life. In time, he learned to be indifferent (his word) to himself and his shortcomings, and he found himself happier. Russell went so far as to say that “interest in oneself, on the contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind.”16

There are, according to Russell, three types of people who come to be unhappy through reflection: sinners, narcissists, and megalomaniacs. Sinners constantly find fault in themselves. No matter what a sinner wants, he’ll see it as something he shouldn’t want. As a result, he either does something he doesn’t want to do or does what he wants and disapproves of himself.17 George Michael fits this description. He’s infatuated with his cousin Maeby, but he knows that society at large (except maybe the French . . . he likes the way they think), and his family in particular, would disapprove of any sexual relationship the two of them might form. Rather than admit his desires to his cousin, he enters into a relationship with a boring girl, Annabell (I call her that because she’s shaped like a . . . she’s the belle of the ball!), with whom he’s got nothing in common. He spends a lot of time with her family praying (they are on Bethlehem time), which he hates, and he goes so far as to waste money on music just to burn at Ann’s Christian (pause) music bonfire. All the while he longs to be with his cousin, and goes out of his way to impress her, only to feel ashamed. When he and Maeby finally act on their feelings, he gets to second base (stealing it like Pete Rose), but the cost is that he is filled with so much self-loathing he can’t be in the same room with her. If George Michael would just admit to his taboo sexual desires (like his Gangee and Uncle Oscar), rather than suppressing them, he would