Countries and cultures are abstractions over complex systems just like an organism is an abstraction over many complex systems all working together. And like organisms countries and cultures fight for survival, can become stronger or weaker, and can even become sick and die. I believe the West, and specifically The U.S. is facing a disease that threatens to destroy it and I'm not talking about COVID-19. I've noticed a trend of increasing nihilism, despair, and learned helplessness that is spreading throughout the central nervous system of this country and affecting all aspects of our society. Let's look at some of the biggest indicators that have been keeping me up at night.
Symptoms
First up we have the increase in drug overdoses within the US. The CDC compiles great statistics for a variety of causes of death going back a couple decades including drug overdoses and let me tell you, the stats paint a grim picture. We only have provisional data for the years 2021 and 2020 but even the official data going to 2019 shows a serious problem.
It's worth noting that the explosion in recent years can at least be partially attributed to the rise of synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl which are often laced in drug products and cause overdoses when they're not expected.
We can see in Figure 2 that fentanyl really began its uptick in usage around 2015, though, and we can see a steady rise over the past twenty years even before that. These graphs don't even include stats for 2020 and 2021, the years where more Americans were isolated, fearful, and in economic trouble than ever before. Provisional data for 2020 shows that overdose deaths topped 90,000[1] which is a significant increase over the previous high of 70,000 in 2019. And it's not getting better. Data coming in for 2021 shows that overdose deaths have surpassed even that level with a current total of over 100,000 deaths[2].
Now look, if someone smokes a joint and then overdoses because it was laced with Fentanyl then I don't think that necessarily speaks to the mental state of our nation but at the same time no sufficiently healthy nation should have the overdose stats that we do. Especially in a time when legal (and presumably clean) drugs are more available than ever in this country it doesn't make much sense for these numbers to be as bad as they are. Instead it shows an increase in helplessness and pain as people run to these substances for an escape only to end up dying. Yes, part of it might be a supply chain issue with contaminated substances but it's also a cultural issue where people seem to increasingly be using these substances as an escape. We can argue the reasons for that but fundamentally, a healthy society doesn't increasingly try to escape reality to the point of death like this.
Okay so America has a drug problem. That's not exactly new info and I'm not even against drugs when used safely so let's look at a much more worrying trend: suicides.
The above figure is one of the scariest charts I've seen in a while. Between 1999 and 2018 the total age-adjusted rate of suicide increased by 35% with official numbers as of 2019 being around 47,500 deaths due to suicide. That's over twice as many homicides (19,141) in the US and makes suicide a 10th leading cause of death [3].
These numbers are smaller than overdoses but more alarming due to their nature. There is no accidental suicide. By definition of these statistics these individuals are willingly choosing to end their lives, and many more have attempted but failed (we don't have good stats for suicide attempts). If this many people are actually taking action to end their existence what does that tell us about how many people are still severely depressed but not to the point of suicide? How many people are suffering in this country without any sign of a way out? It's hard to say anyone is more hopeless than a person willing to take their own life so suicide acts as the ultimate barometer that lets us peer into the mind of a society's outlook on the future and what we're seeing in America is not good.
COVID-19 has only made this situation worse. In April-July of 2020 a study was run on over 5,000 people in the US to gauge their mental health. Over 10% of each representative group reported having seriously considered suicide in the previous 30 days with 25% of respondents aged 18-24 having considered it [4]. This is an absolutely astounding number. That 1 in 4 young adults would even consider ending their lives speaks volumes to the helplessness, despair, and nihilism our population is experiencing.
Glenn Greenwald said it best when addressing this issue in a post for The Intercept.
In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.
Can’t say it any better myself. No healthy society should see an increasing trend in suicide like America is seeing.
There are other symptoms that indicate a decline in our culture and suggest an increasing despair. I won't go too in-depth on these but things like the insane obesity epidemic in America where 42% of Americans were obese in 2018 according to the CDC, a number that has risen since 1999 by over 12% [5]. You could definitely argue this is more due to economics and/or a fucked up food supply chain but the overall lack of care for one's own health is a startling trend on the rise.
