Social Pathology by Peter Joseph : Chapter 1 : Diagnosis (2 of 4)

Chapter one: Diagnosis.

Before I begin this analysis of the social condition, we need to first consider the problem of value and cultural relativism. People today tend to think that their ideas are equal to other's ideas, regardless of supportive information. This obsession with opinion has created a frame of reference for so many people today, which has no physical referent, where evidence becomes inconvenient and ultimately, people think that everything is equal. And you get this argument a lot, I'm sure you've all experienced this. It's a very specific point. Everyone is not equal in their opinion. It's impossible, as quaint and convenient as such a concept might seem.
The ultimate question becomes, "What actually deserves belief?" What is important to everyone on this planet, and how do we maintain our well-being, both personally and socially, in a sustainable way? What is the indisputable common ground, which can all be agreed on, in a world of christians, muslims, capitalists, socialists, atheists, anarchists, scientologists, republicans... What can we all agree on? Well, here's one thing that's universal. Being healthy versus being sick. Being healthy is a preferred value preference, you could say. Normal versus pathological states, hence healthy versus diseased states, provide an incontrovertible value basis for all individuals and societies. Virtually all people in all societies prefer to be alive and healthy, last I checked. There is no cultural relativism about, whether having good food to eat, staying away from cancer, or having unpolluted water to drink, is a good value to have. Therefore, our analysis of the health of society is not going to be based on GDP, consumer price index, the state of the stock market, economic growth, unemployment levels or employment levels, free trade agreements, or any other commonly referenced economic attribute used to claim that society is "improving" or "growing". Instead, we will examine things that actually matter, such as rates of disease, poverty, social capital (trust), conflicts, corruption, planetary depletion, pollution, murder rates, life expectancy, educational performance, imprisonment rates, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, etc. These are things that actually matter. So let's begin.
Contrary to popular belief, evidence now shows that our early human ancestors, which predate the neolithic revolution, really didn't live in a state of perpetual conflict and extreme scarcity as many anthropologists early on had assumed. In fact, hunter-gatherer societies were a very unique arrangement immersed in both a restrictive yet self-regulating environmental paradigm.
Before the advent of agriculture, there was very little control over what was available. You didn't have agriculture, you couldn't control the environment. So, what happened is a natural balance was in order. And the societies themselves seemed to reflect this balance by having, in fact, non-hierarchical, noncompetitive, leaderless social structures. In fact, it has been found that their value systems, their social values, were essentially based on equality, altruism and sharing. And they literally forbid upstart-ism, dominance and aggression, and egoism. We know this today because of the anthropological research done on remaining hunter-gatherer societies around the world such as the Piraha, which is how is pronunciated, out of Brazil.
Amazingly it appears that well over - it is important point, for anyone that tells you that the current system is natural - for well over 90% of human beings' existence; human species' existence, on this planet as we know it, we were within social organizations that did not use money, that did not have hierarchy, and even had "counter-dominance strategies," where the majority would work together to shut down any individual that was trying to gain power and control. Pretty much the reverse of what we have today. The Neolithic revolution changed all that. It provided human beings with an ability to control their environment more intently. The sustenance of life could now be cultivated essentially at will.
Now, while this advent would appear as a profound benefit to all, it also introduced some pesky social problems as a result of conditioning attributes which we still deal with today. In the view of the anthropologist and professor of neurology at Stanford University, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, "Hunter-gatherers have thousands of wild sources of food to subsist on. Agriculture changed all that, generating an overwhelming reliance on a few dozen food sources. Agriculture allowed for the stockpiling of surplus resources and thus, inevitably, the unequal stockpiling of them, stratification of society and the invention of classes. Thus, it has allowed for the invention of poverty." Since this dramatic change in the structure of human society, the creation of imbalances has continued and social stratification and income inequality are now staples of the modern world as we all know.
In fact, many who are unfamiliar with human history would probably consider these attributes again to be part of some "natural human order;" it's so pervasive today. We've gone from food cultivation, to commodity bartering, to gold exchange, to metal-backed certificate exchange, to fiat currency. We went from a system with values reflective of true natural processes to a system of values based on certificates of ownership traded for income on their own, virtually - I'd say not even virtually - completely decoupled from physical resources.
