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“Self-destruction isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our socio-economic system,” writes Charles Hugh Smith of the OfTwoMinds blog. In other words, the widening chasm between the rich and the poor is killing us. Not in a spiritual way. Literally.
“The proliferation of self-destructive behaviors, choices and incentives in our socio-economic system is profoundly troubling,” Smith contends. “Dependencies on addictive substances is one manifestation of self-destructive behavior, but dependency on an institution that leads to a loss of self-reliance is also a subtle form of self-destruction.”
He likened the epidemic of drug addiction to the era of easy money.
“If we ‘reward’ doctors for prescribing painkillers and patients for taking them, an opioid epidemic was essentially built into the system,” Smith explains. “The same can be said of our financialized economic system that rewards speculative gambles backstopped by the central bank or state.”
He then used two charts to illustrate the link between the rise in drug-related deaths and increasing global inequality.
First, the opioid epidemic:
Now, the rich getting richer:
“Do you reckon a system whose initial conditions reward those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid to the exclusion of the bottom 95% might have something to do with our social-economic self-destruction?” Smith asked... rhetorically.