Happiness Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s line lands like a throwaway joke, then quietly turns into a threat. “Really naked” isn’t just bodies; it’s the fantasy of total transparency, the stripped-down self without manners, branding, or plausible deniability. Pair that with “everyone knew what each other was thinking” and you get a punk-version of mind-reading: not enlightenment, but social chaos.

The brilliance is the forked ending: “laugh... or they'd lock each other up.” He’s sketching two competing ways culture handles the raw human mess. The first is comedy, that pressure valve where we admit we’re ridiculous, frightened, jealous, horny, petty - and keep living together anyway. The second is policing: if our private thoughts were treated like evidence, the world becomes a prison built out of intrusive certainty. Hitchcock’s cynicism isn’t misanthropy so much as suspicion of purity politics. Total honesty sounds liberating until you realize it eliminates mercy.

As a musician with a long career in the art-rock/psychedelic lane, Hitchcock is also speaking from a tradition that mistrusts slick surfaces and celebrates the weird interior monologue. The quote reads like stage banter, but it’s also a defense of privacy as a social technology. We don’t survive by being transparent; we survive by editing. The joke is that intimacy is overrated at scale. The darker point is that surveillance culture doesn’t need to read minds to act like it can.