We've come from a world based on necessity, and social drive for preservation and sustainability, to a world based on strategic manipulation, pointless materialism, and obsession with property and ownership. In the words of historian, philosopher David Hume, "The first man who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors would that man have saved the species, who pulling up stakes or filling up the ditches, should have cried to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody."
Moreover, scarcity is now a driving force for commerce. In our system scarcity equals profit. The less there is of something, the more it can be valued in terms of money. In other words, abundance is a negative thing in a profit system. In the words of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins [corrected], "The market industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled, and to a degree nowhere else approximated where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity." Likewise, I'd like to point out, as a simple aside, that the money supply in America, at all times, has less in value than the outstanding transactions required. In other words, there isn't and never will be, in the American money supply or most other money supplies on the planet, enough money in existence, at any one time, to cover the outstanding transactions within the economy.
Money is created out of debt, through loans. And interest is charged for those loans, whether it's a government bond or a personal home equity loan. If every single debt was called in right now in our economy there would be enormous amount of money that is literally impossible to payback in domestic currency. This is a central reason why stratification and inequality is literally built-in into our system: the inherent scarcity of the money supply itself. Imagine that. In this system bankruptcy isn't some irregular byproduct that negligent people just happen to stumble into, it is an inevitable built-in attribute. It's a game of musical chairs. I hope that's clear. In the words of economist Bernard Lietaer, a great quote, "Greed and competition are not the result of immutable human temperament. Greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using.
We can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, but there's clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of the central banks is to create and maintain that scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other, in order to survive." That last sentence really defines so much. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive. The consequence of these mechanisms is again extreme social imbalance, and hence social stratification. With this understood, let's now consider the state of income inequality within the world.
In 2005 the jolly folks at Citigroup put out a memo to its wealthiest clients in regard to the state of what they called the "Plutonomy". And the opening summary on this is very very clear. "The world is divided into two blocs - the Plutonomy and the rest. The US, UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies - economies powered by the wealthy." A Plutonomy is defined as a society where the majority of the wealth is, of course, controlled by an ever-shrinking minority. And as such, the economic growth of that society becomes dependent on the fortunes of the wealthy minority and not the rest of the people. Keep that in mind. They then go and ask the question: "What are the drivers of Plutonomy?" They state, "Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, *cough* SLAVE LABOR *cough* the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time."
The basic point of this document is the understanding that the average consumer is essentially meaningless to the equity markets. For the super-wealthy, trading amongst themselves, account for the state of the economy overall. They state, "In a Plutonomy there's no such animal as 'the US consumer' or 'the UK consumer' or, indeed, 'the Russian consumer.' There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie." They continue. "This is why, for example, we worry less about the impact of high oil prices on aggregate consumption. Clearly high oil prices are a burden for most parts of our communities. However, without making any moral judgment, income inequality, being what it is, just makes this group less relevant to the aggregate data.
The conclusion? We should worry less about the average consumer - say the 50th percentile - what they're doing, when that consumer is (we think) less relevant to the aggregate data than how the wealthy feel and what they are doing. This is simply a case of mathematics, not morality." You gotta hand it to them for being honest. Now, before I go any further, let me clarify a bit. Plutonomy, as the Citigroup documents describe, and these are very long-winded documents, is of course the state of extreme imbalance; so extreme in certain countries, that the investment community has little regard for the average person's consumption habits. In other words, the preference mutation has occurred as a result of the financial incentive system, where the consumption patterns of the general population become nearly obsolete in the interest of the wealthy. Where they, the wealthy elite, the Plutonomy, can now just trade amongst themselves and forget about the lower classes.
In other words, so much money is being moved around between the rich, that the public consumption patterns are nearly irrelevant. This of course makes sense when you think about the methods used to gage health of the economy, which are supposed to be relating to everyone. GDP is basically calculated by how much money people spend or make on a given good or service.
