Leading Indicators

That we're in for interesting times

Pharmatopia

We live in a pharmaceutical utopia, and that should strike terror into the hear of our beings. Rather than addressing the core degradation of our society, the increasing atomization and loneliness that envelopes individuals¹, the loss of purpose and meaning, we prescribe drugs at rates which suggest we’re living in a nation sized madhouse.

I knew someone who witnessed her best friend murdered in the theater

Antidepressant drugs, in a large portion of the population they are applied to make the person feel flat or emotionless which is quite the approach to remedy depression. Why, simply make people feel nothing! However, for another part of the population these drugs have been known to increase aggression and self-harm² for at least fifteen years. In spite of this, there has been an increase over the years in prescriptions of this class of drugs and approximately 15%³ of the population of the United States are on SSRIs. There is also evidence that changes in the prescription dose repeat the cycle of danger most apparent when users first begin taking the drugs. This presents an extreme direct danger - through links to mass shooting events, general psychotic breaks, and a less obvious societal danger of handing out soma to so many people. If all your emotions are flattened, do you ever fall in love, marry, experience the dizzying heights and abyssal lows? When your inner fire is smothered your entire being is dimmed in essence and energy.

Thankfully, the problem extends well beyond a mere 15% of the population being prescribed antidepressants. Approximately 14%⁴ of the population is on Adderall. There is some overlap where Adderall users are given antidepressants in order to level them out; likely because they’re tweaking out. Adderall, one might recall, is an amphetamine and carries with it all the known risks thereof⁵. Adderall has also been easily available on the street to customers looking for an edge in everything from work, to studying in college, to Counter-Strike pros⁶ (and StarCraft, DoTA, et al) for many years. This usage is anywhere from rare, cramming for an exam, to abusive where people feel they cannot function without the drug. This medication is prescribed to children deemed ADHD because of aberrant behavior in a school system which caters to the lowest level of skill, and leaves them bored out of their minds, instead of leaving those that can’t behind and elevating the rest to their highest potential.

This is not the complete set of psychoactive prescriptions in America, nor have I touched upon the opioid crisis, the burgeoning statins prescriptions, or any number of overprescribed drugs which are serving simply to cover up an unhealthy society and its unhealthy people. It doesn’t touch massive illegal markets nor the high power marijuana derivatives potentially generating schizophrenics, particularly in youth use. This also leaves alone the question of, well, how much money is to be made with hormone therapies and surgeries to affirm people into an early grave while fleecing them for all of their worth.

Cats Out of the Bag

Property crime as a clear sign that we are in an economic downturn, despite whatever the PR wing of the White House, mass media, is trying to sell you. While I don’t live in an area as pro-crime as San Francisco, my own locale has seen sharp uptick in catalytic converter theft⁷. This was brought to my attention initially by the loathsome NextDoor website, and then with my own eyes as I could see glittering debris left over from the thieves’ work naught but a few blocks from my home. Now, the company I work for has sent out communications advising people to have guards installed around their catalytic converters as a deterrent! What a wondrous society we live in that a company advises their employees to spend their own money on a catalytic converter guard when that company should be agitating for increased police patrols, and DAs that will prosecute these crimes which most harm those who have least. I can afford to replace a cat or two, but the higher crime areas where this first started in my city will have much more difficulty as they are also poorer.

The grocery stores have all sprouted security cameras in the parking lots. There are police units parking and spending more time on site, but they aren’t there 24/7 and people report everything from being harassed to mugged.

Increased violent offenses follow after non-violent property offenses. We’re seeing the poorer parts of the city have a growing number of shootings, and young kids killed, week by week now. As it stands it has yet to encroach the wealthier areas too much, and yet I fear that they will. Even worse, will we suffer anarcho-tyranny or will there be a return to the awareness that the broken windows theory worked?

Not Getting Any at Scale

The arrival of technology to the dating scene was supposed to make it easier for people to connect with one another, to find love, and to pair off. Match.com made a large advertising push around finding a marriageable partner and making those matches. We see that model has effectively died. Instead, technology has made for a hyper-efficient fuck market where few men sleep with dozens, if not hundreds, of women per year; and the remainder of men, who in the past would have been given a chance due to social proximity effects, are left in the cold⁸.

There are additional social factors at play around the notions of consent in the modern day. This foists an entire fear complex upon men who are aware that, unless they are in the top 10% of attractiveness or desirability, their advances will not simply be rebuffed and forgotten; but HR called, a Title IX complaint filed against them even if there was consent at the time of congress and the woman later comes to regret it, and any number of other potential land mines for them to step on.

Now we have huge swathes of young men who have no relationship prospects, have dim career outlooks, and are firmly priced out of goods like starter homes in decent areas. Historically, this will result in their energies being directed toward violence and revolution. Our society has crushed them and turned them into spiritual geldings, it remains to be seen if it be enough to prevent the pressure from building to critical.

Cheer up, it’s only getting worse

Fat Acceptance

The loss of social norms and shaming around weight is one of the myriad manners that ideology is using to divorce the population from reality⁹. I believe this is one of the many series of misfires resulting from the overdone elevation of the individual in society. There are benefits here, namely that fat bodies require significantly more drugs to keep operating at a level approximating a healthy body. There is a slight of hand at play which is utilized often in our society in a number of places and which is horrific: we should love individuals for who they are. The trick is that love is an overloaded term in English. A correction here is required, and we can start with an apophatic: we should not bully or hate individuals; then we can add a positive statement: we must love others by desiring what is best for them. This is still slipperier than I’d like, however, it is certainly outside the bounds of this definition of love to tell someone grossly overweight that they’re healthy, deserving of a spouse, et al.

The active promotion of unhealthy bodies and lifestyles is couched in the language of compassion, and I must ask this: is it compassionate to drive someone to an early grave? To diminish the likelihood of them finding a mate? To burden them with pain from their each and every movement? To say it’s normal for it to feel like a weight is pressing on your chest with every breath?

The Power of the Atom(ization)

Americans are lonelier than ever before¹⁰. Prior to the farcical COVID-19 pandemic it was clear that society was failing vast swathes of people and communities, essential to binding a nation and culture together, were disintegrating. Charles Murray made note of it in Coming Apart and remarked that the practices of the upper echelons of society still patterned after older societal behaviors. Church attendance; communities of interest; keeping their kids off the internet; marriage; and other factors which are seen less and less as normal amongst the hoi polloi.

Post-pandemic we have awareness that people are increasingly isolated. Our youth is especially effected as they were forced to abandon their social lives to save some thousands of the elderly who were already at the end of their lifespans. We will see if they recover. They’re overmedicated, inundated with individualist propaganda, driven from their parents by those in authority, and hooking up with one another less than ever before.

Our willful minimizing/snubbing/destroying of social technology has been a net negative over the past fifty years, and the technological substitutes we have are not suitable replacements. No amount of refinement is going to usher in the pharmatechno-utopia that is dreamt, and no amount of machinery can replace the ancient wisdoms we have discarded carelessly.

American rugged individualism, the archetypical result of Enlightenment thinking, has positive qualities and it also has severe shortcomings which we see come to fruition today. Working within the frame often fails to yield satisfying arguments against practices that are obviously self-destructive and society-destructive. America is a cultural hegemon, and we often see surprise or confusion when countries as disparate as Hungary and China reject American culture and societal mores wholesale. What can we learn from this, and how can we construct a positive vision for the future that welds together the best of systems without collapsing?

All of these things are tied together. Probably.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/798676465/most-americans-are-lonely-and-our-workplace-culture-may-not-be-helping

2. http://wayback.archive-it.org/7993/20170111122946/http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/InformationbyDrugClass/ucm096273.htm

3. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm

4. https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20220916/adderall-shortage-reported-pharmacies-patients

5. https://americanaddictioncenters.org/adderall/side-effects

6. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/46453/cs-go-professional-kory-semphis-friesen-everyone-adderal/index.html

7. https://www.denverpost.com/2022/01/24/colorado-catalytic-converter-thefts-legislature/

8. https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/

9. https://www.facebook.com/usatoday/videos/five-women-show-beauty-comes-in-all-shapes-and-sizes/1714459635545224/

10. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america