My thoughts on how the world works

Google News: The Canadian Press

A new study has found that five times as many high school and college students in the U.S. are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era.
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Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external – from wealth to looks and status – has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues.
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Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate – with six times as many scoring high in two areas:

• “Hypomania,” a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5 per cent of students in 1938 to 31 per cent in 2007)
• Depression (from 1 per cent to 6 per cent).

I know how Adam and Eve felt like when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden: terrible. This legend must be so common because it reflects a common human experience: the loss of a beautiful, unspoiled place. In my case the problem as not a serpent, but the owner of a bar just down the street – and a incompetent, corrupt government – but most of all people who like to get drunk and make a racket – something common the world over. Hashish, by contrast, is a mellow drug.

People who lived in New York City or San Francisco, when they were really nice and inexpensive, felt the same way when they had to leave. I felt the same about Santa Barbara in California where Beth and I once lived as young hippies – side by side with retired people who liked living in a nice, cheap, beautiful place. All gone forever, developed out of existence.

I once did a trek in Northern Thailand, visiting the hill people – who were truly amazing. When I got back to my hotel, I had a profound realization, and said to myself “When the original people are gone, we are doomed.”

I also lived for awhile on a remote island in the Maldives, learned how to trance-dance, and became a local star. Their islands, only a few feet above sea-level, are doomed – and with them, a whole way of life that has survived thousands of years. Only a short distance away, in Hikkaduwa, in Sri Lanka, a beach town beloved of Australian surfers – and a few drug addicts – has also disappeared, helped along by the Tsunami. They were beautiful people too. Not too ambitious, the British had to import hard-working Tamils to work on their tea plantations, but they knew how to live. A vanishing art.

The December National Geographic has a good article on the Hadza in Tanzania. Now that I am limited to doing my exploration from an armchair, the Geographic is one of my comforts.

The American Media is almost useless when reporting on events outside the US. It knows Americans have no interest in this, and so it tells them what they want to hear – which is almost nothing. In the case of news from China, it seems like the Chinese media is looking over their shoulder, telling them what to write – which is natural, because American and China have similar objectives: global hegemony. We are busy scratching each other’s backs – while pretending to be competitors. American business has invested so heavily in China, it is practically the same economy. This is not so say there are not conflicts, there certainly are, but the mutual accommodations are greater.

Both have large militaries. The US uses them mainly outside its borders, because it see its enemies out there. China uses them inside its borders, because it sees its enemies in here. But other than that, the methods are similar: ruthless suppression. The National Geographic has an excellent article on the Uygurs in its December issue.

The story is entitled The Other Tibet, because it highlights the similarities between the two conflicts. Indigenous populations are being suppressed by China and heavy Chinese immigration is swamping their culture. I have even seen this on the Caribbean coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua: heavy Hispanic immigration has swamped the Black, English-speaking culture entirely. The local resources, seafood and lumber, are being exploited ruthlessly.

As always, a map is essential for understanding what is going on, and the Geographic maps, as always, are excellent. See the one on page 42-43. This territory is critical, located as it is between China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan (central Asia), and Russia. It contains much of China’s coal, oil, and gas, and construction is booming. The Uygurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) are fast being overwhelmed; they don’t like it; and some of them are fighting back. That’s the story in a nutshell.

This is one of the points Boorstin makes in his book The Image. We have become so used to substituting images for reality, we think they constitute reality. This is nothing new, people have always substituted their beliefs and their myths for reality. The Greeks had the idea that reality was something different, and not man-made – but most thought this was nonsense. And in our time, we still think this is nonsense. Reality (including morality) is whatever we make it to be, and what we can agree on. Nothing else.

Boorstin made a well-thought-out and interesting case back in 1961, one that has never been seriously challenged. But we have not changed, and still prefer our illusions to the real thing.

Modern thinking agreed with the Greeks: that there was an objective reality, and we had to understand it on its terms if we wanted to prosper. And modern people (Northern Europe and its descendants) prospered to a degree no one could have imagined. The rest of the world (including Latin America) did not.

This period of prosperity is ending, for a number of reasons, but primarily because we are no longer interested in what is real outside of ourselves.

This may strike you as insane, but it is true. We have no external enemies to amount to anything. Why should anyone be our enemy? Who wants to end up looking ridiculous like Osama bin Laden?  9/11 was such a success, publicity-wise, how can it be improved on? And if American wants to bring its own troops to Iraq or Afghanistan, they make fine targets. Why go all the way to America? Everyone knows America is a declining power, so why worry about it?

So we create enemies, and pretend they are going to rape us in our beds – men and women both.