So, using the example of "net worth," if you have the top 1% controlling 35% of the financial wealth in America, with the next 19% controlling 50%, leaving the bottom 80% with 15%, you have 20% of the American population controlling 85% of the money. And this is what Citigroup figured out. This very small section of the population is what actually powers everything. What this means is that the financial system has little incentive inherently to care about the actions or well-being essentially of 80% of the public. And since we all know that the financial system is the most powerful influence on most governments in the world, especially the US government; you begin to see that the only concern the ruling class has with regard to majority of the population is merely to keep us complacent enough so a backlash does not occur.
I'm not projecting this, Citigroup makes us very aware of this, explicitly, when they state, "We see the biggest threat to Plutonomy as coming from a rise in political demands to reduce income inequality, spread the wealth more evenly, and challenge forces such as globalization, which have benefited profit and wealth growth." But, don't worry, they are not too concerned: "Our conclusion? The three levers governments and societies could pull on to end Plutonomy are benign. Property rights are generally still intact, taxation policies neutral to favorable, and globalization is keeping the supply of labor in surplus, acting as a brake on wage inflation.
They summarize: "The heart of our Plutonomy thesis: that the rich are the dominant source of income, wealth and demand in plutonomy countries, such as the UK, US, Canada and Australia; countries that have an economically liberal approach to wealth creation, we believe the actions of the rich and the proportion of rich people in economy helps explain many of the nasty conundrums and fears that have vexed our equity clients recently, such as global imbalances or why high oil prices haven't destroyed demand. Plutonomy, we think, explains these problems away, and tells us not to worry about them. Secondly, we believe the rich are going to keep getting richer in coming years, as capitalists (the rich) get an even bigger share of GDP as a result, principally, of globalization. We expect the global pool of labor in developing economies to keep wage inflation in check and profit margins rising - good for the wealth of capitalists, relatively bad for developed market unskilled/outsource-able labor. This bodes well for companies selling to or servicing the rich."
Sorry to pull you through all of that long-winded text, but I hope it settles in what people at the top are really thinking about behind the financial system. And they are likely right. The rich are going to get richer. The current economic decline that we are in now really doesn't mean anything to the top 20%. It's the 80% that continue to suffer. But hey, who cares? Evidently the top 20% power the economy anyway, and I'm not even gonna go into what this means in regard to our naive assumptions of democracy in the modern world. In fact, in the words of former supreme court justice Louis D. Brandeis, I believe it's how it's pronunciated, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both."
Now, I bring all of this up as an introduction to what we are going to talk about in regards to "social health". Coupled with this, however, I think a few stats should be digested. In 2007, chief executives of the largest 365 US companies received well over 500 times the pay of the average employee. In many of these top companies the chief executive is paid more in one day than the average worker makes in a year. The Wal-Mart family, which is about 6 people, the Waltons, has a combined fortune estimated at about $90 billion in 2009, according to Forbes. The combined wealth of the lower 40% of the US population is only $95 billion. Also, the highest paid jobs on the planet are in fields of trading and investment. Occupations which have no meaning whatsoever. Create nothing. They are pointless at the state of society in the natural world. In 2005, the average annual "take home" pay for managers of the top 26 "hedge funds," aka "gambling casinos," was $363 million each! Compare that to the average medical doctor which makes about a $150'000 a year, and the biological research scientist, which are looking for cures and treatments for diseases, which makes only about $68'000 a year. You get the point.
Income inequality is here, and is growing, and it appears to be unstoppable when you look at the mechanisms of the financial markets and the culturally accepted reality of tremendous wage differentials among different fields. So now, we present the question. What does this mean to our health, to our well-being? Ground-breaking research by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket of the UK in the area of social inequalities in health and the social detriments of health has given us some profound realizations about what it means to have a society based and driven by inequality. To summarize this ground-breaking research, the common view that social problems are caused directly by singular material conditions, such as bad housing, or poor diets, or lack of educational opportunities, and so on; is being overturned. The idea that more wealthy societies do better than poorer societies in regard to health in general, is not the case.
