An Epidemic of Despair
There is an epidemic of despair in
the United States. The visible part is the increase in what have been called
“deaths of despair” -- deaths by drugs, alcohol, and suicide. Among people who
have not gone to college and for whom a traditional middle-class life is more
and more out of reach, such deaths are rising steadily. The increases are connected
to “a measurable deterioration in economic and social wellbeing.”[1]
In a West Virginia town where
textile plants and woolen mills that once provided good jobs now stand empty, a
journalist who used to live there was asked why so many people there are
struggling with opioids, including heroin.. He responded,
“In my
opinion, the desperation in [this area], and places like it, is a social vacancy,”
he said. “People don’t feel they have a purpose.” … “Many drug addicts, he
explained, are “trying to escape the reality that this place doesn’t give them
anything. That’s really hard to live with—when you look around and you see that
seven out of ten of your friends from high school are still here, and nobody
makes more than thirty-six thousand a year, and everybody’s just bitching about
bills and watching these crazy shows on reality TV and not doing
anything.”
A professor at West Virginia
University who studies drug addiction, described opioids as “the ultimate
escape drugs.” She said,
“Boredom and a sense of uselessness and inadequacy—these are human failings
that lead you to just want to withdraw. On heroin, you curl up in a corner and
blank out the world. It’s an extremely seductive drug for dead-end towns,
because it makes the world’s problems go away.”
Feeling hopeless about Climate
change? Well, said someone recently on Facebook, “There's an app for that:
Oxycodone”.
When economic opportunity becomes a
desert, and peoples’ desires are thwarted at every turn, they lose hope. No
sense of purpose, no reason to get out of bed in the morning: that’s the state
of despair. I want to be something,
do something, but I don’t know what. I
want to matter in the world, but I have no idea how. I’m full of desire, full
of the vitality of a living being, but my desire is a curse because I don’t
know where to go with it, what to aim it at.
Opioids solve that problem. I no
longer despair at having nothing to do, because I simply don’t care. It no
longer matters that I have nothing to do with my desire because my desire, my
vitality, is asphyxiated to where I hardly notice it – except for the one clear
desire for the next pill, fix, or drink.[2] Crushing one’s desire moves one closer to
death, and many people fall off the edge, a risk they are willing to take
because nothing, including life itself, matters anymore.
But sometimes despair seeks other
avenues of relief. Instead of smothering the desire for a life that means
something, a person may force his life to mean something by an act of violence
that takes revenge on the world that has given him no place to exist. This is
one way of understanding those lonely men and boys who open fire on crowds and
then turn their guns on themselves or allow the police to kill them. These are
deaths of despair that cause yet more death. At a
buried emotional level, such killers are taking revenge on a world that refused
to recognize them.
So we have an epidemic of despair
leading to self-annihilation by opioids and to the enraged killer who takes his
resentment out on others. Despair in a world with no place for hope, for a
meaningful life. But what is it about our world that leaves so many people
without hope?
Well, what is required of a society if it is to be a medium in which human desire
and achievement can flourish? It’s not enough that people be fed and sheltered;
there must be places in society in which people can feel that they matter, in
which their existence and their activity are recognized. And the basic
institutions of the society need to provide pathways to those positions, not
obstacles. The deaths of despair we talked about stem from lack of ways to
matter and to join with others in common projects.
Capitalism is a form of society
that at the best of times provides, for some
people, some of these conditions for
a good life. When it is expanding, there are jobs and entrepreneurial
opportunities. However, even then there are many losers: “the unemployed the
homeless, and the indebted. And capitalist society is unstable: the regular occurrence
of crises – depressions and recessions – is built into the system. Moreover,
capital always goes where opportunities for profitable investment are greatest,
which means it is always moving from one place or one form of activity to
another, leaving behind communities and workers who are now of no use to
capital – as happened in the rust belt in the 60s and 70s. And finally, even when capitalism is
flourishing, it tends to reduce human desire to the desire for money and turn
all value, including the value of our lives, into market value. Artistic
activity, land, water, forests, and our own labor become nothing more than raw
material for capitalist exploitation.
That’s capitalism at the best of
times. However, these are not the best of times. Capital is increasingly
invested in complicated financial schemes that produce nothing besides inflated
profits for wealthy investors, and very few working class jobs. Computerized
production and distribution systems have deskilled or eliminated many jobs. The
result is too many people for whom capital has no use, leaving them with nothing
much to do and too much time to do it in. The capitalist state steps in to
control these extra people by, mass entertainment, mass distribution of
debilitating pharmaceuticals, and mass incarceration.
So in a world where our lives
depend on how and whether capital can be profitably invested, the best case
scenario is one in which a good and meaningful life is shaped around the
pursuit of money and what money can buy. In the worse scenarios, like the one
we are living now, life loses meaning and despair sets in, despair that is
either medicated into numbness and often death, or is transformed into rage
that produces not only the spectacular sprees of violence that appear in the
news, but innumerable acts of emotional and physical brutality behind closed
doors.
There is an alternative to living a
life whose meaning is determined entirely by the stormy tides of capital, and
that is to work in cooperation with others for a world order that honors, and
works to fulfill, the full range of human need and desire.
Presented on the Old Mole Variety
Hour
August 14, 2017
Audio here
[1]
This increase affects primarily whites without college: “The mortality rates of
whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent
lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than
blacks by 2015.”
[2]
Cigarettes, too, it
has been written, give an otherwise boring life a structure of desire that
builds and that can then be satisfied.
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