But rebuilding community within globalism’s decline offers a way out
“We don’t fully understand why this is happening.” – Emily Brignone PhD, Highmark Health, Pittsburgh, PA
In 2017, studies conducted by a husband & wife research team made a brief wave in the national media when they documented “deaths of despair” — deaths due to alcoholism, drug overdose, dietary problems, and direct suicide — particularly among white Americans over age 50. Interestingly, this original study documented more despair in white people than people of color, with the described demographic being remarkably similar to how we often think of Trump voters — “White, middle-aged, undereducated, rural residents…” These people were “experiencing a substantial increase in mortality related to self-destructive behavior as opposed to others in different geographical, educational, and racial groups.”
In 2020 a new and larger study confirmed & expanded the findings, revealing that the symptoms have spread and increased among all age groups and sexes, and that in the past 10 years, drug and alcohol misuse and suicidal behaviors have increased across the board for men and women in all age groups. The researchers added that while it’s early to tell, increased isolation, unemployment, and other stresses from COVID-19 likely have compounded such effects. As is typical these days, there was a lot of arm waving about what to do about such an overwhelming problem; offered solutions invariably involve treatment, both medical and social, and include worthy words like “outreach” and “intervention” and “hard conversations.” Below are assorted quotes from authors and media about the studies:
“How do we show up where they are — at schools, churches, neighborhoods?”
“We have to look at how to embrace the hard conversations around mental health and addiction. We need to know how to talk to each other, and be empathetic and supportive.”
“We have to improve outreach to people in need and remove barriers to care…”
I reflect often on this type of post-hoc “treatment” approach to societal solutions, because it is one-of-a-part with the reformist (as opposed to systemic) remedies that usually comprise the liberal mindset; the idea being that, yes, society and capitalism suck, but if we vote and remain vigilant, we can correct the shortcomings. A week or two ago I attended a highly-publicized local workshop on drug overdoses in our small city, which has seen a huge-fold increase in overdose deaths in 2021 due to fentanyl (11 deaths since Aug. 1 2021 alone). Speakers, several of whom had experienced tragic family deaths due to overdoses, mostly offered post-hoc solutions, not dissimilar in tone to those above in the studies of deaths of despair:
“Let’s have more dialogue at home; let’s start raising our kids to have strong character and coping skills, so when the worst day of their life occurs they don’t run for an oxycontin.”
“Let’s expect for our schools and our educators to start pushing for this stuff in their curriculum too.”
“Give them coping skills and tools, and counselors, and more social workers… that’s awesome, let’s keep that going.”
One speaker almost got it; he said that “unfortunately we’ve been looking at the back end of substance abuse disorders for the last 25 or 30 years; we wait until the disease is set, and then try to figure out what to do;” in other words, he suggested that the treatment solutions we offer now, while helpful and necessary, are too late. As he said this, I reflected that 25 or 30 years ago is actually pretty recent history, only the 1990s; and that recreational drug use had been firmly in place in American society decades before that, since at least the mid-1960s, coming into mass public awareness by the late 1960s. In 1968, my usual 8th-grade Social Studies class was interrupted for a film called “Marijuana” narrated by Sonny Bono (former husband and abuser of Cher), wherein Bono talked over & over about how marijuana was a dangerous gateway to other bad drugs; he assured the children watching that the “hard choice” about drug use was up to us, but the message was clear that marijuana led down a deadly and dangerous road.1 Over 30 years later, by the 1990s, my daughter attended the Columbia public school anti-drug DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program (eliminated in 2009), which was given locally by the popular & charismatic police officer John Warner; DARE worked on “strengthening children’s refusal skills so they can better resist social pressures to try and use drugs” — in other words, saying NO to drugs. Some twenty years after that, here we were having yet another discussion about the dangers of drug abuse.
It is striking that most Americans can’t see choices outside of the institutions that they have grown up with, and it’s hard to blame them for that; as a result, over and over, the options proffered by liberals and centrists2 are to vote, vote, vote, to write their congressperson, and to have those “hard conversations.”3 The problem is that the system — the nation-state and the neoliberal economic system that guards it — are huge and pervasive, and their actions and power are all encompassing, like the weather. The overall effect is that many of us are forced to lead, essentially, meaningless lives; lives with limited community connection, lives employed in bullshit jobs — or worse, lives circumscribed by medical and college debt — all of which we compensate for by self-medication that in turn leads to deaths of despair.