The social problems, abundant in rich highly stratified countries, are largely caused by the scale of material differences between people within society itself. The problem is not absolute income, but rather the problem of relative income. If you compare groups of people with the same income in different countries, you'll find that those in more unequal countries do much worse than those in more equal countries with the same income. It appears to be a psycho-social phenomenon. Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional. And as based on measures of societal health, crime-rates, and well-being, it is safe to say, as you will see me point out, that really our current structure is nothing more than a social failure.
Life expectancy... On this chart we see a specific set of wealthy countries. I apologize for those that can't read this in the back; I'll do my best to point out what is going on here. Basically, the Y-axis you see is Life Expectancy and the X-axis is Income Inequality going from left to right, low to high. Life expectancy bottom to top of course, low to high. As you can see in this, Japan has the lowest amount of income inequality, but with a staggeringly high life expectancy. While Singapore, trumping only the United States in this particular set of countries analyzed, which are mostly wealthy countries, has the greatest income inequality, and the regression line in the middle shows clearly how the patterns moving from lower inequality to greater inequality reduces the life expectancy of all of these countries.
Drug use... We see the United States as having the highest level of inequality, based on the sample set, while also being within the top 4 of countries with the most illegal drug use: US, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. While in the lower echelon you have Japan, Sweden and Finland, which have the least amount of inequality and the least drug use; Greece is in there too. It's the trends that are important here. You can see the clear regression line. I wanna' expand on this particular one. The reasoning for this: There was a study done in 2002 with macaque monkeys. In the study 20 monkeys were observed and analyzed in regard to social hierarchies that developed in different circumstances noting which animals were dominant and which were subordinate. The result was that the monkeys that had become dominant had more dopamine activity in their brain, than they had before they had become dominant while the monkeys that became subordinate showed very little changes in their brain chemistry. In turn, after teaching the monkeys how to administer cocaine to themselves through levers, it was found that the subordinate monkeys took in much more cocaine than the dominant monkeys. In other words, it's a form of self-medication. Let's continue onto
Mental illness... Mental illness is much more common in more unequal countries. Once again we have the US at the peak of mental illness, we have Japan at the lowest echelon. As you can see from this chart, mental illness and inequality are very much correlated. A quick glance at SSRI antidepressant drug visits to doctor's offices among adults 18 years of age or older in the United States from 1995 to 2002 shows a clear trend of growing dependency on antidepressants. The most common type of disorders of course are anxiety and depression. A psychologist by the name of Jean Twenge did an interesting study which proved that Americans are much more anxious than they used to be. A survey of college students from 1952 to 1993 across 52'000 students found that students today were more anxious than 85% of the population at the beginning of the study (meaning 1952). By the late 1980s, the average American child was more anxious than the child psychiatric patients of the 1950s.
As far as depression, a study called "Time trends in adolescent mental health" found that in Britain depression among people in their mid-20s was found to be twice as common, in a study of 10'000 or so people born in the 1970. 10'000 people study - twice as common as it was in 1958. It also found that in general psycho-social disorders affecting the young people have risen substantially over the past 50 years. In Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, 1 in 10 are deemed "mentally ill" in a year. In the UK it's 1 in 5, and in the US it's 1 in 4. Across entire populations rates of mental illness are 5 times greater in the most unequal countries compared to the least unequal.
Now, of course, I know what you're saying: What about genetics? I think Richard Wilkinson summed it up very well: "Although mental illness can be affected by changes in the levels of certain chemicals in the brain, nobody has shown that these are actually causes of depression, rather than changes caused by depression. Although some genetic vulnerability may underlie some mental illness, this cannot by itself explain the huge rise in illness in recent decades. Our genes cannot change that fast." And let's move on to the idea of Trust. Another word for this is Social Capital. Social Capital is defined as an attitude, spirit, or willingness of people to engage in collective civic activities. hence, has a strong Trust-relationship. As you can see in the chart, those that feel they can trust one another are much more common, naturally, in societies that have less inequality. This of course is beyond obvious as I'm sure many would agree. Naturally, with greater inequality, people are less caring of one another. In fact, mistrust and inequality, I think, reinforce each other.
