- Gov. Cox said Americans are wrong to treat pleasure-seeking as a core value on July 4.
- The "pursuit of happiness" means self-improvement, responsibility and sacrifice, Cox said.
- Cox has praised Utah for its unique levels of community, charitable giving and religion.
The United States has forgotten the true meaning of its most famous phrase, according to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.
Over the past few months, and again this week, Cox reiterated to Utahns what he believes is the real intent behind the Declaration of Independence’s most well-known line:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
When Thomas Jefferson penned those words, he did not have in mind the freedom to seek whatever pleasures best suit an individual’s tastes, Cox told a crowd gathered at the state Capitol on Tuesday to kick off a year of events leading up to the country’s 250th anniversary.
By pursuit of happiness, Cox said, the founders of American independence sought to convey the spiritual aspirations that the ancient Greek and Romans thought were necessary for human flourishing: service, worship and self-improvement.
“The pursuit of happiness meant responsibility,” Cox said. “You actually have to do what is better for your neighborhood, for your community, for your country. The pursuit of happiness was about sacrifice. It was about giving up your personal pleasure to make sure that we lived in a better place.”
A number of scholarly sources have recently clarified that in the context of the Declaration, “pursuit” indicated a daily practice and “happiness” conveyed filling one’s life with worthy, and morally valuable, endeavors.
But Americans have gotten this wrong “for a long, long time,” Cox said, by replacing this elevated interpretation with a philosophy of “feeling good.”
And without a correct understanding of that pursuit, Cox said, the founders believed “we wouldn’t be able to survive as a country.”
Does Utah get it right?
During an event on homelessness organized by Solutions Utah in May, Cox said that a “God-shaped hole” in the hearts of many Americans has led to an increase in the number who try to find satisfaction in drugs, gambling and technology.
“There are so many instances of this happening in our society because dopamine got cheap, and we decided that freedom to do anything we want is an American core value,” Cox said.
“And we forgot that the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence was actually about self-improvement and self excellence, about making ourselves better every day, about doing the hard stuff and taking care of people instead of just living for the moment.”
Cox has often touted Utah as an exception to this national trend. The state regularly ranks No. 1 in the country on measures of family unity, charitable giving and neighborhood friendships.
It is also by far the most religious state in the country on multiple metrics, including the highest share of the population that identify as adherents of a religion, and the highest rate of weekly church attendance.
These things are “all interrelated,” Cox said at the Solutions Utah event. A month earlier he again pointed to the proper pursuit of happiness, this time as a key contributor to the state’s top ranking in economic outlook for the 18th time.
“The pursuit of happiness is not the pursuit of pleasure, as understood by the founders of our nation,” Cox said in April. “It’s the pursuit of personal excellence. It’s the pursuit of doing things better, leaving a place better than we found it, planting trees, not for our shade, but for the shade of a future generation. And I think those things make Utah really unique.”