From Axios on Saturday:
- In 2015, white people among the 15 to 64 age group accounted for 80.2% of all opioid-related deaths, higher than their 61.9% share of the population. Native American people were the only other racial group with a higher share of deaths (1.1%) than their share of the population (0.9%).
- Black people were the only racial group whose death rate trended upwards with age, with the oldest age groups (45 to 54 and 55 to 64) with the highest death rates (26.1 and 26.5 per 100,000 people).
- The demos with the greatest increases in death rates from 1999-2015 were white people aged 55 to 64 (488%), Native American people aged 45 to 54 (380%), and white people aged 25 to 34 (339%).
Some thoughts;
Lots of people find ways of living in American society in meaningful ways, but there are millions and millions of people who don’t, and it’s getting worse, and I don’t see how that gets turned around so long as the fundamental underlying problem remains meaninglessness.
Meaning, as Aristotle told us, is not the province of Logos but of Mythos, which in most societies is the province of religion. But while there has been and still is plenty of good religion in American society, there seems to be more bad religion, and these days bad religion has given good religion a bad name. In doing so it has delegitimized good religion and rendered it impotent in shaping any kind of healthy public meaning framework.
Late capitalism with its celebration of disruptive, creative-destructive, Ayn Randy style of winner/loser rugged individualism shapes in different degrees the mythos of political and corporate elites (i.e., Republicans and neoliberal Democrats) in this country. That is an ideology, but it functions as a bad, really bad, religion substitute. Nevertheless, it’s the only one in the precincts of the elite with any juice, and there is no good mythos (religion or ideology) with legitimacy enough to provide a robust counterbalance.
The political/economic system produced by this elite mythos creates of necessity more losers than winners, and when the losers don’t have some alternative mythos that affirms their dignity and gives their lives a sense of purpose, they often understandably spin off into depression, substance abuse, and rampage shootings, and resentment-driven politics. And this is why people in the rust belt hate cosmopolitan Liberals and vote for con men like Trump. Trump channels the resentment they feel from the contempt that is directed toward them by cosmopolitan elites, among whom HRC was exemplary in that deplorable respect.
Meaning, or the lack of it, isn’t everything, but it is a much bigger part of what is contributing to our political and social pathologies than I hear spoken about or written about.
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