And what if political thinking is unhappy?

Why does reading most social criticism (theory, history, etc.) leave me feeling mainly anger? Yes, I know: the thought and its objects are more important than the feeling and its effects. But that does not answer the question; it merely gives me a good enough reason to continue this reading notwithstanding. True, if, as the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once suggested, "God is unhappy" (or the world is, which amounts almost to the same thing), then there is nothing to be done about it, except of course to struggle to change the world and hope we'll be happy later, when we succeed (or perhaps convince ourselves that the joy of transgressive and courageous work is more important than the kind of contentment that helps you sleep at night and wives or mothers, doctors and therapists, be themselves content with you enough to leave you alone). But my problem is a simple and real one, that I fear religion and art both may or may not solve, depending on circumstance and the incalculable luck that our virtù always needs for its successes, which is why even the just cannot be assured of avoiding catastrophe. Simply, what drives me to want to do anything or care about persons and matters other than my own happiness is discontent at the way things are in "the world." And, alas, I have two desires that even the unity of God does not guarantee compatibility: I want to do my part to improve an awful world, and I prefer my own enjoyment to suffering. I define conservatism as the scorn for discontentment. Every radicalism risks that, and the essentially psychological ideology of our police state, a therapeutic police state that aims to ensure its citizen's contentment, punishing its lack, may target us merely for that. In this, I find decisive (it's in the novels and plays of Beckett, the painting of Francis Bacon, the cinema of Pasolini and Fassbinder, and more) the dominant reading in our time of Dante's Inferno in materialist and sociological terms, rather than psychological and moral ones. The happiness of the just is welcomed, not required; contentment as a moral demand is at the heart of every reactionary or fascist ideology. God is not happy but exigent; he will be happy only when the world is. What is to be done? Love the beautiful and good, but work on evil, don't just turn your cheek to look at something else. Do that only when what is said is boring because false.