Now, this point is probably enough for a one-hour lecture in and of itself. What is a society if people cannot trust each other? It's important to realize that the idea of friendship and the notions that couple in with friendship, which is ultimately a quality of trust, is a characteristic completely opposed to the competition mentality and the economic theories of self-interest we see today. Empathy, reciprocation, and cooperation equates to good health, while suspicion, fight, competition, always equates to high levels of stress and hence destruction. As we'll talk about in a second, stress is one of the deadliest killers that we know of. It's a secret killer. And living in a society where you have to look over your shoulder, and where you have to fight for everything that you have; where you have to question virtually every transaction, given the initial assumption - - assumption that the person might be trying to pull one over on you for their own betterment... The fact of the matter is, we thrive socially on trust and cooperation, provably by health standards. And social structures which create relationships based on inequality, inferiority, and social exclusion, are inflicted with the greatest deal of social pain and neurosis.
Let's move on to educational scores. This one's very interesting. Not only do more unequal countries have worse educational attainment, kids are more likely to drop out of school, as well. Interestingly, class distinctions and their effect have become very obvious in this regard. For example, a study was done in 2004, where they took 321 high-caste Indian boys, and put them with 321 low-caste Indian boys, and they were given a task of solving a certain problem. The first time they did this, the caste relationship, the social status, was not announced to these children. They had no idea who was around them. And as you can see, the caste unannounced - low caste actually beat the high caste. The second time they did it, the results were dramatically skewed as the lower caste did much worse than before while the higher caste did better. This is psychological. It's a psycho-social inferiority-superiority relationship, that has been repeated many times in many cases through other studies, which has the exact same consequence.
People are greatly affected by their perceived status in society. When we expect to be viewed as inferior, very often we perform as such. Homicide rates. As you can see, the United States blows everything out of the water when it comes to homicide rates. And obviously if you look at the regression trend, homicide rates are naturally more common in unequal societies. In fact, violence itself is probably the most established attribute of social inequality over any of the things that we're talking about in these examples.
James Gilligan, who was a prison psychiatrist for 25 years, and he is currently director for the Center for Study of Violence at Harvard University, had this to say about his experience dealing with violent criminals to the extensive length that he has; "The prison inmates I work with have told me repeatedly, when I asked them why they have assaulted someone, that it was because 'he disrespected me.' The word disrespect is central in the vocabulary, moral value system, and psycho-dynamics of these chronically violent men. I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and did not represent an attempt to prevent or undo this 'loss of face' - no matter how severe the punishment. For we misunderstand these men at our peril if we do not realize they mean it literally when they say they would rather kill or mutilate others, be killed, than live without pride, dignity, and self-respect. They literally prefer death to dishonor." It's really easy to see how class-relationships, and hence income inequality, can translate into feelings of humiliation, loss of control, disrespect, and ridicule. You know, when someone loses their job, it's often demoralizing. They say, "Oh, my husband's unemployed." And that's a demoralizing thing, "Oh, he's... unemployed..." After all, the very nature of class is hierarchical. In other words, the upper class really looks down upon the lower class, historically speaking. And to be looked down upon is essentially humiliating. Therefore, it should be no surprise why the United States has the largest number of homicides in the world, given its extreme income inequality.
And this leads us to rates of imprisonment. The trend is very acute as well. Obviously as we can see imprisonment rates are much higher in unequal countries. The more unequal the country, the more people in prison. However, what is interesting about this reality is that it doesn't just relate to rates of crime, which of course is more prevalent in unequal societies, but it also has to do with the punitive attitudes toward the so called "criminal elements of society". In other words, the more unequal the society, the harsher the punishments are for a given offense. And hence, more people are put into prison for longer periods of time than they are in more equal countries. Since 1984 the state of California has built 1 new school, and 20 new prisons. As an aside, for those out there who think the prison system might serve some therapeutic rehabilitation role in the modification of human beings and human behavior, I'd like to refer back once again to the prison psychiatrist James Gilligan for his perspective. He states: "The most effective way to turn a nonviolent person into a violent one is to send him to prison. The criminal justice and penal systems have been operating under a huge mistake, namely, the belief that punishment will deter, prevent or inhibit violence, when in fact it is the most powerful stimulant of violence we have yet discovered."