My question to those who accept the current system would be: how do we vote away meaninglessness? How do we de-legislate the neoliberal economic system that has resulted in decades of working-class wage stagnation and exaggerated wealth inequalities to such extremes? How do we unconsolidate the huge school systems that arose in the past 80 years which, while saving tax money, have resulted in socially-disconnected & alienated young people, who are arguably more prone to drug use, and maybe even school shootings, because of such alienation? Can we really shop our way to a new and fairer economy? Can we really recycle our way out of environmental degradation? How do we undo the self-medicatory ravages of opioid addiction, obesity, and alcoholism — resulting in deaths of despair — that seem so pervasive now? While post-hoc remedies like education, coping skills, and “dialogue” are certainly necessary, the country has already fumbled these tools, without success, for many decades. If one steps back to look at the big picture, one might say that in this moment we are strung out on the end of a long, long journey, one in which each of the many fingers of modern life extend useless, flailing dead ends. Is this the “late-stage capitalism” people talk about on social media? Or perhaps this is the playing out of the “internal contradictions” of capitalism of which Marx & Engels spoke?
While the Biden election has bought time4, I firmly believe that there is no way to somehow “compromise” or “build consensus” to get ourselves out of the situation that faces us. I am aware that mine may be an extreme view, but offer instead that there are two choices for us: one, authoritarianism — undergirded and fed by the amorphous fear that embodies our times — will surely continue to emerge, even if temporarily, if the current trend of the Republican party to embrace Trumpism continues. If not stopped or eroded, this process will result in the US becoming something like a modern version of 1980s Argentina or Chile.
The other looming possibility is a more gradual and larger societal decline or collapse; something like what we saw during COVID-19 but longer, slower, and something that happens in the context of global warming. Paradoxically, provided we are able to save ourselves from the elemental forces that have existed in America from the beginning and which now seem to be massing inside the border, such a decline offers us the special chance to build a nurturing localism in our respective communities.
If nothing else, surely community is the one lesson we got from the Covid pandemic: we learned about taking care of neighbors, we relearned how to cook, we learned about growing front-yard victory gardens, about participating in mutual aid; in short, we gained insight about what community looks like. From anarchist David Graeber, in an essay he wrote shortly before he died in 2020:
“…we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another… those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.”
Footnotes
1. Sonny Bono later joked that he was high on pot during the entire filming of the movie.
2. “These debates remain trapped within a fundamentally liberal view of history in which it is impossible to move beyond each group’s story of their struggle against oppressive forces. This can be seen as a form of identity politics in historical thinking and, as many Marxists have pointed out, identity politics in fact neatly reproduces the pluralistic liberal ideology that has emerged to represent the ruling factions of our contemporary ruling class.” White, J., Making our own History, 2021
3. Hard conversations with whom, I sometimes wonder? How often outside of social media do most of us really interact with those having opinions exactly the opposite of our own? These people for the most part don’t live in our neighborhoods; does a yelling match with an intractable father-in-law at Thanksgiving constitute a “hard conversation?” Such a conversation could be “hard” as in unpleasant, certainly, but how often does either party reassess their viewpoint or truly take consideration of another’s?
4. Although some liberals seem to think that the January 6th Capitol sacking marked the beginning of an end to the power of the far-right in the US, history shows that nations only unite in condemnation when the cumulative results & consequences of rightist activities lead to almost overwhelming and pervasive societal fatigue or societal collapse; witness Germany after World War II and the United States after the twin ravages of Vietnam and Watergate.
References
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/economic-despair/520473/
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/10/e037679
https://www.livescience.com/diseases-despair-rising-us.html
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-11-10/diseases-of-despair-skyrocket-in-america
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607684/
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https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/columbia-public-schools-eliminate-dare-program-consider-alternative-methods/article_db89b565-d0cd-5ab8-8a6b-deb23656f4d5.html
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