The Silent Epidemic in a Broken, Deranged System: Stress
April 18, 2013)
It's not only the individual who needs help adjusting to chronic stress–the deranged system he/she inhabits needs to change.Longtime readers know that I see our system not just as financially sick but as spiritually and psychologically deranging. The illnesses are related, of course–a distorted economic system (i.e. financialization) that rewards parasitic sociopathy and political predation cannot help but make its participants physically and psychologically ill.
Here is a selection of the many entries I've written on this largely ignored topic:
Serial Addictions, Serial Speculative Bubbles: a Sickness Unto Death (Feb. 2, 2010)
Welfare Nation: Addiction, Denial and Magical Thinking (February 1, 2010)
The Wider Context for Twenty-Somethings (Gen Y) in America (February 19, 2010)
Opting Out and the Culture of Entitlement (March 29, 2010)
Readers are often puzzled by the term The Politics of Experience, which is the core of the Survival+ analysis. The term comes from psychiatrist/author R.D. Laing, and I use it to describe the subtle ways that our worldview is molded to make certain forms of political and financial dominance so “natural” that we lose awareness of its arbitrary, carefully engineered structure.
America Is Just Going Through the Motions (November 19, 2010)
The Junkie in the Pool and False Idols (August 10, 2011)
Japan and the Exhaustion of Consumerism (October 18, 2012)
Narcissism, Consumerism and the End of Growth (October 19, 2012)
When Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008)
I recently received this commentary from Kenneth Daigle, a 33-year veteran stockbroker/financial advisor on the subject of chronic, systemic stress. (He requested that his full name be published.) Kenneth succinctly ties together the nation's economic distemper, its broken healthcare system and the culture of high expectations and consumerism:
