David Swanson and I were ruminating about why Americans are so apathetic in the face of corporate and governmental perfidy. He has written a good piece resulting from that chat.
David Swanson: We’re Not Idiots. We’re Drugged.
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David Swanson and I were ruminating about why Americans are so apathetic in the face of corporate and governmental perfidy. He has written a good piece resulting from that chat.
Comments are closed.
7 Comments.
i don’t know, ted. i’ve been on effexor for years and i’m the most passionate, least apathetic person i know. in fact, it was only after starting my meds and alleviating my depression that i started to care about anything! and i know plenty of people who take no drugs and still couldn’t give a shit about anything other than themselves or the latest celebrity gossip.
I don’t know either. Certainly I would agree that on average American’s are over medicated and this probably has a number of negative effects including possibly being part of the problem, but I don’t really think it is the full thing. I personally think it is a complex mixture of effects.
One of the most important things I think is the mass media propaganda. Sure this stuff exists in all oppressive regimes everywhere in every period of time, but the countries that rise up are the ones that by and large know that their state sanctioned media outlets are lying to them, misdirecting them, or dumbing them down. In the US from an early age people begin to believe that we have to much freed, openness, and all that other good happy stuff to possibly imagine they are being assaulted with propaganda 24/7 from every outlet all of which are attempting to make them apathetic and accepting of their situation and doing so successfully. As Paul Krugman pointed out, one of the saddest ironies, is the people who watch FOX news actually believe FOX’s claim that every other media outlet is lying to them (not entirely untrue, but not true in the way FOX means it) and that only by watching FOX they will have secret insight into the truth. What do you get from this? The tea party, people who do get active and do rally, just against their own best interests.
Meanwhile every other media source works to encourage people to wait for things and vote, and their viewers by and large wait for things and vote. FOX and the tea party demonstrate right there that if you show Americans there are problems, and let them know that they can fix them by being active about them, they will get up and try to do something about them even when they don’t actually understand the situation.
Again though, while I think American media acceptance coupled with the sorry state of American media propaganda is the primary source of the problem I believe it is the compound of many effects that causes this. Over-medication probably does help pacify the masses (talk about Karl Marx’s “the opiate of the masses) but I would argue trace accumulating pollutants are probably worse and do more to create a drug like restfulness in the masses.
Some examples: almost all plastic contain plasticizers, the two most common being dioctyl pthalate and bis phenyl acetone (BPA). These leach out of plastic wrappings and containers into foods, and when ingested enter the blood stream where they are endocrine disruptors, which among other effects, disrupts metabolism and has a tendancy to make people fat, and to a lesser extent lazy. Can you name another country that eats as much food off of plastic that contains plasticizers as the US? Is the a coincidence? I don’t know, but I think it is worth a look.
Similarly there is high fructose corn syrup. No one, and I mean no one, talks about this but the scariest thing about it is that it is processed from chemicals made in an electrolytic process. Why is this bad? Well it means that anything containing high fructose corn syrup is basically guarenteed to contain trace mercury. Not enough to kill you or seriously impact your health, but enough such that over the course of a decade or two of Coke drinking and Jelly bean eating it will gently and subtlety wear at ones mind making them a slightly simpler and more apathetic version of themselves. (This issue may be getting less server as it is becoming popular in industry to replace the mercury electrodes with novel organic membrane ones which is starting to reduce the amount of mercury that ends up down stream in high fructose corns syrup.)
Almost all antiperspirining agents contain processed bits of aluminum (check almost any underarm deoderant in the US and you will usually see aluminum zirconate or related aluminum compounds). Sources of aluminum like these when ingested or even just applied to the skin have been directly linked with noticeably increasing the risk Alzheimers over time. But what no one talks about, is that the effect of aluminum on the brain (it helps encourage the natural equilibrium of certain key brain proteins into polymerizing and forming plaques) begins with subtle effects due to the initial build up of plaques long before even the earliest signs of Alzheimers begins to show.
We also ingest a lot of aluminum from our cooking. I haven’t looked at the actual numbers so I could be wrong, but the US has more aluminum pots and pans then I have seen just about anywhere. Most other people cook with Iron, steel, stainless steel, or copper cookware. For the same reason that health experts encourage cooking with iron cookware, which is that iron gets into the food which is good for you, cooking with aluminum gets aluminum into the food which is bad for your. Flouridated water exacerbates this as heating fluoridated water in the presence of aluminum forms aluminum fluorides, which have been demonstrated to unusually effective in penetrating the blood brain barrier relative to other aluminum compounds and once inside appear to be considerably more neurotoxic then most other simple aluminum compounds.
Aspertame, which people consume by the boatload in the US, is close enough to neurotransmitters in chemical structure that it does interfere with the mind. It has already been linked to Multiple Scurosis and other forms of brain damage when used over long periods of time.
These aren’t conspiracy theories, because conspiracy is when people secretively meet to conspire to accomplish things. These are all unintended consequences of the free market. Plastics are more durable with plasticizers and no known plasticizers are effective as cost effective as PBA and dioctyl pthalate. Aluminum Zirconate is just a VERY effective antipersperation/drying agent, if you find and use an antiperspirant without it you will find it is noticeably less effective. Aluminum metal is incredibly cheap, it is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust and it is easy to work with, so it is only natural that all sorts of common goods such as cookware would be made out of it. The companies that lobby to keep flouride in water are the ones that produce sodium flouride as a byproduct of their industrial processes (these days it is mostly the phosphate fertilizer industry). They aren’t trying to poison you, they probably believe the old flawed studies that suggest it is good for you, they just have two choices, they can sell their sodium flouride byproduct to the government and make profit, or they can dispose of it as toxic waste, because it IS toxic waste and is thus very expensive in terms of industry overhead cost to dispose of. (see the material safety data sheet for sodium fluoride here: http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s3722.htm also note its health rating is a 3 out of a possible 4 where only things like chemical warfare agents or compounds equally dangerous get a 4)
There are many more, but this post is already too long, and I have listed enough examples to sufficiently make a point.
I think the apathy is here in America because many Americans are well off, and if things seem to be going okay, then why change them?
I don’t see this changing until we are prevented from further mortgaging our futures. As long as we can continue to deplete our energy resources, can continue to destroy our environment, and can continue to pay for economically non-producing expenses (e.g., war) by borrowing to the hilt, we will continue to live happily in the moment.
I don’t buy this idea. Tunisia and Egypt had lower income inequality and unemployment than the US. Evicted and jobless, Americans are plenty uncomfortable.
Drugs? Maybe! For one, I find that people are too busy on the treadmill of American life for the “hobby” of politics. Families either have mom and dad holding jobs or trying to find jobs. Two, there are no political parties that can challenge the duopoly and no political organizing to speak of. There were once unions that organized workers, but the only vital unions are largely in the public sector, and they are being undermined by state legislatures and budget cutting. There are no leaders who command widespread respect, enough to threaten the corporate establishment. So, three: People feel that political activity is futile. They feel powerless, and they are, usually. It’s not just drugs. It’s our system of government, too. It was not designed for democracy. It was designed to protect the wealthy, and it does.
Ted, I’m reading this, but could you please add this video of your chill interview with the Young Turks.
That interview was a long time coming Tedmanbashi.
Good job man.
TLW
Thanks, just posted it. Tell Cenk!