Now, here's a very interesting one: Social Mobility. Social Mobility has to do with the class relationship that you have upon your birth, and how easy it is for you to move up out of that class or lower than that class, during your life. In other words, if you're born into poverty - how much of a possibility do you have to become wealthy? Well, as you can see by this chart, the United States, home of the "American Dream," has the lowest Mobility rate of all the countries in the sample set. There are very high odds that if you are born into poverty, you will stay in poverty. Likewise, if you are born into great wealth, you will stay wealthy most likely for the rest of your life. And if you think about it, it's really a form of class segregation. This reality can be blamed in part on the very mechanisms of our financial system, which keeps the lower classes poor, and the upper classes rich, deliberately. As a quick example of this, which I've stated before, but I think it's a very important example, if you have $1 million and you put it into a C.D. into a bank at 5% interest, you are going to generate $50'000 a year simply for that deposit. You are making money off of money itself, paper made on paper, nothing more, no invention, no contribution to society, nothing. That being denoted, if you are a lower to middle class person, who is limited in funds, which must get an interest-based loan, like most people, to buy their home or use credit cards, then you are paying interest to the bank, which the bank is then using, in theory, to pay the person's return with the 5% C.D. Not only is this equation outrageously offensive, due to the use of interest to steal from the poor and give to the rich, but it also perpetuates class stratification by its very design keeping the lower classes poor, under the constant burden of debt, while keeping the upper classes rich, with the means to turn excess money magically into more money, with zero labor or social contribution. This is only one mechanism, by the way, which is used to make sure these class attributes, or class segregation, is maintained.
Infant Mortality... Very simply, more high in unequal countries, than less unequal countries. Obesity. Naturally, higher in more unequal countries. Teenage birth-rates. Higher in more unequal countries. Innovation. I love this one. Because it's a total slap in the face to all those party line toting market-enthusiasts, who seem to think that the competitive-based incentive system of seeking profit translates in the new innovations for the common good. And I'm sorry to say, that isn't the case whatsoever. Using the measure of patents per million, Finland, Sweden, and Ireland trump the United States, when it comes to invention. And finally, let's take a look at an aggregate summation, that was compiled, of the many points we have just examined.
This chart shows Life expectancy, Math/Literacy, Infant Mortality, Homicides, Imprisonment, Teenage Births, Trust, Obesity, Mental illness (drugs/alcoholic use), and Social Mobility. As you can see, in the United States, with the highest level of stratification, we are the absolute worst. And just to make sure you understand this analysis clearly. Here's a chart showing absolute income, of the same thing you just saw. As you can tell, there's no pattern. There's no trend regression line. Here they are, side by side, so you can see how viable this information really is. The trend is very clear about the ramifications of inequality in a given country or social environment. As a final point on this topic of inequality and its consequences, I wanna bring up a study called "The Whitehall Study," which was in 2 rounds - 1 and 2 - stretching over I believe about 60 or 70 years. Prof. Michael Marmot of the Dept. of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London was the director of these studies. He used the British civil service system as the subject group and they found that there's a gradient of health quality in industrialized societies, which is not simply a matter of poor health for the disadvantaged, and good health for everyone else. Something else was happening. Remember, this is the UK, which has socialized health care. So everyone essentially has equal access to the same amount of health care. They found, regardless of this, that there was a social distribution of disease, as you went from the top of the socio-economic ladder to the bottom. And the types of diseases that people would get would change on average.
