He used the British Civil Service System as
the subject group and they found that there
is 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 rungs of the hierarchy
had a 4-fold increase of heart disease based
mortality, compared to the highest rungs.
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.
And it, 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 a 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 persons health. The bottom line is that
there is 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 really 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
just 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 leading 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 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 "conspicious 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 of 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
the continual breakdown of civilization as
we know it, as we destroy all of our natural
resources through this idiotic act of conspicious
consumption to fuel GDP. Part Two: Prognosis
The prior points, made about the well-being
and quality of life issues associated with
social imbalance, is a big issue. However,
to be fair, just because there's a propensity
for an overweight, violent, diseased, mentally-disturbed,
selfish, untrusting, illiterate population,
does not necessarily translate into the consequence
of social collapse, as we are beginning to
see. So, we are going to move on, putting
the basic well-being of humanity aside for
a moment, and focus on the mechanisms of the
social system itself, and the larger order
problems that are being generated. Okay, here's
the deal: One of the most critical things
to understand, which without a shadow of doubt
proves the unsustainable nature of our current
social system and how it is on a collision
course with nature, is this: Due to the way
money, and hence the market system functions,
we are locked into an incompatible paradigm,
where two mutually exclusive operating principles,
one, the need for constant consumption or
"infinite" growth, collides with an unyielding,
finite planet, and hence, the physical laws
of nature. You simply cannot have an infinite
growth of commerce, and hence consumption,
in a closed system such as the planet Earth.
For all those that don't fully understand
this, let me explain more. The planet Earth
is basically a closed system, when it comes
to its resources. All the minerals and energy
deposits that we currently use have rates
of cultivation that dramatically exceed the
lifespan of the human being. For example,
oil and fossil fuels in general took over
a 100 million years, easy, for them to come
about. The same goes for our mineral resources.
The 4,400 mineral species out there today
took outrageous amounts of time to be created.
The diamonds that we find today took over
3 billion years to be created. Now, given
this environmental reality, it would seem
painfully obvious that the most important
aspect of any Earthly society would be the
preservation of the Earth's resources, right?
It would seem, in fact, that the entire basis
of any economic structure would have, as the
number one priority, the preservation of the
resources of the planet. Why? Because once
it's gone, it's gone. For example, even at
this stage of scientific inquiry, we cannot
take a tire, which contains probably 6 or
7 gallons of oil, and convert it back into
combustible fuel. So instead of having a logical
system of resource-management, where we actually
monitor the Earth's resources and try, as
the human species, to strategically orient
our use of these precious finite elements,
we came up with something much more interesting.
And it's called the Infinite Growth Economic
Paradigm. In our current system we grab as
many resources as we can, we throw them into
anything that we think someone will buy, and
we try to manipulate each other into buying
these things from us for profit. In fact,
the entire basis of the free market ideology
is using and exchanging as many resources
as possible, as fast as possible, to generate
as much money as possible, which in turn is
used to exploit more resources over and over
again.