There's also increasing talk amongst middle and upper class Americans discussing the ethics of having kids, the conclusion being that it is unethical to have kids in the face of coming challenges like climate change. I won't get into the merits of that debate but by definition I can't think of anything more nihilistic and self destructive than a society collectively agreeing to stop having children.
I should say now that I do not claim to know what the cause of these problems are. Everything I've pointed out leads me to my original point that America (and Western culture as a result) is facing a crisis of despair and increasing nihilism. There are probably multiple main causes of these issues and they're worth discussing but specifically worth discussing in the context of our desired outcomes. On some level these solutions will be political and political debates get lost in the weeds all too easily nowadays. It's critical to keep in mind that we do not want to continue down the path we are currently heading. However we get there, we should aim for a society where suicide is a rare event, where overdosing is a rare event, where our citizens are fit and healthy, and where young members of our society look forward to being parents and feel that it is the right decision for them. I find it very difficult to imagine a society such as ours surviving with its current trajectory.
Correcting Course
So what can we do now? I think our country craves a purpose, whatever that may be. When faced with an uncertain or undesirable future the best remedy for despair is purpose. We need heroes for our young kids and missions for young adults. Everything in this country seems to be about activism which can be great but recently seems to be focused on tearing down without much thought for building. We used to throw ticker tape parades for heroes of our society like the soldiers returning from WWII, Charles Lindbergh after his trans-Atlantic flight, and John Glenn after his travel to space. Where are our heroes now? Why do we not celebrate them? We killed God and cancelled our heroes and now our society is riddled with depression and lack of meaning. Perhaps these developments were necessary but now it's necessary to build new myths and new legends to align our society and give us a sense of purpose. This cannot happen from the top down; it requires all of us to buy in. It requires a grassroots movement to bring purpose back into our society.
So how does that happen? I've been keeping my eye on an ambitious project to build a new city from scratch. Since I was young I've been fascinated with the idea of new cities and nations, created with the explicit goal to further society by experimenting with unique governance and social institutions (ideally the US would do this naturally with its states and system of federalism but that has largely been unsuccessful as the federal government continues to grow in importance and power) so I leapt at the announcement of this project. Named Praxis, this project aims to build a community of like-minded individuals to build a value-aligned society online first and then acquire a plot of land and establish an autonomous city. The goal is to eventually build a society that showcases the upside of technology and progress without the downsides of a lot of modern civilization like factory farming, lack of community, uninspired architecture, etc. The fascinating realization behind this movement is the idea that generally to create a new city from scratch you need to have a critical mass of people move at the same time. This was historically quite difficult but now with technology and the internet you can build a community large enough online first and then once you have the numbers you can negotiate with an existing nation for a piece of their land. You might think it's unlikely that any country would be willing to set up a mostly-autonomous region within their borders for foreigners but the odds are probably higher than you think. Many countries would love to have the next Hong Kong within their borders as long as they could also benefit in some way.
Aligning those incentives between the city and its host-nation will be crucial for making the project work. It's also extremely hard to start from scratch because that necessitates the building of all the institutions we take for granted on a daily basis. And even if all the initial citizens are value-aligned what happens in 20 years when there's a new generation? How about 40 or 80 years? To correctly pull off a project like this requires not only identifying all the problems with our current American society but also coming up with viable solutions and integrating all of them with a culture that can endure itself over the long term. The upside is that they don't have to solve everything at once and if they are successful they will provide a blueprint for the rest of western society to save itself. We should be encouraging hundreds of these projects across America and the world but until we do, we have Praxis.
I'll be writing more about these issues, what I think the causes are, what some potential solutions are, and how Praxis aims to tackle them. If you care about these issues then I encourage you to get involved and follow this newsletter. The future can be better than the past but it's up to us to make that reality.