One's country is wherever one does well.

Name	Marcus Tullius Cicero
Life	106 - 43 BC
Country	Rome
Category	Wisdom
Wikipedia	>>

Your country, your "patria", is where you do well. Capri is a most lovely island to live on, the Capresians are generous, kind and tolerant, and the nature is incredibly beautiful. Capri could be the fatherland of anybody. And, yet, some people are unhappy even on Capri. Does that depend upon them or upon Capri? The statement by Cicero seems simple. Shouldn't everyone want to live in a lovely place like Capri? And be happy, too! Life is, however, slightly more complicated. Assume that you had a twin brother or sister, a "one-egg" or a "monozygotic" sibling. Assume also that you had been separated at birth. Such things happen because of poverty or war. One of you was adopted by a wonderful family - decently rich, caring, even loving - who gave you the best of education in excellent schools. The other was less fortunate. He or she came to experience a poor family in which shouts and fists were major education instruments outside of a lousy school. Now, at middle age, you have met for the first time in life. Wouldn't you believe that the former child would have a much more positive attitude towards life than the latter? In fact, the world's best study of "monozygotic twins reared

apart" has shown something very surprising. Happiness, as well as unhappiness, are to a large extent the same in these pairs of twins. A very tiny influence, as little as one fifth of all, comes from the family background. Most of these feelings seem to be biologically grounded in our genes. In other words, it is not only that Capri is lovely. To really enjoy it, you must also be born with a positive outlook on life. However beautiful Capri is, due to their biological predisposition, some, luckily very few, feel anyway so unlucky that they literally, try to fly away from it. "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick; on whom my pains, humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost", said Prospero about Caliban in Shakespeare's Tempest. During the last hundred years it has almost been a dogma in Western social thinking that nurture, manipulation of the environment, is able to make everybody do well. Socialists have believed so. Social engineers, too. And now our dominant idea is that if only everybody gets rich by economic growth, everybody will also be happy. It might not be so. We are slowly beginning to understand that nature, biological inheritance, is more important for us than nurture. Should Cicero instead have said: "One's country - where one does well - is everywhere or nowhere"?