For example, the lowest ranks of the hierarchy had a 4-fold increase of heart disease based mortality, compared to the highest ranks. And this pattern was to a certain degree again irrespective of access to health care. This is just one example, by the way, there is a gradient of health problems that emerge that cannot be explained by absolute income. In fact, goes back to the stress response, if you go into it and research these points. Even in a country with universal health care, the worse the person's financial status and position in the hierarchy, the worse their health is going to be on average. In other words, people in higher socio-economic positions, those higher in the pyramid, live longer, enjoy better health, and suffer less from disability. While those of lower socio-economic status die younger and suffer the greater burden of disability and disease. This comes in the form again of a gradient, meaning that from the higher upper class, straight down to the lower class, bottom class, each successive step down, or up, the socio-economic ladder constitutes a respective quality change in a person's health.
The bottom line is that there's a great deal of statistical data that screams that living in a more equal society is more healthy and productive for about 99.9% of the population. It is only those at the very tip of the pyramid that could be considered unaffected by the disease known as social inequality. Equality benefits everyone, in other words.
Now, given this reality, it begs the question: What is the actual psycho-social cause of these issues? What are the most dominant mechanisms in place that continually support class division and the neurosis and sickness it generates? Well, we don't have to look very far for a viable possibility. The cultural programming wing of the market system is the advertising industry, which serves to perpetuate the consumption values that you see around you. However, it goes much deeper than that. It goes much deeper than getting people to buy things for a specific company's profit. The fact is, the values of materialism and consumption are of dire importance to the operation of the world economy. Without those values the system would falter, and let me explain why. At the core of the economy as we know it lies the unalterable requirement for constant, perpetual, cyclical consumption. In other words, the entire basis of what we refer to as "economic growth," which in turn is translated into things such as Gross Domestic Product, which are supposed to be measures of social progress and the like, is nothing more than human beings constantly and perpetually buying and selling, over and over and over again. If human beings do not buy things, companies and stores cannot afford to pay their employees. If an employee cannot be paid, then that employee, which is also the consumer, cannot go out and spend the money they receive from employment back into the system to perpetuate the cycle. If people do not constantly spend their money, the entire economic structure, including the entire labor system, would completely collapse.
Given this reality, the highest priority of any corporation or in fact any government that cares about its economy, is to make sure the public has an immediate interest to constantly consume. It is interesting to point out that America was originally founded on a certain degree of a protestant work ethic, a protestant world view, where thrift and savings were actually dominant values back then. Since that time, advertising agencies had to switch their arguments from utility-oriented angles to those engaged in for emotional appeal and status enhancement. Americans now consume twice as much as they did before the end of World War II. As an historical note, one of the lead figures in this American value "hijacking," as I would call it, is a man named Edward Bernays. Bernays is most famous for his book called "Propaganda," in which it was bought by many people, including Joseph Goebbels. He was hired by all of the major corporations many many decades ago to help influence the public into buying things very simply that they did not need. A new world of neurotic associations, such as materialism, and "conspicuous consumption" to quote Thorstein Veblen, was unleashed during this time and has grown and mutated dramatically. Today, human needs have become utterly perverted by the imposed, suggested wants, generated by the consumption-provoking mechanism of marketing and advertising. The more dissatisfied and unhappy a population is, the better it is for advertising agencies and corporations. Consumerism feeds on a form of inferiority and self-consciousness. And that translates, very literally, into identity and social status.
Amazingly, the indoctrination is so powerful, that consumerism is regarded by most of society as reflecting some kind of "basic" human interest. As though it's a reflection of human nature. This of course is baseless. In fact, our neurotic need to shop and consume is actually a reflection of how deeply social we are, and how influenced we are by the social programming, and status orientation, or possessions, and appearances, and everything else that's been pushed upon us.
Okay. On this note, I'm now going to begin a transition to the next section of this presentation, and to bridge that I want to make a point that not only does the status generated consumption patterns of most of the public, especially in America, cause a great deal of social stress, leading in part to many of the problems we have just analyzed, the propensity for constant cyclical consumption, which, again, is required for the entire world economy to function, is also outlining trends, which show a clear path to severe environmental problems, and a continual breakdown of civilization as we know it, as we destroy all of our natural resources through this idiotic act of conspicuous consumption to fuel GDP.